Reformed Scholasticism and Reformational Thinking — Joe Boot

Reformed Scholasticism and Reformational Thinking

The Root of Creation The New Testament reveals explicitly the role of Christ Jesus as the one in whom all things are created and hold together and for whom all things exist (cf. Col. 1:15-20). The apostle Paul deepens our understanding of creation and redemption profoundly by showing that the triune God is the root and end of all things: for from Him and through Him and to Him are all things” (Rom. 11:36).

The twentieth-century Dutch philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd drew out some important implications of this scriptural truth when he taught that it is not only the Christian worldview, but all human thought which is embedded in a religious ethos (ground-motive) oriented toward an idea of origin and law-order. In his New Critique of Theoretical Thought Dooyeweerd expressed this reality in philosophical terms:

All meaning is from, through and to an origin, which cannot itself be related to a higher origin … all genuine philosophical thought has therefore started as thought that was directed toward the origin of our cosmos.1

This is part of what makes the Christian worldview utterly unique as a system of thought. In the Greco-Roman cradle of Western civilisation, there was no room in philosophical thought for a free creation by an infinite-personal God as revealed in the Bible. This is because the Greek understanding of nature (as it comes to full flower in Aristotle) was ruled by a ‘form-matter’ scheme that regarded reality as consisting of an uncreated, amorphous chaotic matter, which by a forming activity of an impersonal divine principle achieves a coherence of ‘form and matter.’ This duality had the effect of dividing reality into two realms – the sensory and supra-sensory – the former being the realm we can experience with our senses and the latter being the realm which we cannot. This latter realm was nonetheless thought to be know-

SUMMER 2022

Ezra Institute

Dr. Joe Boot,

M.A., Ph.D.

JOE BOOT is the founder and President of the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity and the founding pastor of Westminster Chapel in Toronto.

Joe earned his Ph.D. in Christian Intellectual Thought from Whitefield Theological Seminary, Florida. His apologetic works have been published in Europe and in North America and include Searching for Truth, Why I Still Believe and How Then Shall We Answer. His most noted contribution to Christian thought, The Mission of God, is a systematic work of cultural theology exploring the biblical worldview as it relates to the Christian’s mission in the world.

Joe serves as Senior Fellow for the cultural and apologetics think-tank truthXchange in Southern California, and as Senior Fellow of cultural philosophy for the California-based Centre for Cultural Leadership. Joe is married to Jenny and they have three children, Naomi, Hannah, and Isaac.

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able by the intellectual contemplation of rational souls – an idea which influenced the thought of Augustine, for whom the soul was conceived as an immortal substance.

In our understanding of what it means to be human, the eventual result of these ideas was that man came to be seen as assembled from two components, distinct in principle i.e., a mortal, material body, and an immortal, rational soul. Plato considered the soul-substance of the human being primary, whilst regarding the body as merely its “tool,” the way a man drives a car. For Aristotle, form was the divine, higher principle that is embedded in non-divine, chaotic matter as its essential unity. Together they make up a substantial unity in which the rational soul is considered the “essential form.”2

This view is a radical departure from biblical revelation, in which there are no independent substances (uncreated soul substances, essences, or eternal chaotic material), over-against the all-conditioning Word of God. In Scripture creation is distinct from Christ but not separated from Him. The apostle Paul thus shocks the Greek philosophers in Athens with his application of this reality: “for in him we live and move and exist” (Acts 17:28). As Andree Troost puts it, “[Christ] is with God the Father, the creator and bearer of the entire cosmos which was created in him.”3

Scholasticism

Scholasticism can be broadly defined as an effort to blend Christian theology and ancient Greek dualism. In the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas brought Roman Catholic Scholastic thought to its apogee by officially interpreting Aristotle’s views for the church. He attempts to build a formal bridge between the Greek dualistic worldview and Scripture. As Dooyeweerd notes, “Scholasticism seeks a synthesis between Greek thought and the Christian religion. It was thought that such a synthesis could be successfully achieved if philosophy, with its Greek basis, were to be made subservient to Christian theology.”4 Aquinas thus tried to accommodate the form-matter dualism of the Greeks to the Christian faith. In this marriage, ‘matter’ was the principle of imperfection, and the ‘rational form’ was the ‘thinking soul’ which participated in the divine.5 As a result, Aquinas divides the creation order into a natural and supernatural realm. That legacy has remained with us in various permutations ever since.

Eventually, in this accommodation, a theological trend developed that we might call a psycho-creationist anthropology. Such a paradigm asserts that with each new life, God permits the implanting of

an indestructible soul into a body from without – restored through Christ and the church – the church the body being prepared by an organic life prin- being the one supernatural institution of grace. ciple. So instead of maintaining the biblical unity of the human person, what emerges is the uncom- Reformed Scholasticism fortable assemblage of two independent substances – body and soul. The flesh (non-divine earthly Though the Reformation broke with much of this matter of the body) is conceived as a shell for the mischaracterisation of life and sought a renewal of noblest ‘part’ of man – the immortal soul which es- the biblical understanding of a life-comprehending capes the corruptible material flesh at death. The Creation, Fall, Redemption and Consummation by rational soul (anima rationalis) is regarded as a spir- the power of the Holy Spirit, it did not completeitual complex of particular functions (i.e., thinking, ly destroy Scholasticism’s artificial bridge from Arfeeling, willing etc.), the seat of true light, natural istotle to Christianity. Consequently, a ‘Protestant reason, and spirituality, whilst the body is implicit- scholasticism’ soon became entrenched and has ly or explicitly denigrated in terms persisted into modern evangeliof lower desires and carnal appetites. Sin’s root is then supposedly This scholastic calism. As Dooyeweerd explained, “Protestant scholastics thought located in these ‘lower’ fleshly de- perspective is they could strip Greek philosophy sires. This teaching obviously entails the problematic notion that God creates and inserts sinful antithetical to the scriptural reality of its pagan features by depriving it of all independence and turning it into a handmaiden. Thus, it was souls into each new body – hence of the creation of put to so-called formal use in systhe need to shift the seat of sin to the body’s ‘lower’ capacities. This human beings as a tematic theology and theological ethics.”6 I’m reminded of recent helps account for the rise of the unity, along with a assertions that Critical Race Theory medieval ascetic ideal and a vision of monastic life as manifesting the fullest expression of devoted serlife-comprehending apostasy in sin and can be a “useful analytical tool” for Christians. vice to God. rebellion at the Fall. The great reformer, Martin Luther, openly claimed to be of William of The religious superstructure built Ockham’s school – a perspective in up around this philosophical dualism steadily di- which he was immersed whilst at Erfurt monastery. vides all of life into two domains, the natural and He was profoundly influenced by Ockham’s comthe supernatural (spiritual) – a worldview expressed plete separation of ‘natural life’ from the ‘superin the polarities of nature and grace. Nature is con- natural’ Christian life of grace – thereby driving a ceived as form and matter, and grace (supernatural radical wedge between creation and redemption. faith) as an additional gift to bring the immortal So-called ‘nature’ was viewed exclusively in the light soul to perfection. This scholastic perspective is of sin, with ‘reason’ regarded as the only guide in antithetical to the scriptural reality of the creation the natural domain, clearly entailing the ubiquitous of human beings as a unity, along with a life-com- and secularizing notion of a radical separation of prehending apostasy in sin and rebellion at the Fall ‘reason’ and ‘revelation.’ Consequently, “[I]n matso that humanity is in need of an equally life-com- ters of secular government, justice and social order, prehending redemption at the root of our being. a person possessed only the light of reason.”7 Instead, though our ‘rational soul’ is wounded by sin and deprived of the gift of faith, it is not radical- This fundamental error also expressed itself in Luly perverted and depraved by the Fall. Scholastic ther’s attempt to set law (nature) and gospel (grace) thought teaches the Fall really robbed us only of a in opposition to each other. The law was an order supernatural gift of grace (i.e., true faith) which is for sinful nature which Luther began to regard as

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antithetical to supernatural grace. Gospel love must overcome the ‘rigidity’ of law. Consequently, the link between creation-law and God’s grace was effectively severed. On this view, redemption came to imply the death of ‘nature’ rather than its restoration and renewal. Though he vigorously attacked pagan philosophy, because of his lack of insight into the full implications of a biblical worldview, Luther was unable to direct people to a comprehensive inner reformation of thought. As Dooyeweerd explains, “he did not see that human thinking arises from the religious root of life and that is therefore always controlled by a religious ground-motive.”8

Calvin also, though Barth rejects clearly grasping the sovereignty of God any point of over all creation contact between and its life-comprehending charthe Christian acter, was not able faith and natural life so that he to fully extricate himself from this persistent Greek completely dualism because repudiates the he lacked a truly scripturally groundidea of Christian ed ontology. Calvin culture follows Augustine (who unsuccessfully fought to shake off Neo-Platonism), and this is apparent in Calvin’s view of the human person where he conceives of the soul as the noblest ‘part’ of man – an immortal (though created) ‘being.’ The flesh is a kind of prison so that soul and body stand over against each other in uncomfortable tension, never fully taking in the biblical unity of the human person.

Calvin’s reformational emphasis on Christ’s rule over all of life is thus pushed aside by a protestantized Scholasticism. Whilst wanting to honour biblical revelation, there is no true inner reformation of all thought and so Christ’s kingship and scriptural authority are soon sequestered in the narrow realm of religious faith. Theology is consequently honoured as ‘queen’ of the sciences, whilst philosophy and other disci-

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plines must simply be ‘adapted’ to the church’s theological principles. The thought that philosophy, history, natural sciences etc. must be inwardly reformed from a scriptural worldview just doesn’t occur. These disciplines supposedly belong to the lower realm of nature, natural reason, and natural law, whereas theology is concerned with the higher supernatural realm of faith, grace, and the church.

It is then no surprise to find the eventual development of dialectical theology in Protestantism which “sharply opposes the religious antithesis in the area of worldly life, rejecting the idea of Christian politics, of a Christian political party…and of Christian scholarship.”9 Karl Barth continues the identification of nature with sin, separating nature from the Word of God which he and his followers regarded as ‘wholly other.’ Barth rejects any point of contact between the Christian faith and natural life so that he completely repudiates the idea of Christian culture – including Christian art, political life, scholarship, and even social action. Here, the creation law and ordinances recede so far from view that Christian thought effectively begins with the idea of a Fall and then redemption – for Barth there could be no knowledge of creation law and norms.

With this continuation of Greek philosophical dualism in various branches of Protestantism, we can see the many ways in which a division of life into separate domains has stubbornly manifested itself. Consider some of these familiar polarities still emphasized to varying degrees by many reformed evangelical Christians and Protestants of all stripes:

Body/Soul: We are a ‘soul’; we have a ‘body.’ Human beings are made up of two separate substances, one higher the other lower, easily distinguishable and separable. The soul (a complex of higher functions including reasoning and feeling) is the ‘real’ person; the body is merely a shell. The soul’s destiny is Heaven or Hell, the body and the earth are relatively less important.

Material/Spiritual: The Christian life is a ‘spiritual’ life consisting of ‘spiritual’ disciplines. It is an inner battle against the desires of the lower

part of us – stemming from the body. The material world is an incumbrance, lesser, or evil, and we will eventually escape it into Heaven. In the meantime, we must suppress the desires of our material nature.

Natural/Supernatural: Most life activities are just natural and about this world, but Christianity is about a supernatural world beyond this one, and therefore this natural life and creation are not as important as the supernatural world. The natural is mundane and boring and carries on largely in terms of its own impersonal laws, but sometimes God breaks in to do supernatural things like miracles, which are much more significant than everyday events.

Public/Private: Our spiritual life of faith is an essentially private matter of personal conviction and should not be imposed on anyone else. Our private faith is not for the public space as it does not involve publicly accessible knowledge and in any case, God’s kingdom is not of this world.

Secular/Sacred: Most of life functions well in terms of neutral secular principles and concepts that everyone can agree on. Politics, education, law, science etc. are secular areas of life for which man’s common natural reason is sufficient to govern. The church, however, is a sacred institution of grace which, unlike these other areas, is ruled by biblical revelation. This revelation must not be imposed or applied to culture and society, for to Christianize culture is mixing the upper and lower storeys, secular and sacred.

Law/Gospel: Law is concerned with the earth, the material world, and sinful natural desires, whereas gospel freedom is spiritual and concerns grace for the soul. The church is the institution of grace, not law – which is a matter for the state as a natural institution. Grace throws law aside because grace has no more need for the law than Heaven needs Earth, or the saved soul has real need for the body.

Common/Special Revelation: The natural creation is the realm of common grace, common principles, natural law. By contrast, Christ is the source of special grace and special revelation. The one is a ladder to the other, but we need the addition of faith and grace in special revelation to bring us to completion, salvation, and perfection.

Reason/Revelation: Human reason is sufficient for understanding most of life in the natural world and guides politics, education, culture etc. in terms of neutral, rational principles. Human reasoning, though prone to errors, is good as far as it goes and can offer high-probability proofs for God’s existence acceptable to logical and right-thinking people. However, supernatural revelation to the soul is admittedly necessary for eternal salvation and to disclose certain spiritual doctrines.

Science/Faith: The sciences operate only in terms of objective natural reason and concern religiously neutral knowledge of the natural world. The sciences answer factual questions about how things happen in the world. Faith is unrelated to reason and is only concerned with the higher value judgments of why things happen. The only truly Christian academic discipline is theology because it is concerned with studying religion and faith. There can be no distinctly Christian view of philosophy or science.

Culture/Kingdom: The kingdom of God is a purely spiritual and invisible reality that does not manifest itself outside the heart and supernatural institution of grace – the church. The kingdom of God fundamentally concerns a future heavenly reality, not the present earth and human culture. The earth is destined for total destruction so nothing in human culture has any eternal value. Getting souls into Heaven and preserving them in the institutional church through this veil of tears is our calling.

Dooyeweerd has shown that these artificial separations of domains in life ruled by different principles follow logically from the dualistic conception of the human person derived from the form-matter and substance concepts in Greek philosophy and then synthesized with the Christian view of creation and redemption.

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The Reformational Response

As with all errors, Scholasticism’s persuasiveness lies in its close imitation of the truth, together with its use of familiar biblical language. Scripturally, we may conceptually distinguish an inner and outer man (2 Cor. 4:11,16), fully dependent in every way and at every moment upon the sustaining Word of Christ (Acts 17:28; Rom. 11:36). But there is no independent ‘essence’ of human life, no higher and lower substances or ‘parts.’ The “I” or human ego cannot be identified simply with reasoning, feeling, willing, or any other aspect of our existence, because these functions all presuppose a deeper unity that transcends them. At the deepest The “I,” our full human level of our selfhood, the depths of the heart, is God’s humanity, at mystery transcending the heart of the temporal functions of our existence and our existence, is grasped only in reall of life is a lation to God who has continuous placed in us a sense of the eternal (Eccl. response to the 3:11). Critically, ChrisWord of God tians shall one day follow Christ out of the grave (Col. 1:18; 1 Cor. 15:20). It is the full person that is raised to life (inner and outer man), just as it is the totality of creation which will be released from its subjection to futility when we receive the fullness of our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies (Rom. 8:19-23).

Reformational thought therefore resists every inclination to divide up created reality in terms of philosophical distinctions that are entirely foreign to the Bible. Our faith rests on the scriptural truth “that the mediating Word is the religious lifeline which links God and man together in a life-long, all-embracing covenant relationship of revelation and response.”10 All of creation in every part is governed by the mediating Word of Christ and in no domain of life do we escape the all-embracing relationship we have with Christ and His Kingdom. All of life is a religious response to that Word. Dooyeweerd’s reformational philosophy translates this all-embracing, mediating, and holding power of the Word of Christ in terms of what he calls ‘ontic normativity.’ This is simply the recognition of a law-Word for creation that provides a normative structure for all spheres of life and every entity within creation – it governs the law-conformity of all created reality. As such, Christ cannot be ‘uncoupled’ from a so-called ‘natural’ realm of factual neutrality, an area of creation that can be withdrawn from the sovereign Lordship and authority of Jesus and His written Word-revelation. Christ Jesus, who holds all things together by the Word of His power, from whom, through whom and to whom all things exist, cannot be banished to a supposed upper storey of reality, a spiritual world of ‘grace,’ shunted out of history to a future age, nor imprisoned in the walls of the church institute so that the kingdom of God (Basileia) is limited to the institutional ekklesia.

The central direction of Scripture is the unity and continuity of God’s creation and redemption within the rubric of the kingdom of God – an all-encompassing Creation, Fall and Redemption of the whole of life. This inescapable revelation must be the starting point for both our philosophical and theological activity; it is not a theological product of human interpretation but is rather the motive-force of the biblical message. The radical character of this religious motive, argues Dooyeweerd:

…can only be revealed by the Holy Spirit, because he opens our hearts so that our faith will no longer be a mere acceptance of formal articles of our Christian confession, but a living faith, serviceable to the central working of God’s Word in the heart – the religious centre of our life… In their radical meaning – as the ground motive of the Word-revelation and the key to true knowledge – creation, fall and redemption are no simple articles of faith; they are rather the Word of God itself in its central spiritual power, directed to the heart, the religious centre of our existence. Confronted by the Word of God in his heart, man can offer nothing, but only listen and receive…The Word of God… must penetrate to the root of our being and become the central motive-force of our whole Christian life.11

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This means that Christ’s restorative kingdom life cannot be restricted to a ‘part’ of the human person nor any isolated terrain of human existence or experience such as the church institute or our personal devotional lives. Rather, it breaks out in marriage and family, education and entertainment, science and arts, politics and law, business and economics. In each of these areas we are led either in terms of the kingdom of light or kingdom of darkness, obedience or disobedience. As Danie Strauss has noted, “It is impossible to speak of a neutral sphere within so-called common grace, where the total antithesis, for or against Christ, does not radically apply.”12 In all life aspects, in every activity, institution, and academic discipline, we will be for or against the Lord.

At the deepest level of our humanity, at the heart of our existence, all of life is a continuous response to the Word of God (Rom. 12:1) All the laws and norms Christ Jesus has ordained for creation which stand above us and yet are bound to us, call us to conformity to the Word! The matchless beauty of this gospel is that Christ’s Word is life and His total kingdom one of righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit.

1 Herman Dooyeweerd, New Critique of Theoretical Thought: Collected Works, Series A – Volume One, trans. David H. Freeman &

William S. Young (Jordan Station, ON: Paideia Press, 1984), 9. 2 D.F.M Strauss, “Scholasticism and Reformed Scholasticism at Odds with Genuine Reformational-Christian Thinking,” in Ned. Geref.

Teologiese Tydskrif Vol. 5, March 1969, no. 2 (97-114). 3 Andree Troost, What is Reformational Philosophy: An Introduction to the Cosmonomic Philosophy of Herman Dooyeweerd, trans.

Anthony Runia (Jordan Station, ON: Paideia Press, 2012), 166. 4 Herman Dooyeweerd, Roots of Western Culture: Pagan, Secular and Christian Options, Collected Works, Series B – Volume 15, trans. John Kraay, ed. D.F.M Strauss (Grand Rapids: Paideia Press, 2012), 115 5 Dooyeweerd, Roots, 119 6 Herman Dooyeweerd, Reformation and Scholasticism in Philosophy: Collected Works, Series A – Volume Six, trans. Magnus Verbrugge, ed. D.F.M. Strauss (Grand Rapids: Paideia Press, 2013), 46 7 Dooyeweerd, Roots, 141 8 Dooyeweerd, Roots, 141 9 Dooyeweerd, Roots, 143 10 Gordon J. Spykman, Reformational Theology: A New Paradigm for

Doing Dogmatics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), 94. 11 Herman Dooyeweerd, Wat is die mens? Cited in Strauss, “Scholasticism and Reformed Scholasticism.” 12 Strauss, “Scholasticism and Reformed Scholasticism.”

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