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jimpemberton
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Name: Jim
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|  Why was Christ necessary? The question might seem simple enough. Most Protestants might answer that we couldn’t save ourselves from our sins so he had to come to save us. The Romanist view differs in that Christ had to come to pay part and we had to pay part. Less-thoughtful Protestants and Catholics don’t have a clue why he was necessary. Really, it's the truth. Thoughtful Protestants might give a more refined view along the lines of Systematic Theology and penal substitution.
Van Til’s section on Christology starting on page 46 would seem to place him squarely in the Systematic Theology camp. This isn’t bad. He even integrates it with theological anthropology seamlessly within the context of presuppositional apologetics. That is to say that he points to Christ as Prophet, Priest and King where willful man assumes the role of prophet, priest and king for himself.
But one wonders presuppositionally whether the necessity of Christ is primarily due to man’s sin. In other words, was Van Til an infralapsarian? For the supralapsarian, God’s elect was part of the design of his creation. The infralapsarian holds that God’s election was made after the fall and therefore was not part of the original design of history.
So then if God’s election was infralapsarian, then Christ was necessary primarily for salvation. If God’s election was supralapsarian, then Christ’s work of salvation for the elect is necessary primarily as a revelation of God. That’s not to say that it wasn’t important for the salvation of the elect, for the necessity of Christ as a full revelation of the Father must entail the central point of his visible work – and indeed be the central revelation. Christ came to save the elect by design of all creation as the pinnacle of the revelation of the Creator.
For the record, I’m supralapsarian. Perhaps I’ll get into what the gospel of Christ reveals to us about God in some later article. The fact that Van Til doesn’t go into this here doesn’t really say anything about his -lapsarian views, but this is all about what I get out of reading Van Til rather than being a full exposé of what Van Til wrote here.
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| Isaiah was brought into the presence of the Lord. He issued his first prophecy against himself: “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the a King, the Lord of hosts!” (Is. 6:5 ESV)
The King James translates it “Woe is me! For I am undone…”
So what kind of awful revelation is this that someone would be “lost” or “undone”? In Revelation 1:17, John describes himself as falling at his feet as though dead. God tells Moses in Exodus 33:20 that no man can see him and live.
Surely a true vision of the Almighty is a great revelation of him, an infusion of the knowledge of truth so tremendous that one is overcome with one’s own guilt, even to the point of death. There’s a reason God feeds truth to us slowly through the process of sanctification.
I recently heard of an interesting psychological proposition called Depressive Realism (DR). It’s contested, but research so far suggests that mildly depressed individuals have a higher sense of reality than optimistic people. The scope of the research is limited by equating the cynicism of depression with pessimism, or by ignoring pessimism altogether. I’m going to explain the research thus far by refining this understanding.
This fallen world is difficult. It’s dirty, hard and deadly. But we have the industrial intellect to make it more comfortable. We don’t have to dig with our hands. We don’t have to walk for miles to get where we need to. We have machines. At the end of the day, we’re not sleeping on a hard mat on the floor. We can kick back in out recliner and watch TV for a while. We don’t need to cook all day every day just to survive. We have instant food. Pop a pizza in the oven or a meal in the microwave oven. Then we can climb up on a mountain of foam and air and snuggle under thick covers to keep warm from our cold air conditioner.
But the fallen world is spiritually difficult. While we have medications to make the pain go away, we must still face reality. And the reality is that people are sinners. This means that everyone has a nature that works to keep us estranged from our Creator. Not only that but this nature works to keep us estranged from each other. We are even internally estranged from ourselves bearing psychological conflicts that we hardly understand.
 But we have coping mechanisms that help us to not be completely undone. Pessimism is the act of weighing the negative heavily so that expectations are unreasonably low. This has the effect of making the world make sense and relieving internal conflicts. Expecting that other people are not to be trusted serves to justify treating them with friendly contempt. The fact that nothing anyone can do will please the pessimist allows the pessimist to blame others unreasonably. This is generally detrimental to the other person, but the pessimist doesn’t care. They happily go on their way having stirred up the trouble they figured was there to begin with.
The optimist, on the other hand, unreasonably expects great things of the world. They work hard to bring about healing and reconciliation that they would expect to see. They dive into constructive activities expecting great things and are pleased to have positive results that they can point to. They tend to ignore and avoid people and things they don’t understand because these things challenge their optimism. They like to deal with little pains that can be helped, but run from the big pains for which there appears to be no solution.
But reality is full of great pains. There is always the potential for great things to happen, but this is to be tempered with the fact that nothing in this world is perfect. No one loves perfectly. Nothing good happens without a struggle. There may be positive benefits from great difficulties, but we may not ever know what they are. In this way, the one who pursues a true understanding of the world may over time become depressed. We have a need for human contact. We have a need to feel useful. However, human contact is imperfect, and often exceptionally so. For most of us, the world wouldn’t notice if we were never here. We’re not important. We really don’t have much control over our lives.
Those who realize things like this can become mildly depressed. Unless tempered with positive experiences of quality fellowship, mild depression can yield a distortion of reality that becomes more severe over time. This distortion of reality is a falsely-weighted set of observations where the few positive experiences are all but ignored and the bulk of negative experiences are dwelt upon. Thus is the downward spiral of depressive conditioning.
So optimism, pessimism and severe depression all involve a denial of reality and true reality tends toward mild depression. Optimism and pessimism are otherwise healthy coping mechanisms while severe depression is the result of a lack of these coping mechanisms where good experiences are not normative.
We need, at the onset of any activity, some sense that the activity will likely turn out well either because we believe factors are positive or because we believe that things can turn out okay in spite of the belief that factors are negative. It doesn’t help to have the correct observation that whether factors are positive or factors are negative, we have little to no control over factors and therefore little to no control over the outcome. We are unimportant and people could care less because they are otherwise deluded.
In my previous post, I asked where the line was between initiative and presumptuousness. To some degree, initiative requires irrational presumption that is either optimistic or pessimistic. Depressive realism cannot yield initiative for there is no opportunity for which we know the outcome aside from what God has specifically revealed to us.
In this vein Isaiah, Paul, Moses, David, Mary and Joseph, Peter, John and many others took their cues from specific revelation. The problem is that we don't seem to have these revelations these days. So does that mean that we shouldn't do anything? Of course not. We have a clear command to disciple the nations. The specifics will be taken care of according to the gifts and faith that God has provided. I know plenty of people who "feel led" to do something or "step out in faith" and their works are greatly used. I also know plenty of people who"feel led" to do something or "step out in faith" and fall flat on their face in failure. However, all things work together for good, no matter what delusions God afflicts us with.
It may be that science will determine that depressive realism is a false proposition. But I doubt it.
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| No one has perfect motives.
All Christians are called to some function within the Body of Christ for which we are told we must take initiative.
Many initiate things that are contrary to their calling. This is presumptuous.
If we are to take the seat of least honor so that we are called to a seat of greater honor (Luke 14) and not think more highly of ourselves than we ought (Romans 12:3) then that presumes that we can think to highly of ourselves.
Do some not say that we would have a burning in our heart for our calling? That seems rather visceral.
So then, what's the line between initiative and presumptuousness?
I dare someone to answer (and I doubt anyone will).
There are two tracks of reason: Either: (1) we must have accountability from godly friends; or (2) God accounts for our presumptuousness;
...or both.
I heard a message recently that encouraged each Christian to have in their lives at any given time a "Paul" (mentor), a "Barnabus" (peer), and a "Timothy" (apprentice). What if a Christian lacks all three and lacks the capacity to obtain them? Doesn't God know we have this need and would provide? What if he goes for a long time without providing?
Well, if he doesn't provide then he doesn't require.
Therefore, either you are presumptuous as you bumble around trying to figure out what God wants you to do and trying a little bit of everything or you just have to sit back and never take the initiative on anything. That doesn't sound right, but there is no other conclusion.\
So I ask again:
What's the line between initiative and presumptuousness?
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| Van Til uses a term here that is explicitly descriptive rather than using the more nebulous term “free will”. He uses it in the section The Fall of Man on page 42. In this section, he investigates the substance of the fall. In other words, he addresses the question: in what manner was man disobedient to God at the moment of the fall? His answer: “Man made for himself a false idea of knowledge, the ideal of absolute inderivative comprehension. This he could never have done if he had continued to recognize that he was a creature. It is totally inconsistent with the idea of creatureliness that man should strive for comprehensive knowledge; if it could be attained, it would wipe God out of existence; man would then be God. And, as we shall see later, because man sought this unattainable ideal, he brought upon himself no end of woe.” The term I mentioned above as found in this quote is “absolute inderivative comprehension.” For will is founded on knowledge. Will is only free where knowledge is complete. The footnotes provided by editor William Edgar on this term reads thus: “In Van Til’s terminology, ‘comprehensive knowledge’ means exhaustive knowledge. ‘Absolute’ and ‘inderivative’ mean autonomous, without recognition of creaturely dependence upon the Creator” The way that I have quickly described it in debating Reformed theology is that there is nothing we know outside of God’s created order. God, being the Creator, has knowledge outside his created order. The word “inderivative” here means that knowledge that is outside of the created order. This is knowledge that is required for us to make decisions autonomously. As it is, even the knowledge we have is not exhaustive of everything IN the created order. While we can claim to make somewhat informed decisions, we cannot claim fully informed decisions. Talk like this could lead to a huge debate where those Christian brothers and sisters who hold to a non-reformed theology would think that I’m questioning their salvation for believing that they have free will over God’s sovereignty. I assure you that’s not the case. There is a difference between the academic proposition of libertarian free will and the functional rebellion of exerting what doesn’t exist. In other words, many who believe that they can make decisions using knowledge God didn’t give them aren’t necessarily practicing it to their spiritual death by doing so. Rather, the unconscious illusion of libertarian free will results in the sin of conscious desires that counter God’s clear commands. This in turn results in behavioral disobedience. But one can easily consciously hold the illusion of libertarian free will to be true and yet be submissive to God in intentional practice. So then, the sin of the fall being the illusion of libertarian free will, or “absolute inderivative comprehension”, foremost establishes presuppositional error. This is why Presuppositional Apologetics is historically aligned with Reformed Theology.
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| In my understanding of presuppositional apologetics so far, one of the lynchpin tactics is to challenge the presuppositions of the non-Christian and demonstrate first that they are borrowed from Christian presuppositions and second that without Christian presuppositions their conclusions cannot stand.
This applies particularly well to morality and Van Til discusses it briefly in the section on ethics. From page 37:
“There is no alternative to the Christian view of the will of God as ultimate but the idea of man’s moral consciousness itself as being ultimate… It is therefore the business of Christian apologetics to challenge the non-Christian view of morality and to show that unless the will of God be taken as ultimate, there is no meaning to moral distinctions.”
On a fundamental level, this is what happens in true evangelism. The non-Christian will always detect that he is internally conflicted with regard to his own state of morality. There will be some agreement that some “natural law” exists from which to derive moral judgments. However, it is a matter of submitting to the truth that any morality so held as true has been transgressed by the one holding it true. The conflict comes from self-justification for such transgressions. Why self-justify if man is his own moral arbiter?
So the evangelist presents the gospel as our need for salvation in the justification of Christ on the cross. Only the gospel of grace so places morality ultimately on the nature of God’s will. True submission to this truth and trust in God’s grace requires the recognition of God as the natural creator and arbiter of morality.
Therefore, evangelism is the highest practice of presuppositional apologetics and such draws its strength directly from the gospel of grace.
And I bet you thought that all this Christian philosophy and apologetical musing was merely academic.
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