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Absolute Person and Moral Experience
A Study in Neo-Calvinism
Nathan D. Shannon
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eBook - ePub
Absolute Person and Moral Experience
A Study in Neo-Calvinism
Nathan D. Shannon
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About This Book
Presenting a neo-Calvinist account of human moral experience, this book is an advance upon the tradition of Augustinian moral theology. The first two chapters are theological interpretations of Genesis 2: 17 and 3: 6 respectively. Chapter 3 approaches the neo-Calvinist notion of God as absolute person through a consideration of theologies of human reason and history. Chapter 4 considers the relationship between absolute person and classical trinitarianism, and the significance of absolute person for accommodation, hermeneutics, and the Creator/creature relation and distinction. The fifth chapter considers the role of the incarnation in Bavinck's thought, and thus provides a backdrop for reflection upon absolute person from a biblical theological point of view. Shannon concludes with the claim that, according to the Bavincks, Vos, and Van Til, human moral experience is the product of a divine self-expression primarily in the Son.
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Chapter 1 Divine Moral Character Self-Given
All men seek happiness. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves. … What is it then that this desire and this inability proclaim to us, but that there was once in man a true happiness of which there now remain to him only the mark and empty trace?
—Blaise Pascal
For Herman Bavinck, Geerhardus Vos, and Cornelius Van Til, the freedom Adam enjoyed in the Garden of Eden, signaled conspicuously by the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and the prohibition of Gen. 2:17, is the primary and definitive instance of creaturely freedom, and most importantly of creaturely freedom relative to what may be called “the law” or “the will of God.” Of whatever Creator–creature symmetry one may speak, and thus of moral meaning in the realm of creaturely experience, its original is found in Genesis 2. The forbidden tree represents the first great contingency of creaturely accountability and of human intercourse with God: obedience would have meant divine bestowal of an advancement of human life to imperishable righteousness consisting of the inability to sin and consummate enjoyment of communion with God, the personal source of life. Indeed, the possibility of disobedience relative to the injunction of Gen. 2:17 was presented as the singular embodiment of evil in Adam’s world, and accompanying that possibility was the prospect of the initialization of divine judicial displeasure. What are sometimes characterized as “genuine” history and freedom, and the moral structure of image-bearing life, have their beginning here in the history recorded in Genesis 2 and 3, in the garden of God. As Bavinck, Vos, and Van Til see it, the nature and possibility of evil are on display here in the arrangement surrounding the two trees placed by God in the midst of the garden.
This chapter presents Bavinck’s, Vos’s, and Van Til’s theology of the prohibition of Gen. 2:17 as a theology of the self-expression of God as moral norm for the image-bearer, even as the implicit fabric of human moral self-consciousness. This chapter seeks to demonstrate that the possibility of sin, as a prototypical instance of creaturely volitional expression, appears within an eschatological-relational structure designed and deployed by God for the purpose of cosmic glorification of himself as sovereign Lord and Creator. Human moral experience is self-conscious engagement with this structure.
Within this structure, Gen. 2:17 is the public, legal expression of God’s own moral character, and as such it is a special formalization of the natural Creator–creature relationship, a relationship that is always and already exhaustively, if implicitly, moral. As such, human moral experience is experience of a moral and relational self-expression of God, and human moral self-consciousness, implicit and explicit, is therefore thoroughly theo-referential. One might say that God is man’s immediate moral experience, or that human moral experience is experience of God. So says Van Til, that “God is man’s ultimate environment,” and that “the creature has no private chambers.”1
This chapter comprises three sections, the first of which presents the crisis in the garden, surrounding the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, as a satellite conflict, a concentrated earthly arena hosting cosmic, kingdom confrontation. In the Garden of Eden, two superpowers, categorically unequal, clash indirectly through the historical sequence of human experience in the garden. Both kingdoms lay claim to the allegiance of the human creature and thereby to the world entrusted to him as well. The second section examines the relational rationale for the prohibition—how exactly “thou shalt not eat” figures into this confrontation, and the third examines the nature of creaturely freedom in prelapsarian Eden. It will become clear that, according to these three writers, the nature of evil itself is observable here in original form, in what they understand to be a highly structured relational environment surrounding the prohibition of Gen. 2:17. The prominence of the relational structure in which the prohibition is issued indicates that the realm of human experience must be understood in terms of divine initiative, immanence, and eschatological relation—what Bavinck, Vos, and Van Til often call “covenant.”2 The intelligibility and ethico-religious significance of human thoughts, words, and deeds are the products of a non-necessary movement of God toward that which is not himself, a movement always covenant-eschatological and revelatory of the absolute personality of the triune God.
Edenic Theater and Cosmic Conflict
Angelic Uprising and Fall
Discussion of an angelic fall is unevenly distributed in the writings of Herman Bavinck, Geerhardus Vos, and Cornelius Van Til. Throughout Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics one finds careful if judicious discussion of related themes. Vos makes only passing mention of the angelic fall but in biblical theological studies of messianism and the kingdom of God, and in his study of Pauline eschatology, he reflects on Satan, his kingdom, and demonology. The noetic effects of the Fall and the state of sin are addressed in nearly everything Van Til published, and often in terms of the influence or reign of sin or Satan,3 but Van Til does not address directly the angelic fall or what bearing it may have had on the situation in the garden. But the exegetical raw material is common ground.
As described in 2 Pet. 2:4 and Jude 6, an angelic transgression precedes the Fall of the first humans. The details of this first sin receive no direct treatment beyond these two verses, with two possible exceptions: the words of Jesus in Lk. 10:18, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven,” and the mention of the “Day Star, Son of Dawn,” “fallen from heaven,” in Isa. 14:12. There are no problems of consistency between 2 Pet. 2:4 and Jude 6; in fact they are remarkably similar. Both refer to angelic transgression, which Jude specifies as attempted angelic mutiny, noting that some number of angels claimed more or greater authority than was rightly (or possibly) theirs, and both mention God’s restraining the transgressors in gloomy darkness, by means of chains, until a final judgment.4
Vos devotes attention to the relevant material from Isa. 14, an extended censure of Babylon focusing on the sin of pride, the “highest embodiment” of which, Vos says, “was found in that king of Babel, the last representative world power that came within Isaiah’s ken.”5 One called “Day Star, son of Dawn,” is addressed directly in verse 12 as “you who laid the nations low.” Vos understands from Isa. 14:13-14 that the sin of pride is essentially self-deification, the presence of which in this prophecy he explains as follows: “such self-deifying pride being the controlling principle of diabolical sin, it was not unnatural to find in the king of Babel here described the type of Satan.”6
Bavinck notes at several points that Scripture teaches “distinctions of rank and status, of dignity and ministry, of office and honor, even of class and kind,” among the angels.7 “The realm of spirits is no less rich and splendid than the realm of material beings,”8 perhaps “more fully furnished and populated, even far surpassing the material world in diversity.”9 This fullness and complexity indicates to Bavinck that the angelic fall must have caused considerable disorder and disarray in the angelic world: “the fall of so many angels must have profoundly disturbed the organism of the angelic world,” since “it lost its head, its organization.”10
Bavinck draws attention to one significant difference, among several others, between angels and humans, that humans from their original design were intended for dominion over the earth (Gen. 1:26) and were, once created, blessed accordingly with the task of subduing its resources (Gen. 1:28) in the exercise of creaturely, image-dominion. “Dominion over the earth is integral to being human.”11 Angels by contrast are servants and ministers. But what sort of disruption is indicated in Jude 6—that they were not content in their position but coveted and sought greater dignity—Bavinck leaves unspecified. Subordination to God, to each other, or to humans, or any combination of these, may have been the original object of angelic discontent.
Clear answers to such questions are not found in the text of Scripture. The primary concern of 2 Pet. 2:4 and Jude 6 is divine response, even divine sovereignty in particular. Peter writes that “God did not spare angels when they sinned.” According to Jude, God has responded by restraining the wayward angels until “the judgment of the great day,” what Peter more simply calls “the judgment.” These phrases signify the Lord’s prerogative in the timing of a conclusive, judicial reckoning and his unqualified sway over the fallen angels until that time. In both verses the word “until,” in other words, indicates that the Lord restrains the angels for a time of his choosing; he delays judgment and suspends, as it were, their destiny according to his own plan and good pleasure. Citing both verses, Bavinck says that “although it is true that after their fall the devils have been thrown into hell to be kept there till the judgment … they have not yet been struck by that judgment.”12
It is unclear how this provisional status s...