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INTRODUCTION

Reformed Classicalism: A First Sketch

This is a definition in progress. It is not meant to be a monopoly on an idea or

a label. Nevertheless it represents a body of thought that is in need of a label,
ultimately because it is really in need of articulation and defense.

This is not to be confused with “Classical Reformed,” which functions as a

description of those holding the most orthodox line with regard to this or that
Confession of the faith. Much less is it to be confused with the “Reformed
Epistemology” that is all the rage among theistic philosophers today.

Reformed Classicalism is a school of thought seeking to exist within the

Reformed tradition — not to oppose, nor to innovate beyond it — but it is a
school of thought increasingly distinct. I almost said “ex-tinct,” which might
have explained a lot as well. What I will call Reformed Classicalism is at least
increasingly unheard of among theologians and institutions in our tradition.

I speak of “our tradition,” but if we must put all our cards on the table, it
should be noted that I am still new to the fully confessional community of the
Reformed. My church planting experiences in Boise, Idaho placed us among
the so-called “New Calvinism” which is very often loosely affiliated. There is
nothing wrong with that in certain situations: such as the one we were in. As to
my other cards, my background leading up to pastoral ministry was in the
realm of philosophy. My early reading of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, C. S.
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Lewis, and Francis Schaeffer, all before professing faith in Christ, made me
especially sensitive to various forms of anti-intellectualism in the most
scholarly halls of Evangelicalism. It was not only in the church, but among
authors rigorously doing battle with secular ideas, that I noticed strands of
anti-intellectualism. This was naturally puzzling.

What I came to discover is a kind of poverty of philosophy (no apologies to

Marx for that title) among even the heads of Evangelical thought. This is first
encountered in material on apologetics. There we are asked to choose between
classicalism, evidentialism, presuppositionalism, Reformed Epistemology, or an
eclectic (cumulative) approach. This is not much of a choice after we are
informed that to be Reformed demands the presuppositional approach. Those
of us who have studied philosophy before coming to faith can see easily enough
that words have undergone radical transformation. And there is a pattern.
Ideas are conforming the the basic flow of Western thought after Kant.

Of course all parties think they have rejected Kant’s divide in the Critique.
However that is just one preliminary ground that has to be cleared by the
school I am proposing. My interest is not primarily in apologetics, but in what
Reformed scholars call the doctrine of primal knowledge, or what philosophers
call epistemology, and what shows up in a good textbook on systematic theology
as the Prolegomena section. In other words, the concern of this school will be
on the question of theological method, and the motive behind this concern
will be on the maintenance of orthodoxy. We are persuaded that bad starting
points tend to issue forth in many bad ends.
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In What Sense is This Idea Reformed?

The reformers had a high view of truth. Think of the doctrine of sola Scriptura
over against the claims of the magisterium of Rome. This idea has many
profound implications, but surely one of them is that the final authority of
God’s word is infinitely objective in distinction with the comparative
subjectivities of pope or council. The terms infinitely objective and comparatively
subjective are crucial to virtually all that will be unpacked within Reformed
Classicalism. In using the term “objective,” in this context, we are talking
about the truth of God’s clear and written word. Note that lesser truths are
still equally true (say “There are six people in this room” compared to “God
knows everything”), but many objects of truth are also subjective vantage
points. That is, they are persons experiencing cognition or making a particular
truth claim. These too are objects that may be thought about — but they are
also finite acts of thinking. Now the knowledge of God comprehends them
both. God knows both the truths of his own propositions (contained in the
Scriptures) and those finite epistemic trains that conform to his truth.
Hopefully one can see, easily enough, the sense in which one is a higher truth:
an antecedent truth, etc.

The Roman Catholic doctrine represented, among other things, a resting of

religious truth upon a comparitively subjective authority. Of course no studious
Roman Catholic would deny that God trumps the Church, or that the Bible
trumps the pope. What they would deny is that the church laity is capable of
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interpreting the meaning of the Bible in a way that could preserve meaningful
authority. So goes the debate. My only point here is to show an obvious area in
which the Reformation was about the truth per se in a very specific and
substantive way.

We maintain that the Reformed Classical approach also happens to be the

truly Classical Reformed position. We may not prove much by appealing to the
magisterial Reformers. Of course, John Calvin has many profound things to say
about starting points at the beginning of the Institutes, but he did not draw out
first things in a rigid, scientific manner. Francis Turretin was much more
explicit in his Institutes a century later. There is much evidence that Jonathan
Edwards would have produced such a synthesis had he survived the smallpox
vaccination upon arrival at Princeton. My only point here is that this is not
such a novel thing I propose. At the end of the nineteenth century, the
“absolute order” proposed by W. G. T. Shedd, in his Dogmatic Theology, is one of
the finest concise statements of the reformed and classical ideas coming
together. For Shedd there was a proper method to theology — one that is both
“scientific” and “logical” — such that to proceed by any other method was
unnatural and inevitably leads to the disintegration of Christian truth.

It will be too complex at this point to draw forth the progression from the
Dutch school to the present Reformed scene, but the upshot is that some of
the lingo of Kant and Hegel, and even some of the conceptions tied to the
words, have been so indellibly stamped upon our various reactions to the
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modern worldview that we refute them only by parroting them. Again this
point will have to wait.

In What Sense is This Idea Classical?

Reformed Classicalism is not an attempt to revive the case of the Ligonier

apologetic wholesale. Now we will find agreement with Sproul, Gerstner, and
Lindsley on two relevant points: first, in part of their concern with what I
would call the “paradoxy” of the Van Tillians; second, in the call to reconstruct
natural theology. On the other hand, since it has been said that those authors
misread (and therefore overreached in critiquing) Van Til, we will also propose
a more thoroughgoing critique. And besides, not much in the way of an
academic treatment has been written in follow up by anyone representing the
school. We can heartily defend the Ligonier apologetic method, but with the
recent passing of Dr. Sproul we thought it better to honor his work in this area
by taking the more modest approach of speaking mostly for ourselves. So what
do we mean by this other term?

The word “classical” typically denotes the highest expression of something.

More often than not, this places the reference point in the past; but not
always. The important point to keep emphasizing here is that the central
concern of Reformed Classicalism is not apologetics, but rather epistemology,
and therefore proper method for the whole of systematic theology. And it is
precisely in acceptance of Van Til’s comprehensive definition of systematic
theology — inherited from Bavinck and Kuyper — that we have this concern.
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The whole program is hacked by sub-Christian gliches to the degree that we

conceed the ideas of “object” and “nature” to some “autonomous” or “neutral”
territory, all the while blaming the classical mindset for doing that. This is the
great irony of the post-Kantian Reformed mind: that in the name of keeping all
truth God’s truth, we have been forced to conceed all truth, except for the ink-
patterns in our tribalized text, to “the world” and “its brute facts.”

Incidentally, I recommend to those within the Reformed Classicalist camp to

use the very lingo of presuppositionalism to expose this irony. Along these
same lines, it is imperative to make an exegetical case that the perspectival
tradition is not forming its lexicon according to the way that the Bible itself
defines the relevant words.

At any rate, by “Classical” we mean to pick up where the Scholastics gave up in

their PR defeat to the nominalists they produced — a nominalist PR victory
that sadly bled into the very foundations of Protestant thought and which has
always discredited Reformed theology to Catholics and other outsiders who
have spent a season considering the claims of our overall doctrine, but who
turn away at what they rightly regard to be a strong dose of relativism. This
need not be the case. We mean to reassert the true meanings and roles of
natural theology and natural law, and to show why the old Arisotilean notions
that “words mean things” and “all objects have natures” do not thereby
constitute some set of “brute facts” necessarily attempting to stand “behind”
God’s word.
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Some Misgivings

It is believed by many that classical thought represents all that went wrong in
the Latin-speaking, Western Church. But what do such critics mean by this?
Objective truth, in general, and systematic truth, in particular, are the usual
suspects. Twenty years ago these were the targets among liberal theologians
and shunned in liberal churches. What has happened that they are now
avoided like an embarassing uncle among conservative Evangelicals? It is a
fascinating collective psychological profile.

We are creatures of our culture. I think we can agree with the postmoderns on
that — that is, to the extent that we passively allow ourselves to be shaped by
the present-tense. And ours is a culture increasingly determined by the present.
That is why we become nothing, as the present is next to nothing. We
Americans were already quite anti-historical. We always suffered from
chronological snobbery. But certain institutions had anchors in the past
nonetheless. The “post-evangelical” has forsaken even those. The greatest fear
now for the thinking Christian is triumphalism. Please note that I believe
triumphalism is (a) a real thing and (b) a bad thing. That is, the real McCoy is
guilty as charged. However I cannot join the frenzied embarassment at all
things Western as if the only way to distinguish Christ and culture is to cut off,
like lecherous flesh, any manifestation of superior Christian ideas upon that
scrap of history. Anything good about Christianity whereby the world was
formerly thought to have been made a better place — all that is now mixed
together in the triumphalist soup.
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In a word (or a few), we must now all repeat after he who knows that
classicalism equals triumphalism. There are many roadways to saying this, and so
otherwise very astute Christians may never notice it being claimed.

The classical definition of truth implies a few “isms” that postmodernism has
successfully turned into philosophical boogey men: foundationalism,
verificationism, and realism (sometimes called “essentialism”). It may help to
know that there is a modern version of these — typically associated with
positivistic and analytical philosophy schools — that are rightly fit to be
consigned to the ash heap of history. But we are often slow to allow a
traditional Christian version of these to reassert themselves. Surely
Chesterton’s quip about Christianity is fitting about its classical expression. We
might remember where he said, “Christianity has not been tried and found
wanting, it has been found hard and not tried.” I think we might want to
reconsider whether or not this is also true about some of the insights of
Augustine or Anselm or Thomas Aquinas or the Puritans or the Princetonians.
Perhaps they were not so naive after all. Perhaps we have lacked the
sophistication to grasp them. We might do well to give them another try.

In What Sense is This Idea Necessary (or Edifying)?

In what sense is truth itself necessary or edifying! We might as well ask it that
way, because if what I am calling Reformed Classicalism is the best way that
one has found to express the truth as it is in Christ, well then its necessity is to
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the gospel what roots are to a tree. Someone may say, “No, the kind of thing
that is necessary to the gospel is what the Apostle said it was with the
resurrection.” That is correct. And how does Paul argue the point to the
Corinthians but with a series of “if … then(s),” which presuppose an object of
truth that even a pagan like Aristotle could stumble upon. The point is not
that Aristotelian logic, thereby, stands “underneath” or “over” the biblical truth
of the resurrection. The Philosopher has no claim upon the “if … then” — not
unless he created it. But in fact he only discovered it. His near-blind reason was
reflecting divine revelation in the nature of things: whether he would have put
it that way or not. If there is no “if … then,” then not even Paul’s “if … then” is
so; but if Paul’s “if … then” is not so, then not even “If there is no resurrection,
then not even Christ has been raised” is so. And so goes the rest of the
dominos on the board you already thought about.

Suppose that someone mentally inserted the sentence “Words have no

meaning” before every single sentence of Scripture. And suppose they really
believed it. What would you think if they also believed in all of the most
important truths in those Scriptures? At the very least the individual is
suffering from a massive case of cognitive dissonance. It is difficult to imagine
at this extreme. However a milder case is not difficult to imagine at all. In fact,
what I will argue is that anything short of Reformed Classicalism just is some
form of commitment to this very cognitive dissonance. A Christian who has
bought into dismissals of objective truth may be a genuine Christian, but will
always be speaking out of both sides of their mouth, or at least leaking out of
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both sides of their brain. And the edification potential of this sort of faith has
severe limitations.