Historian and Reformed scholar
“Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, ca. 1520 to ca. 1725.”
If revealed theology is the Queen of all Sciences — that is if revealed theology is the foundation for all other academic disciplines so that all other disciplines can not be successfully pursued without presupposing revealed theology — then it stands to reason that no discipline of man can be successfully pursued solely upon the basis of natural theology, human reason, or the light of nature as a foundation upon which area of knowledge can be built.
If fallen man can and does successfully suppress the truth in unrighteousness than the truth that fallen man needs in order to build a functioning and stable social order is impossible. Now, he may be able to build a unstable social order that is marginally functional — much like we find in Sodom and Gomorrah or at the Tower of Babel — but for a social order to be stable and functional by a Biblical standard that social order must presuppose the God of the Bible and His revealed Word.
Those that deny this simple truth have to deny the noetic effects of the fall as well as the truth of total depravity. It is true that fallen man, as a collective, is not always as wicked as he could be but it is also true that fallen man, as a collective, builds fallen social orders. Where fallen man gets anything correct in those fallen social orders it is only due to the fact that he has borrowed capital from the Christian Weltanschauung that does not belong to him and, as a result, he has stumbled on to felicitous inconsistency as between what he is suppressing and what he has gotten correct in his social order. As Van Til used to put it, where fallen man gets something right it is only to the end of slapping God in the face upon climbing up into God’s lap.
If we have low views of the effects of the fall we will in turn have a non-Christian anthropology and non-Christian anthropologies, by necessity, will eventually yield non-Christian theologies. One can’t think highly of fallen man’s ability to build beautiful non-Christian cultures and think highly of God at the same time. What is the need of special grace if common grace can do so much?
