What Plato’s Cousin Knew
Monday, June 3, 2013
Douglas Wilson
Theological disputes are often matters of great moment, even when
those outside the dispute cannot track with what is going on. I think it
was Gibbon who once displayed his ignorance by saying that the debate
over homousia and homoiousia was somehow over the letter i — which is pretty similar to saying the debate between atheists and theists is over the letter "a".
But at the same time, theologians are capable of talking past each
other simply because they are used to different terminology, or perhaps
because they are worried about the trajectory of those who use that
other terminology. Take, for example, the distinction between natural
revelation and natural law.
Now before opening this particular worm can, I want to acknowledge
that two positions represented by these phrases can be quite different
indeed. But this is a historical fact, not a logical one. I believe the
two essential positions can be collapsed into one another with 5 minutes
of questions.
Say you are comfortable with the phrase natural revelation.
You believe that the triune God of Scripture revealed Himself through
the things that have been made, and that this fact leaves all men
everywhere without excuse. It sounds to me like this is an ethical
obligation, and another fine word for natural ethical obligation would
be natural law. Honoring God as God is not optional, and it is therefore
law.
Say you are comfortable with the phrase natural law. Laws do not
arrive by themselves, coming from nowhere in particular, but rather laws
come from a lawgiver. And the giving of law is a form of communication, is it not? One might even say that communication reveals things — natural law is therefore a form of natural revelation.
No, no, no, someone will cry. Cornelius Van Til disagrees with John
Locke and Thomas Aquinas. And I cheerfully grant it. This doesn’t mean
that the hearts of the two positions are inconsistent. The God who
reveals Himself through the things that have been made, and the God who
embeds His law in the natural order of things, and even deeper in every
human conscience, is the same God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,
the Father of The Lord Jesus Christ.
I mean, the source of natural law is
what? The true God or another one? Right, it couldn’t be another one,
because he isn’t there — non-existence presents certain barriers. This
means that the source of natural law would have to be the true God,
there being no other options. This means the world and the Word are not
two books from two gods, but rather two books from the one and the same
God.
Now this does not mean that we somehow have to induct Socrates,
Plato, and Aristotle into our honorary Christian hall of fame. We know
too much about what they taught to put them on the “same page” with us,
as some overly charitable Christians have sought to do. But it does mean
we have to accept Plato’s cousin, the one who studied with rabbis at
Westminster East for a bit. There were plenty of pagans who knew about
the Most High God — Jethro, Nebuchadnezzar, Melchizedek, the king of
Nineveh, and others, not excluding Plato’s cousin. I called them pagans,
but it would be better to call them Gentiles — those for whom God
reserved a special place in His Temple. “My house shall be called a
house of prayer for all nations, but you have made it a den of thieves.”
When special revelation tells us that a hymn to Zeus — declaring that
we are all His offspring — is a hymn that is tracking with something
good, then special revelation is telling us that natural law, and
natural revelation, and special revelation provide us with a three-fold
testimony to the triune God. No autonomy anywhere, no neutrality
anywhere, and the ghost of Van Til, who haunts my dreams, is perfectly
happy with me. So is the ghost of C.S.Lewis, who visits me in my waking
hours. Not only that, but those two get along with each other now, and
this gives me the chance to say something I have been aching to say for
years, which is, “I think we’re all saying the same thing, really.” Of
course, you can only say this every once in a while, like every decade
or so.
This is just like the two kingdoms issue. I don’t care how many
kingdoms you think there are, I care how many kings you think there are.
I don’t care how many forms of “natural” communication you believe have
happened, but rather how many gods you think fit under the heading of
“Nature’s God.” There is only one — the true God.
The problem arises when advocates of either position adopt, for
whatever reason, a silo mentality — a silo that they will not allow to
connect at the top with what every form of creational law or revelation
must connect to, the Lord Jesus. Ardent Vantilians can give the
raspberry to natural law theorists because of party spirit. And natural
law theorists can reject the rigor of Vantilian thought because they
imagine a generic Enlightenment God spending eternity humming “Don’t
Fence Me In.”
But it all connects. All of created reality is Christian at the top,
and for the consistent Christian, Christian at the bottom. All of
created reality is Christian at the top, and for the Gentile, partial at bottom. All this is just another way of saying that natural law is just fine if Jesus is the Lord of it.
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