Baggins Protests

For those who haven’t read it, you can find Lane Keister’s response to my previous blog post “Speaking Nonsense” here.

Last things first.  Keister ends his response with this bit of pettiness: “Since Gerety is banned from this blog, he will need to respond on his own blog.”

Does such a small man really deserve a response?  Probably not.  And, for the record, Kesiter gave me the left-foot-of-fellowship for defending justification by belief alone against those like Alan Strange, Ron DiGiacomo, Reed DePace and others on his blog who openly denied this foundational doctrine of the Christian faith.  For these men there are people who can be properly classified as “faithless believers” which is impossible.  When confronted with the logical impossibility of their position Strange and others appealed to “mystery.” At that time Keister complained:

I wonder sometimes if your faith is in reason and logic too much. In your reaction to Van Til, for instance, you reject any and all kinds of mystery in the Christian faith, as if our minds were as capable of understanding everything as God’s own mind. Is there any limit at all to what human reason and logic can attain? Is there a Creator/creature distinction? I’m not sure there is in your thinking. This makes you so sure of your positions that you look down on people who differ from you in almost any way. There is almost no charity at all when you differ from someone. It is what Scott Clark calls the quest for illegitimate religious certainty.

It is important to keep in mind that for these men the Scriptures teach any number of antinomies and insoluble paradoxes to which all men must bow.  This is the modern definition of Reformed piety.  This is also what these men mean by “mystery” and it is the belief that the Scriptures themselves defy logical harmonization at the bar of human reason.  So, naturally, when Keister says “reason cannot prove the trustworthiness of Scripture” I read it from the epistemological framework he is coming from.  Further, in the context of the Berkof quote claiming that the natural man can see only contradictions when he comes to God’s Word, Keister expands this by insisting, “Even the regenerate person still has sin clinging to his reason. How could any untrustworthy instrument prove perfection to be correct?”  Needless to say, I’m hard pressed to see what else I should have concluded other than man, regenerate or otherwise, is incapable of discovering the logical consent of Scripture.

So I’ll ask again, if one was to posit a contradictory Bible, even if only to the human existent, would it still be trustworthy?  Keister has nowhere addressed this question, and, besides, there is no evidence that he or the others at his blog believe Scripture is their axiom.

For example Reed DePace, who is a PCA TE and one of the moderators at Keister’s blog, argued:

We begin with God. We don’t presume God exists because the Bible is true. We presume the Bible is true because God exists.

God and not the Scriptures is their axiom, either that or DePace does not know what the word “axiom” means. DePace then goes into a discussion about circular reasoning completely oblivious to the fact that he has just begged the question. There can be no knowledge of God and we could know nothing about Him apart from His own self-revelation in Scripture.

DePace then says something that is quite good:

This is why the ministry of the gospel is never “positively” proving anything about God. Instead it is declaring what is true, and leaving the issue of proof up to the subjective work of the Spirit of truth.

However, what both Keister and DePace fail to grasp is that if the Scriptures in Berkof’s words “would therefore contradict itself,” we would in Clark’s words “know that some of it would be false.” Consequently, if Keister is correct we could have absolutely no trust that what Scriptures communicates to us about God is true.

This is one of the main reasons the gulf between Clark and Van Til can never be bridged.

Van Til taught that all Scripture is contradictory and to think in submission to Scripture is to think “analogically” which means, at least in Van Til speak, to accept and embrace contradictions in an act of Reformed contrition.  This is the heart of modern ersatz-“Reformed” piety.  Claiming these imagined contradictions of Scripture are only “apparent” and are instead “paradoxes” that are somehow resolved in the mind of God is also begging the question. Again, while these men present themselves as humble servants they are really spitting in the face of God as they belittle and attack the perfection, the logical perfection, of His inerrant Word.

Also, consider Berkof’s remarks again particularly in light of WCF 1:5

The Word of God presupposes the darkness and error of the natural man, and would therefore contradict itself, if it submitted itself to the judgment of that man.

The Confession says nothing of the sort. It states that there are many things that can move us to recognize that the Scriptures “doth abundantly evidence itself to be the word of God,” not least of which is the logical “consent of all the parts.” There is nothing in the Confession that even hints that Scripture presents itself either to the regenerate or unregenerate man as contradictory. The only caveat the Confession gives is that all these evidences, on their own, are never enough to produce a belief in Scripture as the Word of God. That requires “the inward work of the Holy Spirit, bearing witness by and with the word in our hearts.” Therefore, I see no reason why an unregenerate man couldn’t agree that the teachings of Scriptures logically “consent” and yet not believe them to be the Word of God. Perhaps the biblical authors were just good storytellers.

The real problem, the real sin, is that there are very few Presbyterian or Reformed pastors today who actually believe, much less teach, that for man at least, there is a “consent of all the parts” in Scripture.

That is why the “therefore” doesn’t follow in Berkof, but Keister extends even Berkof’s dubious conclusion to the regenerate man as well, so in that sense he may be taking Berkof out of context. Also, let me be clear, and to quote Clark again; “the law of contradiction cannot be sinful. Quite the contrary, it is our violations of the law of contradiction that are sinful.” Is that a position Lane shares? Not in my experience in dealing with the man. When push came to shove, and when faced with a seeming contradiction in Scripture, he opts for “mystery” every time and rejects even simple solutions to problems that the Vantillians call “paradoxes.” Keister seems to be saying that the Word of God can violate the laws of logic and still be God’s Word, but I hardly see how that would follow.

Now Keister has responded insisting:

I would simply say this: go back to the original post and see if I was saying that we can’t prove the Scriptures to be correct. I was NOT saying that we do not apprehend the Scriptures by use of our reason, fallen though it is (the Holy Spirit is required for us to understand the Scriptures: this is God’s answer to correcting fallen human reason). There is a big difference between apprehending (Gerety’s word is “discover”) God’s word by use of reason (which I think is essential), versus proving God’s Word is true by the use of reason (which I believe is impossible).

Let it also here be said unequivocally that I believe that all logic and infallible reason belong to God, and there is not one single contradiction in all of Scripture. Indeed, God, through Scripture, has given us the very source of logical and rational thinking.

I’m not sure what Keister means by “apprehending” the Scriptures by “use of our reason” as the question for him is this: Do the teachings of Scripture from Genesis to Revelation logically cohere to the mind of man or are we confronted in Scripture with what Scott Clark calls in his defense of Van Til’s twisted view of the Creator/creature distinction, “the mystery of paradox”?

He can’t have it both ways.

So, while I would agree that we cannot prove the truth of Scripture, for in one sense that would require that the truth of Scripture be deduced from something more basic which is impossible, the implication of his comments is that God’s Word would “contradict itself” if it were submitted the judgment of even the regenerate man.  Now, if that’s not what he meant, he certainly hasn’t done a good job of amending that perception in his repose to me.

In addition, what does it mean that we cannot “prove Scriptures to be correct”?  Does this mean we cannot demonstrate that the Scriptures, properly understood, present to the mind of man a logically consistent system of doctrines?   I hope not, but it’s hard to say.  Vantillian and Reformed Theological Seminary professor James Anderson said that the Christian in order to remain orthodox must “appeal to mystery in defense of their own paradoxical teachings” and that this is “a small price to pay” when considering difficult doctrines like the Trinity and the Incarnation.

On the plus side, the last paragraph is very good, but so much of what Keister has to say seems to undermine the good things he says.  Besides, wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that God “has given us the very source of logical and rational thinking” by virtue of creating us in His image?  After all, John said that Christ, the Logos or Logic of God, is that light that “lighteth every man” and not just the regenerate.

Keister continues:

The problem here is that Gerety equates my statement of the limited, derivative nature of our reason (which requires an external starting point precisely in order to be valid!) with irrationality.

That doesn’t follow either.  Are unbelievers incapable of making valid arguments?  Certainly unbelievers cannot account for logic apart from the external starting point of Scripture, but that doesn’t seem to be what he’s saying.

What Keister claims he is saying is this:

The only thing I was saying in the post (and what Berkhof was saying, as well!) is that Scripture is our starting point, and that we cannot prove a starting point, any more than we can build a foundation under another foundation. The proof is in the pudding, shall we say, and the pudding is one hundred percent logical, when God and Scripture are our starting points.

If that’s all Keister was trying to say then I have to wonder how he could arrive at that from Berkof who said that the Word of God would contradict itself if “submitted to the judgment of man,” admittedly natural man. The more important question is (besides the question of how many starting points does Keister really have as he now claims to have two), are the Scriptures “one hundred percent logical” to God or man?  Whereas I would say both since God gave us his holy and inerrant revelation so that we might understand, not to mention the Holy Spirit who is promised to lead us into “all truth,” Vantillians like Keister have always maintained the former to the exclusion of the latter particularly when it came to sticky questions like the Trinity, the Incarnation, the so-called “Free Offer,” God’s sovereignty and man’s responsibility, and on and on.  If Keister really believes that the Scriptures are “one hundred percent logical” and that they present to the mind of man a logical consent of all, and not just some, of the parts, is he willing to repudiate and denounce his friend Scott Clark who said:

Our faith is full of mystery of paradoxes to wit, the holy Trinity, the two natures and one person of Christ, divine sovereignty and human responsibility (who has flattened out that one but the anti-predestinarians?), the free offer, the true presence of Christ in the Supper, and means of grace (the Spirit operates through the foolishness of Gospel preaching) and that’s the short list.

If Keister is willing to repudiate and denounce Scott Clark and thereby publicly confirm his commitment to the proposition that the Scriptures are “one hundred percent logical,” I would be more than happy to admit that I may have misunderstood him.  I will even allow him to post on my blog.

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