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An Introduction to Reformed Dogmatics
A profound study of the nature and basis of religious knowledge that offers a valuable critique of European philosophy from the point of view of orthodox Calvinism. The only completed works are translated here: De la Nature de la Connaissance Religieuse and De Fondement et de la Specification de la Connaissance Religieuse. This title has become an influential and widely regarded Calvinist work, and is valued for its penetrating insights and strong Biblical emphasis.
- GenresTheology
412 pages, Hardcover
First published March 1, 1981
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August 29, 2018
This book in large part answered a question that I had been asking since the age of ten, when I first read C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity. There for the first time, not only did I see that atheism was absurd, but that right and wrong are demonstrably recognized by the human soul--and indeed the existence of God Himself could be easily deduced from that.
However, Lewis did not believe in inerrancy, and it left me wondering why I trusted the Bible. After all, even if we know good and evil exist and that some God exists, the trilemma is no good if it was just a cunningly devised fable--and a great deal of wisdom has been cunningly devised. Thereafter, I fell among Van Tilians who emphatically denied the abilities of human reason, and I pretty much kept trying to read evidentialists on this issue, but never got anything like a systematic explanation of why we believe Scripture. Worse, I occasionally got hit with the "testimony of the Spirit" argument, which never somehow seemed to grapple with the fact that Muslims and Mormons (and indeed Jews, one might say) make exactly the same claims.
Lecerf helped answer one of these questions, and left one for me to figure out. Lecerf explained that the reason we cannot have a rationalist fast-tract to the Bible or even to criteria by which we recognize parts of the Canon. This is because we need a certainty that is closer to the certainty we feel about the existence of good and evil or about the goodness of the natural world. The trouble with any defense of the Bible by reason is that you inevitably end up lost in the footnotes and thus, as apologetics has shown time and again, when your faith is based on that, any scholarship problem gets magnified to a crisis of faith, which must be repressed and answered with quick talking points (cue James White). Not only that, but if even an argument itself is the basis for your faith, then your faith is on an argument rather than a true apprehension of God.*
Lecerf, however, does not just rest on an appeal to inner testimony, and in fact he frames, perhaps simplistically, his arguments about the relationship between reason and Scripture on a broad narrative. In modernity, Lecerf says, innatism (the idea that ideas are all in our head) and empiricism (the idea that we just use deduction to figure out the world) both led to a crippling subjectivism that made human perception of the real world inexplicable. Theologians like Schleiermacher thus relegated "religion" away from the real of reason, deduction, and proof to the realm of wish fulfillment and emotional preferences. This is why religion is treated as something "deeply personal" which we really shouldn't talk about, and which nobody can be at fault for observing the wrong one, as long as they are being sincere to their own beliefs.
To get back, though, to the testimony of the Spirit. Lecerf argues that human beings have a sensus divinitatis, a natural sense of the divine, and that it is restored in salvation. This needs to be carefully understood: we do not sense or experience God as being present the same way we experience a friend or even the external world. However, even then, if we try to talk about God's absence or abandonment of us, we all know what that means. We all know that God seems distant at times and this is horribly unnatural. As Lewis said, it would be odd if we had a thirst for something that nothing in this world could quench. Thus, we do in fact sense God and when we read Scripture and are regenerated, we just recognize that this is God's speech. This doesn't necessarily mean intense emotions, as are often produced by movies, kisses, or chocolate ice cream, but every believer just knows that this is not mortal speech.
To sum up, Lecerf says that basically we know the Bible is the Word of God, because of the sensus divinitatis: we just know that this is God speaking, just like we know that murdering and stealing is evil and sacrifice and heroism are good. To the other question on how we can distinguish it from Judaism or Islam, Lecerf does not really grapple with them. I think, however, that we know that the real distinguisher between these religions is basically existential: we know as human beings that we are sinners, and we know that any attempt to live upright lives will always be overshadowed by the fact that our evil works will constantly threaten to outweigh our good ones. When we hear forgiveness, it speaks in the same way to our existential condition as Scripture itself--and that is not something that Judaism or Islam have.
Hopefully, this makes you see why I think this book by Lecerf is so valuable. I probably cannot recommend it for most people, since the prose is so dense that even I couldn't get how he refuted Kant and Schleiermacher, but it helped scratch an itch that I had been feeling for years and years, and it did so in truly beautiful prose that seemed to grow more and more eloquent the farther and farther it went. The last few chapters are especially good on Roman Catholicism and the reason why we don't believe in the Apocrypha.
In addition, the other great and indeed shocking thing about this book came in the chapters on Scripture. One chapter in particular left me scribbling all over the margins with exclamation points and "really?" comments. Lecerf, and apparently, Calvin all knew about the difficulties with harmonizing various accounts and took what, by modern fundamentalist standards, is a liberal approach that is fine with divergences of detail, such as those found in the Gospels. Again, the key here is this is not liberalism along the lines of Schleiermacher et al, because the text affirms exactly what it intends to affirm. This means that the current debates that Peter Enns, for instance, has stirred up, should not have been as melodramatic as they have been. It also means that there's a lot more scholarship to do and a lot more wiggle room on certain issues, Even though clear boundaries exist (and I would fault N.T. Wright, Hayes, Fishbane and sadly Leithart for exceeding these bounds), I think that there's a lot of room for contemporary scholarship and further study. Since we have our existential certainty.
*At the same time, Lecerf is clearly not Van Tillian, though he sometimes talks that way. Van Til was a Kantian subjectivist; Lecerf clearly has roots in the scholastics and affirms a critical realism which sounds a lot like Aristotle and Aquinas.
However, Lewis did not believe in inerrancy, and it left me wondering why I trusted the Bible. After all, even if we know good and evil exist and that some God exists, the trilemma is no good if it was just a cunningly devised fable--and a great deal of wisdom has been cunningly devised. Thereafter, I fell among Van Tilians who emphatically denied the abilities of human reason, and I pretty much kept trying to read evidentialists on this issue, but never got anything like a systematic explanation of why we believe Scripture. Worse, I occasionally got hit with the "testimony of the Spirit" argument, which never somehow seemed to grapple with the fact that Muslims and Mormons (and indeed Jews, one might say) make exactly the same claims.
Lecerf helped answer one of these questions, and left one for me to figure out. Lecerf explained that the reason we cannot have a rationalist fast-tract to the Bible or even to criteria by which we recognize parts of the Canon. This is because we need a certainty that is closer to the certainty we feel about the existence of good and evil or about the goodness of the natural world. The trouble with any defense of the Bible by reason is that you inevitably end up lost in the footnotes and thus, as apologetics has shown time and again, when your faith is based on that, any scholarship problem gets magnified to a crisis of faith, which must be repressed and answered with quick talking points (cue James White). Not only that, but if even an argument itself is the basis for your faith, then your faith is on an argument rather than a true apprehension of God.*
Lecerf, however, does not just rest on an appeal to inner testimony, and in fact he frames, perhaps simplistically, his arguments about the relationship between reason and Scripture on a broad narrative. In modernity, Lecerf says, innatism (the idea that ideas are all in our head) and empiricism (the idea that we just use deduction to figure out the world) both led to a crippling subjectivism that made human perception of the real world inexplicable. Theologians like Schleiermacher thus relegated "religion" away from the real of reason, deduction, and proof to the realm of wish fulfillment and emotional preferences. This is why religion is treated as something "deeply personal" which we really shouldn't talk about, and which nobody can be at fault for observing the wrong one, as long as they are being sincere to their own beliefs.
To get back, though, to the testimony of the Spirit. Lecerf argues that human beings have a sensus divinitatis, a natural sense of the divine, and that it is restored in salvation. This needs to be carefully understood: we do not sense or experience God as being present the same way we experience a friend or even the external world. However, even then, if we try to talk about God's absence or abandonment of us, we all know what that means. We all know that God seems distant at times and this is horribly unnatural. As Lewis said, it would be odd if we had a thirst for something that nothing in this world could quench. Thus, we do in fact sense God and when we read Scripture and are regenerated, we just recognize that this is God's speech. This doesn't necessarily mean intense emotions, as are often produced by movies, kisses, or chocolate ice cream, but every believer just knows that this is not mortal speech.
To sum up, Lecerf says that basically we know the Bible is the Word of God, because of the sensus divinitatis: we just know that this is God speaking, just like we know that murdering and stealing is evil and sacrifice and heroism are good. To the other question on how we can distinguish it from Judaism or Islam, Lecerf does not really grapple with them. I think, however, that we know that the real distinguisher between these religions is basically existential: we know as human beings that we are sinners, and we know that any attempt to live upright lives will always be overshadowed by the fact that our evil works will constantly threaten to outweigh our good ones. When we hear forgiveness, it speaks in the same way to our existential condition as Scripture itself--and that is not something that Judaism or Islam have.
Hopefully, this makes you see why I think this book by Lecerf is so valuable. I probably cannot recommend it for most people, since the prose is so dense that even I couldn't get how he refuted Kant and Schleiermacher, but it helped scratch an itch that I had been feeling for years and years, and it did so in truly beautiful prose that seemed to grow more and more eloquent the farther and farther it went. The last few chapters are especially good on Roman Catholicism and the reason why we don't believe in the Apocrypha.
In addition, the other great and indeed shocking thing about this book came in the chapters on Scripture. One chapter in particular left me scribbling all over the margins with exclamation points and "really?" comments. Lecerf, and apparently, Calvin all knew about the difficulties with harmonizing various accounts and took what, by modern fundamentalist standards, is a liberal approach that is fine with divergences of detail, such as those found in the Gospels. Again, the key here is this is not liberalism along the lines of Schleiermacher et al, because the text affirms exactly what it intends to affirm. This means that the current debates that Peter Enns, for instance, has stirred up, should not have been as melodramatic as they have been. It also means that there's a lot more scholarship to do and a lot more wiggle room on certain issues, Even though clear boundaries exist (and I would fault N.T. Wright, Hayes, Fishbane and sadly Leithart for exceeding these bounds), I think that there's a lot of room for contemporary scholarship and further study. Since we have our existential certainty.
*At the same time, Lecerf is clearly not Van Tillian, though he sometimes talks that way. Van Til was a Kantian subjectivist; Lecerf clearly has roots in the scholastics and affirms a critical realism which sounds a lot like Aristotle and Aquinas.
September 25, 2018
"Reformed dogmatics, like other Christian systems of theology, claims to be an attempt to express and formulate the faith in a scientific manner. Its aim is even higher than that. It desires to become an act of adoration before the mystery of the divine ways in their unsearchable wisdom; renouncing every proud attempt of theodicy. With head bowed in the dust, it would listen to the Word of God. It speaks when it believes that God has spoken, but remains silent in the presence of the silence of His Word. Here are its credentials. It has no others, but these should suffice to enable us, if it please God, to enter upon the field of dogmatic theology which our fathers so diligently cultivated."
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