EVANGELICALS, FUNDAMENTALISTS, AND RATIONALISTS
From N. F. Gier, God, Reason, and the Evangelicals (University Press of America, 1987), chapter one.
Copyright held by author
If one uses the word "evangelical" in the broadest possible sense--i.e., proclaiming an important message--then I believe that most of us have been evangelical rationalists at some time in our life. In my early debates with the fundamentalists, I found myself playing this role. My "gospel" was that the fundamentalists were completely wrong in their interpretation of Christianity. I was just as dogmatic about this opinion as my opponents were about theirs. I thought I could prove the untruth of their claims with the same confidence that they thought they could demonstrate the truth of the Bible. I found myself in an ideological trap: my language was militant and polemical and the intellectual and psychological burdens of my crusade were enormous.
The use of the term "evangelical" in this book is of course not this broad, but surely we have to reject the narrow definitions that are evident everywhere in the literature. For example, in his book The Battle for the Bible, Harold Lindsell declares that those Christians who give up biblical inerrancy have relinquished the right to call themselves evangelicals. Ronald H. Nash proposes a more acceptable definition: "An evangelical refers to a Protestant Christian who accepts the traditional (orthodox) beliefs of the Christian faith, who believes that human beings need to be brought into a personal saving relationship with God through Jesus Christ, and who accepts the Bible as the ultimate authority on Christian belief and practice."1
Although he is not an evangelical rationalist, Donald G. Bloesch could affirm this formulation, especially since it does not mention biblical inerrancy. He would, however, probably offer one proviso. In his book The Future of Evangelical Christianity, Bloesch emphasizes the catholic nature of Christian faith and recognizes that there are many Catholics who would meet Nash's criteria. There is also another issue, which Bloesch would raise with Nash. Although it is not part of his definition above, evangelical rationalists like Nash vigorously defend propositional revelation, while many evangelicals like Bloesch and Cornelius Van Til reject this theory. As we have seen, process theology has an innovative propositional revelation and Richard Swinburne, the philosopher of religion on whom I rely heavily in Chapter Two, supports a more traditional notion. Although I have not chosen to give a detailed analysis of the claim, I do not believe propositional revelation necessarily leads to evangelical rationalism.
An earlier title for this book was "The New Gnosticism: The Case Against Fundamentalist Christianity." The meaning of the first part of this title will be made clear shortly, and I have decided not to use the word "fundamentalism" for a number of reasons. First and foremost, I found that the evangelical theologians on whom I have now decided to concentrate definitely do not like the term. (Ironically, the only theologian in this group who uses the term is J. I. Packer, who stands against rationalism on essential points.) For more sophisticated evangelicals the word "fundamentalism" causes undue confusion and embarrassment, especially when they are identified with popular apologists like Josh McDowell or Francis Schaeffer, or when they are associated with Jerry Falwell and the Religious Right. For evangelicals like Nash, fundamentalism represents an older, narrower form of evangelical Christianity, which in its radical separatism has virtually ignored the challenges of the modern world. In 1963 Nash published The New Evangelicalism in which he proposed that evangelicals should preserve the fundamentalist commitment to biblical authority and values, but strengthen their apologetic by taking philosophy, theology, and modern Bible scholarship seriously,2 and finally restore the historical church's activism with regard to social and political issues.
Fundamentalism got its original name from conservative Christians who, at the turn of the 19th Century, responded to the threat of modernism by reaffirming the "fundamentals" of the Christian faith. In the 1895 Niagara proclamation these basic axioms were an inerrant Bible, the deity of Christ, the virgin birth, and Christ's substitutionary atonement, physical resurrection, and Second Coming. Ernest Sandeen has now shown that there has been a basic confusion about the origins of fundamentalism. The twelve volume The Fundamentals, published by evangelicals in Los Angeles between 1910 and 1915, were unwittingly merged in historical consciousness with the Niagara declaration, even though the former was much less exclusivistic than the latter.3 In any case, defining evangelicalism in this historical sense is unsatisfactory, because many Christians, including many Catholics, would accept these basic beliefs. Nevertheless, the word still carries the meaning which I now want "evangelical rationalism" to bear.
An intellectual apologetic has of course always been found in the Christian tradition. Some of the early church fathers used Greek philosophy in this way, and we shall see a close connection between these first Hellenistic attempts and some evangelical rationalists. Medieval dialectical theology also contained strong rationalist elements. Indeed, Ramon Lull (c. 1232-1316) was a Christian rationalist far more radical than any found in contemporary evangelical theology. Ignoring the careful Thomistic distinction between natural and revealed theology and using intricate circles and geometric designs, Lull attempted to demonstrate the truth of all articles of faith by necessary reason.4 Lull represents the extreme of dialectical theology, and even though thinkers like Anselm held that the necessity of incarnation and atonement could be proved without recourse to revelation, the major theologians avoided rationalism and kept within the Augustinian credo ut intelligam.
In Protestantism this method was threatened by theologians like Johann Gerhard and Francis Turretin; and 19th Century thinkers like Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield carried this evangelical rationalism with full force into the 20th Century. A rationalist tendency has not been absent from modern Catholicism either. In the late 19th Century there was a vigorous reemphasis on biblical infallibility as well as the more often remembered declarations of papal infallibility. Early in this century the Catholic Church denounced all forms of fideism, and theologians like S. Harent argued that the contents of the creed must be accepted as rational propositions.5 Contemporary Catholic theology under the leadership of some unusually brilliant thinkers, has reaffirmed the traditional idea of faith as fiducia rather than scientia.
Before proceeding any further, I must define what I mean by "rationalism." Many evangelical laypeople would probably be puzzled by the conjunction of the terms "evangelical" and "rationalism." Indeed, some of them might reject it outright as an oxymoron. Since the Enlightenment it has been common, and usually correct, for skeptics of the Christian faith to be called "rationalists." More and more frequently, however, evangelical apologetics in this century has attempted to reclaim the use of reason. In his amazingly popular book Escape from Reason, Francis Schaeffer proposes that Christians should no longer look upon reason as the opponent; rather, the real enemies of Christianity are those, mostly within the church itself, who claim that faith is a blind leap in the dark. Even before Schaeffer became popular, C. S. Lewis was urging Christians to dissolve their unnecessary fears about intellectual respectability. Representing a form of evangelical rationalism called "externalism," Lewis sums up his Christian rationalism in these famous words: "I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it."6
In the evangelical literature the word "rationalism" is used equivocally. Many times it is used as a term of derision to describe anti-Christian detractors. When it is used positively, these thinkers cannot decide which type of rationalism is the right one. The strictest definition of rationalism describes what might be broadly called the Platonic tradition of innate ideas in which the primary method is deduction. As we shall see, this type of rationalism describes a tight group of evangelicals (Clark, Carnell, Henry, Nash, Demarest) who follow a neo-Platonic Augustinian philosophy. At the same time, the empirical tradition of Aristotle, Aquinas, and the British empiricists is also called "rationalist." Bruce Demarest contends that Aquinas is too rationalistic in his claims that God's existence can be demonstrated by unaided reason, and Carl Henry also defines rationalism in terms of induction.7 Both Demarest and Henry reject this form of rationalism for its hubris--viz., trying to prove too much (about God or against God) without the help of special revelation.
For the purposes of this book I define evangelical rationalism as a methodological attitude, using either inductive or deductive methods, which assumes that certain religious claims, which are either full Christian mysteries or simply unprovable hypotheses (e. g., biblical inerrancy), can be demonstrated as true or at least coherent. For example, I maintain that Aquinas is not a Christian rationalist because he preserves the distinction between natural and revealed theology. I believe that Aquinas is generally correct (except for the immortality of the soul and some divine attributes) in his claims about what we can know religiously within reason's limits. At the same time Aquinas respects basic Christian mysteries--Trinity and Incarnation--an attitude which I find lacking in contemporary evangelical rationalism.
Demarest criticizes Anselm for drawing too much out of the innate idea of God, but I believe all the evangelical rationalists are guilty of this. Furthermore, in my definition of rationalism, it makes no difference whether the bounds of what is provable are broken by a reason which is unaided or "spirit" aided. As far as I am concerned, the claims of special revelation are just as human as the claims of general revelation, and these claims must be tested by the same human methods. To argue otherwise would simply be indulging in question begging of the highest order.
This means that there is a hidden humanism in evangelical rationalism. When Lewis claims that Christian apologetics is an attempt to see how far we can go "on our own steam,"8 and when other evangelicals tell with great confidence what God has said and what he intends, we are observing a Promethean self-assertion as great as anything in the history of secular humanism. This is found not just among the popularizers whom we can excuse, but among their best theologians. Apparently undermining his own "presuppositionalism," Henry boldly claims that "the revealed facts of the Christian system of truth can indeed be coherently correlated with all other information, including empirical data involving chronology, geography, history, and psychological experience as well."9 As we shall see, Henry does not succeed in distinguishing his position from externalism by calling his theology "revelational theism." Henry's position stands in stark contrast with other evangelicals like Jack Rogers, who stand squarely with the Christian tradition: "Too many Christian apologists seem to reverse the roles of the Holy Spirit and our reason. Some conservative evangelicals seem to feel that the authority of the Word and the facts about Christ must be proved before the Spirit can work."10
I will comment on one last element of Christian rationalism, and I use the broader phraseology because I believe nonevangelical Christians are involved here as well. In his book Towards a Christian Political Ethics Jose M. Bonino makes us aware of some significant dimensions of Third World Christianity. One of them is the fact that it preserves the full-blown supranaturalism of premodernism, whereas modern Western Christianity has a limited supranaturalism. Premodern peoples believed in a whole pantheon of good and evil spirits (they attributed disease via human sin to the latter), but American and European Christians (especially Protestants) have reduced the supranatural to God and Satan (and for many, just God). This phenomenon can be fully attributed to the rationalizing of religious faith under the profound influence of the scientific world-view. As Bonino states: "Clearly we find ourselves here--within the religious sphere--in a Cartesian world."11
For modern evangelicalism this results in an interesting irony: fundamentalism arose as a response to modernism, but evangelical rationalists are thoroughly modernist in their attempts to impose a scientific world-view on the Bible. When I lecture on the Bible's three-storied universe and its view that sin causes disease, evangelicals are both offended and incredulous. They gladly join their secular contemporaries in rejecting claims of Big Foot, flying saucers, and the esoteric realm. (Another irony is that the existence of Sasquatch and extraterrestrials is at least physically possible, whereas in Chapter Three I will show that the Incarnation is logically impossible.) Some evangelicals have not been unaware of this paradox: "We may act like Christians; worship like Christians, and to a great extent even believe like Christians; but to an astonishing degree we think with the categories, values, and tools of a completely secularized mind."12 I am reminded of a marvelous passage from Kierkegaard in which he satirizes modern Christians who do "not believe as shoemakers and tailors and simple folk believe, but only after long deliberation."13
RELIGIOUS GNOSTICISM
Some evangelical rationalists have so thoroughly confused the function of reason and faith that they exhibit some of the characteristics of ancient Christian Gnosticism. Gnosticism, an ancient Christian sect that was declared heretical, claimed divine authority on the basis of esoteric means of direct communication with God. Evangelical rationalists are not especially esoteric, and most of their knowledge claims are allegedly factual, not intuitive or spiritual. Nevertheless, they do claim an infallible knowledge (Gk. gnosis) as the basis for their religion. I am not the first to recognize a general, nonesoteric gnosticism in the Christian tradition. In their thorough historical critique of the doctrine of inerrancy, Jack Rogers and Ronald McKim define the gnosis of evangelical rationalism as "clear demonstration starting from the testimony of Scripture."14 In the same way that the early Christian Gnosticism was strongly Hellenistic in its inspiration, so too do we find evangelical gnostics overemphasizing the cognitive aspects of religious knowledge and human nature.
An integral part of ancient Gnosticism was a radical dualism between spirit and flesh. It is my impression that this Gnostic idea manifests itself most forcefully in old-line fundamentalists, who call for the separation of church and world, rather than in Nash's "neoevangelicals." Insofar as some evangelicals do indeed claim that the secular world belongs to Satan, these Christians are like the Manicheans, the Persian followers of Gnosticism. Harold Lindsell, editor emeritus of Christianity Today, explicitly supports this view in his book The World, the Flesh, and the Devil. Lindsell contends that all of us are "sons of the devil," and that Satan is an "evil principle, which subverts every will and performs counterfeit miracles."15
When I speak to high school classes about religion, I am both surprised and disappointed to get so many questions about Satan. The basic belief behind this obsession with the Devil is the Manichean view that it is Satan who rules the world. Orthodox Christianity never granted this much power to Satan and never accepted the view of a separate, virtually equal, evil principle. But many evangelical rationalists believe in, as James Barr says, the "universal, almost metaphysical character of sin."16 This is evinced most strongly in an ontological interpretation of Paul's idea that there was no death of any kind before the Fall. For some evangelical rationalists Adam's sin was not just personal, nor just collective for humanity, but it also changed the very nature of reality.17 The result is an imputation of evil to the world as strong as any Manichee's or Gnostic's.
In his book The Religious Right and Christian Faith, Gabriel Fackre proposes that a Gnostic dualism infects most of fundamentalist Christianity. The Religious Right does in fact portray contemporary events in terms of the forces of light (the moral majority) and the forces of darkness (immoral minority). Fackre mistakenly implicates Zoroastrianism in the Gnostic and Manichean movements. Zoroaster, like the priestly writers of the Hebrew Bible, never located the evil principle in the world or the flesh as the Persian prophet Mani did. Fackre shows that some evangelicals have forgotten basic biblical principles: the goodness of all creation and the fallenness of all human beings. In my experience with fundamentalists I have always been puzzled by their claims that since they are "new beings in Christ" they are immune from sin. This again compares favorably with the esoterism and separatism of ancient Gnosticism. As Fackre states: "The trauma of the new birth is sometimes mistaken for the adulthood of faith. The 'delivery experience' becomes so absorbing that the need for growth is lost from view. Soteriology is confused with eschatology: what is only a beginning is mistaken for arrival at the end point; justification and a struggling sanctification is mistaken for glorification."18
Both Carl Henry and Ronald Nash, two leading evangelical theologians with whom I have communicated, bristle with indignation at my suggestion that their approach to Christianity has anything to do with Gnosticism. Their reaction is well taken, for my earlier formulations were not very well qualified. As neoevangelicals Henry and Nash are virtually free of the Gnostic and Manichean elements which Fackre and I have located in the old-line fundamentalists. This is why I have chosen to refer to the evangelical rationalists as "gnostic" in general (with a lower case "g") rather than the particular Gnostic movement, whose esoterism, as I have already pointed out, differs greatly from modern-day fundamentalism and especially neoevangelicalism. Nevertheless, when evangelical rationalists like Henry, Nash, and others claim that God's thoughts become our thoughts, a point of contact is established with ancient Gnosticism. One might also mention the tendency to individualism and the privatizing of faith which is especially strong in Protestant conservatism.
Now that I have read Henry's God, Revelation, and Authority I am surprised at Henry's initial reaction. In this work he uses the term "gnosticism" to describe humanistic views which claim too much knowledge by the use of unaided reason.19 Recall that I am not impressed at all with the argument that evangelicals are excused from this charge because they claim that their knowledge comes via the Holy Spirit. God of course would have infallible knowledge, but it is just as gnostic to claim that any person has such knowledge from God as from any other source. Henry does not realize that he is very much a part of the modern gnosis that he criticizes. Henry does admit that Christians do not have the direct, unmediated gnosis that the Gnostics claimed, but his Logos Christology is exceedingly more intellectual and direct than any version since the first Christian centuries, if it existed even then. Although Henry rejects the contention, I believe that Wolfgang Pannenberg is correct in his assessment that any revival of this ancient theology of the Word would inevitably have Gnostic overtones.20
I am in the process of developing a distinction among major types of religion: religions of obedience (Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) religions of knowledge--the "gnostic" religions of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism—and the Zen Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism as religions of practice. In the religions of obedience the basic sin is disobedience, but in the gnostic religions it is ignorance. (One could also describe a third view: sin as impurity in many primitive religions.) Devotees of the gnostic religions would find it difficult, I believe, to understand Yahweh's prohibition about the trees in the Garden: the tree of eternal life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It is significant that some Christian Gnostic accounts of the Fall portray Yahweh as an evil deity while the serpent is celebrated as a true spiritual teacher. I contend that many Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains would essentially agree with this rejection of the orthodox Fall: Adam and Eve did the right thing because moral knowledge and perfection, not obedience to God, are the highest human goals.
Modern evangelicals obviously reject this Gnostic account of the Fall, and they still stress, very emphatically, obedience to God. Nevertheless, their religious epistemology has strong gnostic tendencies. One gets the distinct impression from some evangelicals that it is their own unshakable knowledge about the Bible that will save them, rather than their faith and the grace of God. Many of them claim to know exactly what God wants, contravening the traditional notion of ignorance and impotence on the part of the Christian believer and the idea that saving knowledge is a divine gift. Evangelical rationalists, recalling the wise words of Wendell Berry "cut themselves off from mystery and ...from the sacred" in their attempt to "impose an absolute division between faith and doubt, to make belief perform as knowledge." In terms of the definitions given in Chapter Two, I would change this to making "faith perform as knowledge."
Religious gnosticism has not been limited to conservative Protestantism. Neoorthodox theologians are fond of saying that liberalism and fundamentalism "are two sides of the same coin--trust in reason over revelation."23 Evangelical Donald G. Bloesch is correct that too many liberal Protestants have concentrated on "rational and spiritual insight" rather than a "moral regeneration of the will."24 Bloesch is also right in claiming that liberals are mostly to blame for the "neo-Gnostic" tendency to dissolve the "boundaries between the infinite and the finite, the supernatural and the natural" and thereby threatening "the sovereignty and transcendence of God."25 As I have already indicated and will argue further, process theology does preserve the transcendence of God and legitimately rejects the sovereignty of God, while at the same time avoiding an interpretation of the Incarnation which confuses the finite and the infinite. As we shall see in Chapter Three, this the evangelical rationalists definitely do. Furthermore, it is they who are guilty of Bloesch's two charges of obscuring the kerygma by a gnostic apologetic and using a scientific method as a way of knowing God.
THREE EVANGELICAL TYPOLOGIES
We have already been introduced to two ways of distinguishing among the evangelicals. First, there is Nash's division between old-line fundamentalism and neoevangelicalism. Second, there is my distinction between the rationalists and the nonrationalists. Nash's typology, while helpful in many ways, is not satisfactory for my purposes. As we have seen, Nash and other contemporary evangelicals part company with many fundamentalists on the questions of separatism, philosophical theology, and social activism, but both camps still share a common rationalist epistemology. For some of them this is found not only in the faith and reason area but also with regard to biblical inerrancy and "scientific" creationism. James Barr has identified inerrancy as "a constant principle of rationality" among fundamentalists and evangelical rationalists.
In my ongoing research I have gained a new respect for evangelical theologians who have not fallen into the rationalist trap. I do not share their views on the sovereignty of God, on the uniqueness of Christianity, on the inspiration of the Bible, on the Incarnation, on humanism, and on abortion; but I do appreciate their careful discussions of the reason-faith issue and I praise their courageous defense of the traditional view of the Bible's inspiration and authority. Among the theologians whom I will henceforth identify as "nonrationalist" evangelicals are Donald G. Bloesch, Paul Helm, Bernard Ramm, Dewey M. Beegle, Jack Rogers, Donald K. McKim, F. F. Bruce, Robert K. Johnston, John Pelt, Gabriel Fackre, J. Ramsey Michaels, Clark H. Pinnock, J. I. Packer, and James Barr. Among prominent evangelical rationalists I will discuss Ronald H. Nash, Carl F. H. Henry, Bruce Demarest, Gordon H. Clark, Norman Geisler, E. J. Carnell, Stuart C. Hackett, John Warwick Montgomery, Harold O. J. Brown, and John Jefferson Davis. More popular evangelical rationalists like Francis Schaeffer, C. S. Lewis, Josh McDowell, and Henry M. Morris will be mentioned occasionally and will be found to fulfill almost all the rationalist criteria that I will now list.
Christian rationalism can occur in at least five different topic areas: (1) On the issue of faith and reason one finds a gnostic tendency to subvert or obscure the basic fideism of the Christian witness and tradition (Chapter 2); (2) some evangelicals interpret the meaning of the Christian Logos as discursive reason (next section); (3) there are many who claim "detailed inerrancy," a pseudoscientific attempt to assume, and prove if necessary, that the Bible is free from errors of all kinds (Chapter 6); and (4) there is "scientific" creationism, the result of an inerrant Bible being held as the standard for truth in geology, cosmology, and biology (see 13 and 14). The creationists contend that the "scientific" implications of the biblical record require the true Christian to reject modern evolutionary science in all of its ramifications. While it is fairly easy to identify theologians and their errors under (3) and (4), it is far more difficult to establish the correct balance between faith and reason. The more sophisticated theologians whose alleged rationalism is of types (1) and/or (2) may feel that it is unfair to include them with the inerrantists and creationists in this study.27 But criticism need be taken only when it is directed and justified. Furthermore, it is clear to me that the confusion on the faith-reason issue is at the root of the problems in (3) and (4).
The fifth rationalist criterion is one, which many evangelicals share with the Christian tradition in general. It is most certainly one of the causes for the occasional subordination of faith to reason in Christian theology. There has been a near unanimous opinion in the Christian tradition that the main feature of humans created in the image of God is that they are rational beings. This position is nowhere to be found in the Bible itself; rather it comes primarily from Aristotle's definition of human beings as rational animals. In Chapter Nine I note that some contemporary Christians have begun to recognize the unbiblical nature of this view, but I also emphasize that some evangelicals have intensified the rational component of the imago dei.
Henry's comprehensive six-volume systematic theology has been praised, according to the dust jacket, as "the most important work of evangelical theology in modern times" and a "brilliant defense of the rational character of biblical faith." Henry's work, the largest systematics ever written by an American, manifests wide reading and impressive erudition. The analysis of various issues is generally of good quality, although there are exceptions and far too much repetition. (He also exhibits one of my weaknesses: a tendency to quote authorities on a question rather than to develop my own independent analysis.) I have already noted that Henry does use the term "gnosticism" (but only for humanists who misuse reason), and he also employs the phrase "evangelical rationalism." He reserves this term, however, for Christian theologians who assume that one can do natural theology without recourse to special revelation. Henry makes it clear that his rejection of natural theology is significantly different from that of neoorthodoxy: "To reject the validity of natural theology--as an enterprise that presumptively underestimates the epistemic predicament of finite man--in no way requires the rejection of the role of rational argument in theology or abandoning the intrinsically rational character of special divine revelation."28 I shall argue that Henry's "revelational theism" is just as presumptive, or more so, as any philosophical theology.
Henry's comments bring to light the third typology, one used by the evangelicals themselves. The evangelical rationalists Henry criticizes are Clark Pinnock and John Warwick Montgomery, who believe that basic Christian truths can be demonstrated by the natural light of reason alone. In addition to Pinnock and Montgomery one can mention Stuart Hackett, J. J. Davis, C. S. Lewis, Norman Geisler and Francis Schaeffer. Historically, one can see this type of evangelical theology as a descendant of the Princeton school of Charles Hodge with its link in Scottish empiricism. Here one finds an empiricist epistemology and a preference for the correspondence theory of truth. In the "presuppositionalist" school, by contrast, one finds a rationalist epistemology of innate ideas and an emphasis on the coherence theory of truth. Instead of proving the truth of Christianity by external evidence (hence the term "externalism" as yet another name for the empirical camp), one simply has to show that none of the claims drawn from basic articles of faith are internally inconsistent. In addition to Henry other prominent presuppositionalists are Clark, Nash, E. J. Carnell, Bruce Demarest, and Cornelius Van Til.29
"Logical deduction from Scripture is our method" is Clark's succinct summary of his position, while Montgomery describes the empiricist position with these words: "On the basis of empirical method as applied to history, one can inductively validate the Christian revelation-claim and the biblical view of history."30 Van Til contends that "evidentialism" leads to the "destruction of Christianity" because it encourages a humanistic pride and self-assertion which is alien to Christian faith.31 Henry maintains that evangelical empiricism "requires a herculean burden of demonstration that no evangelical theologian, however devout or brilliant, can successfully carry."32 Henry claims that historical events are not self-explanatory and that prior assumptions are necessary for their proper interpretation. He states that "to appeal solely on the basis of historical research to God's special historical act in the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, apart from any reliance on revelational authority, will not enable us to establish the meaning and significance of the resurrection."33
These responses are perceptive and constitute sound arguments against evangelical "externalism." I believe that a general presuppositional approach is to be preferred because it is methodologically defensible, apologetically sensitive, and more compatible with the biblical witness and historical Christianity. Traditional Christian fideism is a presuppositionalist view, but it differs from Henry and his colleagues in one significant respect: historical Christian theology did not claim that articles of faith are rational propositions. For Catholics and Protestants the basic items of the creed are self-justifying truths. To ask for more or to claim more is to fall into Christian rationalism. Henry calls the evidentialists "presumptuous" but so is he in his claim that Christian truth is fully rational and universal in the philosophical sense of those terms.
The case against presuppositionalism can be phrased simply in terms of the basic logical fallacy of question-begging. Traditional Christian fideism escapes this charge because it does not make the extra epistemological claims that Henry does. I am sure that Henry would agree with John Hick that arguments in theology are more like links in a chain than ladders which are thrown away once the religious goal is reached. If so, then Henry must concede Hick's conclusion from this analogy: "A chain of reasoning can be no stronger than its weakest link;...thus we can never properly be more certain of the truth of a revealed proposition than of the soundness of our reason for classifying it as revealed."34 If Henry wants to incorporate philosophical theology into his revelational theism, then he must accede to Hick's argument against a self-justifying revelation.
Another way of phrasing this response to Henry is to ask: Why his presuppositions rather than some others? Henry has an answer to this question:
Theological truth does not differ from other truth in respect to intelligibility; therefore, truth must be rationally cognized if it is to be meaningfully grasped and communicated. Nor does the difference lie in the fact that revelation is its source, for God is the source of truth. The difference...is that theological truth is divinely authorized, infallibly certain, and biblically attested; all other claims for truth are subject to correction and at most are but probable....35
There are a number of comments to make on this important passage. First, no one need agree with Henry that all truth has to be rationally cognized. Many truths in the axiological disciplines--aesthetics, ethics, and religion--cannot be grasped in this manner. For example, we can perceive the truth and beauty of a great painting and find it very meaningful without rationally apprehending it. Second, Christian believers should not object to the last sentence as it stands. But it is the qualifier before the last sentence that represents the real parting of the ways. Christian fideists would ground their affirmation of the third sentence by affirming, not rejecting, the substance of the second sentence. The answer that they would give to my question above would simply be: "God has revealed it, period." That is not sufficient for Henry, and I believe that is precisely where his presuppositionalism turns into something else.
Just as the evangelical empiricists can be shown to have hidden presuppositions, so Henry and his colleagues cannot avoid an "externalism" of some sort. Henry takes great pains to make sure that his arguments avoid an appeal to external evidence. He challenges evangelicals to show the superior internal logical consistency of their beliefs. It is a gallant attempt, but it fails. He admits that coherence is only a negative test for truth, and this is obviously insufficient for the claims that Henry wants to make. When he states that "any religion that would exert a universal truth-claim...must adduce criteria whereby Christian and non-Christian alike can test the veracity of their claims," he must mean more than the formal logic he stipulates.36 Indeed, on the same page he quotes Carnell favorably with regard to the necessity of presenting sufficient evidence "not epistemologically dissimilar to the kind of cognitive information and historical data on which all historical, judicial or other everyday decisions depend." Henry's externalism is fully revealed when he states that "the Christian is armed with reason and does not evade the question of verifiability" and concedes that "persuasive counter evidence would discredit a biblical faith."37 Finally, instead of just confessing Christ as a good fideist should, Henry says that evangelicals should seek "to convince mankind that Christ is the divine Savior."38 One obviously does not do this merely on the basis of an internally consistent gospel.
I have shown that the standard typology of distinguishing among evangelicals breaks down on the question of basic apologetic strategy. Despite their very different epistemologies (which are not practiced consistently) one finds that they are both forms of the evangelical rationalism that I defined in the first section. Stuart Hackett of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School is a good example of how the third typology fails. His recent book The Reconstruction of the Christian Revelational Claim is one of the best by an evangelical rationalist that I have read. The writing is smooth and elegant and the approach is original with touches of brilliance. Hackett is eminently fair to the critics of evangelical Christianity and he qualifies his points fairly well. Furthermore, he graciously admits that there is some truth in the non-Christian religions. There is virtually none of the polemical tone found among other evangelical rationalists. Finally, Hackett rejects both inerrancy and creationism, although I find his idea of "indefectible" scripture to be ambiguous and equivocal. If Hackett means complete indefectibility in every respect, then we are back to detailed inerrancy again.
Nevertheless, Hackett is definitely an evangelical rationalist on the faith-reason issue. Indeed Geisler lists Hackett as the most prominent evangelical using a rationalist methodology to demonstrate Christian truths. His placement in the evidentialist school is entirely correct, because Hackett attempts to prove the plausibility of Christian claims by employing much extrabiblical evidence and speculation. At the same time, he calls himself a "rational empiricist" and supports the same Platonic-Augustinian realism that Henry and Nash recommend. Still working out of this Greek tradition, Hackett maintains that reason "constitutes the most unique and elevated dimension of human being...."39 Furthermore, Hackett claims that the doctrines of Incarnation and Trinity must be assumed to have "full rational plausibility." He implies, however, that a rational method is appropriate only for philosophical theology and not an empirical biblical theology, because "precision and logical compatibility...are far removed from the complex world of the Bible as a whole."41 In a direct attack on the presuppositionalists, Hackett contends that the Bible does not lend itself to axiomization, and even if it did, the axioms drawn out would be neither self-evident nor self-interpreting.42 I believe that Hackett is completely correct in his assessment, but this appears to undermine his attempt at a rational biblical apologetic. There seems to be a world of difference between his alternative axiom-set--the metaphysics of essences and the God of Absolute Mind and Eternal Reason of his "Philosophical Prolegomena"--and any possible theological reading of the Bible itself.
CHRISTIAN LOGOS: LIFE NOT REASON
Throughout God, Revelation, and Authority Henry criticizes others for importing alien assumptions into Christian theology. In this section I shall demonstrate that Henry and other evangelicals have done this in their development of a Christian Logos. Local fundamentalists have always rejected my own attempts to explain the Johannine Logos in terms of Greek precedents. I felt vindicated when I found that my philosophical translation of John 1:1 as "God is the author of the logic of the world and his son is the expression of this logic" was almost identical to, although not as elegant as, Gordon Clark's "In the beginning was Logic, and Logic was with God, and Logic was God."43 I emphasized, however that my translation was not meant to replace the traditional rendering of logos as "Word," which definitely does more justice to the creative, dynamic, and soteriological functions of the biblical Logos. But Clark insists that this Logos has no redemptive role: it is strictly epistemological in nature. To prove this Clark lists the meanings of logos from the Lindell and Scott classical Greek dictionary. He is very satisfied to find that "Word" is the last and presumably least preferable alternative for logos.44 Many of course would ask why Clark did not consult a good New Testament Greek dictionary instead. Clark, even more than Hackett, is so committed to a classical Greek mind-set that his reading of the Bible is dramatically compromised.45
Although Clark's position is extreme, I have discovered that his basic idea is supported by other evangelicals. Writers for the evangelical New Bible Dictionary suspect that Philo of Alexandria is behind John 1:1 and also state "the use of [logos] is singularly happy, for by it John was able to speak to Jews...to Christians...and to educated pagans who saw the Word as the principle of order and rationality in the universe." English evangelical Michael Green declares that "Christ is the principle of coherence in the universe"45 (after all, Paul did say that in Christ "all things hold together" [Col. 1:17]); that Christ is "the universal principle of rationality so dear to Philo and the Stoics...."; and "it was all a reflection of that universal logos or reason that had taken personal and final form in Jesus of Nazareth."47 It is, of course, in this sense that the Christian Logos is unique. The claim that the Logos had somehow found full and complete expression in a historical person would have been baffling to Heraclitus, the Stoics, and even Philo. (The contention that this somehow makes the Christian Logos superior is disputed at the end of Chapter Five.)
I shall now show that a rationalist interpretation of the biblical Logos does not have either philological or exegetical foundation. John 1:9--"the true light that enlightens every man"--is an instructive example. Henry, Nash, Carnell, Hackett, and Demarest all interpret this passage to mean the light of discursive reason. It is true that Christian theologians, including Calvin and William Temple, followed this reading of John 1:9; but no modern scholar that I have found will support it. This includes evangelical scholars such as William Hendriksen: "Although favored by eminent conservative exegetes and proclaiming an element of truth that must not be denied, we do not believe that in this context or anywhere in the Fourth Gospel where the term light (phos) is used--the reference is specifically to the light of reason and conscience."48 Hendriksen's interpretation is, I believe, correct: light refers to the new life in Christ.
The evangelical rationalists are favorably disposed to the Logos Christology of the Alexandrian theologians, but they do not seem to realize that they have no support from Clement on John 1:9. Although he believed in the preincarnate activity of God's Word, he maintained that this passage was redemptively exclusivistic. As C. K. Barrett has pointed out, the light of John is also a judging light--it shines on some but not on others. A related dimension of the biblical word is seen in the word dabar, a Hebrew equivalent of logos. With the meaning of "deed" or "thing" this word shows how wrong Clark's abstract Logos is: the biblical Word is firmly embedded in praxis. Evangelical rationalists betray their own scriptural roots by importing an alien epistemology rather than staying with the Bible's own practical, fideistic soteriology.
Even though he emphasizes the intellectual aspect of the Christian Logos, Henry is, once at least, on the mark in this comment: "to 'know God' in John 8:54-55 does not basically have in view the intellectual apprehension of the truth of God's reality, but rather the experiential knowledge of God as a liberating power found in a life commitment to his holy will." Ronald Nash also moderates the extremism of Gordon Clark by maintaining that the biblical Logos is not only epistemological and cosmological, but soteriological as well. But true to his rationalism, the focus is always on the intellectual. We can have natural, objective knowledge of God because the Logos Christ "guarantees human rationality and certifies the ability of humans to understand the Word of God."51
Nash claims that the best support for his Christian rationalism can be found in the works of Augustine. I contend, however, that he has overlooked the fideistic foundation of Augustine's theology, a point I discuss at the beginning of the next chapter. Furthermore, Nash never solves the basic problem which most philosophical theologians have with Augustine's epistemology. The divine illumination theory appears to completely undercut the possibility of independent human knowledge, because the human mind is, as Nash says, "a secondary and derivative source of light that reflects in a creaturely way the rationality of the Creator."52 If We, as Nash maintains, "think God's thoughts after him," then we have Luther's "captive" reason (see end of next chapter), a reason not worth having at all. If we think good thoughts and act on them, or produce new philosophical or scientific ideas, then we are not really responsible and cannot be praised. It would of course be God who would be responsible and praiseworthy. The very foundations of critical thinking would collapse if one follows Nash seriously. If Jesus is the embodiment of logic itself, then everything he said and anything Christians claim of him (e.g., the Incarnation) must be a priori correct. Nash's alleged natural theology is actually a totally immune revealed theology in disguise.
FORMS OF THEOLOGICAL DIALECTIORMS OF THEOLOGICAL DIALECTIC
Carl Henry's meager attempts at an etymology of logos are not very satisfactory, so I wish to introduce my own work in this area.53 Henry's claim that in addition to the spoken word, the roots of logos indicate "reckoning and evaluation, reflection and explanation, hence a principle or law discernible by calculation"54 is not supported by, for example, Lindell and Scott. The first root Öleg means "to collect," "to put together," and later "to speak or say." The second root Ö lech means "to lay" as in lechos, the marital couch. From these roots I have proposed that there is a more original meaning of rationality which better describes our basic attempts to know the world. The first expressions of logos in Greek thought were thoroughly dynamic and synthetic in character. Except for possibly Parmenides, none of the pre-Socratic philosophers recognized any of the laws of logic. Criticizing the pre-Socratics for this deficiency, Aristotle was the first to formalize these laws in what he called, significantly for my thesis, "Analytics." Even though analytic reason comes first formally and theoretically, synthetic reason always comes first temporally.
According to a broad, synthetic logos, human beings are "rational" because they are able to "put the world together" (lego) in a certain way, a way that makes "sense" to them. An individual does not have to be able to do a mathematical proof or construct a syllogism in order to be rational in this broad sense. Indeed, this person could consistently violate all logical rules and still be considered "rational." Strict reason is therefore prescriptive and is identical with the philosophical method of the mainstream of Western philosophy. Philosophers and logicians generally are engaged in a normative science that tells people how they ought to think and reason. Broad reason, on the other hand, is a nonnormative way of describing how people have in fact thought, quite apart from whether they have thought correctly or incorrectly.
Broad reason obviously includes mythological constructions, for this is still the predominant way in which individuals put their world together. Therefore, the broad notion of reason bridges the gap between mythos and logos. In myth we see the "passive" interpretation of logos: the world and its order are already laid out by God or a divine agent, or simply just there. Humans then are exhorted to conform to this preestablished order, and to celebrate this union through ritual and magic. These individuals then do not actively put the world together, but passively submit to a fait accompli. The "active " form of synthetic reason is a modern phenomenon, the best example being modern artists in literature and the fine arts. Artists actively shape new "worlds" and new ways of looking at the world, often in reaction against a world-view that has been given passively by traditional institutions. This is the modern "constructive" logos, which Henry rejects, but I contend that the Christian Word is a beautiful example of passive synthetic reason.
Lego is also found in the word "dialectic," and I have used the same etymological clues to propose various types of dialectic.55 The dialectic of Aristotle's Analytics and the dialectic of medieval theology can be called "either/or" dialectics. For example, after one separates all geometrical figures into their proper logical classes, then a figure is either a square, or a circle, or some other figure--a square cannot be both a square and a circle. As we shall see in the next chapter, logical arguments against the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation follow the same model: either Jesus is God or human; he cannot be both at the same time. In saying that he is both one violates the law of noncontradiction.
The method of the existentialists also involves either/or thinking, but it is dramatic and existential, not formal and logical. It is epitomized in the writings of Soren Kierkegaard, who, in The Concept of Irony, claims that Socrates' main aim was not logical clarity but conceptual confusion. According to Kierkegaard, the goal of the early dialogues was to lead the interlocuters into philosophical deadends. This led Kierkegaard to believe that ethical choices are based on faith not reason. Kierkegaard dramatized this point with the example of Abraham, who was faced with this choice: either follow God's arbitrary will or follow the moral law and God's previous promises. There was no way in which Abraham could have made a rational decision. The existentialist thinkers use situations like these to support their belief that logic and ethics are ultimately incompatible. Dialectic theology (early Barth, Bultmann, Brunner) also uses Kierkegaard to declare the complete autonomy of faith and to eliminate the role of reason and natural theology from the Christian religion.
In striking contrast to both forms of "either/or" dialectic is the "both-and," synthetic dialectic of thinkers like Hegel. Hegel was very much indebted to the pre-Socratic Greeks, especially Heraclitus' idea of a logos reconciling all opposites into a unitary process. Aristotle's criticisms of Heraclitus and others prevailed, however, and the law of contradiction and traditional logic won out in the West. Until Hegel a both-and dialectic survived in the Western mystical tradition, most notably in Nicholas of Cusa and his doctrine of coincidentia oppositorum. The key to synthetic dialectic is the rejection of the law of contradiction, and the belief that opposites can be reconciled in a higher synthesis.
In his book The God Who Is There Francis Schaeffer offers a distinction between the methods of "Antithesis" and "Synthesis" which coincides nicely with my either/or and both-and dialectic. He correctly acknowledges Hegel as the chief modern proponent of "Synthesis" but incorrectly places Kierkegaard and the dialectic theologians in this same "irrationalist" tradition. Not recognizing the possibility of an existentialist form of his method of Antithesis, Schaeffer confounds two very different theological traditions. Schaeffer shows how Hegel's dialectical method of Synthesis subverts the logical law that A is not-A, and he reaffirms the either/or argument that "if a thing is true, the opposite is not true; if a thing is right, the opposite is wrong."56 Schaeffer is obviously correct, and for all of its creative dynamics, broad reason fails to provide a method by which we can make progress in any theoretical problem or arrive at even the most provisional truths.
The main problem with Schaeffer's position is that for centuries the central doctrines of Christianity have been explicitly articulated as both-and, synthetic formulae. Hegel was correct in his contention that he had finally discovered the true logic of Christianity. The doctrine of the Incarnation literally means that Jesus Christ is both fully human and fully God. The Christian doctrine of liberty, as phrased by the evangelical J. I. Packer, is that man is both "free and controlled."57 Barth phrases the doctrine of faith as "altogether the work of God...and altogether the work of man. It is a complete enslavement and it is a complete liberation."58 Finally, Luther expresses the Protestant doctrine of justification as simul justus et peccator (simultaneously justified and sinful).
Using his method of Antithesis Schaeffer must answer "either God or man" on the Incarnation, "either free or coerced" with regard to Christian freedom, and "either saved or damned" on justification. There are no special logical problems with the idea that both God and humans participate in faith, for this is what happens in any situation of trust. In contrast Barth is not alone in using mutually exclusive, paradoxical language. The inescapable conclusion is that the Christian Logos has little to do with Aristotle's Analytics or Schaeffer's method of Antithesis; rather, it is in a direct line with Heraclitus and the coincidentia oppositorum. Therefore, we must reject Henry's claim that "a rational metaphysics underlies the Hebrew's depiction of the nature of reality,"59 and affirm that the biblical Word is creative, dynamic, synthetic, and has no apparent concern for the laws of logic.
Endnotes
1. Nash, Christian Faith and Historical Understanding (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1984.), p. 19fn.
2. In my reading I have been struck by how some evangelicals have selectively ignored this scholarship. Some of them also refuse to come to terms with the scholarship on the relationship between Jesus and Old Testament expectations. (See Chapter 8.) F. F. Bruce, although generally supporting conservative evangelical views, commands the respect of all Bible scholars because of his impeccable integrity. Letting the historical-grammatical method do its work, he has concluded, for example, that Isaiah had at least two authors and that Daniel was written two centuries (rather than six) before Christ (see James Barr, Beyond Fundamentalism (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1984.), pp. 156, 185fn.). We shall see that Bruce rejects the popular conservative solution to the conflicting genealogies of Luke and Matthew (p. 152 below). Ironically enough, Harold Brown cites Bruce as a great champion in defeating the forces of liberal scholarship (see "The Conservative Option," p. 346).
3. Ernest Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1970.), pp. xiv, 140.
4. See Frederic R. Howe, Challenge and Response (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1982.), pp. 54-55.
5. See Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Faith and Belief (Princeton University Press, 1979.), p. 96.
6. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1952.), p. 123.
7. Bruce Demarest, General Revelation (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1982.) p. 33; Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 1, p. 266. Henry betrays his strict rationalism by affirming here the "externalism" which he otherwise forcefully rejects.
8. Lewis, op. cit., p. 37.
9. Henry, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 237.
10. Jack Rogers, Confessions of an Evangelical (Philadelphia: The Westminser Press, 1974.), p. 129.
11. Jose M. Bonino, Towards a Christian Political Ethics (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983.), p. 61.
12. Harold O. J. Brown, "The Conservative Option (Tensions in Contemporary Theology, ed., Grundy and Johnson, pp. 327-358.)," p. 332. Many others like James Barr have seen this irony: "It is the conservative evangelicals who are accepting from natural science their understanding of the nature of truth and insisting that the truth of the Bible must be this kind of truth" (op. cit., p. 93).
13. Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Princeton University Press, 1941.), p. 189. Let me repeat Geddes MacGregor's Preface epigraph: "Bible-reading by those whose education is technological rather than literary can result in interpretations so distorted as to blind the reader from the essential insights that the Bible can give to those who come to it with an imaginative child's innocence, curiosity, and wonder."
14. Rogers and McKim, The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible, p. 8.
15. Lindsell, The World, The Flesh, and The Devil (Washington, D.C.: Canon Press, 1973.), p. 18.
16. James Barr, op. cit., p. 26.
17. Fiat creationists like Henry M. Morris and Duane Gish propose that the Second Law of Thermodynamics came into being at the Fall. Although I was unable to find the same claim in Carl Henry, he definitely flirts with the Manichean view by stating that Satan is the "ontological ground of evil" and that "man's rebellion has consequences for the entire cosmos; it implicates all creation." (op. cit., vol. 6, pp. 244, 246).
18. Gabriel Fackre, The Religious Right and Christian Faith (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982.), p. 52. Both J. J. Davis and J. I. Packer also see Manichean elements in some evangelical thinkers. See Davis, op. cit., p. 95 and Packer, Fundamentalism and the Word of God, pp. 132-33.
19. Henry, vol. 1, p. 195; vol. 2, pp. 67, 328.
20. Cited in ibid., vol. 2., p. 302.
21. See Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House, Hardback ed., 1979.), pp. 30-31.
22. Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America (New York: Avon Books, 1977), p. 130.
23. See Bloesch, The Future of Evangelical Christianity (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1983.), p. 157.
24. Bloesch, Essentials of Evangelical Theology (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978), vol. 1, p. 14.
25. Bloesch, The Future of Evangelical Christianity (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1983., p. 145.
26. Barr, op. cit., p. 49.
27. Although most of the best evangelical theologians reject "fiat" creationism, they are usually equivocal about inerrancy. Both Clark and Geisler, however, are more definite: Geisler declares that the "Old Testament is without error (i.e., inerrant) in whatever it teaches..." (Christian Apologetics, p. 363); and Clark says that the Bible "is...inerrant in all it teaches, including John 3:16 and geographical and historical details" (In Defense of Theology, p. 94).
28. Henry, vol. 2, p. 122.
29. It must be said that Van Til, even though he is a presuppositionalist, is definitely not an evangelical rationalist. As a Barthian he insists that basic Christian axioms must be taken as articles of faith, but he does not claim that these are rational propositions. There are other qualifications that need to be made in these two lists. According to Clark, Carnell accepts the traditional arguments for God's existence, and therefore breaks with presuppositionalism on this point. In most other respects, especially his general epistemology, he definitely belongs in this camp. Even though Geisler rejects independent arguments for deity, his strong defense of Aquinas places him squarely within the empiricist school.
30. Clark, op. cit., p. 73; Montgomery quoted in Henry, vol. 1, pp. 230-31.
31. Quoted in Henry, vol. 1, p. 261. 32. Henry, vol. 1, p. 220.
33. Ibid., p. 221
34. John Hick, Faith and Knowledge (London: Collins Sons, 1974.), p. 22.
35. Henry, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 228.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid., p. 265.
38. Ibid., p. 228. When Henry describes the rational method, which Christians must support, he gives examples of induction: proving that the White House is white is methodologically parallel to proving that the Bible is divinely inspired (ibid., p. 266). Therefore one of the basic Christian presuppositions "requires persuasive evidence."
39. Stuart Hackett, The Reconstruction.… (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1984.), p. 175.
40. Ibid., pp. 174, 195. Hackett's unqualified rationalism is strong here: "In a theistic universe...I judge the concept of the Incarnation of God in Jesus to exhibit as full a degree of rational intelligibility as it would be plausible for the most stringent mind to expect" (p. 197). The protest that this seems to undermine basic Christian mysteries is called "impertinent" and simply "old ground revisited" that we need not "plow or even cultivate...again" (p. 196).
41. Ibid., p. 305.
42. Ibid., p. 41.
43. Clark, Religion, Reason, and Revelation (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1961.), p. 67; cf. his In Defense of Theology, p. 85.
44. Ibid., pp. 85-7. Clark admits that he has shocked many Christians with this translation. Clark responds in his inimitable fashion: "They needed to be shocked, for 'Logic' is as good as, indeed better than 'Word' or verbum. Why should anyone think it more sacrilegious to call Christ the Logic than to call him a word--a written ink mark on paper, or a spoken sound in the air?" (p. 85) One expects such naivete about the biblical Word among beginners, not seasoned thinkers like Clark.
45. Henry also uses such phrases as God as "Supreme Reason" (vol. 5, p. 383). It is interesting to observe that the prominent evangelical rationalists--Clark, Nash, and Hackett--are all philosophers by profession, while Henry had philosophical training under Brightman and Clark. Significantly enough, one does not find philosophers in the list of nonrationalist evangelicals.
46. The New Bible Dictionary, pp. 647/608, 745/704. The second page numbers refer to the new second edition.
47. Michael Green, The Truth of God Incarnate (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1977.), pp. 29, 26, 116.
48. William Hendriksen, The Gospel of John (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1954.), p. 78. Here is yet another English evangelical--besides Packer, Helm, Bruce, and Stott--who generally avoids evangelical rationalism. Even though William Temple does say that the Logos "enlightens every man alive in his reason and conscience," he quickly shifts the emphasis to conscience and more generally to the new life in Christ (Readings in St. John's Gospel, p. 13). J. C. Fenton contends that the Logos "enlightens every man" in the sense that he is the Savior and judge of the world (The Gospel according to John, p. 35). Raymond Brown argues that John's light is the same as the saving light of Isaiah (9:3; 42:6; 60:1-2) and also supports the idea of light as judgment (The Anchor John, pp. 28, 9). There is of course the long Quaker tradition which interprets this passage in a strong nonrationalist sense, viz., as a universal spiritual illumination.
49. C. K. Barrett, The Gospel according to St. John (London: SPCK, 1955.), p. 134. Barrett agrees with the Alexandrians: "There was no natural and universal knowledge of the light" (ibid.). For more on the Alexandrian view, see J. H. Bernard, The Gospel according to John, p. 12.
50. Henry, vol. 2, p. 129. Henry acknowledges being led by a good New Testament scholar on this point: C. H. Dodd. If Henry implies that this meaning is restricted to just these verses in John, then he is obviously wrong.
51. Nash, The Word of God ... (Grand Rapids: Zondervan. 1984.), p. 68.
52. Ibid., p. 81.
53. What follows is taken from my Wittgenstein and Phenomenology (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1981), p. 187.
54. Henry, vol. 3, p. 193.
55. See my "Dialectic: East and West," Indian Philosophical Quarterly 10 (1983), pp. 207-218. The Danish inventor of Lego toys obviously had a good classical education. Combining the Greek lego ("I put together") and the Latin lego ("I play"), he came up with a perfect name for his plastic building blocks.
56. Francis Schaeffer, The God Who is There (Downer Grove: Intervarsity Press, 1975.), p. 47. With all of their fierce commitment to traditional logic, some evangelical rationalists make not only the major error of refusing to see that basic Christian doctrines are incompatible with that method, but also make minor errors like confusing truth and validity. Henry uses the phrase "valid truth" thrice (at least) and then tells us that Christian truth can be falsified by the laws of validity and invalidity (vol. 1, 193, 213, 265; vol. 5, p. 366). C. S. Lewis does the same, according to John Beversluis (C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion, pp. 75-79). Finally, Schaeffer's notion of "true truth" cannot be found in any logic text that I know.
57. Packer, op. cit., p. 117.
58. Barth, Church Dogmatics III, 3, p. 247.
59. Henry, vol. 6, p. 75.