Green Baggins

Next up is Mathison’s treatment of Exodus 4. He argues that the evidential nature of the miracles God tells Moses to perform undermines presuppositionalism. The problem here is that everything God tells Moses to show the Israelites is still special revelation, which is not limited to Scripture. God did not tell Israel in Exodus 4 “Just look up at the stars and you will know that I am the God I say I am.” Instead, he gives them specific miraculous evidence, much like the miracles Jesus did, in fact. Special revelation is self-attesting. Van Til often simply referred to Scripture in a way that basically said, “Let the Lion roar.” If it is special revelation, then it is part of the presupposition of the Christian that it is true. If we had anything that could prove Scripture to be true, then that thing would be our axiomatic truth, and partake of more solidity than the Bible itself. I am not sure why Mathison thinks Exodus 4 undermines presuppositionalism.

Here I must register a protest against Mathison’s critique of the wholeness of knowledge. God is an indivisible whole, a simple, non-composite being. Therefore his knowledge must partake of the same characteristic. Out of His knowledge, by speaking the Word, the universe came into existence. How, then, can the universe have any discrete facts that are unrelated to anything else? To posit this would ultimately come back to haunt Mathison vis-a-vis the simplicity of God. A discrete fact would require a separate act on God’s part, an act separate from the decree, or a separate decree, would it not? This would, in turn, undermine the simplicity of God’s decree.

In Mathison’s treatment of Acts 17, which is almost four pages, the only writer outside of Van Til that he references is John Calvin. Normally, I shy away from the critiques that run “Well, you should have read this or that,” the reason being that it is impossible to read everything. But in this case, I squawk a bit. For someone who has a commentary recommendation list, and who “determined to read every book, dissertation, article, and chapter on Van Til that I could locate” (12), then I simply ask why Flavien Pardigon’s published dissertation on Acts 17, Paul Against the Idols: A Contextual Reading of the Areopagus Speech (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2019), which is an exegetical study of the finest order, interacting with all modern scholarship, and propounding a Van Tillian exegesis of Acts 17, didn’t make the cut? Or how about any of the modern commentaries on Acts? There is no reference to Keener, Schnabel, Bock, Peterson, or Bruce (the top five Mathison himself recommends). I could also include Marshall, Fitzmyer, Barrett, Johnson, and a fair number of others. Yes, it might have added a week or so to his research. But for someone who criticized Van Til for his scholarship to do exegetical work this patchy, this seems like an obvious tu quoque. Pardigon functions quite well as a refutation of Mathison’s reading of Acts 17.

Mathison also accuses Van Til of reading his methodology into Scripture. But don’t we all, to a certain extent, see in Scripture what we think we will see, based on our grids? Doesn’t Mathison see anti-Van Tillianism in Scripture where it might not, in fact, be warranted? Isn’t that reading into Scripture something that isn’t there? I have suggested that Ecclesiastes very much dovetails with Van Tillianism, and that the passages used to refute Van Tillianism do not do so.

In chapter 3, Mathison reviews VT’s teaching on the effects of the Fall on humanity, as well as God’s grace. In the process, he looks at VT’s views on natural theology, a bit of a hot topic today.

Mathison starts by noting VT’s rejection of the idea of “brute facts,” by which VT meant “uninterpreted facts.” This does not mean that everything is in the eye of the beholder, a form of relativism. It means that facts always have a context, and that the ultimate context for any fact is God’s knowledge.

The fall of humanity into sin brought about a substitution of man in place of God as the ultimate reference point for facts. Doing so, however, creates a huge distortion of reality. Since no human knows all things and all the interconnections, humanity’s knowledge is always incomplete, but if we also deprive ourselves of the ultimate context for any fact, then all facts become “brute facts.”

In VT, therefore, we have two basic possibilities with regard to knowledge. In the Christian version, God has the exhaustive Creator/archetypal knowledge. We don’t have to have that to know something truly. To know something truly (in the context of the VT quotation on page 75) is to know how something relates to the plan of God. By this definition, of course, all forms of unbelief share in erroneous conceptions of truth. What VT also claims is that if a person doesn’t go with the Christian version, then he has to supply all the interconnections himself. This is the essence of the grasp at autonomy that all forms of unbelief make.

Can an unregenerate person make any progress in these sorts of things? As VT points out, the noetic effects of the Fall (which is the impact the Fall has had on the human mind) are hugely deleterious. A natural theology, therefore, built on human autonomy, cannot produce truth in the way truth has just been described (as conforming to the mind of God). This does not preclude nature speaking a la Psalm 19 and Romans 1. Nor does it preclude what we can learn from creation as believers.

The difficulty that Mathison later points out is this: if unregenerated man cannot produce true (in the sense of conformity to the mind of God) natural theology, then how can he know as much as he does? And how do we account for the “seed of religion” that Calvin discusses? How can Paul say that the attributes of God are clearly revealed in what has been made? Don’t we want to say that everyone in the world knows that the true God exists? I would answer that I think VT would say that the sense of “true” just used (conforming to the mind of God) does not preclude other definitions of “true,” even if such truth is distorted when seen in a larger system. Let’s talk about an unregenerate physicist, for example. He can know a rather large body of facts about how the universe works (and have a lot of theories which might approximate quite well the actual state of affairs). To use an example Mathison will use later, he can understand human language. However, these things are as so many atomistic, discreet points on an invisible line. They have no overall cohesion. To have that cohesion, he would have to understand all those things in connection to the mind of God and His plan. That is why the unbeliever can never know anything truly, if one defines “truly” in the way just described. Unregenerate man knows things atomistically and autonomously, which always involves distortion the second one seeks for a higher level of cohesion. But in the sense of knowing that atomistic fact, an unregenerate man can know many such things. He can know that 2+2=4. He can know how to communicate in human language. Or, as VT would say, the unregenerate man has all things in common with regenerate man ontologically, but nothing in common epistemologically. To anticipate a later criticism I will have of Mathison, I think Mathison expands too much VT’s categories of what fallen humanity cannot do or understand.

Mathison does rightly note the effect of common grace on unregenerate man’s knowledge. Unregenerate man is not consistent in applying autonomy to his own knowledge. This inconsistency is largely due to common grace, which means there can be hints of higher levels of accuracy in his knowledge, just as the reverse can happen to Christians because of indwelling sin.

We dive a bit deeper into the question of epistemology in chapter 2 on creation and revelation. In addition to saying many useful things in expounding VT’s system, we also come across some puzzlement. We come across the statements again that VT made about having to know everything to know anything. Mathison asks, “But why would man have to know everything in order to have true knowledge of anything?” Mathison’s answer, as to what VT believes is that “Because, as we observed in the previous chapter, true knowledge of anything requires knowledge of everything” (62). There has to be a supreme knower, who knows all things exhaustively and in all its connections in order for us to a derivative knowledge. If God is not that Knower, then man has to fill the gap himself.

What is the nature of “true” in this connection? Again, as we said last time, there is more than one possibility. The contexts of VT’s quotations in this section of Mathison have to do with ethical righteousness. True knowledge, in these contexts, is defined as corresponding to God’s complete knowledge. The unbeliever cannot achieve this because he does not assume God’s perfect knowledge as the precondition for his own knowledge. He then has to assume his own knowledge, conceived in rebellion against God, as the benchmark for knowing something. This will inevitably distort all his knowledge, even 2+2=4.

As Mathison notes, VT does not claim that we have to know all facts in order to have true knowledge. VT claims that true knowledge (ethically righteous knowledge) has to be founded on God’s knowledge. We have to be receptively “post-interpreting” (my somewhat clumsy made-up word) what God has already pre-interpreted.

Mathison makes a small, but rather important note that a “limiting concept” is something that needs another idea in order to be properly understood.

I thought this was one of the stronger chapters in the book, and I did not find much to quibble with in his description of VT’s ideas. Whether he draws the correct conclusions from VT’s ideas of what true knowledge is is certainly debatable.

The question that arises for me, and that Mathison does not really answer is this: what is Mathison’s position on the unity of knowledge? I get the impression that he has reservations about the idea, but I am not clear as to what those reservations are. Does Mathison think this is some sort of idealistic postulate? He seems to think so in later chapters. But idealists are not the first people to think of a unity of knowledge. Look at the etymological definition of “university” for one thing. Wasn’t the medieval synthesis an attempt to acknowledge the unity of all truth?