No!

A Theological Response to Christian Reconstructionism

McGlasson

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781621893738
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Sometimes theological ideas are good topics for ongoing debate. Other times, the community of faith needs to come to a decision: yes or no. Christian Reconstructionism offers the Christian church a basic approach to faith different from mainstream historic Christianity. Is their approach warranted? Or is it a fundamental distortion of the gospel? The present volume seeks to set out the case that Christian Reconstructionism is not a legitimate variation of Christian doctrine, but rather a serious misunderstanding of the gospel attested in Holy Scripture. First, an attempt is made to look at the basic ideas of Christian Reconstructionism. Rather than focusing on names and dates, the focus is on the set of ideas that characterize this view of Christianity. Second, a response is given to each of the main ideas. The response makes use of traditional Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox doctrine; but it is based primarily on careful exegesis of Scripture. The ultimate question is if Christian Reconstructionism is grounded in the Bible, or in a political ideology foreign to Scripture. An epilogue briefly points to a different way of seeing Christian involvement in contemporary, global society.

Chapter 1

Epistemological Dualism

We proceed now to the first of our set of four concepts which define Christian Reconstructionism. We have called it epistemological dualism, and we propose to examine the book by Cornelius Van Til, A Christian Theory of Knowledge, in setting out this concept. It would of course be an obvious alternative to define at the outset what we mean by the rather cumbersome term epistemological dualism, and the reader rightly expects a clear definition—and will be given one in due course. However, I must ask the reader’s patience. There seems to be little point in offering a definition of the phrase, and then applying it to Van Til; surely that does little more than show that Van Til’s work can be bent to conform to my definition. Far more fruitful—and in the end far more convincing—would be to delay the definition until the matter is before us, and only then use the phrase to draw attention to the salient features of Van Til’s view: features which make it such a powerful force in initiating the momentum of the Christian Reconstructionist movement.

The first question we need to address in approaching A Christian Theory of Knowledge is what genre of theological writing and research it belongs to. It is not biblical interpretation; though the book refers often to Scripture, it contains only a few references to actual verses of the Bible, and virtually no in-depth theological exegesis of Scripture. It is not dogmatic theology; while it often uses the word God, it again contains no sustained theological exposition of any of the great concepts or themes of Christian witness such as the Trinity, Christology, Creation, Grace, Faith, Justification, and so forth. It is certainly not homiletics; the book contains no references whatsoever to the evangelical call to mission, or to the task of proclamation. So what is it?

Van Til himself calls it an exercise in “apologetics”; and while he is certainly content to leave it at that, I think a word or two of historical context would be helpful in interpreting the rest of the book. In one form or another, such fields as biblical interpretation, dogmatic theology, and homiletics have been part of the church’s theological labor throughout its history; “apologetics” has not. To be sure, in the early church there were a group of writers known as the “Apologists,” writers such as Justin Martyr, Aristides, Tatian, and Athenagoras. They wrote “apologies” of the faith at a time when Christianity was still a persecuted religion, and their aim was largely to convince legal authority and literate public alike that such persecution was unjust and unworthy. They saw their writing as a positive affirmation of the gospel mission, despite the extraordinary circumstances faced by these early Christians.

But apologetics is different in kind from these ad hoc early Christian efforts. For apologetics, as conceived by Van Til and many others, did not arise as a genre until well into the nineteenth century. Apologetics came, so to speak, on the other end of the historical parabola defining the relation of Christianity to the surrounding culture. The early church apologists wrote when Christianity was not yet accepted within the public forum; apologetics arose when Christianity was becoming marginalized by that same forum. With the coming of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, modern science, philosophy, economics, political philosophy, etc., were emerging as independent disciplines no longer looking to the church for primary validation or guidance. Modern humanity—so it was perceived—came into its own, standing on its own two feet without need for faith. Some Christian thinkers tried to respond to this situation by seeking to defend the gospel in the face of modern secular culture; and the defense offered is called apologetics, from the Greek word for defense. Hence, unlike the ad hoc efforts of the early church, the modern genre of apologetics is systematic, defensive in posture, critical, and largely at home in high culture debates rather than proclamation or the mission field.

Now, one option for modern apologetics is to assume some neutral ground between faith and unbelief, between believer and non-believer. On this view, if a believer looks at the world of nature and an unbeliever looks at the same world of nature, there will be observations and laws that both can see with equal clarity and agreement. Such observations and laws are simply “out there.” Because of this neutral ground between belief and unbelief, the believer has the basis for a strategy of persuasion; the believer can use the neutral facts already admitted by the unbeliever as building blocks for an argument for the truths of Christian faith.

This strategy of persuasion was most famously used by the highly influential treatise by Joseph Butler, The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature (1736). As Butler argued, “everything is what it is, and not another thing.”1 That is to say, a fact is a fact, whether a believer sees it, or a non-believer. This neutral ground of mere factuality allows for the enterprise of natural theology, which is the effort to show the unbeliever the marks of God in the natural world through natural reason. Butler continues: “All reasonable men know certainly, that there cannot, in reality, be any such thing as chance; and conclude, that things which have this appearance are the result of general laws, and may be reduced into them.”2 Surely everyone admits that natural laws govern the universe; given this universally reasonable assertion—the same for both believers and non-believers—a case for God can then be made. The Butler-inspired tradition of “facts and evidences” for Christianity has of course remained strong in some circles to this day.

Van Til continues to embrace wholeheartedly the genre of apologetics; he aims to give a biblically based defense of Christianity in the face of modern secular culture. However, he vigorously and systematically rejects the “facts and evidences” tradition of natural theology found in Butler and his many imitators. Let us now proceed to lay out the basics of Van Til’s approach, and then follow by examining in some detail several elements of it.

According to Van Til, the main approach of Christian apologetics should be this: modern thought as a whole has a profound predicament which it cannot under any circumstances solve within the resources at its command. Modern thought in all its variety of manifestations—philosophy, art, science, indeed culture in general—operates with a set of principles which cannot under any circumstances be avoided. And those very principles condemn all modern thinkers, all modern cultural adherents, to a necessarily self-contradictory and self-destructive position. By contrast, Christianity has a set of principles that alone solve the self-contradictory quandary of all modern culture.

Basic to Van Til’s position is that there is one and only one Christian way of thinking, “the Christian position,”3 and he nowhere deviates from this sense that all Christianity on the one hand, and all modernity on the other can be encapsulated into a single set of rational propositions. All Christians reason one way; all non-Christians reason another way; it cannot possibly be any different. (Actually, we need to quality the first statement a bit, as we shall see in our further elaboration of his view. Not all Christians realize the right way to reason in a Christian way. Many Christians fail to grasp the proper method of following the biblical method of reasoning. But of this Van Til is certain; there is only one biblical method of reasoning, and it ought to be followed by all Christians even though sadly it is not.)

So, what is the Christian principle, the one biblical way of reasoning? The foundational principle of all Christian thought is that God is completely and utterly self-sufficient. He exists in himself alone, and for himself alone; and therefore he defines himself alone. God is a completely self-explanatory reality. That means that all human autonomy—all human independence in relation to God—must be radically excluded. It has to be either/or; either God is all and humanity nothing; or humanity is all and God nothing. Either humanity is completely dependent upon God, or God must be in some way dependent upon humanity. Now, if God is completely self-sufficient and completely self-explanatory, this has global implications for the way humanity knows reality. Every fact is created by God; therefore every fact can only be known in reference to God. In the phrase of Van Til, God must always be “the final reference point in all human predication.”4 Every single fact in all space and time can only be known if it is referred to God in its very definition; that is the essence of the Christian principle, the biblical way of reasoning about the universe and all that it contains.

By sharp contrast, the very essence of the non-Christian position—which includes all modern culture in its manifold variety—is to see the universe and the facts which it contains in reference only to humanity. Radical human autonomy is the basis for all modern culture, indeed for all modern people who inhabit that culture. And the principle which animates their reasoning is to make humanity itself the final point of reference for all understanding of the world, and every single fact which it contains. Again, to use the phrase of Van Til: humanity itself becomes “the final reference point in predication.”5

There are thus two and only two mutually exclusive views of all reality available to humankind, based on two and only two mutually exclusive principles: the Christian and the non-Christian. One, rightly, refers all facts to the self-contained reality of God; the other, wrongly, refers all facts to the self-defined autonomy of humanity. How then is apologetics possible? How then is fruitful discussion to take place? The thrust of Van Til’s primary argument comes right at this point.

The typical apologetics of natural theology has assumed a neutral space between believer and non-believer as a basis for discussion. Van Til seeks to show, however, that there is no neutral space. Open discussion between Christian and non-Christian is not possible based upon the illusion of any shared assumptions or possibilities of any kind, be they scientific, philosophical, artistic, or experiential; for in reality all facts in the universe are interpreted either as Christian facts, or as non-Christian facts. The Christian can convince the non-believer only by direct challenge, by confrontation, not by dialogue; the Christian must show the non-Christian that presupposing God as “the final referen...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Epistemological Dualism
• Chapter 2: Mosaic Law in Society
• Chapter 3: Cultural Christianity
• Chapter 4: Christian Political Domination
• Chapter 5: The Open Proclamation of the Gospel
• Chapter 6: Law and Gospel
• Chapter 7: The Call to Global Mission
• Chapter 8: The Call to Discipleship
• Epilogue
• Bibliography