Christ-Centered, Bible-Based, And Second-Rate? “Right Reason” As The Aesthetic Foundation Of Christian Education

By Paul Kjoss Helseth

[Paul Kjoss Helseth is Associate Professor of Christian Thought at Northwestern College in St. Paul, Minn.]

I. Introduction

The institution at which I am currently employed recently revised its “Philosophy of Education” statement. The first paragraph of the revised statement reads:

Northwestern College endeavors to provide education that is grounded first and foremost in the truth of the Bible and in God as the Ultimate Reality of the universe. Only through an intimate knowledge of the Word of God and a deep, growing relationship with Jesus Christ can all other knowledge be interpreted properly and accurately. The study of the Bible and theology is the foundation upon which all other disciplines rest. When the apparent truths of an academic discipline conflict with the truth of God’s Word, we put our trust in God’s revealed truth in the Bible.[1]

While this paragraph and others like it have been eagerly received by the more conservative members of North western’s constituency the question that begs asking is, can it be taken seriously by believing academics who long to take part in the life of the mind “with all the enthusiasm of the veriest humanist,” to borrow a phrase from J. Gresham Machen?[2] After all, doesn’t the statement’s commitment to the centrality of Christ and the epistemological priority of Scripture suggest a reluctance to pursue truth with anything approaching wholehearted, full-bodied rigor?[3] Do these commitments not betray precisely the kind of scholarly provincialism or sectarian anti-intellectualism that is routinely lampooned by the kinds of intellectuals who share what Thomas Sowell calls, in his trenchant analysis of the prevailing mindset “among the intellectual and political elite of our time,” “ the vision of the anointed”?[4] In this article I argue that believing academics with aggressive minds can and should take the commitments articulated in Northwestern’s revised statement seriously because these commitments inform a kind of aesthetic that is the fountainhead of scholarship that is God-centered and therefore first-rate. As I hope to make clear in the discussion that follows, the justification for this contention is found in the grounding of these commitments in a classically Protestant understanding of “right reason,” the aesthetic principle that is informed by the theological disciplines and that conservative Reformed scholars rightly insist is the lifeblood of education that is distinctly and consistently Christian. Northwestern’s “Philosophy of Education” makes its endorsement of this principle plain, and it does so by affirming the following:

We believe that all intellectual inquiry begins with a set of assumptions based on faith. We further believe that, from the beginning, God has revealed truth to humanity by His Word and by His creation. Because of the Fall, sin impairs our capacity to reason rightly and to know truth. It is only God’s redemptive work of new creation through Jesus Christ, revealed in the Bible, that has restored our potential for rightly discerning and interpreting truth.[5]

II. “Right Reason” And The Life Of The Believing Mind

1. The Place of “Right Reason” in the Postmodern World

“Right reason” is a philosophical concept with roots “both in [ancient] Middle Eastern and biblical culture, as well as in Greco-Roman antiquity”[6] that was assimilated by the Christian church, and that in many respects is still at home in the postmodern world. If we conceive of postmodernism as “a mindset” that, at its heart, “is tightly linked to. .. [the] denial that humans can know truth in any objective, universal sense” because they are thought to be “too historically situated and sociologically conditioned” to have anything approaching an unbiased, “God’s-eye” view of reality,[7] “right reason” as a concept is remarkably at home in a postmodern world not because it lends credence to the truth-destroying notion that “‘knowledge’ is [nothing more than] a construction of one’s social, linguistic structures,”[8] but because it acknowledges that both objective and subjective factors are involved in the process of knowing. To vastly oversimplify the matter, while modernists are convinced that objective truth can be known only when “personal and subjective factors.. . [are] eliminated from the knowing process,”[9] and while postmodernists are persuaded that objective truth cannot be known precisely because personal and subjective factors are an essential component of each and every attempt to know, advocates of “right reason” recognize that although knowing does in fact involve the kinds of personal and subjective factors that many modernists naïvely presume have little if anything to do with our attempts to know, this does not mean that a more or less objective apprehension of reality is beyond our reach.[10]

2. The Concept of “Right Reason”

What, then, is “right reason”? In short, “right reason” is “not merely reason in our [modern] sense of the word; it is not a dry light, a non moral instrument of inquiry. .. [Rather] it is a kind of rational and philosophic conscience which distinguishes man from the beasts and which links man with man and with God.”[11] As a philosophical concept that was born in Ancient Greece and later assimilated “by the early Church Fathers and redefined in the Christian context of sin and grace,” it denotes at once “a mode of knowing, a way of doing, and a condition of being” that is invested with “unique meaning” by two “controlling” assumptions.[12] In the first place, the concept assumes—in stark contrast to the fractured worldview that came to reign in the Age of Reason— that we live in a rationally ordered and organically integrated universe that is comprised of truth that is simultaneously intellectual and moral as well as natural and supernatural in nature.[13] To put it differently, the concept affirms what Herschel Baker calls a “sacramental” as opposed to a “secular” view of the universe,[14] and thus it champions the notion that the right way for human beings to lay hold of the truth that comprises this organically integrated universe is through the use of an “organic epistemology”[15] Since “beauty goodness, [and] love” are, according to this view, “a part of truth,” it follows that reasoning itself is rightly regarded as an act of the whole soul that includes “faith, intuition, [and] feeling, as well as the more strictly rational processes.”[16]

In addition to this affirmation of a “reasoning process” that involves the whole soul as opposed to “the quasi-mathematical reason” alone,[17] the concept recognizes, secondly, that since truth is simultaneously intellectual and moral in nature, it follows that both the depth and quality of an agent’s apprehension of reality are largely dependent upon the kind of person the knowing agent is. According to Robert Hoopes, wherever advocates of “right reason”

speak of the achievement of true knowledge. .. they invariably speak of a certain transformation that must take place in the character of the knower before that knowledge can be attained.. .. Since Truth in its totality is at once intellectual and moral in nature, the conditions of wisdom are for men both intellectual and moral. True knowledge, i.e., knowledge of Truth, involves the perfection of the knower in both thought and deed.[18]

In both its classical and Christian manifestations, then, “right reason” is a kind of moral reasoning which “unites truth and goodness”[19] while combining both “natural and supernatural.. . into one picture of total reality”[20] That is to say it is a kind of theological aesthetic that affirms a rationally ordered, “theocratic universe”[21] while insisting that because truth is not only true but also good, in order for human beings to know truth in a more or less true or right sense “they must themselves become good.”[22]

3. “Right Reason” In The Tradition Of “Christian Humanism”

How, then, do human beings become good so that they can know what is true? In his incisive analysis of Robert Hoopes’s Right Reason in the English Renaissance, Jack Rogers correctly notes that the concept of “right reason” developed along “humanist” and “antihumanist” lines in the Christian church, in large measure because differing conceptions of philosophical psychology led to two different answers to this question.[23] Those who endorsed the “tripartite” psychology that originated in Ancient Greece and was later accommodated by Christian humanists in the Medieval and Renaissance eras viewed the human soul

as an aggregate of autonomous functions (“faculties”), which were believed to operate discretely and in a prescribed order. Reason apprehended truth and recognized ultimate ends. The will, defined as a “rational appetite,” sought the rationally defined good. The affections, or passions, which constituted the “animal” part of human nature, followed sensually defined goods, such as food, sex or other sources of physical pleasure.[24]

In short, those who endorsed this understanding of the “faculty psychology” conceived of reason as a power that “was implanted by God in all men, Christian and heathen alike, as a guide to truth and conduct,”[25] and they insisted that men become good and thus reason “rightly” when they learn to follow the dictates of reason rather than of passion, the dictates of the head rather than of the heart. That is to say, moral agents become wise—they become virtuous knowers— when the affections or passions are self-consciously subordinated to the appetites of the rational will, and reason—which, though fallen, is still able to discern the good, the beautiful, and the true—is thereby exalted as “the ruler of the soul.”[26]

Hoopes summarizes this “intellectualist” understanding of “right reason”— which sustained the Medieval synthesis and empowered scholasticism’s analogical investigation of reality[27] —as follows: “Right reason may thus be thought of as a faculty which fuses in dynamic interactivity the functions of knowing and being, which stands finally as something more than a proximate [or immediate] means of rational discovery or ‘a nonmoral instrument of inquiry’ and which affirms that what a man knows depends upon what, as a moral being, he chooses to make himself.”[28]

4. “Right Reason” In The Tradition Of “Christian Antihumanism”

While the affections or passions in the intellectualist view of the soul are separated from and thus are often at odds with the appetites of the rational will, the affections or passions are regarded as “an aspect” of the will in the psychology of ‘Augustinian voluntarism,” the “bipartite, heart-centered psychology”[29] that Norman Fiering suggests is the “most enduring and persistent antagonist to intellectualism in [the history of] Western thought.”[30] According to those who stand in the Augustinian tradition—the tradition that, in matters epistemological, came to be the object of near universal loathing in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries due to what its critics regarded as an “almost obsessive emphasis.. . upon the fact of human depravity”[31] —the soul is not “a mere aggregation of discrete faculties, but... an integrated totality of perception and volition, [that is] determined by the basic affective inclination, or fundamental amative orientation”[32] of “the inner essence of the whole man.”[33] That is to say, Augustinian voluntarists conceive of the soul “not as a system of objectively distinguishable faculties” that have the ability to operate in more or less isolation from each other, “but as a ‘mysterious organic unity”’[34] that has “both an intellectual-percipient and a volitional-affective dimension,” a two-dimensional unity that follows or takes its cues from the disposition or character of the “heart.”[35]

What, then, is the “heart”? In the Augustinian tradition as in Scripture, the heart is “‘that mysterious organ which is the centre of the personality”’[36] and “the single spring of thinking, feeling and acting.”[37] The concept denotes the “bent” or “bias,” the “inclination” or “fundamental amative orientation” of the personality “either toward the world of sin and self, or toward God and divine reality,” and thus it indicates the underlying, preconscious “principle of psychic unity. .. [that] determines the manner in which one (1) perceives reality, and (2) wills, feels, and chooses.”[38] Since the “heart” in this tradition is that principle which integrates and determines the “psychic totality” of the “whole soul,” it has to do not with the emotions alone, but with “the simultaneous and interdependent operations of the cognitive and volitional-affective aspects of the personality, [aspects that are] unified, even fused, by its [inclination, or] fundamental amative orientation.”[39] According to Augustinian voluntarists such as Charles Hodge, it is this emphasis on the heart that

forbids any such marked distinction between. .. [the soul’s] cognitive and emotional faculties ... as is assumed in our philosophy, and therefore is impressed on our language. In Hebrew the same word designates what we commonly distinguish as separate faculties. The Scriptures speak of an “understanding heart,” and of “the desires of the understanding,” as well as of “the thoughts of the heart.” They recognize that there is an element of feeling in our cognitions and an element of intelligence in our feelings. The idea that the heart may be depraved and the intellect unaffected is, according to the anthropology of the Bible, as incongruous, as that one part of the soul should be happy and another miserable, one faculty saved and another lost.[40]

For those who stand in the tradition of Augustinian voluntarism, what this emphasis on the heart suggests is that the rightness or wrongness of the manner in which an agent apprehends and interacts with reality is determined not by the natural competence of the agent’s distinct faculties, but by the moral character or underlying disposition that unites the two dimensions of the agent’s soul into an organic thinking-feeling-willing whole. What this means for Protestants who are like Augustine and take the fall and original sin seriously is that moral agents who are dead in sin and inclined to the world of sin and self acquire the ability to reason “rightly” not by gritting their teeth and resolving to follow the appetites of the head rather than the passions of the heart, as in the intellectualist view of “right reason,” but do so rather by being given “hearts of flesh” (Ezek 11:19)— that is, by being inclined to God and divine reality—in regeneration.[41] In regeneration, the Holy Spirit, working with and through the Word, becomes the new principle of life in the regenerated soul, and it is this new principle of life that inclines the soul to God and enables the moral agent to perceive, feel, and act “differently than before.”[42] Among other things, the regenerated agent now not only sees all things in relationship to the God of the Bible because he looks at reality through the “spectacles” of Scripture,[43] but as an essential component of this seeing he also delights in and savors the spiritual excellence and beauty that is objectively present in and really radiating from the objects of his understanding[44] In other words, he now recognizes with the likes of Charles Hodge that “truth is not merely speculative, the object of cognition. It has moral [and spiritual] beauty.”[45] Jonathan Edwards, one of the most thoughtful defenders of the bipartite, heart-centered psychology in the history of the Augustinian tradition, summarizes the regenerated agent’s ability to perceive what Hodge calls “the moral and spiritual excellence of truth”[46] as follows:

Hence we learn that the prime alteration that is made in conversion, that which is first and the foundation of all, is the alteration of the temper and disposition and spirit of the mind; for what is done in conversion is nothing but conferring the Spirit of God, which dwells in the soul and becomes there a principle of life and action. ’Tis this is the new nature and the divine nature; and the nature of the soul being thus changed, it admits divine light. Divine things now appear excellent, beautiful, glorious, which did not when the soul was of another spirit. 

Indeed the first act of the Spirit of God, or the first that this divine temper exerts itself in, is in spiritual understanding, or in the sense of the mind, its perception of glory and excellency ... in the ideas it has of divine things; and this is before any proper acts of the will. Indeed, the inclination of the soul is as immediately exercised in that sense of the mind which is called spiritual understanding, as the intellect. For it is not only the mere presence of ideas in the mind, but it is the mind’s sense of their excellency, glory and delightfulness. By this sense or taste of the mind, especially if it be lively, the mind in many things distinguishes truth from falsehood.[47]

Protestants who stand in the tradition of Augustine therefore insist that the regenerate alone “may rise to an understanding of the truth,” because the regenerate alone have the moral ability to see revealed truth for what it objectively is, namely, glorious.[48] That is to say, regenerated knowers alone can know more or less “rightly” not only because they have an intellectual or speculative understanding of that which is true, but also because they have—as a necessary element or essential component of their understanding—a love for the truth precisely because they see it declaring the glory, the moral excellence and beauty, of the One who is the source of truth and the epistemological key to interpreting all reality correctly (cf. Col 2:3). For regenerated knowers, then, the eyes of faith—eyes that look at reality through the “spectacles” of Scripture— make a material difference not only in how they know, but also in what they know; they “are in a superior epistemic position”—that is, they are better knowers—because the Spirit, again working with and through the Word, helps them use their “natural epistemic faculties rightly.”[49]

What this suggests may be quite surprising to those who would think biblically about the task of believing scholarship: Christians and Christians alone can understand reality “rightly” not because they are members of an elite class of self-made, autonomous knowers, but because they bring to their intensive analysis of everything—from the fact that cows eat grass,[50] to basic questions of human morality, to their understanding of what the meaning of the word “is” is, to their assessment of what is and is not aesthetically praiseworthy—to all these varieties of analysis Christians bring an aesthetic sense that is grounded in and shaped by the Word of the One without whom nothing is. To deny the epistemological significance of revelation and regeneration, and thereby to reduce the problem of knowledge to “exclusively intellectual dimensions,” is, as D. A. Carson suggests, “to buy into the worldview that predominates in the West, the worldview that presupposes that human beings are autonomous, that human reasoning processes.. . are both reliable and morally neutral, [and] that God, if he exists, must present his credentials to us in such a fashion that we remain the arbiters.”[51]

5. Believing Academics As The Appraisers Of “All Things”

If the task of believing scholarship ought to be understood within the context of this bipartite, heart-centered psychology, as conservative Reformed scholars insist it must be, then believing academics are being called to an approach to faith-learning integration that is perhaps best characterized as what I would call a “judicious” form of “reconstructionism.”[52] Whereas “strict” reconstructionists seek to “rebuild” their disciplines “on. .. overtly biblical grounds”[53] because they are convinced that believing and unbelieving academics in the same academic discipline are doing completely different kinds of disciplinary scholarship due to the effects of sin and grace on their respective minds, those I am calling “judicious” reconstructionists acknowledge the significant contributions to disciplinary scholarship made by their unbelieving colleagues. Yet they still insist that the reformation of particular disciplines on explicitly biblical grounds is necessary due to the unrelenting inability of the unregenerate to reason rightly.[54] While judicious reconstructionists recognize that the unregenerate can apprehend truth in a speculative or merely rational sense and thus can produce scholarship that is useful and even true as far as it goes, they nonetheless insist that unbelieving academics cannot apprehend truth in a true or right sense because they do not have what William Wainwright suggests are “the proper moral and spiritual qualifications” for “tracking” truth reliably.[55] That is to say, they do not have “converted” and thus “properly disposed heart[s],”[56] and as a consequence they are blind, always and everywhere, to the true significance of what they can rationally perceive; and their scholarship, even in its best manifestations, is in some manner a violation of the ninth commandment’s prohibition against bearing false witness. If all truth in all disciplines in fact declares the glory, the moral excellence, and the spiritual beauty of the One who is both the source of truth and the epistemological key to understanding all truth in a true or right sense, then disciplinary scholarship that ignores this fact is, in the final analysis, at best an anemic testimony to the true nature of reality.

Among other things, what this means is that those of us who have the privilege of teaching in Christian institutions ought to recognize that the kind of faith-learning integration in which we are being called to engage has more to do with a kind of aesthetic reflection than it does with the rationalistic application of a given method because its essence is found in away of seeing that grounds the life of the mind in what Mark Noll, commenting on the “profoundly theological philosophy” of Jonathan Edwards, calls a “God-entranced” vision of all things.[57] Since “all truth is God’s” and all truth “comes forth from him” and “leads back to him,” as B. B. Warfield has said,[58] the eyes of faith are essential to the academic enterprise because they enable believing academics to see the vast expanse of reality in relationship to God, and thus to think more or less rightly about all things. That is to say, theological reflection—the kind of reflection that “work[s] outwards from Scripture, Christian experience, and religious traditions”[59] rather from nature and the so-called “established truths” of contemporary scholarship—makes it possible for believing academics to see all of reality more or less the way God would have his creatures see it, that is, as manifesting the glory of the God who called it into existence and sustains it moment by moment by the word of his power. Conceiving of believing scholarship in this fashion, far from privileging modern or postmodern conceptions of rationality that fracture the life of the mind by denying in one way or another the goodness, beauty, or truthfulness of truth, instead fosters extraordinarily rigorous, profoundly comprehensive, and qualitatively superior scholarship, for it champions the thoroughly biblical yet routinely forgotten notion that those who have “the mind of Christ” are the appraisers of “all things” (1 Cor 2:14–16), including things in what for most are the distinct realms of nature and grace, of reason and faith.

III. Theological Thinking And The Myth Of Neutrality

1. The Talbot-Basinger Exchange

At this point I suspect that a certain kind of reader is incredulous. He or she is perhaps thinking like an evangelical philosopher by the name of David Basinger, who, in an exchange with Wheaton philosopher Mark Talbot on the nature of Christian philosophy, accused Talbot of “blur[ring] the important distinction between the task of philosophy and the task of theology”[60] when Talbot suggested that “Christian philosophers can do better and more interesting philosophy if they keep their distinctively Christian beliefs at the philosophical forefront.”[61] While most of us have no problem acknowledging that our Christian commitments often play a significant role in determining the kinds of research programs we choose to pursue, many of us are reluctant to affirm that these same commitments ought to play a significant—perhaps even decisive—role in the way we practice our various disciplines. Like Basinger, we seem to suppose that good disciplinary scholarship requires that we “ ‘shuck.. . [our] explicitly Christian truth-commitments,”’[62] for whether we know it or not we tend to conceive of good disciplinary scholarship in intellectualist terms. That is to say, we tend to conceive of scholarship that is God-honoring and therefore first-rate as something that is within the reach of “rational individuals in general”[63] —and not just the regenerate—and thus we have little patience for the claims of believing academics like Talbot: “Doing philosophy with all of our Christian truth-commitments intact,” Talbot suggests to our chagrin, “can be a fertile source of philosophical insights, a safeguard against philosophical error, and a genuine source of philosophical strength.”[64]

While it should be obvious from the foregoing discussion that I have little sympathy with Basinger’s way of critiquing a believing academic like Talbot, I would suggest that the exchange between Basinger and Talbot is helpful because it is a good illustration of what some have called “the myth of religious neutrality.”[65] Basinger chastises Talbot for insisting that believing philosophers “ought to ‘muddle’ the philosophical/theological distinction. .. insofar as muddling it is likely to save. .. [them] from philosophical error,”[66] ye the seems oblivious to the fact that his reluctance to endorse Talbot’s understanding of Christian philosophy is itself grounded in assumptions that are inherently theological. Not only does Basinger presume that “rational individuals in general” have the moral capacity to handle truth rightly—an assumption that is nothing if not suspect on biblical grounds—but he also denies, at least implicitly, the moral and spiritual dimension of truth. He thereby demonstrates that his own understanding of the task of philosophy “muddles” the distinction between theology and philosophy, for his truncated conception of philosophy is informed by his own theological assumptions, assumptions that he then smuggles into his contention that believing philosophers, and, by extension, believing academics in other academic disciplines, ought to engage in disciplinary scholarship in a fashion that is theologically neutral.

2. Key Assumptions Of The Biblical Worldview

But is neutrality possible? In other words, is it possible for anyone, anywhere to consider a subject apart from allegiance to a set of assumptions about reality that are necessarily theological in nature? While contemporary intellectualists insist that neutrality is a possibility, thereby regretfully endorsing at least some manifestation of the sacred-secular, faith-reason dualisms that confound many modern and postmodern minds, Augustinian voluntarists insist that it is not. Reality can be known in a more or less objective or “right” fashion, they contend, only when regenerated knowers assess reality from the perspective of the biblical world view.[67]

What, then, are the fundamental assumptions of the biblical worldview, the assumptions that are nurtured by the theological disciplines and that constitute the foundation of education that is distinctly and consistently Christian? According to conservative Reformed scholars, the assumptions that inform the ability to reason rightly include, but are not limited to, the following four:

1. The Creator-creature distinction. Scripture teaches that God spoke the universe into existence (Gen 1) and “upholds all things by the word of his power” (Heb 1:3). There is nothing apart from God, and no aspect of created reality is not subject to his “everlasting dominion” (Dan 4:34), because apart from him nothing can be.[68] What this means, among other things, is not only that every aspect of created reality is utterly dependent upon the providential activity of the Creator, but, more importantly, that no aspect of created reality can be understood rightly outside of the context of the Creator’s good, sovereign, and sustaining will. As Scott Oliphint incisively argues,

A thing is what it is by virtue of the plan and activity of God. A thing holds relationships to other things and to all things generally because of, and only because of, that all-sufficient plan. To attempt to know some “thing,” therefore, without knowing it as having its being and meaning by virtue of God’s plan is, in some important sense, not to know it truly at all.[69]

2. Creation is the “theater” of God’s glory. Scripture teaches that “the whole earth is full of God’s glory” (Isa 6:3) because every aspect of the created order “is declaring the work of his hands” (Ps 19:1; cf. Ps 8:3–4; Rom 1). What these passages suggest is not only that the created order “cannot exist apart from God,” but more importantly that it “cannot be silent of God,” and this unrelenting, never-ending testimony is “unavoidable.”[70] Human beings, Calvin insists, “cannot open their eyes without being compelled to see him. Indeed, his essence is incomprehensible; hence, his divineness far escapes all human perception. But upon his individual works he has engraved unmistakable marks of his glory, so clear and so prominent that even unlettered and stupid folk cannot plead the excuse of ignorance.”[71] Since the revelation of God in the things that he has made cannot be silenced, it follows that these things are properly regarded as objective testimonies to the “glorious qualities” of their Maker.[72] Indeed, all natural manifestations of truth, goodness, and beauty are rightly regarded as reflections of the glory that ultimately is God’s alone.

3. The unregenerate “cannot understand” the things of the Spirit. Just as Paul makes clear in 1 Cor 1 and 2 that the wisdom of God is “foolishness” to those who are perishing, so too he demonstrates in Rom 1 that the unregenerate worship and serve creatures rather than the Creator because they are blind to the true significance of what they can rationally perceive in the created order. Although Paul makes it clear that the unregenerate “may have a kind of knowledge [of the created order] that is useful and helpful in a limited way, that knowledge. .. is. .. fleeting, shadowy, superficial, and in the end condemnable,”[73] because it does not penetrate to the spiritual significance of what is objectively present to the understanding. This spiritual dullness, Oliphint suggests, although it prohibits the “natural man” (1 Cor 2:14) from knowing “anything” as it should be known,[74] cannot be accounted for by pointing to an objective deficiency in what has been revealed; rather, it can be explained only by pointing to a moral or subjective deficiency in the heart of the knower, a deficiency that renders the knower “unable to see what is really there.”[75]

4. Those who are “spiritual” are the appraisers of “all things.” Whereas those who are “devoid of the Spirit” are without the ability to see reality for what it objectively is, those who are “indwelt, renewed, enlightened, [and] directed by the Holy Spirit”[76] are, according to 1 Cor 2:15 and 16, the “appraisers of all things” because they have “the mind of Christ.” They have, in other words, what the “natural man” does not have, and for this reason they have the ability to do what the “natural man” cannot do, namely, discern the wisdom—the truth, goodness, and beauty—of what God has made known to his creatures in both general and special revelation.[77] In short, those who have “the mind of Christ” have the ability to see “all things” more or less for what they objectively are because they have “the Spirit-worked capacity” to see “all things” in relation to Christ, who is, as Richard Gaffin incisively argues, “the indispensable key to rightly understanding God himself, and, with that understanding, literally everything (πάντα) in his creation.”[78]

IV. Conclusion—The Role Of Theology In The Christian University

It perhaps goes without saying that we live in an age that is less than enthusiastic about the idea of Christian scholarship. Indeed, many of our colleagues at secular institutions regard the idea of scholarship that is self-consciously Christ-centered and Bible-based as peculiar at best and delusional at worst, for they presume that Christian commitments are antithetical to scholarship that is able to pass muster in a university setting. In this article, I have sought to challenge the assumption that Christian commitments are the kiss of death to qualitatively superior scholarship by arguing that the regenerate alone have the ability to do academic work that is God-centered and therefore first-rate because they alone have the aesthetic capacity to look at reality through the spectacles of Scripture, and thus to see reality for what it objectively is, namely, glorious. While I have not suggested that believing academics are better scholars because they see reality in an unbiased or neutral fashion, I have argued that they are better scholars because their seeing of reality is biased by the work of the Spirit and the formative assumptions of the biblical worldview.

Herein, then, lies the critical role that the theological disciplines play in the academic life of the Christian university. The theological disciplines not only serve to remind the constituency of the Christian university that the ultimate source of truth, goodness, and beauty is not the world but the One whose truth, goodness, and beauty are reflected in the created order,[79] but more importantly they enable believing academics to see reality in a more or less objective or “right” fashion by nurturing the vision that is the lifeblood of God-centered, first-rate scholarship. In short, the theological disciplines play a critical role in the Christian university because they encourage believing academics to see reality more or less the way God would have his creatures see it, and they do so by cultivating the convictions, passions, and spiritual disciplines that inform the aesthetic sense that is the fountainhead of education that is distinctly and consistently Christian.[80]

Notes

1. “Philosophy of Education” (Saint Paul, Minn.: Northwestern College), 1.
2. J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Culture, in Selected Shorter Writings of J. Gresham Machen (ed. D. G. Hart; Phillipsburg, NJ.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2004), 402.
3. By the “epistemological priority of Scripture” I mean the affirmation that the Bible is “the lens through which we interpret knowledge discovered in all. .. subject areas” (“Philosophy of Education,” 1), including those that are obviously religious or theological in nature, as well as those that are less obviously so.
4. Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 2. Sowell insists that what is important about this vision is “not only its particular assumptions and their corollaries, but also the fact that it is a prevailing vision—which means that its assumptions are so much taken for granted by so many people, including so-called ‘thinking people,’ that neither those assumptions nor their corollaries are generally confronted with demands for empirical evidence. Indeed, empirical evidence itself may be viewed as suspect, insofar as it is inconsistent with that vision.” Among other things, I hope that this article challenges some of the prevailing assumptions about the nature and quality of scholarship that is self-consciously Christ-centered and Bible-based.
5. “Philosophy of Education,” 1. It remains to be seen how seriously the College will take its endorsement of a classically Protestant understanding of “right reason.” Will it champion the principle of “right reason” and thereby become a beacon of God-honoring, first-rate scholarship? Or will it accommodate some version of “the vision of the anointed,” thereby losing its soul as well as the means to true academic excellence? Time will tell.
6. Brad Walton, Jonathan Edwards, “Religious Affections” and the Puritan Analysis of True Piety, Spiritual Sensation and Heart Religion (Studies in American Religion 74; Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002), 166.
7. Stephen J. Wellum, “Postconservatism, Biblical Authority, and Recent Proposals for Re-Doing Evangelical Theology: A Critical Proposal,” in Reclaiming the Center: Confronting Evangelical Accommodation in Postmodern Times (ed. Millard J. Erickson, Paul Kjoss Helseth, and Justin Taylor; Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2004), 163.
8. J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (Downers Grove: InterVarsity 2003), 146.
9. Millard J. Erickson, Truth or Consequences: The Promise and Perils of Postmodernism (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2001), 74.
10. I qualify this statement with the words more or less simply to acknowledge that although none of us sees any aspect of reality perfectly, some of us see various aspects of reality more clearly than others, and we do so for a number of reasons, including theological reasons. Note that I am using the word “objective” in this article not in the sense of Enlightenment foundationalism, i.e., to suggest that neutral, comprehensive, mathematically-indubitable knowledge is possible for finite human beings, but in the much less ambitious sense which affirms that at least some true knowledge of real states of affairs in the “world as it is” is possible for finite human beings, the influence of culture notwithstanding. In short, I am not convinced that the influence of culture is so profound that it precludes the Spirit from enabling believers to see reality more or less the way God would have his creatures see it. As far as I can tell, a text like 1 Cor 1 and 2 gives us warrant for concluding that either the Apostle Paul should have done some graduate work in the sociology of knowledge or that at least some measure of “objective, transcultural” knowledge in fact is possible for finite creatures who have the “mind of Christ.” Yes, theology is an enterprise in which finite human beings who are constitutive members of particular cultures engage; but when properly understood is the theological enterprise a merely human enterprise? Is it not also, in its best sense, a spiritual enterprise requiring a regenerated nature and all of the “stances” that entails? I don’t see how we can conclude otherwise, and this is why I find it troubling when obviously gifted thinkers like John Franke affirm, “We simply cannot escape from our particular setting and gain access to an objective, transcultural vantage point” (The Character of Theology: An Introduction to Its Nature, Task, and Purpose [Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005], 90). Please note that the account of Christian seeing that I am commending in this article—which affirms that “objective, transcultural” knowledge is foundational to Christian vision and thus to Christian scholarship—is significantly different than the accounts commended by Christian non-foundationalists who have adopted a “constructionist view of the world” (cf Franke, Character of Theology, 23–26). For a helpful critique of Christian postmodernists who have endorsed the prevailing assumption that objective knowledge is impossible because there “is simply no way” for human beings “to get ‘outside’ of the influence of language to know the world as it actually is,” see the incisive work of R. Scott Smith, including Truth and the New Kind of Christian: The Emerging Effects of Postmodernism in the Church (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway 2005); and “Language, Theological Knowledge, and the Postmodern Paradigm,” in Reclaiming the Center, 109–33. For an impressive affirmation of the possibility of objective knowledge that grounds the possibility of such knowledge in the activity of God rather than in the self either as an autonomous individual (modernism) or as a constitutive member of a particular, narrative-shaped community (postmodernism), see K. Scott Oliphint, Reasons for Faith: Philosophy in the Service of Theology (Phillipsburg, NJ.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2006).
11. Douglas Bush, Paradise Lost in Our Time (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1945), 37.
12. Robert Hoopes, Right Reason in the English Renaissance (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), 1, 4.
13. S. L. Bethell, The Cultural Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (London: Dennis Dobson, 1951), 64, 63.
14. A “sacramental” as opposed to a “secular” view of the universe presupposes not that “truth and piety” belong “to quite different orders of reality which permit no interaction,” but that “every element in man’s experience. .. [is] an object of cognition that. .. leads ultimately to [an essentially rational] God” who is both the cause and the end “to which the whole creation inexorably and teleologically strives” (Herschel Baker, The Wars of Truth: Studies in the Decay of Christian Humanism in the Earlier Seventeenth Century [Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1952], 305, 5).
15. Ibid., 124. Note that the transition from a sacramental to a secular understanding of reality at the dawn of the modern age is a central theme of Wars of Truth. For Baker’s initial discussion of the “sacramental” view, cf 4-6. On this transition, see also Basil Willey The Seventeenth Century Background: Studies in the Thought of the Age in Relation to Poetry and Religion (Garden City N.Y: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1955), 11-46. For helpful analysis of the intellectual history of the seventeenth century, see also Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1939; repr., Boston: Beacon Press, 1961); and the following works by Gerald R. Cragg: From Puritanism to the Age of Reason: A Study of Changes in Religious Thought within the Church of England, 1660 to 1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950); The Church in the Age of Reason, 1648–1789 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1960); introduction to The Cambridge Platonists (ed. Gerald R. Cragg; New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 3-31.
16. Bethell, Cultural Revolution of the Seventeenth Century, 57. Note that this organic view of reason was largely rejected in the Age of Reason when the epistemological realms of faith and reason were disastrously separated. According to Bethell, in the modern world “the pattern of reasoning was mathematical deduction, combined with the inductive but strictly quantitative reasoning necessary for physical science. It is a process that ideally ignores the human element, though a large degree of unconscious faith actuated its exponents.. .. But faith, though a precondition, was not a part of the process; intuition, though useful in suggesting hypotheses, had no function in their demonstration; feeling, even a sort of austere aestheticism, could accompany, but could not enter into, the methods of reasoning; and the whole great range of human experience knowable only through faith, intuition, and feeling—spiritual experience, human passion, the beauties of nature and art—was no longer proper material for rational thought. The universe that reason could properly explore had narrowed to the calculable aspects of material existence: this was the real, the rest was epiphenome-non, manageable in part ... by a ‘common sense’ which aped the categorical exactitude of true reason, but in the main left to the incalculable caprice of ‘enthusiasts’ and sentimentalists” (58).
17. Ibid., 55, 63.
18. Hoopes, Right Reason in the English Renaissance, 5.
19. Baker, Wars of Truth, 235.
20. Bethell, Cultural Revolution of the Seventeenth Century, 54.
21. Baker, Wars of Truth, 5.
22. Hoopes, Right Reason in the English Renaissance, 4, 6.
23. Jack B. Rogers, Scripture in the Westminster Confession: A Problem of Historical Interpretation or American Presbyterianism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967), 84.
24. Walton, Jonathan Edwards, 15. Walton suggests that the Aristotelian analysis of human psychology (cf. Eth. nic. 2, 3, 6, 7, 10 in Ancient Philosophy [ed. Forrest Baird and Walter Kaufmann; 3d ed.; Upper Saddle River, NJ.: Prentice Hall, 2000]) “passed to Thomas Aquinas, who identified the concept of rational choice, or ‘rational appetite,’ with the Latin word voluntas, or ‘will.”’ Walton summarizes Aristotle’s views in the following fashion: “For Aristotle, human moral excellence lies in the subordination of the non-rational aspects of the soul to prudence, or practical reason, operating through deliberation and rational choice. The objects of deliberation and choice are normally presented by the senses, which combine percipience with affectivity, and which represent the animal aspect of the soul. Choice is thus carried out within a psychological environment of emotion, of ‘sensitive appetite’ and ‘desire.’ Emotion, or desire, competes with rational deliberation, to determine action. The ‘uncontrolled’ person ... is not moved to act by the command of reason, but by sensation and desire. The self-controlled person. .. while experiencing sensitive appetite and desire, is not moved to act, except by the determination of the intellect. In the self-controlled person, the emotions and desires have been brought, normally by an elaborate and lengthy process of education, to a state of such tranquility and equilibrium as permit rational choice to operate without interference. Thus, the affections contribute to human moral excellence only negatively by being so carefully controlled as not to overpower rational choice” (Jonathan Edwards, 144). On the nature of Ancient Greek psychology, see also Norman Fiering, Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth-Century Harvard: A Discipline in Transition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 147–48. For the primacy of reason in the thought of Aquinas, see, e.g., Summa Contra Gentiles (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), 3.1.25.
25. Bush, Paradise Lost in Our Time, 37; cf. Hoopes, Right Reason in the English Renaissance, 3; John Spurr, “‘Rational Religion’ in Restoration England,” Journal of the History of Ideas 49 (1988): 570.
26. Fiering, Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth-Century Harvard, 113. On the anthropological optimism that is at the heart of Christian humanism, cf. Baker, Wars of Truth, 25–29, 90. Note that while classical and Christian humanists share a rather optimistic assessment of human nature, the assessment of Christian humanism is nowhere near as optimistic as that of classical humanism. According to Hoopes, whereas Christian humanists affirm the perpetual dependence of the creature upon the Creator, classical thinkers assume that “man by his own efforts may realize whatever ideal of perfection he sets for himself The omnipresence of this assumption is, or ought to be, the meaning of ‘the classical ideal,’ for it is the one element fundamental to the thought of all classical thinkers whose systems otherwise conflict” (Right Reason in the English Renaissance, 65, 52; cf 52–58). Thus, while classical humanists assert “man’s essential independence” (57) and insist that reason “possesses a potential infallibility suigeneris” (56), Christian humanists assert “man’s everlasting dependence” (57) and insist that reason’s pursuit of the end for which we were created is dependent not only upon the law of God that is promulgated through and discerned by reason, but also upon the infusion of the theological virtues that make the achievement of this end possible. On the significance of the theological virtues, see the helpful discussion in Jean Porter, The Recovery of Virtue: The Relevance of Aquinas for Christian Ethics (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1990). For a helpful discussion of how this understanding of “right reason” informed patristic and medieval ethical theory see Vernon J. Bourke, History of Ethics (Garden City N.Y: Doubleday 1968), 89–91.
27. On the relationship between analogical reasoning and the Medieval synthesis of faith and reason, of supernatural knowledge and natural knowledge, cf. Baker, Wars of Truth, 25–29, 309; Bethell, Cultural Revolution of the Seventeenth Century, 53–58.
28. Hoopes, Right Reason in the English Renaissance, 5; emphasis added. The words intellectualism and “voluntarism” are being used in this article in the way that Richard Muller uses them in his analysis of Calvin’s theology. According to Muller, “The terms refer to the two faculties of the soul, intellect and will, and to the question of which has priority over the other: intellectualism indicates a priority of the intellect; voluntarism, a priority of the will. In a technical theological and philosophical sense, however, intellectualism indicates a view of soul that denominates intellect the nobler of the two faculties because it is the intellect that apprehends the final vision of God as being and truth, whereas voluntarism denominates the will as the nobler faculty and assumes that its ultimate cleaving to God as the highest good. .. addresses the highest object of human love” (The Unaccommodated Calvin: Studies in the Formation of a Theological Tradition [New York: Oxford University Press, 2000], 162). Muller argues that for Calvin the problem with the “intellectualism” of the Aristotelian-Thomistic psychology “is that its entirely correct definition of the relationship of intellect and will applies only to the prelapsarian condition of humanity The philosophers did not understand grasp [sic] the problem of sin and therefore did not perceive the degree to which sin subverts the right ordering of the faculties” (165). Muller therefore insists that what we find in Calvin is “not a philosophical but a soteriological voluntarism that not only recognizes the necessity of grace to all good acts of the will but also recognizes that, in the soul’s present sinful condition, the will [which ‘determines even the extent of our knowledge of any given object’] most certainly stands prior to the intellect” (166). In his recent analysis of Calvin’s philosophy Paul Helm amplifies the significance of the fall for understanding the basic differences between Calvin and Aquinas on issues relating to natural law and natural theology: “Calvin holds that there is an underestimation of the noetic effects of sin possibly in the likes of Aquinas and certainly in the case of the classical philosophers more generally. He thinks that the idea that sin is solely a matter of sensuality prevails with them whereas for Calvin sin affects the understanding, not by destroying it but by depraving it. In particular the moral understanding is not completely wiped out, but it is choked with ignorance and prejudice, as a result of which without divine grace the will cannot strive after what is right” (John Calvin’s Ideas [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004], 375; for elaboration of this point, see James K. A. Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-Secular Theology [Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004], 164–66). For helpful discussions of the “intellectualism” of the Aristotelian-Thomistic psychology, cf Fiering, Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth-Century Harvard, 110–14; Walton, Jonathan Edwards, 143–47. Please note that one of the primary differences between the intellectualist view of “right reason” and the Augustinian view discussed below centers on disagreement over the effects of sin on our ability to know. Whereas advocates of the intellectualist view presume the “essential goodness” of man (Bush, Paradise Lost in Our Time, 39; cf. William J. Bouwsma, The Culture of Renaissance Humanism [Washington, D.C.: American Historical Association, 1973], 5–6) and affirm the ability of even unregenerated sinners to know rightly advocates of the Augustinian view insist that the unregenerate are dead in sin and thus unable to know rightly In her analysis of Augustine’s anthropology Carol Harrison summarizes the basic difference between Augustine’s assessment of the moral agent and that of classical philosophy While it would be unfair to suggest that Christian humanists endorsed the classical Greek view without qualification (see n. 26 above) we can say that they shared, at least in some measure, the optimistic view of human nature that prevailed in Ancient Greece. Harrison writes: “The Christian doctrine of the fall, with its denial of man’s capacity to attain the good through his own unaided efforts, of his inability to know or to do the good without God’s grace, and of the unattainability of beatitude in this life marks the final break between classical and Christian understandings of virtue, the will, and the happy life. The startling optimism of classical philosophy with its unerring conviction of man’s autonomous will, his capacity for rational self-determination and for perfectibility through knowledge. . ., has been dealt a death blow by Augustine’s uncompromising picture of man subject to original sin following the fall of Adam. Without the help of grace man can do nothing to achieve salvation, his flawed and vitiated will can no longer do anything but sin, his grasp of the truth is marred by ignorance and blindness” (Augustine: Christian Truth and Fractured Humanity [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000], 100).
29. Walton, Jonathan Edwards, 220, 181.
30. Fiering Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth-Century Harvard, 117. In this psychology the soul is thought to consist of two rather than three faculties or powers: the understanding which includes the powers of perception and speculation, and the will, which embraces the affections and the power of volition. Moreover, advocates insist that these faculties are not distinct, but act as a single substance that is united and governed by the “heart.” Cf J. Knox Chamblin, Paul and the Self: Apostolic Teaching for Personal Wholeness (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1993), 37–59; Richard J. Gaffin, “Some Epistemological Reflections on 1 Corinthians 2:6–16, ” WTJ 57 (1995): 120; T Kermit Scott, Augustine: His Thought in Context (Mahwah, NJ.: Paulist Press, 1995), part 3, esp. 193–216; Peter T O’Brien, The Letter to the Ephesians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 320–22; Walton, Jonathan Edwards, 43, 149, 220. On the rise and subsequent decline of Augustinian voluntarism in the Renaissance, see William J. Bouwsma, The Waning of the Renaissance: 1550–1640 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), chs. 2, 3, 11. Please note that I am using the term ‘Augustinian” largely in the sense that it is used by Perry Miller in his analysis of the New England Puritan mind. The Puritans in seventeenth-century New England were Augustinians, Miller argues, not because they “depended directly” upon the writings of Augustine, but because Augustine is the “arch-exemplar” of a kind of piety that “centered upon. .. God, sin, and regeneration” (New England Mind: Seventeenth Century, 3–34). The various elements of “Augustinian voluntarism” are evident in the following works of Augustine, which can be found in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (ed. Philip Schaff; 1887; repr., Peabody Mass.: Hendrickson, 1995), herein NPNF: Conf 7.10.17 (NPNF 1:109–10, 111–12); Civ. 12–14 (NPNF 2:226–83); Tin. 8–13 (NPNF3:115–82); Enchir 1–5 (NPNF3:237–38); Trac. En. Jo. 1 (NPNF7:7–13); Solil. 1.1-4 (NPNF 7:537–38).
31. Hoopes, Right Reason in the English Renaissance, 98.
32. Walton, Jonathan Edwards, 220.
33. Fiering, Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth-Century Harvard, 117.
34. Walton, Jonathan Edwards, 174, quoting William J. Bouwsma, “The Two Faces of Renaissance Humanism,” in Itinerarium Italicum (ed. T A. Brady, Jr., and H. Oberman; Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1975), 36.
35. Walton, Jonathan Edwards, 227.
36. Ibid., 174, quoting Bouwsma, The Two Faces of Renaissance Humanism, 38.
37. Walton, Jonathan Edwards, 184.
38. Ibid., 160, 227, 160.
39. Ibid., 177, 220, 160.
40. Charles Hodge, Commentary on the Epistle to the Ephesians (New York: Robert Carter & Bros., 1866), 249–50.
41. On classically Protestant conceptions of the life of the mind, see Mark A. Noll, America s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 95–102; Theodore Dwight Bozeman, To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension in Puritanism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 51–80.
42. Walton, Jonathan Edwards, 187.
43. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (ed. John T. McNeill; trans. Ford Lewis Battles; 2 vols.; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), 1:70 (1.6.1).
44. Cf. Walton, Jonathan Edwards, 154–58, 189, 209, 222. Please note that by saying “objectively present in” I am not suggesting that the objects of the regenerated agent’s understanding are themselves the ultimate source of the “spiritual excellence and beauty” that is perceived; I want to affirm with Reformed scholars generally that the glory of created things is reflected glory.
45. Hodge, Commentary on the Epistle to the Ephesians, 250.
46. Ibid.
47. “Miscellanies” no. 397, in Jonathan Edwards, The “Miscellanies,” a-500 (vol. 13 of The Works of Jonathan Edwards; ed. Thomas A. Schafer; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 462–63.
48. Hoopes, Right Reason in the English Renaissance, 64. Please note that Augustinian voluntarists do not claim that the “right” knowledge of the regenerate is comprehensive knowledge; thus, they are amenable to robust yet chastened understandings of “perspectivalism.” E.g., see Vern Poythress, Symphonic Theology: The Validity of Multiple Perspectives in Theology (1987; repr., Phillipsburg, NJ.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2001).
49. William J. Wainwright, Reason and the Heart: A Prolegomenon to a Critique of Passional Reason (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1995), 42, 43. Note that if this is an accurate representation of how Augustinian voluntarists conceive of “right reason,” then the work of Protestants who stand in this tradition ought not to be handled in a wooden, unimaginative fashion, for doing so will lead to serious misunderstandings, including the conclusion that such Protestants are rationalists. According to Carl Trueman, this is how progressive evangelicals have handled the Protestant Scholastics. ‘As the work of scholars such as Richard Muller has indicated,” Trueman argues, “confessional Reformed Orthodoxy. .. has theological moorings in an intelligent interaction with, and appropriation of, the best theological and exegetical work of the patristic and medieval authors, as well as the correctives of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Yet this careful scholarship is so often aced in the evangelical culture by popular potboilers which tell a very different story. Thus, post-conservative evangelicals may take the worst bits of Hodge, read them back into Turretin, mix in a faulty understanding of scholasticism as an adumbration of Enlightenment rationalism, repeat, mantra-style, superficially learned and portentous phrases such as ‘Cartesian dualism’ and ‘modernist mindset,’ and extrapolate from there to dismiss the whole of confessional Reformed Orthodoxy; but that is just one more example of the cod-theology which passes for scholarship in some evangelical quarters” (review of Mark A. Noll and Carolyn Nystrom, Is the Reformation Over?, http://wwwreformation21.org/ Shelf_Life/Shelf_Life/127/?vobId=1466&pm=281 [accessed 21 May 2007]).
50. According to Richard Pratt, “It is not enough to know that cows eat grass. True apprehension of cows and grass reveals the providential power and care of God and the task which was given to man to subdue every other creature to God’s glory (cf Gen 1:28)” (Every Thought Captive: A Study Manual for the Defense of Christian Truth [Phillipsburg, NJ.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1979], 14). It is also “not enough to know that rain is the condensation of evaporated water.. .. The true knowledge of rain. .. reveals to us the mercy of God and how God expects us to treat enemies with kindness (Matt 5:45f). Of course, scientific investigation into the nature of rain will intensify and clarify the Christian’s understanding of these things but true knowledge of rain is discovered by investigation resting on and governed by the Scriptures” (40–41).
51. D. A. Carson, “Christian Witness in an Age of Pluralism,” in God and Culture: Essays in Honor of Carl F. H. Henry (ed. D. A. Carson and John Woodbridge; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), 52.
52. On the various strategies employed by evangelicals to integrate faith and learning, see Ronald R. Nelson, “Faith-Discipline Integration: Compatibilist, Reconstructionalist and Transformationalist Strategies,” in The Reality of Christian Learning: Strategies for Faith-Discipline Integration (ed. Harold Heie and David L. Wolfe; Grand Rapids: Christian University Press, 1987), 317–29; William Hasker, “Faith-Learning Integration: An Overview,” Christian Scholar’s Review 21 (1992): 234-48.
53. David K. Clark, To Know and Love God: Method for Theology (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2003), 314.
54. Judicious reconstructionists like B. B. Warfield acknowledge that there is a difference between their work and that of their unbelieving colleagues, but they insist that this difference is a difference “of perfection of performance, rather than of kind” (B. B. Warfield, introduction to Apologetics: or, the Rational Vindication of Christianity, by Francis R. Beattie [Richmond, Va.: The Presbyterian Committee of Publication, 1903]; repr. in Selected Shorter Writings of Benjamin B. Warfield [ed. John E. Meeter; 2 vols.; Nutley NJ.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1973], 2:101).
55. Wainwright, Reason and the Heart, 3, 5.
56. Ibid., 5, 3.
57. Mark A. Noll, “Jonathan Edwards, Moral Philosophy and the Secularization of American Christian Thought: Two Important Books,” The Reformed Journal 33 (February 1983): 26; cf John Piper and Justin Taylor, eds., A God-Entranced Vision of All Things: The Legacy of Jonathan Edwards (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway 2004).
58. Heresy and Concession, in Shorter Writings, 2:674.
59. Noll, ‘Jonathan Edwards, Moral Philosophy” 22.
60. David Basinger, “What Christian Philosophers May Do,” The Reformed Journal 35 (February 1985): 18.
61. Mark R. Talbot, On Christian Philosophy: A Review Article, T he Reformed Journal 34 (September 1984): 19.
62. Basinger, What Christian Philosophers May Do, 19.
63. Ibid.
64. Mark R. Talbot, “Reply by Mark R. Talbot,” The Reformed Journal 35 (February 1985): 20.
65. E.g., see Roy A. Clouser, T he Myth of Religious Neutrality: An Essay on the Hidden Role of Religious Belief in Theories (rev. ed.; Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005).
66. Talbot, “Reply by Mark R. Talbot,” 20.
67. For how I am using the word “objective” in this article, see n. 10 above.
68. E.g.: “For from him, and through him, and to him are all things” (Rom 11:36). “For by him all things were created, both in the heavens and on the earth, visible and invisible. .. all things have been created through him and for him. .. and in him all things hold together” (Col 1:16–17). “All things came into being through him, and apart from him nothing came into being that has come into being” (John 1:3). Our “life-breath” and our “ways” are in his hand (Dan 5:23). “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). He is the one who “does according to his will in the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of earth,” and for this reason “no one can ward off his hand or say to him, ‘What have you done?”’ (Dan 4:35).
69. K. Scott Oliphint, “Jonathan Edwards on Apologetics: Reason and the Noetic Effects of Sin,” in The Legacy of Jonathan Edwards: American Religion and the Evangelical Tradition (ed. D. G. Hart, Sean Michael Lucas, and Stephen J. Nichols; Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003), 138–39. Cornelius Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology (Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1974), 22, makes this same point in a characteristically complex fashion: “What is true with respect to the existence of the whole space-time world is equally true with respect to the meaning of it. As the absolute and independent existence of God determines the derivative existence of the universe, so the absolute meaning that God has for himself implies that the meaning of every fact in the universe must be related to God. Scripture says constantly that the world has its whole meaning in the fact that it was created for the glory of God. This appears most beautifully in Revelation 4:11, where the redeemed creation joins in one grand Hallelujah chorus in praise of the Creator: ‘Worthy art thou, our Lord and our God, to receive the glory and the honor and the power: for thou didst create all things, and because of thy will they are, and were created.’. .. If we hold with Paul (Romans 11:36) that ‘of him and through him, and to him, are all things; to whom be glory for ever,’ we see clearly that the existence and meaning of every fact in this universe must in the last analysis be related to the self-conscious and eternally self-subsistent God of the Scriptures.”
70. Pratt, Every Thought Captive, 15, 14.
71. Calvin, Institutes, 1:52 (1.4.3).
72. Pratt, Every Thought Captive, 14. Cf. Diana Butler, “God’s Visible Glory: The Beauty of Nature in the Thought of John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards,” WTJ 52 (1990): 13-26; John Piper, God’s Passion for His Glory: Living the Vision of Jonathan Edwards (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway 1998); Susan E. Schreiner, The Theater of His Glory: Nature and the Natural Order in the Thought of John Calvin (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1991).
73. Oliphint, ‘Jonathan Edwards on Apologetics,” 137; emphasis in the original.
74. Ibid., 138.
75. Stephen J. Nichols, An Absolute Kind of Certainty: The Holy Spirit and the Apologetics of Jonathan Edwards (Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2003), 54; for an extremely helpful discussion of Edwards’s epistemology see ch. 2, “Revelation: Edwards on Knowing,” and ch. 3, “Perception: Edwards on Seeing and Sensing.”
76. Gaffin, “Some Epistemological Reflections,” 114.
77. Note the extensive nature of this claim. According to Gaffin, “All. .. attempts” to “make room for the more or less peaceful.. . coexistence of Christian and non-Christian wisdom” by distinguishing between “secular” and “sacred” kinds of truth are contrived and “run aground on the immovable rock of Paul’s unqualified πάντα [‘all things’ in 1 Cor 2:15]. Every attempt to read our passage in partial terms or to restrict its scope by categorical distinctions, of whatever kind, clashes with the sweeping totality of Paul’s vision” (“Some Epistemological Reflections,” 117–18). For a challenging discussion of the intimate relationship between general and special revelation from a conservative Reformed scholar, see Cornelius Van Til, “Nature and Scripture,” in The Infallible Word (ed. Ned B. Stone house and Paul Woolley; Philadelphia: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1946), 263–301.
78. Gaffin, “Some Epistemological Reflections,” 115, 116. In his discussion of this passage Gaffin cites Col 2:3 to corroborate the extensive nature of Paul’s “all things.” Some of the commentators who are more or less in agreement with Gaffin’s interpretation of 1 Cor 2:15 include the following: Leon Morris insists that “the force of all should not be overlooked. The spiritual principle is the basis of. .. [the spiritual man’s] judgment on what men call the secular, as well as the sacred” (The First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980], 61). Gregory Lockwood argues that “the spiritual person is able to exercise good judgment in all things. . ., both secular and sacred; he has ‘a privileged understanding of reality”’ (1 Corinthians [St. Louis: Concordia, 2000], 103). Simon Kistemaker contends that the spiritual man “receives the guidance of the Holy Spirit and uses the Scriptures as his compass for the voyage of his life. The expression all things signifies the broad spectrum of human existence. This does not mean that the spiritual man is an expert in every area of life. Rather, with respect to the community in which God has placed him, he is able to appraise all things spiritually” (Exposition of the First Epistle to the Corinthians [Grand Rapids: Baker, 2002], 93). Peter Stuhlmacher makes a compelling case pertaining to the context of 1 Cor 2:15, namely that 1 Cor 1:18–2:16 and Col 2:3 are “the New Testament counterpart to Prov 1:7 and parallels. A faith theory of knowledge is also present in nutshell form in 1 Cor 2:6–16, where faith is not a hindrance but liberation to realistic thought. The fact that capacity for this new thought grows out of the gift of the Holy Spirit does not separate Paul from the wisdom tradition of Israel. It binds him to it” (“The Hermeneutical Significance of 1 Corinthians 2:6–16, ” in Tradition and Interpretation in the New Testament [ed. Gerald F. Hawthorne and Otto Betz; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987], 340–41). Gordon Fee interprets the phrase “all things” in 1 Cor 2:15 much differently than the foregoing interpreters. “Such a statement,” he argues, “of course must not be wrested from its context. It is the Spirit who ‘searches all things, even the depths of God’ (v. 10); therefore the person who has the Spirit can discern God’s ways. Not necessarily all things, of course, but all things that pertain to the work of salvation, matters formerly hidden in God but now revealed through the Spirit” (The First Epistle to the Corinthians [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988], 118).
79. Cf. Douglas Jones and Douglas Wilson, Angels in the Architecture: A Protestant Vision for Middle Earth (Moscow, Idaho: Canon Press, 1998), 28.
80. For an excellent analysis of the difference between “aesthetic” or “poetic” knowing and Enlightenment rationalism, see Douglas Wilson’s thoughtful discussion in ibid., 181-99.