Augustine, Luther, Musculus & Apostolic Constitutions; An Appeal To Wet Baby Presbyterians

Claiming that  paedocommunion isn’t found in Reformed history, as some of the well intended Reformed harpie police will shriek isn’t true. The Reformed tradition drew from Augustine, who advocated for paedocommunion as quoted below. In point of fact paedocommunion was non-controversial in his day. The great forerunner of the Reformation, Hus, was a paedocommunion advocate. As quoted below, during the Reformation, Wolfgang Musculus also advocated for paedocommunion and Luther, as we see below, was at least open.

Paedocommunion is not some strange modification of Reformed theology. It is consistent with Reformational baptismal theology and covenant theology.

“Those who say that infancy has nothing in it for Jesus to save, are denying that Christ is Jesus for all believing infants. Those, I repeat, who say that infancy has nothing in it for Jesus to save, are saying nothing else than that for believing infants, infants that is who have been baptized in Christ, Christ the Lord is not Jesus. After all, what is Jesus? Jesus means Savior. Jesus is the Savior. Those whom he doesn’t save, having nothing to save in them, well for them he isn’t Jesus. Well now, if you can tolerate the idea that Christ is not Jesus for some persons who have been baptized, then I’m not sure your faith can be recognized as according with the sound rule. Yes, they’re infants, but they are his members. They’re infants, but they receive his sacraments. They are infants, but they share in his table, in order to have life in themselves.”

St. Augustine, Sermon 174, 7

(1) Those who possess the thing signified also have a right to the sign

(2) Children who can receive the grace of regeneration (as is evident from Baptism) can also be nurtured in their spiritual lives without their knowledge.

(3) Christ is the Savior of the whole church, including the children, and feeds and refreshes all of its members.

(4) The demand for self-examination (I Cor. 11:26-29) is not intended by the apostle as a universal requirement.

Wolfgang Musculus — Loci Communes
Second Generation Reformer

Luther considered communing children to be not necessary but also not sin. He offered here;

“[They] pretend that children, not as yet having reason, ought not to receive [the sacrament]. I answer: That reason in no way contributes to faith. Nay, in that children are destitute of reason, they are all the more fit and proper recipients of [the sacrament]. For reason is the greatest enemy that faith has: it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but – more frequently than not – struggles against the Divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God.”

Martin Luther

Going behind the Reformation we find the Apostolic Constitutions written not by the Apostles circa 380 AD. The Apostolic Constitutions would have been written during the lifetime of St. Augustine. In this early church liturgy document we read that the children are included among the faithful that remain and take communion after the readings. Others who are not initiated (baptized) are excluded and excused from the communion. A door-wathcher keeps non-initiated out.

“As to the children that stand [the infant children do not stand, but are among the initiated who are prepared for communion], let their fathers and mothers take them to themselves …. After this, let all rise up with one consent, and, looking towards the east, after the catechumens and the penitents are gone out, pray to God eastward, …. Then let the sacrifice follow, all the people standing, and praying silently; and, when the oblation hath been made, let every rank by itself partake of the Lord’s body and precious blood, in order, and approach with reverence and holy fear, as to the body of their King. Let the women approach with their heads covered, as is becoming the order of women. Moreover, let the door be watched, lest there come in any unbeliever, or one not yet initiated. P 65

Let no one eat of them that is not initiated; but those only who have been baptized into the death of the Lord [all that are baptized, to include infants and children] p.145

[nowhere are baptized children excluded from any part of the Lord’s Day communion.]

Of course forbidding the covenant children from the sacrament of communion exists upon the same logic of forbidding the covenant children from the sacrament of Baptism. This forbidding amounts to a halfway covenant. Covenant children are seen as having one foot in the covenant and one foot outside the covenant. They are akin to the actual splitting in half of the legendary Solomonic baby and those Presbyterian and Reformed who refuse to commune their children, themselves have one foot in and one foot outside the circle of being logically consistent.

If I were a Baptist today and if I were debating a Presbyterian on the issue of covenant I would be forever banging the Presbyterians over the head regarding their wet but unfed covenant children.

This is just one reason why we insist that putative Presbyterians today are “wet baby Baptists.”

 

Of Thomism, Presuppositionalism, & The Current Epistemological Regnant Follies

 Because there is no such thing as neutrality what has come to be called “presuppositionalism” is an inescapable category. The Lord Christ himself gave us the “no neutrality” teaching when He said, “He who is not with Me is against Me, and he who does not gather with Me scatters abroad.” Personally, I doubt that there is any place that this truth is exhibited more than in apologetics. Because there is “no neutrality” one either gathers with Jesus in their apologetics by presupposing the God of the Bible and His Word or they presuppose man and his autonomous word and so scatter.

“Presuppositionalism” was a word first coined by the enemies of Biblical covenantal apologetics (BCA) and currently those enemies are in fine fiddle. Part of the reason for that, I believe, is the fault of many of those counted among the 2nd generation of Presuppositionalists. Many of these chaps have given Presuppositionalism a black eye because of their support of what is now being called “The Post-War Consensus.” The generation coming behind the first generation of BCA (guys like Andrew Sandlin, Joe Boot, James White, Doug Wilson, etc.) are giving BCA a bad name and making it much harder for those of us who are presuppositionalists to win over some of the younger chaps.

These chaps (45 and younger)  are looking at BCA and seeing how its practitioners so often align with the now hated post war consensus (actually post-Enlightenment consensus but let’s not quibble now) and are saying to themselves, “there is no way in Hades that I am going to embrace BCA if that means I have to embrace the Post-War consensus.” As such many of these chaps have taken up a different version of Presuppositionalism called Thomism (or Natural Law theory) where man presupposes Himself as His own epistemological authority and then backfills with Natural Law and the Bible to prove their “Christian” conclusions that were autonomously arrived at and embraced.

I can’t say that I blame folks for rejecting BCA. If I thought that embracing Presuppositionalism meant that I also had to embrace the Post-War consensus with its full throated rejection of Kinism, with its refusal to understand the millennium long contest between Christianity and Jews, with its embrace of the Civil Rights movement, with its insistence that the   that the World Wars of the 20th century found the West as the chaps in White hats I also would likely reject BCA and embrace a alternate epistemology (Thomism) if only because of the self-survival instinct.

I find myself in a odd position. You see, because I don’t agree with my generation on the Post-War consensus I find myself on the outside of their clubs. Because I don’t agree with the atrocious Thomism of many of the younger chaps I find myself on the outside of their clubbing.  I am a flag with no country it seems — Anti-post-War consensus/ pro presuppositionalism.

Still, Thomism and it’s Natural Law philosophy has serious problems and is completely unbiblical. I hope to demonstrate some of those problems and the non-Biblical nature of Thomism. However, before doing so let me say again that Thomism does not escape being labeled as a presuppositional approach. As I suggested at the outset above the question is never “if presuppositionalism” but only “which presuppositionalism.” Will we have a presuppositionalism that presupposes God and His authoritative Word or will have a presuppositionalism that presupposes man and his autonomous word?

On this point much hinges on the truth of the sensus divinitatis. This Calvin affirmed against Aquinas.

“There is within the human mind, and indeed by natural instinct, an awareness of divinity (divinitatis sensum). This we take to be beyond controversy. To prevent anyone from taking refuge in the presence of ignorance, God Himself has implanted in all men a certain understanding of His divine majesty. Ever renewing its memory, he repeatedly shed fresh drops.”  (Institutes)

The sensus divinitatis teaches that all mankind knows God because man, being made in God’s image, cannot escape knowing God. This is true just as a fingerprint, if animated, could not deny knowing the existence of a finger. The fact that man knows God at a ontological level but suppresses that knowledge via the use of his fallen epistemology is taught in Romans 1:18f.

8 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who [d]suppress the truth in unrighteousness, 19 because what may be known of God is [e]manifest [f]in them, for God has shown it to them.20For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and [g]Godhead, so that they are without excuse, 21because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened.

The truth that man, in his ontological reality can’t escape knowing God when combined with the truth that man uses his epistemological tools/abilities to deny and suppress what he can’t escape knowing intuitively means that all fallen men are, at the core of their being, walking contradictions who spend their lives reinforcing and nursing their contradictions so as to not be dragged into the sunlight of God’s reality.

The sensus divinitatis simply defined embraced three over-lapping truths;

1.) All people know God truly and will be judged, at last, on the basis of that knowledge (Rmns. 1:18-20).

2.) Knowing the true God genuinely includes the fact that all people without exception know God’s righteous judgment (1:32)

3.) Because of the radical effects of sin all people, apart from Christ, suppress the knowledge of God and His requirements (1:21-32).

Aquinas rejected this sensus divinitatis arguing instead that while God is known in a generic sense to man He is not known in a specific sense and in order to be known in a specific sense the proposition ‘God exists’ “needs to be demonstrated by things that are more known to us, though less known in their nature — namely, by effects.”

Quoting Aquinas even more fully on the matter;

“Therefore, I say that this proposition, ‘God exists,’ of itself is self evident, for the predicate is the same as the subject;  because God is His own existence as will be hereafter shown (Q. III., A. 4). Now because we do not know the essence of God, the proposition is not self evident to us“but needs to be demonstrated by things that are more known to us, though less known in their nature — namely, by effects.”

Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I q.2 a.1 resp.

And Again,

“On the contrary, no one can mentally admit the opposite of what is self-evident; as the Philosopher … states concerning the first principles of demonstration. But the opposite of the proposition “God is” can be mentally admitted: The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God (Ps. Lii. 1). Therefore that God exists is not self-evident.”

Summa Theologica, Volume 1, Question 2, Article 1

The demonstrations that Aquinas speaks of above are necessary because Aquinas denies the sensus divinitatis taught in Romans 1:18-32. Per Aquinas, there is no divinely implanted knowledge of the specific God of the Bible in fallen man and so fallen man isn’t suppressing the truth in unrighteousness because that specific God and His specific invisible attributes are not clearly seen and so there is the need for a demonstration, via appeal to Natural law with its arguments for God’s existence (Efficient Cause, Gradation, Necessary being, Design, Motion) in order for fallen man with his not so fallen mind to conclude that God is.

That this conclusion is not unique to me is seen by quoting Gordon Haddon Clark;

Thomas faced two other contrasting views.  One is that the existence of God is self-evident and neither needs nor is susceptible of proof from prior first principles.  Those who hold this view argue that God has implanted in all men an elemental knowledge of himself.  The idea of God is innate.  On this showing any argument or so-called proof could be nothing more than a clarification of already present ideas; and such in effect was the nature of Augustine’s, Anselm’s and Bonaventura’s attempts.  Now, in one sense Thomas is willing to admit that God’s existence is self-evident: it is self-evident in itself, it is self-evident to God; but it is not self-evident to us.  God has not implanted ideas in the human mind, and all knowledge must be based on sensory experience.”   

Gordon H. Clark
Thales to Dewey, 272-273.

All of this reveals Aquinas’ weak view of sin and its devastating effects on man while at the same time revealing high views of man’s noetic abilities post-fall. Something that is anathema to the principles of the Reformed, even if many of the Reformed were not as consistent on this point as we might have hoped.

We must interject here that even though we are quoting from a long dead theologian (1225 – 1274) Aquinas lives through his disciples…. disciples today and disciples throughout Reformed Church history. There can be little doubt that the views of Aquinas were embraced by much of the Reformed Church through the centuries. That should not surprise us since nobody has ever claimed that there isn’t yet more light to shine forth from Scripture. The weakness of the position of Aquinas took some centuries to reveal but with the advent of the 19th and 20th century Aquinas came to be incrementally challenged. Men like Bavinck, Kuyper, Dooyeweerd, Vollenhoven, Zuidema, Van Til, Gordon H. Clark, Schaeffer, Bahnsen, were raised up by God to bring a consistency to the Reformation that heretofore had been missing when it came to the subject of epistemology. That is not to say that all these men were in agreement, nor that they were all as consistent as they might have been but it is to say that they were all reaching for a consistency with Scripture that Thomism or Scottish Common Sense Realism were missing.

Interesting in all this, Biblical Covenantal Apologists may well use the arguments for God’s existence that have been relied upon by the Thomists. However, the presuppositionalists argue that those arguments only work if one first presupposes the God of the Bible and that they will fail every time if used without presupposing God. This is due to the fact that for presuppositionalists God is the precondition of all intelligibility and if God is not presupposed then the only precondition for intelligibility that is left is the mind of fallen man and the presuppositionalists argue that any god that is reasoned to as starting with the epistemological authority of man as the basis, by definition cannot be the God of the Bible, since any god arrived at sitting upon the foundation of fallen man’s naked epistemological ability is naught but “man said loudly.” We see then that while both BCA and Thomists might use Natural Law arguments to argue for God’s existence Thomists use these argument with man as the precondition for all intelligibility while presuppositionalists make these argument with God as the precondition for all intelligibility. They are therefore the same arguments in form but not in substance. Likewise they are both presuppositional arguments with the difference only being which God is being presupposed — the God of the Bible or fallen man as God.

Now, what are the implications of this so far.

1.) Thomism denies the noetic effects of the fall

For Thomism the mind of man retains the ability to reason its way to God in light of Natural Law type arguments that presuppose the ultimacy of man’s fallen mind.

2.) Thomism denies the Reformed doctrine of total depravity

Here, what Thomists do in order to justify themselves, is that they try to insist that the BCA is advancing a doctrine of utter depravity vs. total depravity. This is smoke to hide their denial that fallen man knows the specific God of the Bible. The very fact that those who hold to total depravity embrace the sensus divinitatis vis-a-vis the Thomist “theology” substantiates the BCA abhorrence of the miscreant doctrine of utter depravity. It is precisely because man is not utterly depraved that explains why he is responsible for his rebellion against and suppression of what he ontologically intuitively knows but epistemologically rationally suppresses.

3.) Thomism is a return to Aristotle’s prioritizing of sensory or empirical evidence over the earlier Augustinian emphasis on innate ideas.

Thomism cannot exist apart from a robust empiricism. The Thomist theory of knowledge depends upon a-posteriori categories and reasoning and as such fits well into Enlightenment era thinking that dominated the West from the late 17th century through the early 19th century. Now there is a push to resurrect this Enlightenment era thinking.

For example, in 1984 influential Reformed men R. C. Sproul Sr., John Gerstner, and Arthur Lindsley could write;

“We suggest that classic Reformed orthodoxy saw the noetic influence of sin not as direct through a totally depraved mind, but as indirect through a totally depraved heart.”

Classical Apologetics: A Rational Defense of the Christian Faith and a Critique of Presuppositional Apologetics — p. 243

The problems with this are stunning as coming from putatively Reformed men. First of all there is a problem of suggesting that in Scripture the heart and mind refer to different organizational points in a man. More often than not in Scripture heart and mind are synonyms (i.e. — “As a man thinketh in his heart so he is.”) Second of all we find a outright denial here that fallen man’s mind is totally depraved, instead preferring to find the real noetic villain being a indirectly arrived at totally depraved heart (whatever that could possibly mean).

The influence of Aquinas on Sproul, Lindsley and Gerstner (hereafter SLuG) is manifest. Elsewhere in the same book they write;

“In Romans 1:20, Paul is affirming that humans can in fact move from the phenomenal realm to the noumenal realm…. the method of knowing is mediate, or inferential, indicating the rational power to deduce the necessary existence of the invisible from the perception of the visible.”

However, that is decidedly not what St. Paul is affirming in Romans 1:20. In point of fact SLuG here has put Roman 1:2o on its head to make it say the exact opposite of what it does say. The point of Romans 1 is not to teach fallen man what he can accomplish in moving from the phenomenal realm to the noumenal realm via a mediate/inferential knowing. The point of Romans 1 is that what we can’t help knowing because we are God’s fingerprint we deny/suppress knowing because we are fallen and hate God with all our minds. The sensus divinitatis is present but we tear ourselves apart in order to deny it.

(Inserting a slight rabbit trail here — this explains the whole sodomy/trannie movement as our sexuality is closely bound up with man as God’s Image. The work of the pervert class of people in denying/suppressing their sexuality are living out the inherent contradiction between what they ontologically know to be true [maleness or femaleness] but epistemologically will not consent to be true.)

SLuG offers what they think is their coup de grâce to Van Til and presuppositionalism by writing;

“But people do not necessarily consider themselves in opposition to God, whose existence they do not even know at the outset. They do not necessarily deny the divine being as Van Til insists they do. People do not assert their autonomy against an initially known God as Van Til insist that they do. They simply operate according to human nature.”

This is pure Thomism and in this denial of the Reformed doctrine of total depravity these men and those more recent polemicists against presuppositionalism (Fesko, Mathison, Mueller, Stephen Wolfe, etc.) what we find (politely speaking) is an abandoning of the whole structure of the Reformed faith in favor of a Arminian / Roman Catholic anthropology and theology. We hasten to add that we do not doubt for a second that there is in these men and those who have embraced this “theology” a felicitous inconsistency that finds them as being “Reformed” and “Biblical” at other points in the Reformed theological constellation but at this point the serious student and practitioner of Reformed theology scratches their head and asks, “How can you chaps say you’re Reformed while building, at the very beginning, a foundation that is so anti-Reformed — a foundation that contradicts everything you will now proceed to build upon it?”

We are currently is a time of great instability in Christ’s Church in the West. Many are those who see the problems but seeing the problems and offering a way out are not the same. Right now, Stephen Wolfe (a man who has gone out of his way to emphasize that he is not a theologian) is decidedly Thomist in all of his reasoning and though Wolfe can arrive at conclusions I agree with his methodology for arriving at those conclusions insure that whatever is built on that methodology will suffer from the non-Biblical methodology that it is built upon. After all, it is not as if Natural Law and Thomism hasn’t been tried. In point of fact it has been weighed in the balance of history and found wanting. It collapsed because the inconsistencies of it was seen. Do we really believe that a Protestant Christendom will be built with the Thomistic building material of Roman Catholicism?

On the other hand presuppositionalists (Sandlin, Boot, White, Wilson, etc.) need to realize that many of the post-war consensus conclusions that they are supporting with their alleged Christian presuppositionalism and Christian Worldview suck big time. If the Thomists are suckling off the teat of Natural Law theory the current crop of presuppositionalists are suckling off the teat of classical liberalism (Libertarianism) as massaged and manipulated by Cultural Marxism. The foundational presuppositions of both of these schools leave me feeling nauseated.

If I live to be 90 I have 25 years left. Maybe we will get out of this morass before then.

Dr. Adi Schlebusch & McAtee Correcting Jon Harris On Natural Law

Harris wrote,

Stop conflating sinful activities with natural law please. It just muddies the waters.

Bret wrote;

Natural law can teach any number of sinful things depending upon the one doing the natural law.

Harris responds;

Wouldn’t that same critique apply to interpreting special revelation?

Dr. Schlebusch responds to Harris;

No because 1. We confess that the Spirit guides us in interpreting Scripture while NL proponents claim it is “self-evident” 2. Scripture contains written propositions in an infallible text. NL does not.

McAtee chimes in;

In addition … special revelation is perspicuous to the Spirit illumined while Natural Law clearly is not perspicuous to fallen man given that he suppresses the truth in unrighteousness. However, Jon, you get bonus points for coming up with the old as Methuselah common “what about.”

Harris responds,

1. The root issue for this question is whether God communicates in ways that lead to sin, not the mechanism He uses. Sinful man will violate reason and ignore the Spirit to arrive at interpretations that suit them.

2. The nature of Scripture communicates theological truths natural law cannot and must be propositional, but that’s not the issue here either. Neither communicates sin (especially if we believe the propositions Scripture gives us about what the natural order conveys)- that’s a problem with receiving and interpreting.

Bret responds,

a.) Right … which explains why Thomistic Nat’l law theory is bogus. Sinful man ontologically knows but epistemologically insists that he doesn’t know what he can’t help but know. Fallen man suppresses the truth in unrighteousness.

b.) This is dualism. Nat’l law declares handiwork of God per Scripture (Psalm 19, Romans 1:19-20). Hence, Natural Law teaches theological truth. See confessions here.

Canons of Dordt — 3rd & 4th Head / Article 4

There remain, however, in man since the fall, the glimmerings of natural light, whereby he retains some knowledge of God, of natural things, and of the differences between good and evil, and discovers some regard for virtue, good order in society, and for maintaining an orderly external deportment. But so far is this light of nature from being sufficient to bring him to a saving knowledge of God and to true conversion, that he is incapable of using it aright even in things natural and civil. Nay, further, this light, such as it is, man in various ways renders wholly polluted and holds it in unrighteousness, by doing which he becomes inexcusable before God.

c.) I agree with your last sentence in your #2 above,  but fallen man does not agree with you. Hence we have a major problem with Thomistic Nat’l law theory. Thomistic Natural Law theory denies Total Depravity by denying the noetic effects of the fall.

 

Stephen Wolfe’s Dualism Baldly Stated

“More than any other discipline, theology is prone to becoming a political ideology. Theology’s source is supernatural; it’s propositions are above nature. And so people use it to conceal or to generate “tension” with obvious natural truths known by reason and experience.

Mixed with doctrines of utter depravity, theology is a constant source of trouble for basic truths informed by experience. Everything you think you know from observation, or from deep instinct, is actually “fallen” and needs to be replaced by seemingly absurd supernatural ethics.”

Stephen Wolfe
X posting

Bret responds,

When I read this I couldn’t belief Wolfe was serious since this was such a blatant appeal to the scholastic dualism wherein grace and nature stand opposed to one another. Note here that for Wolfe there are two sources of truth. One source is theology which is supernatural. The other source is natural which comes by “reason and experience.” These two sources of truth conflict with one another because supernatural truths are to be confined to an area that deal with matters that are “above nature,” while natural truths are, presumably, to stay out of “the above nature domain.” To be faithful in interpreting reality one has to keep in mind these two different truth sources and apply accordingly.

Now, as to this area of Wolfe’s “natural truths,” we find an epistemological appeal to autonomous man’s

1.) reason
2.) experience
3.) observation
4.) deep instinct

However, Wolfe’s problem here (a problem shared by all Thomistic Natural Law “thinkers”) is first the presupposition that reason isn’t itself fallen, and so is an untrustworthy guide for interpreting reality. The second problem that Wolfe has here is that experience, observation, and deep instinct all themselves are held to be likewise not affected by the fall. The four factors listed above do not suffer the consequences of original sin but are, in Wolfe’s classic scholasticism, all trustworthy guides to interpreting reality.  Reason, experience, observation, and deep instinct being definitional of who we are as humans all share in our fall and so are not sources of knowledge that can be cordoned off from theology as the source of truth.

Another thing that Wolfe does here is he tries to suggest that those non-dualist Reformed folks disagreeing with him are guilty of embracing “utter depravity.” Wolfe is trying to turn the pedestrian Reformed doctrine of Total depravity into the obscene doctrine of Utter depravity. It is most certainly not utter depravity to teach that all of man is fallen including his reason, experience, observation, and deep instinct.

Scripture supports this doctrine of total depravity which teaches that man’s experience, reason, observation, and deep instinct are fallen.

Romans 8:7 teaches

“The carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be.”

And Ephesians 4:17f teaches,

17 This I say, therefore, and testify in the Lord, that you should no longer walk as [f]the rest of the Gentiles walk, in the futility of their mind, 18 having their understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart; 19 who, being past feeling, have given themselves over to lewdness, to work all uncleanness with greediness.

I must say that it is past odd that Wolfe, who repeatedly noted in his recent book that he was no theologian and so had no intent to take up theology, has apparently as of late become a theologian and so can post on theological matters like total depravity.

However, the fact is that Wolfe is a theologian — just as all men are — and only sought to sidestep thorny issues in his book by seeking to push theology off the table as he took up the subject of Christian Nationalism.

In closing, I can’t help but note how close Wolfe is to blasphemy when he above writes above about appealing to “absurd supernatural ethics.”

Wolfe is a practitioner of dualism and so is to be warned against. It is true that the man comes to some conclusions that we wholeheartedly salute but his methodology finds him to be nought but a blind old sow who finds a felicitious acorn once in a while.

McAtee, Christopher Hitchens And Henry Van Til On The Relationship Between Religion And Culture

“The radical, totalitarian character of religion is such, then, that it determines both man’s cultus and his culture. That is to say, the conscious or unconscious relationship to God in a man’s heart determines all of his activities, whether theoretical or practical. This is true of philosophy, which is based upon non-theoretical, religious presuppositions. Thus man’s morality and economics, his jurisprudence and his aesthetics, are all religiously oriented and determined.”

Henry Van Til
Calvinist Concept of Culture

This quote teases out the meaning of the truth that “Theology is the Queen of the Sciences,” as theology is that discipline which makes religion to be religion. Everything is religion/Theology expressed in alternative ways. It is not only the case that “as a man thinketh in his heart so he is,” it is also a case that as cultures think in their heart so they are. This is why we say that culture is properly defined as religion made manifest, or alternatively, “culture is the outward expression of a people’s inward belief.” When I look at any culture I am looking at its theology. When I look at or converse with any person I am engaging their theology incarnated. Show me a culture and I will tell you which God god they are serving. We should seek to think of cultures as facades or masks from which the explicit theological authority principal hides behind to operate.

That’s why there is no talking about culture without theological analysis.
It also explains why the the Thomists are errant and why the followers of Dooweyweeerd are likewise errant as they both refuse to see that all flows out of singular theology / worldview. They each compartmentalize reality into different academic categories and have no unity born of a singular Biblical theology.

This quote also explains the vapidness in arguing that religion is a poison we should all give up.

“Religion is poison because it asks us to give up our most precious faculty, which is that of reason, and to believe things without evidence. It then asks us to respect this, which it calls faith.”

~ Christopher Hitchens

It is nothing but the humanistic religion of the now deceased Hitchens which animated him to write that “religion is poison.” Hitchens’ owned a religion of materialism and yet insisted on believing in “reason.” Is reason materialistic? Can I see or taste “reason?” The quote above merely tells me that Hitchens is denouncing religion so as to hide his deeply religious take on “religion.” Hitchens did not escape Henry Van Til’s observation on religion.

Because all this is true a man must be a theologian in order to understand culture. If a man is not a theologian he does not have the categories by which to properly analyze culture. To be sure he may get some things right as he borrows theological capital from a Christian worldview but taken as a whole his analysis will be sorely wanting at critical points.

All of this, in turn, explains why the insistence, as coming from many quarters such as R2K and Stephen Wolfe’s Natural Law project, that clergy should just shut up about anything but soteriology and private ethics since when they speak on other matters they are “getting out of their lane.” The problem is not that clergy speak on issues putatively not in their lane. The problem is that clergy speak on issues which are putatively not in their lane from a non Christian theological/worldview understanding. The problem is not their speaking on subjects… the problem is that they are not particularly Christian when speaking on said subject. The cure isn’t to get clergy to shut up. The cure is to train clergy to think worldviewishly as Biblical Christians.