Bavinck’s Prolegomena: Fresh Light On Amsterdam, Old Princeton, and Cornelius Van Til

By Donald Macleod

[Donald Macleod is Professor of Systematic Theology at the Free Church of Scotland College, Edinburgh, Scotland.]

Herman Bavinck’s Prolegomena is the work of an outstanding theological architect who devoted the best years of his life to designing and erecting one of the most imposing intellectual edifices in the whole Reformed tradition. When completed, the project consisted of the four massive volumes of the Gereformeerde Dogmatiek,[1] but hitherto those of us who do not read Dutch have been limited to gazing at them with awe on our library shelves. We did have access, of course, to the first part of volume 2, translated by William Hendricksen and published by Eerdmans in 1951 under the title, The Doctrine of God. Bavinck’s Stone Lectures, delivered during the 1908–1909 academic year at Princeton, have remained available in English.[2] The entire field of the Dogmatiek was also covered in popular, and somewhat superficial, form in Our Reasonable Faith, a translation of Bavinck’s Magnalia Dei, first published in 1909.

Now, thanks to the efforts of the Dutch Reformed Translation Society, the entire Dogmatiek is almost within our grasp. The first part to be published was the eschatology section, a decision prompted by the longing “for a sane, biblical voice” amid the apocalyptic fever of the 1990s.[3] Volume 1, the Prolegomena, appeared in 2003.[4] Volume 2, God and Creation, followed in 2004.[5]

While the Prolegomena is part of a larger project it is also a most impressive edifice in its own right. It consists of five floors. Part 1 is an Introduction to Dogmatics. Part 2 covers its History and Literature. Part 3 deals with the Foundations of Dogmatic Theology, Part 4 with its External Principle (Revelation), and Part 5 with its Internal Principle (Faith). Within this overall structure Bavinck pays meticulous attention to detail, and the translators and editors of this English edition have done him proud by their own scrupulous thoroughness, particularly in relation to bibliographical information.

I. Edinburgh, Princeton, and Amsterdam

There can be no denying Bavinck’s magnificent intellectual rigor, but for those familiar with the history of Reformed theology over the last two hundred years the newly translated volume of Prolegomena has an added interest. While Bavinck was working in Amsterdam, Reformed theology was being prosecuted with equal vigor in the two other main centers of Calvinist scholarship, Edinburgh and Princeton. How did the three centers compare, and how did they differ?

The Edinburgh dimension of the comparison has been almost entirely neglected. One reason for this is that while there were close contacts between Edinburgh’s New College and Princeton Seminary, contacts between Edinburgh and Amsterdam were minimal. Bavinck makes few references to Scottish theologians and betrays no awareness of their contributions in the area of Prolegomena. Yet they did give the subject considerable attention, and while some, like Thomas Chalmers,[6] and, to a lesser extent, Robert Flint,[7] were unreconstructed exponents of the classical apologetics of Butler and Paley, others were more discriminating. William Cunningham, who visited Princeton in 1843–1844 and became a close personal friend of Charles Hodge, clearly emphasized the insufficiency of Natural Theology and the importance of the witness of the Holy Spirit.[8] This followed the pointers already given in such earlier Scottish theologians as Thomas Halyburton, whose Essay concerning the Reason of Faith[9] adhered closely to the position taken by John Owen in his work of similar title, The Reason of Faith.[10] Cunningham’s younger contemporary, the Old Testament scholar A. B. Davidson, took things further, observing that

it never occurred to any prophet or writer of the Old Testament to prove the existence of God. To do so might well have seemed an absurdity. For all Old Testament prophets and writers move among ideas that presuppose God’s existence.... Scripture regards men as carrying with them, as part of their very thought, the conception of God.[11]

The twentieth-century theologian John Baillie continued this line. Reared in Scottish Calvinist piety, but later standing alongside Reinhold Niebuhr somewhere between Liberalism and Neo-Orthodoxy, Baillie endorsed a vague form of pre-suppositionalism: “All peoples have such an awareness of the divine as is sufficient to awaken in them what it is impossible to regard otherwise than as a typically religious response.”[12] This did not, however, lead to an outright dismissal of apologetics: “Though we may not try to prove either to ourselves or others that God exists, we may do something to persuade both ourselves and others that we already believe in Him.”[13]

But all this remains an unwritten chapter, due mainly to the collapse of Calvinism in Scotland itself. The question of Amsterdam and Old Princeton, by contrast, has been well traversed, and part of the fascination of the newly translated Bavinck is the light these volumes shed on this debate.

II. “It is Bavinck who taught me.”

There are two distinct questions concerning Amsterdam and Old Princeton. One is the relationship between Bavinck and his Princeton contemporaries, most notably B. B. Warfield. The other is the link between Bavinck and Cornelius Van Til, who, by taking his presuppositional theism into Westminster Seminary, effectively took Amsterdam into Old Princeton.[14]

These two questions are intertwined, but let us take Van Til as our entry-point. He not only acknowledged his indebtedness to Bavinck (and, of course, to Abraham Kuyper), but asserted it:

Have I, following such a method, departed radically from the tradition of Kuyper and Bavinck? On the contrary, I have learned all this primarily from them.... It is Bavinck’s monumental work which set a natural theology frankly oriented to Scripture squarely over against that of Romanism, which is based on neutral reason. It is Bavinck who taught me that the proofs for God as usually formulated on the traditional method prove a finite god.[15]

What Van Til learned from his Dutch mentors was, above all, the principle that the existence of God is not the conclusion of an elaborate argument, but the presupposition of all thought. Meaning is possible only because all that exists and all that occurs is set within the framework of the divine decrees. Without these, there would be no probabilities, and certainly no sustainable (scientific) predictions. All knowledge and all reasoning presuppose God. Consequently, in all discourse with unbelievers we have to assume that “there is hidden underneath the surface display of every man a sense of deity.”[16] Even as an “old man” and even as a covenant-breaker, he knows that God exists.

Bavinck would have been less insistent than Van Til that the fact of God must be asserted before approaching the question of the foundations of knowledge. Yet he is an equally ardent advocate of presuppositional theism, and the difference in emphasis between the two thinkers is due mainly to their differing vocations. While Van Til is seeking to lay a foundation for apologetics, Bavinck is laying a foundation for dogmatics, and his primary concern is that dogmatics must have its own foundation. We cannot lay the foundation with philosophy and then proceed to erect the edifice with theology.

This implies a clear rejection of Thomism, which began by using reason to establish basic truths such as the existence of God and then, having done so, proceeded to expound the “truths of faith” on the basis of holy scripture. Dogmaticians, Bavinck insisted,[17] cannot first take their position outside the Christian faith and then position themselves within it when dealing with later dogmas. Instead, the foundation itself has to be theological, and that means presuppositional. We have to assume that God exists, that God is knowable, and that he is knowable because he has revealed himself. Dogmaticians as such know nothing apart from scripture. This applies even to their attitude to general revelation: “They position themselves in the Christian faith, in special revelation, and from there look out on nature and history. And now they discover there as well the traces of the God whom they learned to know in Christ as their Father.”[18]

But Bavinck rejects Kant as emphatically as he rejects Aquinas. According to Kant, we can have no “scientific” knowledge of the super-sensuous (the noumenon) since all such knowledge is based on perception. At first sight, this looks like a duly humble deduction from the limitations of Pure Reason. But it assumes that the noumenon, the self-contained triune God, cannot reveal himself. This is something the theologian cannot concede. He has to insist on the possibility of a knowledge of God based on the reality of divine self-disclosure. Here Bavinck fully endorses the positions laid down by Calvin in the opening chapters of the Institutes. The sensus deitatis is engraved on every human heart and the semen religionis sown in every soul. “This revelation of God,” writes Bavinck, “is general, perceptible as such, and intelligible to every human.”[19]

III. Is the Knowledge of God Innate?

This assertion raises a series of fascinating questions. One is whether it is appropriate to speak of this knowledge of God as “innate.” In the Prolegomena Bavinck appears to reject the whole notion of innate ideas, but this occurs only in the context of his critique of Idealism, where he fortifies himself with the fact that the theory of immediate ideas was disowned by Scholastic as well as Reformed theologians.[20] Seventeenth-century dogmaticians such as Voetius even took over the empiricist thesis that “there is nothing in the intellect which is not first in the senses” and spoke of man, prior to the act of perceiving (that is, using his senses), as a blank page on which nothing is written.[21]

When, however, we turn to these seventeenth-century theologians we find that in addition to repudiating Idealism they were also combating Socinianism, and this required a quite different discourse. Socinians rejected Calvin’s doctrine of the sensus deitatis, and they did so on the basis that man’s soul is originally a tabula rasa.[22] The Reformed response was to insist that there is a cognitio Dei innata. According to Peter Martyr, for example, “Knowledge of God is naturally innate in the minds of all.”[23] Turretin, likewise, referred to natural theology as “partly innate.”[24]

There is a clear problem here: two problems, in fact. One is the meaning of “innate.” Does an innate knowledge of God mean that the newborn infant already possesses the sensus deitatis? The other is whether this innate knowledge is an inherent quality of human nature, existing independently of God.

In volume 2 of his Dogmatics Bavinck addresses these issues directly. He repeats and expands his critique of the theory of Innate Ideas, but then goes on to argue that this is only one side of the question.[25] It is legitimate to speak of the knowledge of God as “innate” if by that we mean that every human being possesses both the capacity and the inclination “to arrive at some firm, certain, and unfailing knowledge of God.”[26] We are not born with the knowledge of God. It has to be acquired. But the ability and the impulse to acquire it are innate, and we gain the knowledge in the course of our natural development and in a natural manner. It never needs to be instilled “by coercion and violence, nor by logical argument or compelling proofs, but belongs to humans by their very nature and arises spontaneously and automatically. Humans in the course of a normal development arrive at a certain knowledge of God without compulsion or effort.”[27]

Distrustful of the notion of Innate Ideas, Bavinck prefers to speak of the sensus deitatis as an “innate cognition”; and, anxious not to portray it as an autonomous human attribute, he links it directly to revelation: “Humans are not born fully equipped with a ready-made knowledge of God, but obtain it mediately, by the interior impact of revelation upon their consciousness.”[28] In accordance with this, he lists “the sense of divinity” (along with reason and conscience) as among those things “which are not active abilities but capacities that, as a result of stimuli from related phenomena in the outside world, leap into action.”[29]

This fact of the dependence of the sensus deitatis on God’s own action in revelation is enormously important, and this is reflected in the language used by Calvin and his successors. According to Calvin, there is an awareness of deity in every human heart and it is there by natural instinct. But it is no independent attribute of human nature. It is there only because it has been placed (inditum), engraved (insculptum), and written (inscriptum) there. The seed of religion is sown (insitum), and the knowledge of God is an implanted knowledge (notitia insita).[30]

Thus, the knowledge of God is simultaneously innate, acquired, and given; and the fact (or force) which unifies these qualities is revelation: “What is knowable about God (to gnoston) is manifest in them because God has revealed it to them” (Rom 1:19).

It fully accords with this view that it is such a presuppositionalist as Van Til who insists most strenuously on the force and clarity of general revelation. More than once he alludes to Ps 19:1 and adds the comment, “The Psalmist does not say that the heavens probably declare the glory of God, they surely and clearly do.”[31] In his article “Bavinck the Theologian” he asks, “Is not God’s revelation of himself clearly revealed in nature and history? Is it not a wrong reading of nature if it is not seen to be clearly revelatory of God?”[32] In his essay “Nature and Scripture”[33] he gives an extended treatment of the same theme, arguing that general revelation speaks with the same authority as scripture, and boldly applying to the former all the qualities that the Westminster Confession attributes to the latter. God’s revelation in nature—no less than his revelation in scripture—is necessary, authoritative, sufficient, and perspicuous. This does not mean that it affords exhaustive knowledge of God. Even less does it imply that human beings readily accept the revelation. But we must be careful, Van Til insists, not to impute to general revelation the inadequacies of man’s understanding of it. Indeed, he goes so far as to argue, “Even when man, as it were, takes out his own eyes, this act itself turns revelational in his wicked hands, testifying to him that his sin is a sin against the light that lighteth every man coming into the world.”[34]

Bavinck seems to agree with the endorsement given by such seventeenth-century dogmaticians as Voetius to the principle that “there is nothing in the intellect that was not previously in the senses.”[35] If this is true, it must apply to the sensus divinitatis and to the cognitio Dei insita as surely as it does to the rest of our human knowledge, although this discourse is complicated by the fact that the word “sense” is often used very imprecisely. Its Latin root, the verb sentire (whence sensus), means not “to feel” or “to sense” but “to perceive.” Calvin’s sensus divinitatis, therefore, refers not to something in the “senses” (a “sense” or “feeling” of deity), but to an awareness or perception. Yet, any revelation given through creation or nature must be given through our senses, and to this extent our “innate” theism is empirical, and therefore a posteriori. Only as we see, hear, taste, touch, and smell the universe do we experience it as declaring the glory of God. From this point of view God, the supersensuous, reveals himself through the sensuous, the noumenon reveals himself through the phenomenal, and the invisible gives himself visibility in creation.

But if it is true that the creation around us is so structured as to reveal the glory of God, it is no less true that we are so structured that we cannot but perceive the eternal power and glory of God shining through that universe. There is a clear seeing, as well as a clear revealing (Rom 1:20). Bavinck ultimately explains this correspondence in terms of the Logos, who both created the universe and indwells the human heart. But his starting-point is that “all life and all knowledge is based on a correspondence between subject and object.”[36] This “agreement” is not some human achievement, the result of man’s adaptation to his environment. It has to be explained theistically. Humans were adapted to the world from the beginning, and the world reciprocally adapted to them. It is this adaptation that has to be explained in terms of the Logos. “It is the one selfsame Logos,” he writes, “who made all things in and outside of human beings”; or again, “It is the Logos himself who through our spirit bears witness to the Logos in the world.”[37] The Logos Bavinck has in mind is not some preexistent Platonic Idea or some eternal Form. Even less is the Logos some inherent human rationality, independent of God, grace, and covenant, providing a foundation for thought. The Logos is the eternal personal Word, the Lord Jesus Christ; and the background in Bavinck is not Platonic but Johannine. The Logos made all things, inside as well as outside human beings. He is the life of the world, and, as such, also the light of the world ( John 1:4), illumining not only creation, but every human being ( John 1:9). This light has not been extinguished by the Fall. In the darkness the Light still shines, and in the silence the Logos still speaks.[38]

Here, once again, there is a clear link between creation and revelation. Creation is suffused with Logos. That is why creation is ultimately benign, the word of the curse (Gen 3:17) being always subordinate to the word of the gospel (Gen 3:15). But that is also why creation is revelational, the Son glorifying the Father by making him manifest in creation; and the reason that we are able to understand this revelation (indeed, never fail to understand it) is that the Logos indwells us, even in our darkness. We cannot not see, despite our most strenuous efforts to reject God from our knowledge (Rom 1:28). The revelation is clear, and the perception is clear (Rom 1:20)

Beneath this there lies for Bavinck an absolutely fundamental principle: God can be known only through God. And beneath this, in turn, lies something more fundamental still: only God knows God. The basic principle here was stated by Abraham Kuyper: “All personal life remains a closed mystery to us as long as he whose life this is does not himself disclose it to us.”[39] This precise point is made by Paul in 1 Cor 2:11: “For what person knows a man’s thoughts except the spirit of the man which is in him?” (RSV). The principle applies even more clearly to our knowledge of God, whose being is so much more mysterious and so counter-intuitive by comparison with our own. Of him, even more than of man, it is true that “you cannot know him in his personal existence, except he himself disclose the mystery of his inner being.”[40] This highlights the utter dependence of the theologian. Without revelation there can be no theology.

IV. What Is the Role of Apologetics?

But if so much is to be presupposed, what is the role of apologetics? Bavinck argues that if Christian revelation were to submit in advance to the judgment of reason it would contradict itself, since that revelation presupposes the darkness and incompetence of the human intellect.[41] Apologetics, therefore, cannot precede faith. Nor can it precede dogmatics, either as introduction or as foundation. Instead, it has to assume the truths set forth in dogmatics. This seems to mean apologetics can do no more than defend and vindicate the truths of theology. It cannot lay a foundation for theology by, for example, adducing evidence that the Bible is the word of God. Revelation can be received only by faith, and faith is evoked not by evidences or proofs, but by the truth itself. By the same token, certitude is the fruit of faith, not its prelude. Faith is certain; and to acquire certitude, or to keep it, we must focus our hearts on the object of faith. The function of apologetics, therefore, is purely defensive: reactive, almost. Its role is limited to refuting and silencing opponents of Christian dogma. This means that though useless a priori (in laying a foundation for faith) apologetics can be useful a posteriori, in the sense that once you have come to faith you can “find support for it in nature and history, in science and art, in society and state, in the heart and conscience of every human being.”[42]

Bavinck’s attitude to apologetics is essentially the same as that of Abraham Kuyper, who again insists that we begin with dogma, not apologetics. When Kuyper begins to reflect on “The Organism of Theology in Its Parts”[43] and to itemize its various divisions, there is no mention of apologetics. When he discusses the fundamental principium of theology, holy scripture, he states categorically, “No apologetics, however brilliant, will ever be able to restore the blessing of faith in the Scripture.” On the contrary, any faith that rests merely on reasoning is both absurd and devoid of all spirituality. The divine character of scripture rests exclusively on faith: “Our heart gives itself captive, not because critically it allows and approves the approach of God; but because it can offer no resistance, and must give itself captive to the operation which goes out from God.”[44]

When Kuyper addresses the question whether reason (or natural theology) is able to summon God’s special revelation before its tribunal, he answers, like Bavinck, with a resounding No! The reality and reliability of scripture cannot be demonstrated at the bar of reason; indeed, to allow reason to judge whether the Bible is the word of God is like the psychiatrist asking the maniac to prescribe his own treatment.[45] Even attempts to derive proofs of its divine character from scripture itself are devoid of all force with the opponent. Whatever value they may have in allaying the fears of those who are within the walls (intra muros), to those who are outside the walls (extra muros) they have no value.[46]

V. Old Princeton’s Consternation: “The sturdiest belief joins hands with unbelief.”

Old Princeton as represented particularly by B. B. Warfield reacted to these sentiments from their Amsterdam colleagues with consternation. Reviewing Bavinck’s De Zekerheid des Geloofs,[47] Warfield wrote, “It is a matter of surprise to us that the school which Dr Bavinck so brilliantly represents should be tempted to make so little of Apologetics.”[48] Kuyper’s attitude was, if anything, even more perplexing. Warfield could understand Ritschlians disparaging apologetics, but the case is very different

when we encounter very much the same forms of speech on the lips of heroes of the faith, who deprecate Apologetics because they feel no need of “reasons” to ground a faith which they are sure they have received immediately from God.... Thus, the sturdiest belief joins hands with unbelief to disparage the defenses of the Christian religion.[49]

He leaves us in no doubt who these “heroes of the faith” are: “Dr Abraham Kuyper, one of the really great theologians of our time, is a very striking instance of this tendency.”[50]

Warfield himself was certainly of a very different tendency, giving apologetics a most honorable place in the organism of theology and arguing that its role was not merely polemical or defensive, but foundational. It had to lay down the basis for the practice of theology and justify its place within the sciences.[51] He even goes so far as to say that “there would be the same reason for its existence and the same necessity for its work, were there no opposition in the world to be encountered and no contradiction to be overcome.”[52] This seems to come very close to saying that even if the human race had never fallen there would still have been a need for apologetics, because the necessity lies not in “the accident of sin, but in the fundamental needs of the human spirit.”[53]

In Warfield’s view it is impossible to be a believer without a reason for our faith; and it is the task of apologetics to bring this reason to our consciousness and to make its validity plain. As for specifics, apologetics has to lay a three-fold foundation: God, religion, and revelation. He argues that if theology is to exist “it must begin by establishing the existence of God, the capacity of the human mind to know him, and the accessibility of knowledge concerning him.”[54] This last, of course, was provided by scripture, and it was to exploring the foundation for accepting it as a divine revelation that Warfield gave the main strength of his life. He willingly conceded that a Christian must take his standpoint not above the scriptures, but in the scriptures: “But surely he must first have scriptures, authenticated to him as such, before he can take his standpoint in them.”[55]

If this tension between Amsterdam and Old Princeton ever led to a conflict of loyalties in the heart of Cornelius Van Til, his writings never show it. He came down unambiguously on the side of Kuyper and Bavinck, hesitating only as to whether they had always done justice to their own principium. While applauding Warfield’s massive contribution to Reformed theology he distanced himself from his apologetics: “Warfield wanted to operate in neutral territory with the unbeliever.”[56] Kuyper, on the other hand, is given a warm endorsement: “What has been advocated in this syllabus has in large measure been prepared under the influence of Abraham Kuyper, or has at least to a large extent been suggested by his thinking.. .. I have chosen the position of Abraham Kuyper.”[57]

VI. How Wide Is the Divergence?

But just how wide in reality is the divergence between Amsterdam and Old Princeton? One obvious difference is that the Princeton theologians devoted far less attention to Prolegomena than did their Dutch counterparts. The foundations, the methodology, and the intellectual foundations of theology were never their primary concern, nor were they hugely interested in such questions as whether theology was a science or whether its place was in the academy or in the seminary. As a result, nothing came out of Princeton comparable to Kuyper’s three-volume Encyclopaedie der Heilige Godgeleerdhied or Bavinck’s Prolegomena. Warfield’s only dedicated contribution to this discourse is his essay on “Apologetics,” extending to a mere eighteen pages. Charles Hodge devoted 188 pages of his Systematic Theology to Introduction, before going on to “Theology Proper” (this includes a discussion of theism and related issues, but then, volume 2 of Bavinck’s Dogmatics also revisits these introductory questions, which are given further extended treatment in The Philosophy of Revelation).

This asymmetry between Amsterdam and Old Princeton is a curiosity in itself. On the face of things, it is the presuppositionalists you would expect to rush eagerly into the heart of dogmatics; and if dogmatics has to provide its own principia it would be more logical to postpone the discussion of these principia to an Appendix, rather than treat them as prolegomena. Instead, it is Kuyper and Bavinck who linger in the anteroom, providing a massive apologia for dogmatics while arguing at the same time that the dogmatics must come before the apologia. By contrast, the Princeton theologians show what is, by comparison, an impatience to get to the heart of the Christian message. Warfield himself was clearly conscious of this anomaly. Referring to Kuyper’s Encyclopaedie he asks pointedly, “What is it that Dr Kuyper has done here except outline a very considerable—though certainly not a complete—Apologetics, which must precede and prepare the way for the ‘Bibliological group’ of theological departments?”[58]

We have to note, too, that Warfield, so often labelled an evidentialist, accepts unreservedly the kind of presuppositionalism expounded by Calvin in the first nine chapters of the Institutes. His position becomes crystal clear in his essay on “Calvin’s Doctrine of the Knowledge of God.”[59] Warfield sees this section of the Institutes as providing for the first time in the history of Christian theology “the plan of a complete structure of Christian Apologetics.”[60] His ensuing exposition makes plain that, far from holding that belief in God is an intellectual or rational conclusion from a series of theistic arguments, he follows Calvin in holding that it is innate, instinctive, universal, and ineradicable. “The knowledge of God,” he writes, “is given in the very same act by which we know self “; or again, “Man has an instinctive and ineradicable knowledge of God”;[61] or yet again, “Man cannot avoid possessing a knowledge of God.”[62]

As we have already seen, this sensus deitatis is not some autonomous attribute or endowment of human nature. It is entirely dependent on God’s self-disclosure in general revelation. God makes us aware of himself through his creation: an awareness that depends, ultimately, on our senses. Consequently, while Calvin insists that the knowledge of God is instinctive he is also aware that creation implants the sensus deitatis only because there are, stamped upon it, marks of the divine: “incomparable excellences,” we might say, which abundantly evidence it to be the work of God.

These statements call into question the assumption that evidentialism and presuppositionalism are mutually exclusive. It may be through the evidences that the notitia comes to be insita. Calvin is certainly not content with simply asserting categorically that the knowledge of God is innate. He goes on to state that “men cannot open their eyes without being compelled to see him.”[63] And they can see him only because “upon his individual works he has engraved unmistakeable marks of his glory, so clear and so prominent that even unlettered and stupid folk cannot plead the excuse of ignorance.”[64] Among these “marks” are the skillful ordering of the universe; the facts exposed by astronomy, medicine, and natural science; the human body; and, above all, man himself, “a microcosm because he is a rare example of God’s power, goodness and wisdom, and contains within himself enough miracles to occupy our minds.”[65] “Wherever,” concludes Calvin, “you cast your eyes, there is no spot in the universe wherein you cannot discern at least some sparks of his glory.”[66]

This does not mean that the sensus deitatis is a rational deduction from these “sparks of his glory.” Even less does it mean that God is posited simply as a cause to account for a finite universe. But it does mean that when God implants in us the knowledge of himself he does it through the phenomenal universe; and when he does it through the phenomenal universe, he does it through the attributes of that universe. It is the beauty, vastness, complexity, orderliness, and fecundity of the world that reveal his power, wisdom, and goodness; and it is our God-given ability to receive and interpret that revelation which constitutes the seed of religion.

It is noteworthy, too, that when Warfield argued that faith in the divine authority of scripture was a persuasion based on evidence, he was merely echoing a commonplace of Reformed theology.[67] Indeed, he was simply expounding the Westminster Confession (1.5), according to which scripture “doth abundantly evidence itself to be the word of God.” The Westminster divines clearly deemed that evidence to be cogent. “‘Abundant evidence,”‘ Warfield wrote, “one must suppose to be sufficient; and objectively it is sufficient, and more than sufficient; and this is what the Confession means to affirm.”[68] The evidence possesses such inherent cogency that everyone who reads the Bible ought to be persuaded that it is the word of God. Indeed, it is a sin not to be persuaded.

VII. How Dead Are the Unregenerate?

But whom do we expect to be persuaded? Warfield was fully aware of the noetic effects of sin. He knew as well as Bavinck that “it certainly is not in the power of all the demonstrations in the world to make a Christian,”[69] just as they both knew that all the preaching in the world could not make a Christian. He knew, too, that the human soul has been so damaged by sin that, confronted with general revelation, it deflects, suppresses, and perverts the self-manifestation of God; and he knew no less surely that that soul needs to be repaired before it can perceive the light emanating from the written word.

But at the same time Warfield was profoundly concerned at the use to which Kuyper put the doctrine of palingenesis. Amsterdam made the distinction between the regenerate and the unregenerate too absolute, as if they were separate species producing two different kinds of knowledge or science. Warfield saw the difference as one in degree, not in kind.[70] He pointed out that though sin had corrupted human nature in all its faculties it had not destroyed any of them, and went on to make the very obvious point that the regenerate were still sinners and that there was therefore no possibility of a sinless science.

Warfield certainly does not overstate Kuyper’s position. Regeneration, according to Kuyper, breaks humanity in two.[71] It repeals the unity of the human consciousness; it also repeals the unity of human science. This is particularly important for the science of theology.[72] Unregenerate theology assumes that all is normal, including the human intellect itself. On the contrary, the natural intellect has been perverted and debilitated by sin, and has consequently forfeited its right and lost its competence to judge the reality and reliability of special revelation.[73]

On this question, Van Til unhesitatingly sided with Kuyper. Warfield, he declared, attributes to “right reason” the ability to interpret natural revelation with essential correctness, but this right reason is not the reason of the Christian. It is the reason that possesses some criterion apart from Christianity and purports to judge Christianity. “The result of this method of appealing to ‘right reason,”‘ he concludes, “is that theism and Christianity are shown to be only probably true.” The underlying problem, he continues, is that Warfield, like the Arminian, does not believe in the absolute deadness of the natural man, but views that deadness merely as a thing of degrees. To Van Til, there can be no degrees of deadness: “The natural man does not know God.”[74]

VIII. Two Irreconcilable Approaches?

We seem, then, to be faced with two irreconcilable approaches: that of Bavinck, Kuyper, and Van Til on the one hand, and that of Warfield on the other. But once again we have to ask, “Is the gulf really as deep as it appears?”

We should note, first of all, that if the unregenerate intellect is as incompetent as Kuyper believes, this incompetence must affect its response to general revelation as much as its response to special revelation. Yet according to Paul in Rom 1:20, not only is God clearly revealed to every human heart: he is clearly seen. He is understood from the things that are made (Rom 1:20). Similarly, Kuyper’s “absolutely dead” man knows the judgment of God (Rom 1:32). This is why the pagan is without excuse for his idolatry. C. E. B. Cranfield, reflecting the Barthian suspicion of general revelation, takes Paul’s meaning here to be not that through general revelation man acquires a valid though limited knowledge, but only that man is excuseless in his ignorance.[75] But Paul’s point, surely, is precisely that man is not ignorant. In his very unrighteousness he holds the truth (v. 18) and in the very moment of holding it, he holds it down, suppresses it, and perverts it. All this points to real knowledge, and to knowledge that is ineradicable. There is no point at which he does not know the judgment of God (Rom 1:32), and he certainly can never reach that depth of intellectual incompetence where he loses either the notitia Dei insita or the semen religionis. Absolutely dead he may be, in Van Til’s terms. But we have no right to make an illegitimate totality transfer from the death metaphor, arguing for total noetic incompetence in the face of the Bible’s clear statement that this dead man understands and knows.

It is equally clear that at the purely noetic level the intellect of the spiritually dead man is perfectly capable of understanding not only general, but special revelation. The Fall has not reduced the natural man to total theological incompetence. On the contrary, he may be a perfectly competent exegete of scripture and perfectly capable of understanding every single doctrine of the Christian faith. He may even be disposed to defend them vigorously, he may derive enormous intellectual pleasure from studying theology, and he may be able to dilate on the most intimate Christian experiences. By common grace all these subjects lie within the compass of the unregenerate intellect. He would be a rash man who would conclude from mere theological prowess that he is in a state of salvation.

In fact, the “absolutely dead” unregenerate intellect may even feel the force of truth and be attracted by it. He may immediately receive the word with joy (Mark 4:16), he may taste its goodness (Heb 6:5), and he may be pricked in his heart (Acts 2:37). Indeed, something like this portrait is essential if we are to understand the gravity of the sin against the Holy Spirit (Matt 12:24–32). It is “unforgivable” precisely because in the very moment of ascribing the works of Christ to the malevolence of Beelzebub the blasphemer knows assuredly that these works are from an utterly different source, the beneficence of the Holy Spirit. What is unforgivable is not the failure to recognise the Spirit, but the fact that, clearly recognising him, they speak evil of him.

There is a curiosity here. For all its disavowal of philosophical a priorism, the Kuyperian approach gives every impression of resting on the philosophical principle that “ought implies can.” It is on this basis that the hyper-Calvinist refuses to offer the gospel freely and indiscriminately to every sinner. If the sinner cannot believe, there is no point in asking him to believe. Indeed, to ask him to believe is to undermine the doctrine of total depravity and to convey a totally false impression of the capabilities of fallen man. Conversely, the Arminian argues that if man is obligated to believe, he must be able to believe, so that the ultimate spiritual primacy lies not with divine grace, but with the human will.

This all seems to find its echo in the Kuyperian argument that because man is “absolutely dead” there is no point in apologetics; or, conversely, that to engage in apologetics is to call in question the noetic depravity of man. But by the same token, there was no point in Jesus saying to Lazarus, “Lazarus, come forth!” There is surely the same merit in apologetics as there is in preaching (of which, indeed, it is but a sub-species); and there is the same merit in plying the unregenerate intellect with the evidence for theism and the evidence for the divine authority of scripture as there is in following Paul’s example in plying it with evidence for the resurrection and for the messiahship of Jesus. That evidence may often fall by the wayside, or on stony ground, or among thorns. But what we have absolutely no right to do is to look at the soil and say, “Thereisno point in sowing here. It’s dead!” God says, “Sow!” and so we sow. When we sow, he gives the increase. When, because of our own presuppositions, we decline to sow, there can be no increase. It was precisely in view of human inability that Augustine prayed, Da quod iubes et iube quod vis. Through the apologist God commands the dead to believe, and God gives them the faith he commands them to have. Our command may have no more intrinsic power than the dust from which God made Adam. But God’s decision was that without dust there would be no Adam.

None of this is inconsistent with the emphasis of the Westminster Confession on the need for the illumination of the Holy Spirit in order to our understanding scripture. The key phrase in the Confession’s statement is “saving understanding”: “We acknowledge the inward illumination of the Spirit of God to be necessary for the saving understanding of such things as are revealed in the word” (1.6; italics mine). The Confession clearly posits two kinds of understanding: one that is sufficient and saving, and one that is purely cerebral and noetic. Yet the two are not unrelated, and certainly not antithetic. The “illuminated” mind also has knowledge: knowledge that in its epistemic content differs in no way from that of the unregenerate. In fact, it is this very knowledge that is illuminated in the case of the believer, so that he not only reads the words of scripture and hears the voice of the preacher, but sees and hears through them the beauty of Christ, drawing him irresistibly towards himself. It is not the intellect that is changed; at least not primarily. It is the taste. The revolution is one in discernment and discrimination. There is a transition to a whole new spiritual aesthetic.

Without such a revolution the natural, unregenerate man, whatever his theological competence, is inevitably going to resist the Christian message. Yet that is no reason for refraining from presenting it to him. Nor is it any reason for holding back from offering an apologia for the gospel. The Lord himself piped to men who refused to dance (Matt 11:17). Far from insisting that his messianic status and divine identity must be the presupposition of all dialogue, he ventured onto the ground of the natural man; and far from operating under the protection of an imperious summons to implicit faith, he operated under all the vulnerability of the Messianic Secret. He was approved and attested by God through miracles, wonders, and signs (Acts 2), yet stood at last where men could spit on him, mock him, and kill him. Christian apologetics must do the same. It is no disgrace if the apologist makes himself as vulnerable as his Lord. And it is no disgrace if the world treats the apologist as it treated his Lord. We have no right to refuse to stand where we may be mistreated. We have no right, even, to refuse to stand where our witness runs the risk of seeming to collapse in ignominy. The apologist, no less than the ambassador, may have to operate on bended knee (2 Cor 5).

There is good reason to think that Van Til would have been in entire sympathy with these sentiments. For all his agreement with Kuyper on the absolute deadness of the natural man, he knew that in reality it is spiritually, not intellectually, that the natural man is incapacitated. Indeed, the deadness of the natural man is not a deadness in ignorance, but a deadness in knowledge: “For the spiritual deadness of the natural man is what it is as suppression of the knowledge of God given man by virtue of creation in God’s image.”[76] Following on from this, Van Til deliberately and consciously parts company with Kuyper in his rejection of apologetics. “I have chosen the part of Abraham Kuyper,” he writes, “but I am unable to follow him when from the fact of the mutually destructive character of the two principles he concludes to the uselessness of reasoning with the natural man.” He even states his agreement with Warfield to the extent that, “Warfield was quite right in maintaining that Christianity is objectively defensible.” He accepts, too, the distinction between intellectual understanding and spiritual understanding, and affirms that the natural man has the ability to understand intellectually, though not spiritually, the challenge presented to him.[77]

IX. Van Til’s “Challenge”

But what challenge, precisely, and how is it to be presented to him? Van Til is adamant that the defense cannot proceed on the assumption that there is common ground between the believer and the unbeliever. Instead, we have to challenge the very ground on which the unbeliever stands and show him that on his principle (the principle that God’s existence is at best only probable) human predication can have no meaning at all. There can be no truth and no meaning where there is no ultimate meaning; and there can be no ultimate meaning where there is no sovereign intelligence and no overall purpose.

This “challenge” can be epitomized in the principle, “If knowledge, then God.”[78] It is well founded. All human discourse assumes a rationality that rests on the fact that the universe was created by the eternal Logos, just as all human praise and blame assumes an absolute justice that reflects the holiness of God most high. It is perfectly legitimate to argue, therefore, that the unbeliever in all his discourse (even against theism) has to stand on theistic ground. However, while it is easy enough for the apologist to convince himself and his fellow apologists that this is the case, this does not by itself amount to effective apologia. The apologist has to convince the unbeliever that this actually is his assumption; and here Van Til clearly recognises the limitations of his own approach. He can convince the natural man only intellectually, not spiritually.[79] Van Til’s challenge is not an alternative to argument or evidence. It is an alternative argument, and as such it is no more cogent than Warfield’s “proofs.” The latter can convince us intellectually that scripture is the word of God, but they cannot give us “a full persuasion and assurance” of its divine authority. Van Til’s “challenge” can do the same for Christian theism. It can engender respect for it and convince us of its intellectual coherence and force. But it cannot bring men to their knees, confessing, “Jesus Christ is Lord!”

Van Til’s apologetic, for all its objective validity, can achieve subjective cogency only through the witness of the Holy Spirit. Here the difference between Amsterdam and Old Princeton becomes minimal. In the last analysis each has to invoke the testimonium internum Spiritus Sancti. His reliance on that testimonium vindicates Van Til from the charge of fideism; but, equally, it vindicates Warfield from the charge of rationalism.

X. Van Til and Warfield: Fideism versus Rationalism?

Take Van Til first. Fideism means faith in faith: a certitude based on the act or fact of believing rather than on the reasons for believing. Applied to Christian theism it would mean that we believe in God because we believe in him. This is not the argument deployed in Van Til’s apologetic. What Van Til does is to argue that we cannot but believe in knowledge, and that to believe in knowledge means believing in God as the source, guarantor, and test of knowledge. Here, conscious theistic belief (fides) is the result of argument: argument that forces the unbeliever to face his own presuppositions (presuppositions which are fully consonant with the positions Paul lays down in Rom 1:19–32) and to accept that he does, after all, have a sensus deitatis. Here the theistic belief arises from a man’s facing the truth about himself.[80] But in the absence of the witness of the Spirit the conviction will remain mere naked, sterile conviction. The Spirit alone can give the argument, “If knowledge, then God,” spiritual cogency. Van Til was fully aware of this. He acknowledges, for example, that his own challenge to the natural man will be effective only “if the Holy Spirit enlightens him spiritually.”[81] In the same way, referring to our reception of scripture as divine revelation, he declares: “For the acceptance of that revelation it is again upon the testimony of the Spirit that we must depend”; and this work of testimony, he insists, is as supernatural as the work of the Spirit in inspiration itself.[82]

Yet the Amsterdam tradition is also fully aware that the Spirit does not produce this conviction without evidence. So far as the testimonium is concerned, the Spirit is advocate or attorney. He is not the evidence. He is the witness to the divine authority of scripture, not its ground or reason. Kuyper seems to acknowledge this, declaring that though God’s personal witness in our souls is indispensable, yet he does not bear this witness “majestic-absolutely,” but through the scriptures.[83] This takes us back to the Confessional position that scripture attests itself through its own “incomparable excellences”: those very internal evidences of divine origin that constitute Warfield’s proofs. And although Kuyper argues that even the richest exposition can never constitute anything the word of God, yet it is surely the responsibility of the apologist (including the preacher) to expound those excellences, both to confirm the faith of the believer and to instill faith within the unbeliever; always bearing in mind that while Paul plants and Apollos waters it is God alone who can give the increase (1 Cor 3:6). Only the risen Lord can open hearts; but conversely, he does so only while Paul speaks (Acts 16:14).

But what of Warfield? Was he, albeit unwittingly, a rationalist, putting his faith not in God and his word, but in logical argument and rational proof ? Did he, as Sandeen argues, “depart from Reformed teachings by emphasising the ‘external evidences’ for the Bible’s authority rather than asserting the witness of the Holy Spirit within the believer to confirm that authority”?[84]

It is tempting to rush in blindly to defend Warfield from such a charge. We need to pause, however, to take stock of the alternative to the rationalism of which he is accused. We cannot treat the divine authority of scripture as an element in a type of Christian foundationalism: a self-evident premise providing a foundation for all subsequent thought. What Paul says of faith in Christ is surely equally true of faith in scripture. “How,” asks the apostle, “can people believe in one of whom they have never heard?” (Rom 10:14). “How,” we may ask, “can they believe in a Bible which they have never read?” In the one case, faith comes by hearing. In the other case, it comes by reading. Only in this way can we experience the self-evidencing power of the word.

Yet, self-evidence is evidence. Besides, though it is internal in the sense that the evidence is in the scriptures themselves, it is external in that it is not in us. The reasons for our faith in scripture lie not in ourselves, but in the Bible;[85] and these reasons, as Paul Helm points out, are not rationalistic, but religious, arising out of our relation to God. They are in the generic sense “spiritual.” The Bible is not received because it conforms to some external standard of reasonableness.[86] Yet there are “standards” in our hearts before the Bible enters them. In the case of the unregenerate there is a divinely implanted sensus deitatis: a revelation antecedent to that of scripture, to which any authentic special revelation must attest itself. A word from God must conform to what we already know of the eternal power, justice, goodness, love, wisdom, and god-ness of God.[87] In the case of the regenerate (or the spiritually awakened), there are other, newly implanted “standards”: a conscience in need of justification; a weakness that looks for strength; a bewildered confusion that rejoices in the voice of the Good Shepherd.

XI. “Man needs more than evidence.”

These are the religious reasons that underlie the assurance that the Bible is the word of God. Yet Warfield knew full well that no matter how brilliant the divine credentials of scripture, “man needs more than evidence, however abundant, to persuade and enable him to believe and obey God’s word.”[88] While the paraklesis (advocacy) can have no authority without evidence, only a parakletos (advocate) can give the evidence cogency; and that parakletos is the Holy Spirit.[89]

Warfield is careful to define the precise meaning of the testimonium internum. He circumscribes it with two distinctions. On the one hand, it is not mysticism, as if faith in scripture were no more than an emotional state of euphoric assurance without any objective foundation. But neither, on the other hand, is it mere rationalism, producing not fides, but scientia: an intellectual belief based on reasoning and proof.

Instead, the witness of the Spirit is a “preparation of heart.”[90] It is neither an additional evidence nor a dispensing with evidence. It is a renewal of the heart, sensitizing it to the evidence so that it is fully persuaded, by the very scriptures themselves, that these scriptures are the word of God.

Here Warfield brings together the Confession’s statement on the testimonium internum and its statement on Saving Faith (chapter 14). Both, he argues, are dealing with the same question: what is the origin of our certitude that scripture is the word of God? In chapter 1.5, the Confession defines faith as full persuasion of the divine authority of scripture, and asserts that this persuasion is due to the witness of the Spirit. In chapter 14.2, it defines faith as the grace by which the Christian believes to be true whatever God has revealed in his word. But to what is this belief due? It is “the work of the Spirit of Christ in their hearts” (14.1).

Building on this, Warfield lays down his fundamental position: the change effected by the testimonium internum takes place not in the object, holy scripture, but in the subject, the believer: “What is supplied by the Holy Spirit in working faith in the heart surely is not a ready-made faith, rooted in nothing and clinging without reason to its object; nor yet new grounds of belief in the object presented; but just a new power to the heart to respond to the grounds of faith, sufficient in themselves, already present to the mind.”[91] Here Warfield is deliberately approximating the doctrine of the testimonium to the doctrines of regeneration and effectual calling: to Kuyper’s palingenesis, in fact. “What is needed,” he writes, “is, in ordinary language, a new heart.” Indeed, when he asserts the need for the testimonium, he borrows the very language used by the Shorter Catechism to define effectual calling: man needs preparation of spirit “in order to be persuaded and enabled to yield faith and obedience.”[92]

Yet the testimonium internum Spiritus Sancti cannot simply be identified with the new birth. Edward Reynolds uses a common analogy: “To proportion the eye of the soul to the light of the word, there is required an act of the Spirit opening the eyes and drawing away the veil.”[93] But something more is needed than an operation to restore the sight. The Spirit must also shine the light, because the sighted are as blind in the dark as the blind are in the light. He must shine the light of the word into the newly opened eyes. Only in that combination of light and eyes, of new heart and cogent evidence, do we have the testimony of the Spirit.

Though there is no evidence that Bavinck had read Warfield’s expositions of the testimonium internum, he was certainly familiar with the position adopted by the Princeton theologian: it had already been espoused by seventeenth-century Reformed theologians. According to Bavinck, it represented a falling away from the position of Calvin and the early reformers:

Gradually the doctrine of the internal testimony began to lose its place of honour even in Reformed theology. Already in Turretin, Amyrald, Molina et al., it was weakened and identified with the so-called illumination of the Holy Spirit by which the intellect is enabled to note the marks and criteria of the divinity of Holy Scripture. Faith no longer connects directly and immediately with Scripture but is the product of insight into the marks of truth and divinity it bears. Inserted between Scripture and faith, then, are the marks of the truth of Scripture.[94]

Once again, however, it is by no means clear that there is any significant divergence between Amsterdam and Princeton. Just as Warfield links the testimonium to the experience of the new birth, so Bavinck links it to “the state of the religious subject”: “The witness of the Holy Spirit, accordingly, gives no assurance of the objective truths of salvation aside from the state of the religious subject. The Spirit guarantees those truths because they are inseparable from regeneration and conversion, forgiveness and the adoption of the believer as a child of God.”[95] Clearly, there is no testimony of the Spirit either prior to regeneration or outside of regeneration. The Spirit regenerates by witnessing: witnessing both to scripture and to Christ. This means that the testimonium is not merely given to faith: it is given in faith. And in that faith, trust in Christ and trust in scripture are linked together inseparably. The faith which believes to be true whatever God has revealed in his word has as its “principal” act “receiving and resting upon Christ alone for justification, sanctification and eternal life” (WCF 14.2). The Spirit sheds his light simultaneously on Christ and on scripture; and in doing so he gives us not only the capacity for faith, but faith itself: the faith he commands us to have.

What do we then recognize in holy scripture? The voice of the divinity we already know in the sensus deitatis; a message “matchless, godlike and divine”; a God of such splendor that a greater cannot be conceived;[96] and a Christ so glorious that “less cannot satisfy, and more is not desired.”[97]

I heard the voice of Jesus say,
Come unto me and rest.

(Horatius Bonar)

Notes

1. The first edition of Gereformeerde Dogmatiek appeared in four volumes between 1895 and 1901. A second, expanded edition appeared between 1906 and 1911. Subsequent third and fourth editions (Kampen: Kok, 1918 and 1928) were unaltered from the second, apart from pagination.
2. Herman Bavinck, The Philosophy of Revelation (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1979).
3. Herman Bavinck, The Last Things (ed. John Bolt; trans. John Vriend; Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003).
4. Herman Bavinck, Prolegomena (vol. 1 of Reformed Dogmatics; ed. John Bolt; trans. John Vriend; Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003).
5. Herman Bavinck, God and Creation (vol. 2 of Reformed Dogmatics; ed John Bolt; trans. John Vriend; Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004).
6. Thomas Chalmers, Institutes of Theology (vols. 7 and 8 of Select Works of Thomas Chalmers; ed. William Hanna; Edinburgh: Constable, 1854–1863). Before turning to the “Subject Matter of Christianity” Chalmers devotes 360 pages to Preliminaries, Natural Theology, and Christian Evidences. Chalmers also published a full-scale, 520-page apologetic, Evidences of the Christian Revelation (vol. 6 of Select Works); and in the course of his professorial duties he supplemented this with extensive lectures on Butler’s Analogy and Paley’s Evidences (see Posthumous Works of the Rev. Thomas Chalmers [ed. William Hanna; 9 vols.; Edinburgh: Constable, 1847–1849], 9:1–128).
7. Robert Flint, Theism (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1891). Flint concedes that the books of the Old Testament “assume, and could not but assume, that God is, and that he is all-powerful, perfectly wise, and perfectly holy.” He concedes, too, that these books “do not prove this,” but contends at the same time that they “must necessarily imply, and do everywhere imply, that a real proof exists.” For that proof, according to Flint, scripture refers us “to the world and our own hearts” (these quotes appear on p. 6). Flint’s corpus on Natural Theology was completed by the publication of Anti-Theistic Theories (Edinburgh: Constable) in 1879 and Agnosticism (Edinburgh: Blackwood) in 1902, the year after the appearance of the final volume of the first edition of Bavinck’s Dogmatiek.
8. William Cunningham, Lectures in Theology (London: Nisbet, 1878; repr., Greenville, S.C.: A Press, 1990). Cunningham believed (105f.) that “nature” did contain proofs of the existence of an invisible, intelligent being, to whom all things owe their existence. But he distinguished between the objective existence of these proofs and our ability, in the mere use of our natural faculties, to discover them. He suggests, too, that, at best, Natural Theology is merely seeking proofs from nature for doctrines already known from Special Revelation: “That men could have discovered them does not necessarily flow from the fact that they can now prove them” (106). For Cunningham’s treatment of the witness of the Spirit, see Lectures in Theology, 320–42.
9. Thomas Halyburton, An Essay concerning the Reason of Faith (Edinburgh, 1714); repr. under the title, An Essay concerning the Nature of Faith in The Works of the Rev. Thomas Halyburton (ed. Robert Burns; Glasgow: Blackie & Son, 1833), 505–46.
10. See The Works of John Owen (ed. W. H. Goold; Edinburgh: 1850–1883; repr. in 16 vols., London: Banner of Truth, 1967), 4:4–115.
11. A. B. Davidson, The Theology of the Old Testament (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1904), 31.
12. John Baillie, Our Knowledge of God (London: Oxford University Press, 1939), 6. For Baillie’s overall theological contribution see George Newlands, John and Donald Baillie: Transatlantic Theology (New York: Peter Lang, 2002).
13. Baillie, Our Knowledge of God, 240.
14. For the link between Princeton and Westminster, see, for example, the words of J. G. Machen in his first Convocation Address, 25 September 1929: “Though Princeton Seminary is dead, the noble tradition of Princeton Seminary is alive. Westminster Seminary will endeavor by God’s grace to continue that tradition unimpaired.” This address (“Westminster Theological Seminary: Its Purpose and Plan”) is republished in J. Gresham Machen: Selected Shorter Writings (ed. D. G. Hart; Phillipsburg: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2004), 187–94.
15. Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith (2d ed.; Philadelphia: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1963), 208.
16. Ibid., 207.
17. Bavinck, Prolegomena, 320.
18. Ibid., 321.
19. Ibid., 310.
20. Ibid., 224.
21. See further the discussion in Bavinck, God and Creation, 66–72.
22. Heinrich Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics Set Out and Illustrated from the Sources (ed. E. Bizer; trans. G. T. Thomson; London: Allen & Unwin, 1950; repr., Grand Rapids: Baker, 1978), 1.
23. Quoted in Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, 1.
24. Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology (ed. James T. Dennison, Jr.; trans. George Musgrave Giger; 3 vols.; Phillipsburg: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1992), 1:6.
25. Bavinck, God and Creation, 70–76.
26. Ibid., 71.
27. Ibid., 73.
28. Ibid., 72.
29. Bavinck, Prolegomena, 586.
30. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (ed. John T. McNeill; trans. Ford Lewis Battles; 2 vols.; LCC; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), 1:43–44 (1.3.1).
31. Cornelius Van Til, introduction to The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible, by B. B. Warfield (Philadelphia: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1948), 21. Cf. Van Til, “Nature and Scripture,” in The Infallible Word: A Symposium by the Members of the Faculty of Westminster Theological Seminary (ed. N. B. Stonehouse and Paul Woolley; Philadelphia: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1946), 278.
32. Cornelius Van Til, “Bavinck the Theologian,” WTJ 24 (November 1961): 57.
33. Van Til, “Nature and Scripture,” 263–301.
34. Ibid., 278-79.
35. Bavinck, God and Creation, 68.
36. Bavinck, Prolegomena, 586.
37. Ibid., 586, 387.
38. Cf. Calvin, The Gospel According to St. John 1–10 (vol. 4 of Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries; ed. David W. Torrance and Thomas F. Torrance; trans. T. H. L. Parker; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 11–12.
39. Abraham Kuyper, Principles of Sacred Theology (trans. J. Hendrik de Vries; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1898; repr., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1954), 248.
40. Ibid.
41. Bavinck, Prolegomena, 215.
42. Ibid., 515.
43. Kuyper, Principles of Sacred Theology, 627ff.
44. Ibid., 366.
45. Ibid., 381.
46. Ibid., 388.
47. Herman Bavinck, De Zekerheid des Geloofs (Kampen: J. H. Kok, 1901). ET: Certainty of Faith (trans. Harry der Nederlanden; Jordan Station, Ontario: Paideia Press, 1980).
48. B. B. Warfield, Selected Shorter Writings (ed. John E. Meeter; 2 vols.; Nutley, N.J.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1973), 2:117.
49. Ibid., 95.
50. Ibid.
51. See in particular Warfield’s chapter, “Apologetics,” in Studies in Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1932), 3–21.
52. Ibid., 4.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid., 11.
55. Warfield, Selected Shorter Writings, 2:98.
56. Van Til, Defense of the Faith, 265. Curiously enough, Van Til and Karl Barth seem to be at one in emphasizing the futility of engaging the unbeliever on his own ground. Barth claims the support of Anselm for the idea that discussion on the unbeliever’s ground was not only difficult, but expressly excluded and forbidden: “If, in the last analysis, this partner is completely devoid of faith, then any attempt to help him in regard to knowledge of faith, of which of course he must also be devoid, cannot but be in vain. And so insipienter quaerere and sapienter respondere are marching along side by side but really having nothing in common and once that is recognized they might as well save themselves all the trouble and excitement” (Barth, Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum: Anselm’s Proof of the Existence of God in the Context of His Theological Scheme [trans. Ian W. Robertson; London: SCM Press, 1960], 65).
57. Van Til, Defense of the Faith, 263, 265.
58. Warfield, Selected Shorter Writings, 2:97.
59. B. B. Warfield, “Calvin’s Doctrine of the Knowledge of God,” in Calvin and Augustine (Philadelphia: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1956), 29–130.
60. Ibid., 30.
61. Both quotes, ibid., 31.
62. Ibid., 32.
63. Calvin, Institutes, 1:52 (1.5.1).
64. Ibid.
65. Ibid., 54 (1.5.3).
66. Ibid., 52 (1.5.1).
67. The precedent was set by Calvin, who devotes a whole chapter to the internal indicia of the divinity of scripture (Institutes, 1:81–92 [1.8]). See further, Paul Helm, John Calvin’s Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 252–57.
68. B. B. Warfield, The Westminster Assembly and Its Work (New York: Oxford University Press, 1931), 211.
69. Warfield, Selected Shorter Writings, 2:98.
70. Ibid., 117.
71. Kuyper, Principles of Sacred Theology, 152.
72. Ibid., 220.
73. Ibid., 381.
74. See Van Til, Defense of the Faith, 264–66.
75. C. E. B. Cranfield, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (2 vols.; ICC; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975), 1:116. Cf. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/2 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956), 303: what man achieves “is never the knowledge of God as Lord and God. It is never the truth. It is a complete fiction, which has not only little but no relation to God.”
76. Van Til, Defense of the Faith, 226.
77. Ibid., 265-66.
78. Cf. James Anderson, “If Knowledge Then God,” CTJ 40 (April 2005): 226.
79. Van Til, Defense of the Faith, 266.
80. This brings us back to Calvin’s insistence on the intimate connection between knowledge of God and knowledge of ourselves: “while joined by many bonds, which one precedes and brings forth the other is not easy to discern” (Institutes, 1:35 [1.1.1]).
81. Van Til, Defense of the Faith, 266.
82. See Van Til, “Introduction,” 34–35.
83. Kuyper, Principles of Sacred Theology, 366.
84. E. R. Sandeen, The Origins of Fundamentalism: Toward a Historical Interpretation (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1968), 24. Cf. J. B. Rogers and D. K. McKim, The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible: An Historical Approach (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979), 323–61; and T. F. Torrance, review of B. B. Warfield, The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible, SJT 7 (March 1954): 104-8.
85. It is hard to agree unequivocally with Bavinck when he states that “the final and deepest ground of faith cannot lie outside of us in proofs and arguments, in church and tradition, but can be found only in human beings themselves, in the religious subject “ (Prolegomena, 385; italics mine). On the other hand, Bavinck is also anxious to insist that the witness of the Spirit cannot be reduced to “the subjective assurance that scripture is the word of God” (ibid., 593).
86. See Paul Helm, “Faith, Evidence and the Scriptures,” in Scripture and Truth (ed. D. A. Carson and John D. Woodbridge; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1983), 306.
87. Cf. Warfield’s observation that, “without general revelation, special revelation would lack that basis in the fundamental knowledge of God as the mighty and wise, righteous and good, maker and ruler of all things, apart from which the further revelation of this great God’s interventions in the world for the salvation of sinners could not be either intelligible, credible or operative” (Inspiration and Authority of the Bible, 75).
88. Warfield, The Westminster Assembly and Its Work, 211.
89. The rendering “advocate” for parakletos in such passages as John 15:26, John 16:7, and 1 John 2:2 is well established. It is warranted by Philo’s consistent use of the word in this sense, but it is also required by the prevalence of lawcourt imagery in the above passages (see TDNT 5:803). The noun paraklesis does not appear in John, nor does it occur in forensic contexts elsewhere. But once we introduce the parakletos to the lawcourt, his paraklesis must be adjusted to the new metaphor. It becomes advocacy: the presentation of evidence. In the current context, the Spirit acts as advocate for the divine authenticity of scripture in the human heart.
90. Warfield, The Westminster Assembly and Its Work, 212.
91. Warfield, Selected Shorter Writings, 2:115.
92. Warfield, The Westminster Assembly and Its Work, 212. Cf. the language of the Shorter Catechism (Answer 31): “Effectual calling is the work of God’s Spirit, whereby...he doth persuade and enable us to embrace Jesus Christ, freely offered to us in the gospel” (italics mine).
93. Cited in Warfield, The Westminster Assembly and Its Work, 221.
94. Bavinck, Prolegomena, 584.
95. Ibid., 594.
96. Anselm, Proslogion, chapter 2 (aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari possit).
97. William Guthrie (1620–1665), The Christian’s Great Interest (n.p.: The Publications Committee of the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland, 1951), 43.