Bavinck's Philosophy of Revelation

[Music] welcome to Christ the center your weekly conversation of reformed theology now on episode number 571 my name is Kim did you see I'm pastor of Hope Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Grayslake Illinois got a really fun episode lined up for you today with a lot of excellent friends and wonderful theologians and scholars so let me start introducing to you our panel today we have back with us our good friend Dan Ragusa dan is a PhD student at Westminster Theological Seminary he's a calling in here on video from New York welcome back to ants great to speak with you and see you today thanks again good to be here as always yeah and we also have with us some of you watching on video already see in our video panels they're introducing first we have Corey Brock dr. Corey Brock who's pastor at First Presbyterian Church PCA in Jackson Mississippi he's also a faculty of Belhaven University teaching biblical studies welcome back Corey it's great to speak with you I don't know if we did video last time we spoke we only been doing this really regularly for the last couple months and so it's uh it's good to connect with you and to see what's going on we need to send you some books I've did you just move into your office you get a bus bust your chops too much but you're like you're like the antithesis of our other friend David Filson who you can't even take one step forward in his office because you're still settling in well well I hear you there but I'm sure that the books you have there every single one of those is in the original Dutch I'm sure right so another guy who's very fluent in Dutch Theological Dutch we're very happy to welcome our friend Nathaniel grace is tanto is a assistant pastor at covenant City Church in Jakarta Indonesia welcome back gray it's good to talk to you too great to be here we've got our good buddies on today to speak about some important theology today we're gonna be speaking about Herman Bhavik one of our theological heroes and one of his most important works philosophy of Revelation but now there's a new annotated edition many of you have probably seen it there have been some wonderful sales offered and some promotions through the Westminster bookstore Hendrickson publishers has been kind enough to work on this and publish this but our guests today have edited and introduced the book kori Brock and Daniel Grayson Tonto it also has a foreword by none other than James Eglinton one of the premier if not the premier bobbing scholar in the world and so this is a book that has been adapted and expanded from babak's 1908 stone lectures which uh most of them were presented while the stone lectures all of them were presented at the Princeton Theological Seminary but he wrote a few more lectures that were not delivered there so we're gonna get into that today and talk a bit about the history and about this important theology and philosophy of Revelation and speak about the wonderful annotations tremendous service to the church by doing this so thanks brothers for writing it and for joining us today before we get into the book itself we got just a few bits of housekeeping things to update people about of course the biggest thing on our plate is Daniel lingers a biography of gear hardest Voss which has been printed it's delivered many of you have pre-ordered the book and ordered copies after our episode last week on the subject on Christ the center just say no that book is still for sale you can buy it at Reformed forg it's as I'm speaking in stock at amazon.com they had previously sold out and they have ordered new copies from us they've processed those so right now there are more copies in stock we also have a Kindle edition that you can buy through Amazon and we're sending out a big shipment to the Westminster book store we're hoping to work on some special things through them working out some details there but very soon gonna have it available for sale and in our favorite bookstores so just like the the philosophy of Revelation book it's going to be available there as well so if you'd like to get a copy you could check out those different channels whatever a particular sales channel works for you and is best for you if you're overseas we know that we some trouble you know legally we're still working out with the tax accountant to get the books figure out how we can ship books internationally from our reform formed org store so that's the hold up there however Westminster and certainly Amazon can get the book to you no matter where you are and I noticed the number one sales location for our Kindle edition is Japan of all places so I'm always amazed at the Reformed people around the world interested in in reformed theology we're hoping that's going to be the case today so brothers let's talk a little bit then about about Herman bobbing we heard a little bit about bobbing from Danny Olinger who is talking about the relationship between Voss and Bob Inc and how those families were so closely related and familiar with one another but here we have another theological Titan and really is only perhaps starting to get his due we're very thankful for the Bhavik scholarship and how there's been a an increase a renaissance in it recently but it wasn't really until the 2003 that the first edition in English of babak's reformed dogmatix came out that people really started to become aware of him and I know at that time that many of the systematic theology courses at Westminster in Philadelphia for example started to use it as a textbook and now we're seeing folks such as yourself and and others that have now had access to Bhavik in English which has driven them only to study and investigate him further not just in English and what's available in English but even in the original Dutch well what can you guys say just in broad terms and in general regarding the state of bobbing scholarship is it an exciting time yeah definitely it's a certainly a very exciting time I think with James's work and of course before I before him Brian Matson's word coming out which I think you know considerably reshaped the the discourse involving scholarship for sure because I think now there's a greater recognition of the unity of balance thought that is organic motif cannot be reduced to something that merely came before it it was just a reproduction of idealist logic and there is no contradiction involving himself but rather that bobbing represents one unified theology and that is based on the organic motif and I think that we shaping a farm scholarship is really taking in two plates and there's there's other PhD students that are edible right now riding great theses involving in Christology and you know doctrine of God doctrine of sanctification so a lot of things are coming out of Edinburgh as well even as we speak 20:19 will be a great year for bobbing texts and scholarship we've got the reform to ethics that's about to come out three volumes and gray and I and James have been working on the Christian worldview which will come out next fall with Crossway and that will be the first time that text has ever appeared in English so there's a lot of primary sources for 2019 to be on the lookout for and in addition to that James Edmonton's been working on a new biography and it's gonna be excellent so 2019 should be a good year okay yeah tell us a bit about just you know your academic history of course we know is interacting with you but the listeners might always not be aware of you know where you studied Attenborough and how you ended up there and how this has kind of become and has been for some time really a hotbed and like at like a little Bhavan key an enclave of scholarship yeah yeah has become a school in itself that has a has a Bobby Conclave and that really began with James Eglinton who studied there did his PhD there under Paul Nimmo and David Ferguson and and from there left and tall lectured at babak's home seminaries theological school in Kampen in the Netherlands and was there for three years came back the year that - had a brother year that gray and I were coming into Edinburgh and a close tight-knit community has formed there around boggling scholarship and it was fun it was great yeah well that's that's tremendous I mean just you know for people like me this is just a wonderful time to be around to read the products of the fruits of your labor that I did you know the I love Bob Inc I mean I cannot read Theological Dutch I could spend the years of learning it and maybe I'd be better I know I would be better for it but you got to make choices and make priorities in my life you know as I spend time with my children or learn Dutch because the father the the Lord's will for me and that is pretty clear and my own desire as well but you know having having these resources in English is tremendously helpful even then you know with distance and unless you become a Babak scholar some of these things might be a little bit more difficult to access and we've seen that with the scholarship and how its growing gray as you mentioned you know reading Bhavik as a whole and reading his you know organic nature to to his theology is helpful because the tendency can be to pick up on certain threads in Bhavik and perhaps to have a I don't want to be overly harsh but maybe a myopic view or an incomplete view we're filtering what you're what you're receiving through a preconceived grid or lens and so having annotations from people who enlarge measure devoted their scholarly life to studying this man and understanding him deeply and fully is tremendously helpful so having the annotations is like a shortcut to being able to to do all this heavy lifting I just ask get you in the mix Dan I mean have you found it helpful you know similarly to the way I have and you're you're actually writing currently you know researching and writing papers in the field too but I imagine that it's it's wonderful to have new things showing up in journals and and through the publishers as well absolutely and I know even this specifically these lectures here the philosophy of Revelation I've been constantly encouraging people to read them but I'm always having to qualify it saying there they're in about a hundred years ago it's not exactly easy reading and there certain things are gonna be difficult so when I saw that the annotated version was coming out I was so excited so I've been encouraging other people to read it as well and it's actually gonna advance bombing study even as you guys mentioned in the introduction how it is some of his more mature thinking even coming after his reform dogmatix and so seeing how themes from his prolegomena specifically come out here in this philosophy of revelation is just really fascinating and and helpful for the church Cory and grey I wondered if you could introduce to us or speak a bit about the historical circumstances in the context for this book it's also a bit about the the history how did how did Bob Inc eventually end up in the States to work on these lectures you know what was going on at the time what was bobbing thinking about and and you know set the stage for us so that as we open up the book and to start speaking about the content therein we understand from from whence it came and why sure Bobbie had done a tour of the states in 1892 and Piper of course gave the stone lectures just several years before Bobby would Bobby was invited to give them for the end of the autumn the fall term at Princeton and 1908 and so he delivered them we don't have exact dates but he delivered them in the late fall of 1908 and he did a tour at that same time around the northern northeastern US delivering lectures and Grand Rapids and other other places Chicago for instance and it is some of his more mature thinking and one of the important points to know when you read the book or read the lectures is that he intended them to be an elaboration a sequel to his Christian worldview which is a much more brief brief argument in three lectures three chapters that is a compact version of the philosophy of Revelation if you will for years before that they were immediately translated into both English and German by boston's and others and by Herman Koontz in Germany and those translations were very well received at the time we're piggybacking on on some of that work that was done in 1909 Grady I mean that you want to have yeah I think that's bobbing who was very much interested in not only saying that revelation is you know what he says is the secrets behind all of existence but also demonstrating that to be the case and doing that in a very inductive fashion he made sure that he indicated that revelation solved a lot of the intellectual problems that we face but not in a deductive way as if he was just proclaiming that to be the case but rather by showing through textual evidence it's through very careful argumentation that if you just reason it out you will end up with the inescapability of revelation at the very end and I think he addressed some very deep currents in German idealism and even in an English scholarship and he made sure that he demonstrated that to be the case I'm even know as me motivation in writing the philosophy of over him mom yeah I was gonna ask you've already kind of him answered some of the question but you know more speaking from an historical theological standpoint why why are these particular lectures significant historically and more than that how how did they relate to uh babak's other works I mean where would you rank them if you had to you know in terms of contribution influence important significance whatever categories you want to use where would you place them in relation to some of the other works that that we might be aware of you know this is the second most important work that Bobby ever accomplished of course the first being reform dogmatix and some of the reason for it was that it certainly to be a philosophy after dogmatix one that goes in assuming the fact of Revelation it's both a revelational philosophy and a philosophy that has revelation as its object and that meant that in his mind dogmatix is prior to that activity for one another historical note is this is that the early is his early 20th century he's writing Christian worldview in 1903 and for he's publishing these in 1908 and he's wrestling at the turn of the 20th century with what he saw as the death of a certain type of modernism that was taking place in the continent and that style of modernism was one that he called for example evolutionary monism materialistic positivistic in terms of its scientific method he he saw a world that was reawakened to the possibility of revelation and one that had been touched again by Mia agonism and other things he saw a world that was open to talking about the invisible again and that was part of his motivation to address that in in scholarship you know in in the book really right early on just looking at Roman numeral thirteen we have in the preface to the annotated edition here Bhavik offers to the contemporary reader the most substantial alternative amid modern theologies of the 20th century and particularly the Neo Orthodox movement especially represented by the theology of Carl Bart that that's quite quite the statement and I think quite helpful and interesting to think about the challenges of our present day and the theologies that are reigning you know in one way shape or form even among people that might not name Bart or others as you know their theological champion we still see his program his style of theology his method kind of you know continuing to to wreak havoc among the Christian Church and then you have all sorts of other weak and feeble and perhaps even failed attempts to try to address his theology at the core people will tend to want to deal with the leaves without dealing the route but it's important to see here and especially with philosophy of Revelation how how Bob ink really can address figures like Bart and other modern theologies at a at a root level in a way that really matters and I don't know if everyone understands that about bombing exactly right and I think you know if I could put it this way the strategy of new orthodoxy and response to modern challenges is to simply say that revelation revelation is you know it exists in a completely different sphere of existence or it exists in a way that is completely uncontrolled by man which of course has some grain of truth in it and therefore untouchable by science and therefore in a discipline of study that is completely distinct from science and other meta makers loving actually argues and tries and this is taking on a hard task but also I think amenable tasks to demonstrate that revelation has significant scientific benefits and not scientific just in the you know English sense of the word that might imply simply the empirical sciences but the sciences as in all academic disciplines as the Dutch word relationship up which is in reference to any scholarly discipline and bombing actually it tries to say that revelation doesn't just not exist in a different sphere from all academic disciplines but it actually aids it in the way it's all I could have a physically able to flourish and as before I had a question along those lines for you guys I think along those lines at least but a Gordon Graham in an article that he wrote for the Calvin Theological journal had and made the point that the sort of implicit intellectual context for these lectures was actually me cheese philosophy and Nietzsche critiquing sort of a strawman version of Christianity as idea of resignation from the world and sort of just rejecting life in itself do you find like bobbing here in these lectures as she shows the necessity of Revelation for all these different disciplines as sort of countering that I mean how would you assess Graham's point of it being Nietzsche and having the implicit context for it yeah I think that's in the background so I think the Imam explicitly tackles materialism and the sense of on the one side you know denying the need for any kind of Telos for the existence of the descendants at any level and trying to say that if we go down route you'll actually find that you'll end up in all sorts of absurdities that actually been man then we call him back of Revelation but he's not just everything responding to you know Nietzsche's argument he's also responding to another strand I think someone like Edward von Hartman mmm-hmm in his philosophy of the unconscious who basically argued that when you study the world empirically you'll end up with all kinds of mysteries that cannot be answered unless you are we suppose an absolute unconscious underneath all of existence so fun Hardman appeals to this absolute to account for our perception of the empirical world how is it that our thought corresponds to reality and von Hartman also appeals to this absolute unconscious to say how do we make sense of the progress of history how do we make sense of movements because if we just appeal to you know um merely material mass inertia objects in front of us we can't really develop an account of knowledge or tell us or purpose or development that is intelligible and so I think it's seeing that kind of observation he's also observing you know arguments were showing and his fellow Schelling's philosophy of Revelation that's argued similarly for an organically connected universe and bobbing is basically saying look you know you guys are looking you guys are looking for the right things but you're looking for in the wrong places it's true being is grounded and everything is United together but we're not united together in an unconscious absolutes plaintiff on hardman or in an organic pantheism contra shelling or panentheism depending on how you read him but rather were connected because you know God has created creation in such a way that it conforms to an organic plan to the console of God and he bombing appeals to divine providence and the divine counsel that made all things connected in a in a way that that conforms to a pattern of unities and diversities and that's what we have subject that's why we can trust our knowledge that's what we can have notions of progress because you know creation as a plan of creation is united even though there are diverse parts in it and so we have we can avoid all kinds of reductionism so I think along with Nietzsche and you know other materialists see bobbing is definitely responded to the pantheistic mmm-hmm yeah it's helpful implicit would be the key word in Graham's argument and I think I'm right in saying that Bob Inc almost never interacts with Nietzsche and his entire corpus I remember correctly and I don't think there's a single reference to Nietzsche in glossary of Revelation and that's just coming off the memory certainly some of that's there in debate but it might be helpful just to say that the three primary opponents or those in whom with him he's in conversation are a neo idealism a early 20th century pragmatism and different strands of evolutionary thought Thomas Huxley post Darwinian monastic tendencies towards naturalism or his three primary opponents in the work I think a few references sure but I think that's exactly where he's more in the back illicit yeah I mean yeah it seems his name I'm just did you know I would have no idea but just looking at the PDF just a brief search there just the reference the names where his name appears just seemed to be lumped in very general statements with other folks you know so it doesn't seem like he's particularly expositing anything you know yeah there's so much here I you know a lot of little places I've got all sorts of questions they're just you've raised it I'd like to like to get the answers to just out of personal curiosity but you know speaking more generally an introductory you make an interesting statement about the title of the book and you know in English we have philosophy of Revelation but make the point about there really could be two different ways that we we can understand that Janet I will phrase in English which you know is certainly in a sense intended by Bob Inc in in the original what is bobbing really doing here in with the philosophy of Revelation and what's the fullness of that phrase to make sure we understand the project yeah yeah I think the way we can get at it is that I think bobbing is trying to trace out the implications of Revelation to other academic disciplines and I think he sees the task of philosophy philosophy revolving is a universal science in the sense of philosophy investigates the reason is aims and purposes of all the other academic disciplines and this why all the other academic disciplines need philosophy just as much as all the academic disciplines need theology he makes that claim in those places but so a philosophy of regulation then not only investigates that how you know how does revelation penetrate into the human consciousness but also the ways in which revelation impacts or it's required by the other academic Sciences so if a theology of revelation is an investigation of revelation from its dogmatic moves you know so scripture and what scripture says about revelation and revelation in terms of its source the Trinity and all those sorts of ways of thinking about Revelation a philosophy of Revelation asks a horizontal ask question when I think about Revelation what is the significance of Arts and profession of divine revelation from me trying to the other academic disciplines so when we think about the philosophy of Revelation we're not thinking about revelation in some general religious sense as if we're just conceiving of it you know a revelation we investigated by reason alone or something like that that's not what philosophy or revelation means but rather its revelation externalized so to speak or horizontal eyes how do I view revelation and its impact on those Sciences yeah I would say something like this the main the main point or the main activity I think he's the main enterprise is that he's allowing the fact of Revelation to discipline our investigation of the sciences and when he does that he's unveiling the fact that revelation makes makes intelligible many of the solutions that philosophical inquiry has has yet to solve for the unity the most God world and humanity that revelation when you allow revelation to discipline your thinking mm-hmm it solves problems that have been remain unsolved for history of philosophy we have you know James Brad I think put it really hopefully and we included this in our introduction where he argued that Bobby's argument is at the end then no matter how fragmented reality seemed to be and how illuminating it could be to explore it as such in the veil of human relativity bobbing was sure that it all cohered and absolute and that human life could proceed only under that assurance and I think Madden was demonstrate that with particular philosophical and empirical problems well you see definitely in ways how much Van Til would have been dependent upon bobbing and Vause and others like him there was steeped in the same tradition and how critical and essential revelation is to his theology really Bhavik is really lurking in the background to instruct Van Til and his revelational epistemology and he's merely just kind of applying basic reformed theological categories to the discipline of apologetics you could do the same thing to all sorts of other fields as we see you know Bhavik interacting with with many other things here I was curious on a historical point you know knowing babak's times his dates and then um you know understanding a lot of the milieu that Van Til was reacting to with idealism and pragmatism how much Bhavik was familiar with some of the same figures or at least the undercurrents of the british absolute idealist movement for example you got a guy like Bernard bowls and cue 1848 to 1923 and then many of the other figures of that ilk really kind of presenting that same kind of notion of that that personality even if it's an unconscious that kind of binds all of reality together that without without this thing that kind of keeps everything integrated and then without having knowledge that corresponds to that reality we just we just can't have knowledge so bobbing just really in a way seems to explicate you know the the the impossibility of the contrary for all of these things kind of in kind of the same way that the Van Til does with the problem of the one and the many you know he's not always really super precise or the way he describes that or working as an analytical philosopher on some of those things which kind of maddened some philosophers in terms of what he does but he's getting at this general basic problem like how do you explain for unity and diversity in the world and and how do we explain things like us knowing when we when we don't know everything how could we have some sort of a foundation for anything and that's then from that he ends up with his you know his teaching and principles of there are no brute facts and things like that you know bhavanibabu covering the same territory and in a way maybe the until is cribbing off of bombings lessons here and just developing them in some new directions i thought forget Matson's book why not rather rather an article that he wrote because when he was making the point where we're Van Til and critiqued Babak on certain certain points regarding his realism and stuff that they were actually close to her friends then pen till even thought I'm at times and and there's clearly the the influence of bobbing on on pan/tilt thought I at least I see that do you guys ever come across areas where the Bob ink was dealing with those figures the British side of things or not or is it mostly all continental yeah I think you get some passing references yeah to green and maybe Boston to you but you know it is interesting I mean I think it's just off my memory here there were portions in the philosophy of revelation that refer to the absolutes and he actually used the English like the absolute so it's all Dutch absolutely of this absolute anything in English oh that's a nasty witch and the no reference like he doesn't even know anything you know but in most other cases when he talks about the absolute Hughes as the German yes and he would refer unconscious and you you know when he's referring to von Hartman he's using the German under boostin you know so it's it's not that so he's very I think soft consciousness references and who we might be able to talk about this more but his references are markers using very precise you know terms firm strata markers at all so I would think that when he referred to the absolute in the English he did them with intent yeah I think I know but you get intense it but I think it definitely is primary focus was to come through huntin yeah it's worth probably adding just that's one of the main reasons that we undertook this project is we noticed that when we were doing our dissertations on Bobby we noticed how often throughout his corpus he switches languages in the middle of his prose and the very often writes and German by far the most in addition to his Dutch but also French and English as well from from time to time and often times it will be quotations or brief phrases that you would find directly and another thinker that are never cited or when that gets translated to English without any reference it's impossible or difficult at least to tell exactly what he's trying to do he's the signal to the reader exactly who he's thinking of who he's working from in an age that had of course different different standards of citation and we in our new it wanted to highlight that throughout well it's also with a word that is used by many philosophers like even if we didn't cite it but all of a sudden I just whipped out the word da sign right you know who I'm referring is in citing her you know and even though that's a foreign word no no one else uses that philosophically in the way that he does it's his term but yeah with absolute who knows sorts of people fascinating interesting a little tidbit is that a scoop does that qualify as a theological scoop that we breaking breaking news here I don't know let's do it okay that's really good well let's start talking about some of these lectures I mean you know and in terms of the things he's focusing on the first the idea of a philosophy of revelation we've been touching upon that but oh what are some things that you to find editors would like to to highlight regarding this book or some perhaps some gems and here that you think are particularly worthy for for the people that are going to be picking up and reading this book for the very first time I had a quick question maybe before you jump into that where you speak about this subjective side of Revelation and and even though you have revelatory pressure I think it's a I think it's poppings phrase would you like to explain the acts I think we also think of Revelation as something external to us but thinking about this subjective side of Revelation might be really helpful so if you want to explore that it's a great question yeah I think that's something that is uniquely romantic involving that bombing is introducing it to dark the doctrine of general revelation so bombing her from the classical reformed understanding of general revelation namely that God has revealed himself in our conscience in the moral order and with God and the external order has revealed to us you know something of his greatness it's evident and so forth but I think he's also on top of that adding what you know he said it's the subjective side of Revelation hmm leave the imprint of God's revelation in our consciousness and I actually argued in a recent article in the our jst that for him this revelatory pressure on wants consciousness it's felt rather than thought mmm but bobbing feeling is not a separate faculty from knowing rather he argued in his principles of psychology which hasn't been adequately translated yet he argued there that feeling is actually a function of the knowing faculty so if you you know oftentimes we think about you know the faculties of our minds and we or our being so we think there is feelings and emotions on the one hand and then there's things and reasoning on the other and knowing is just reasoning and feeling it's not reasoning bobbing actually argues there that what you feel contributes to knowledge just as much as thinking and so realm actually impacts us in our consciousness so he's got some very interesting examples in that book where he argued that you know you're often you often are aware or are you know you know certain things that you're not actually conscious about so he talks about walking around building instead of is very familiar to you you know where these pillars are located and you might be lost in some other on thought you know a train of thought but you're you're walking over these buildings and crossing these rows I said you know you knew him but you never you were never little thinking about them and I think that's just an interesting example that he knows and in the floss you have revelation this is gonna come out especially in lecture 3 in Revelation or philosophy where he argues that one knows God not simply by thinking about God propositions about God but rather one knows God because we have a feeling of absolute dependence and that's something that Cory could talk about because he poses it's hard to sir tation on that you know yeah at the heart of the argument in philosophy of Revelation he he begins by saying that the possibility of engaging in any science or in any art depends upon the revelation of the self to the self that the first thing that happens to all of us is that we awaken in our lives to being a self to having an ego to being an I am II and his argument using our marker is that that consciousness the self consciousness of self being self being able to be an I in any activity that we perform is the first proof the first the first fact that reveals that revelation and faith is at the heart at the bottom of all scientific activity and endeavor and maybe we I don't know if you want to get into the details on exactly how he picks up on the feeling of absolute dependence there it's a little technical but by all means let's go okay YUM that's what we do yes follow the thread yeah so in Chapter three for example he he picks up exactly on schleiermacher phrasing he uses it even in the German he refers to immediate self-consciousness and the feeling of absolute dependence and he talks about our immediate self-consciousness by what she's referring to our awareness of self as self which is not something we come to through the reasoning process it's not an empirical discovery it's something that arrives to us in the domain of feeling which gray explained just a moment ago feeling is an aspect of knowing foreboding in his psychology it's a it's a way of knowing it's not a reference to the emotions nor was it for schlau marker either it's a way of knowing and what he's saying is that in our immediate self-consciousness we realize ourselves to be dependent right first we realize ourselves to be dependent on other things in the world we we know that we cannot be without our mothers and we know that we cannot be without all sorts of things that our own personal identity is dependent upon things in this world but immediately as soon as you start to process this and realize this you also know that all of these other objects in the world are also dependent they are dependent upon you they get their identity as well from your existence and so what he's what he says using Schwalm walker as one of his examples of how god works and how God reveals himself in the immediacy of self-consciousness is that we immediately all through revelation because of God's revelation are aware that there must be that there is that upon which we depend upon absolutely beyond all relative dependence it's the very bat from which we get our own consciousness our own selves in other words he's arguing that the self is a primordial gift and it's a it's a common grace if you will and that it the realization of self the faith in the existence of my own consciousness is the ground of all other activity in the world we couldn't do anything else without it and it's the first place that God reveals himself in the giving of that gift to the human consciousness the human consciousness to human consciousness so how do then how then is that qualified or understood you know through something like the imago Dei the image of God versus what we might find with des cartes indubitable for example well I mean I'd have to brush up again on Descartes it's been but what I can say kind of for him just I guess is just this necessary foundation but it's something he arises at from that process of doubt right right so that's very different I I'm just curious what your thoughts I'm not trying to ask a trick question but you know manok - it just seems much you know he's picking up on maybe a tiny grain of truth that that Descartes understood that you know I can't doubt my own existence I in a sense like if there's one thing I can't doubt is that I'm thinking and I'm the one doubting we understand that you know apart from a biblical worldview in a biblical understanding de cartes not really you know offering a proper properly qualified theology as revealed by God but bombings kind of getting seems to be at least as you're describing this seems to be getting at it the same kind of investigation truth but doing it in a way that's a lot more consistent with the biblical witness and and naturally understands things according to revelation and the reason we have this awareness and knowledge it's a gift of God and ultimately a function of or at least attendant to being made in His image right I mean it well you said it I mean you said I think you gave a great answer the the difference between Descartes and Bobby on this point is that the only bobbing is arguing that the only possibility for explaining for the self the realization of self as self is revelations the fact of Revelation it's recognizing faith in God at the bottom of all possibility of human knowing acting willing and for him that that begins psychologically in and feeling and of course there he's picking up on that very german of tradition in the early 19th century ready everything yeah I think it might be helpful to go over one of Bobby's arguments you know it I think if chapter 3 laid out his basic definition of how revelation came about psychologically and I would even argue logically and chronologically you know and I think in chapter 4 or 5 and so on he actually tries to demonstrate how that actually helps the other sciences so it might be helpful to just take a look at chapter 5 that's just as one test case you know Revelation in history yeah how he tries to concretely show that revelation is helpful to the discipline of history at this point so in Chapter five in philosophy of population you know his basic strategy is showing how revelation is necessary how revelation is helpful to generate you know the productivity and the academic sciences is that you know if you think with Revelation and with God as we trying to mean in the back of it you will avoid all kinds of reductionism and uniformity I think that's his basic strategy he would argue that does not begin with the reality of God's revelation will end up reducing the phenomena with which to study or the phenomenon that they are studying so and in history I see it's a big test case for that so in Chapter five in Revelation in history he argues that the scholarship of history in his day ends up attributing to history a monistic doctrine of causality that's page one and a monistic evolutionary conception of history so a monastic doctrine of causality and a monastic evolutionary conception of history let's page 101 so yeah so he argues that Marxist that is a clear example of that because Marx basically argues that the way to understand history is by reducing it to class and economic conflict that's the key to understanding all of history so why does history evolve the way that it does why is history shifting the way that it does well understand class and economic struggles and you found all of history and loving talks about Schopenhauer and other thinkers that might divide you know all of history under very distinct and concrete stages of development as if you know history could be neatly divided like that well bobbing are used that if you begin with revelation however you don't have the temptation to reduce all things to one Bearpaws or you know successive stages of neatly compartmentalized phases of evolution you know nearly you know if you think of a history that way bobbing actually are used in a very efficient way then you will end up arguing that your culture is the most developed kind or one specific race one specific philosophy as the master philosophy that alcohol of history had been pointing to from the very beginning and bobbing argues that that that's a kind of heuristic triumphalism that he actually noticed is part and parcel of a bunch of terms of philosophy first again Yesi a stuff we'll wait for him to call back in again well do want to jump on something yeah go ahead go ahead Dan oh yeah because he had used the language of side by side or one after another which is I think language that appears throughout the lectures if I'm if I'm correct so for example in the floss in the revelation history chapter he says that in all these distinctions so all these various diversity that we find it's it's forgotten that the relations and conditions which are thus placed in a series one after another exist throughout the ages side by side in different peoples and even within the same people in different strata of society so my question Cory I guess now since the gray is gone is is that slide by sign language almost like organic language in the sense of that they're existing at the same time rather than in a sort of you nickel or sequential way do you find that like his language of side-by-side being significant throughout the lectures that's interesting IVA never come back that's an inside yeah well thanks yeah we're thanks grey sorry about that technical problem Cory Cory's Cory's answering a question here so just jump on him well ready my can help with this he then pointed out that he's frozen again no there is good oh my goodness do you think switching to audio only might be better or that's up that's up to gray I mean we can give it one more shot with gray if if you get locked up again maybe next time just call in the audio and we'll just we'll that'll save you some bandwidth but go let's go with it while it's working go ahead Cory pointed out a theme of my teeth were bobbing uses the language side by side in a way tight yeah do you have thoughts on that so where was I cut off just now you know it was post your marks comment yes right yeah so yes sir bluffing is arguing that if you have revelation in the back of your philosophy of history he would argue that you are free now to see history not as if it's one phase following another but rather all kinds of phenomena are always pre-existing and coexisting with one another side by side and that's an important phrase you're right in pointing that out so he argues that when you look at the ancient peoples you actually see a lot of technological advancements and philosophical depth so it's not as if you know you had you know philosophically a maturity and then you ended up with philosophical maturity and you know that he says that does an argument that is simplified by a lot of German philosophy that they always typify some kind of German philosophy as the master philosophy toward which all of history is pointing to but rather if you now just simply you know let go of the desire to reduce all of history under one cause or one evolutionary conception you were actually free to look at the expansiveness of all of history and the expansiveness of all of human civilization and he argues very specifically that revelation is necessary for that he argues that if you have revelation and if you have a divine counsel then you recognize that history is what he says it in a true sense truly possible a history of the world and history of humanity in which all men all peoples may all creatures are embraced and are held together by one meeting thought namely by one counsel of God and so because God's counsel is rich and Multi formed and holds all things in unity and diversity you would expect that in human life in all of human history a rich phenomena of different things with what Quakers a side-by-side yeah a couple he connects it nicely on page 114 to what we've already discussed as well the relationship between the unity of history and the unity of the self the ich heights the I&S of the self he says just a soul and body and man are not genetically one and I've not originated from each other and yet form in the ego the eye of man an inner organic unity so the matter stands with every man and every people in history and also with all humanity so he connects is really nicely there with what we've already been discussing that's tremendous yeah that's really powerful you think about that that philosophy of history you know contra folks like Arnold Toynbee or Marx as you mentioned momenta s' it's so much richer than what the you know dominant we're prevailing academic models might present yeah I think it's specifically hunting if you think about what's gonna happen in the 1940s when perpetuated by you know Nazi Germany and I think violent was very recent that that might be won't be happening that it's this way that if you conceive of history as simply a bunch of successive phases that anticipates one particular nation for one particular people as the most advanced then you're gonna end up reducing all the other peoples and what we need a philosophy of revelation that chemically do justice to the diversity of people and the diversity that we find industry and it's worth saying he does make exactly those predictions in Chapter ten revelation a feature where he ties his philosophy of history to the possibilities of eugenics the coming 20th century and says some shockingly brilliant things by way of prophecy in terms of what with him Germany yeah guys have consequences right there's no accident go ahead Dan here okay naps so in at the end of this chapter of Revelation in history he of Christ as being at it's very center and if for example he says but think Christ away for a moment with all he has spoken and done and wrought immediately history falls to pieces it has lost its heart it's kernel its center its distribution and so on from here so what role I mean because then I guess that's getting at their part of the relationship or the organic organic relationship between special revelation general revelation but now and what a way to create a bit bobbing see Christ as the center of this history and what way does it fall apart if we if we lose Christ yeah I think we sorry well he mentions the fact that when we start considering not merely the gift of general revelation but special special revelation that we realized that Jesus Christ he he says is himself history that he is the kernel in the true content of all history Christianity summarizes is itself history and that's what the gift of special revelation offers that's more than distinct from general considered without its organic unity was special look Greg go ahead yeah I think that's exactly right and another layer on top of that is his understanding that crisis the organic head of the second humanity so he argues that the first head of course was Adam and all of humanity was organically contemplated in Adam and the second organic head is Jesus Christ and without you know by definition or an organism is something with conforms to the shape of the unity and diversity and without Adam and without Christ Baba contends you'll only have disparate you know particulars and not really a unity University and especially when we're thinking about history where it's not just you know surveying natural phenomena but you're actually looking at the history of people who's together you need to understand them in terms of who their federal heads is you know you need to I be able understand them in terms of we down to fish in terms of the sins of Adam in terms of what Christ is doing to Amita manatee so I think that's what he meant there as well thankful so MIT so would he see it like an organic relationship between what we might speak of as redemptive history and just history in general they're not so much separate categories but but there's a there's even a priority maybe to the redemptive history or a centering of it yeah I think there's definitely only a pragmatic distinction I think in between the two you know we've argued that general and special revelation each require one another to be intelligible and I think he meant that in a real way that they're both to be connected in such a way where you know any distinction that would be made between them needs to take into account during a caring community yeah he says that if you think Christ away for even a moment if you get if you forget Christ for even a moment then history loses its heart it's Colonel its core and becomes nothing but a distribution of random races and people groups acting in time that Christ is the unifying center of all peoples and therefore long history may be something you know is helpful that I thought I saw forgetting with pagers on maybe 83 or so regarding the natural laws and how bobak makes the point that these natural laws assume or are only really valid within a theistic worldview which seems to be very similar well actually it's the question when he's speaking with these natural laws is he's thinking specifically of gravity or something like that or does he have more even of like causality and and various other things in mind [Music] it sounds very similar to say with with something that been till would argue for regarding the natural laws where they're where they're valid the Christian even certain evidences for God but they're only valid within a theistic worldview they assume that to begin with to evolve ankle for example we'll say that these natural laws they got a law assumes a lawgiver and so there has to be something behind these laws so would I guess to what extent is he using the idea of natural laws like what are these laws in that specific text and not specific acts it's just important to know that he uses the phrase the laws of nature and and and not what is often referred to as the natural law um so you you said it yourself I mean there he's referring to the actual fact of nature in motion and God's upholding the of seed time and harvest and gravity and Newton's laws as we described them etc and not referring in this moment it leads to the impression of the moral order upon human consciousness that is often called not the natural law but is there more to it than that as well like expanding that you know even to the things like causality I guess that would be included but I kind of get I get where you're coming from Dan in terms of the broth of the breath of that phrase I guess there's a way that we could kind of think of it in a contemporary scientific setting and you know law is very specific thing for a natural scientist and and it's really helpful to clarify that he's not at this moment speaking about natural law amidst current discussions on that subject that's you know Romans 1 etc that's really important but how broad is is it is it you know God's overall coven ental sovereign care over the whole world or is he speaking maybe to a subset of those things that might be the more you know not not involving use of the term science or scientific but in terms of how we might understand the subject right well I mean I just wrote on chapters 4 and 5 for a paper that I'm about to present in LA so this is providential that this camera but in Chapter facili so when he talks about natural laws and laws of nature there I think he does have in mind not just you know specific laws like gravity but also general laws like you know even notions of causality you know as brought that for sure and I think what he's trying to argue in that specific chapter is argue against two kinds of reproduction isms again as well so the first kind is mechanistic with closet allottee you know we're we're you know the you know people like Ernst Heinkel or other materialists would argue that causes are really an aggregate you know of different parts moving around together of physical parts so there's a kind of physicalism materialism there but then on the other hand here are you use against this what he calls vitalism that argues that causes are not really an aggregate or is not really the of an aggregate of material parts coming together in unique ways rather that underneath the material parts there's an energy a force a substance and again he brings up Edward von Hartman there another one that dude my sub is Bill hawal mm-hm and both of these figures are you that you know materialism can't make sense of causality you know you put matter on top of one another you can't say that they cause one another or you mean humor can't you know the the critical subject for COD just imposes it on the bare phenomena and Hume just from for a lack of a better more nuanced way to put it just you know it's imagined so one Heartland world would argue that you know without quoting contour Hume but they would argue in similar ways that all you would have it's just one particular on top of another in particular without any real activity connecting one to the other so the argue that there had to be some kind of vital energy vital activity and bond Hardman ultimately the unconscious absolute commercial some you know incomprehensible force or energy and bobbing is arguing neither can ground a coherent notion of causality or developments are of you know organic growth in a way that is intelligible materialist of course can't make sense of it for all the reasons finalists say but vitalists on the other hand also can't really Express what it is they mean by this unconscious how do they know that this unconscious actually even exists how do they know that this energy is even there underneath than the material things they can't make sense of that and so bobbing actually lands in page 79 you know he argues there that revelation actually allows you to hold both things in tension you don't have to reduce matter or G and you don't have to reduce energy into matter but rather both are making valid observations but they're just not making it in a you know in a way that is able to preserve the two things together in a unity and diversity kind of fashion so you know then you you asked about is there more that unity saying that it's only valid under a theistic framework yes but I want to be precise there and I have a section of my thesis that compares bombing and Kuiper on this and I think for kuiper if the unregenerate man doesn't really know science and the regenerated man know science bombing is making a simultaneously more modest but also a more um but also at the same time a very ambitious claim he's making the more modest claim because he's saying unregenerate science can produce real knowledge he would actually say that yeah it's my knowledge it's not it's one side enough which is a reductionist kind of knowledge it but still real knowledge they're making observations about good things about phenomena look at it's not her organic knowledge so buckling are used that the difference between unregenerate knowing and regenerate knowing it's not between ignorance and knowledge but rather between mechanical and organic no and I sense that I think Van Til is probably going to side more with Kuiper rather than with Bobby on this point yeah he has that psychological epistemological distinction which is maybe not the most helpful use of terms but for him they would say you know unbelievers do know things truly but they'd but not rightly in in some way it can end up being kind like an ethical thing but obviously the bolete unbelievers can no two plus two equals four but they can't understand it rightly and upon the proper foundations and therefore unbelievers be you know being darkened in their understanding don't know anything correctly and rightly because they don't subject their knowledge to to the trying God and they can't account for it because they try to explain their own knowledge you know in an autonomous way so that's what he means by that and and so the critics that want to say well they until you know says unbelievers can't know anything clearly they know some things therefore Van Til is wrong that's not exactly what Viet it was talking about but it isn't tremendously interesting to compare Bob ink and Van Til perhaps on this revelational epistemology and to think how interest you know and then you could also bring in Warfield and kuiper on this it sounds like a sounds like a book waiting to happen between psychology and epistemology is very helpful I think that's enough and I wonder you know again so lobbying argues that revelation happens in the sight so that that's that's interesting yeah yeah soul therefore those you know Greek you know Suki right yeah yeah right very good well brothers wanted to this has been a tremendously fruitful discussion I would like to follow up and and talk more about this on into the future perhaps we could evolve some other folks to to get some different questioners coming at you and but I'm always I'm always not just satisfied but just it's just happy to just pick your brains on these subjects because it's it's really helpful but before I let you go I wanted to ask about the cover and you make a comment about this of them get the pronunciate the Dutch pronunciation correct but I believe piet mondrian and the artist that you're using in terms of what what's on the cover of the actual printed book could you speak to him what's the relationship and really what's the statement being made not only in his art but also in the inclusion of his art in the cover of this particular book well my beyond was a Dutch painter about 20 years younger than Bob Inc and if you look at Mondrian's early career he was mostly painted in the abstract a lot of landscapes and things like that and it's regularly noted that his transition to cubism was largely derivative of his relationship to theological exploration he was into the Theosophical primarily and and a lot of that had to do with his relationship to dutch reformed theology of what she was very much embedded in the culture of the late 19th early 20th century and has turned towards primary color sharp line cubism and things like that I think we have a quote in the book where he says he wrote that for him that the spiritual began to merge with the secular and it became more apparent that the spiritual did not reside merely in religious subject matter which is a very Dutch Reformed Theological way of thinking about the organic nature of reality yeah Greg you had something that yeah I oh you know we oh yeah Robert Cavallo thanks here for his insights because that's really his field of study here he was a faculty member in Biola University story honors Institute and he studied you know the relation between bobbing and aesthetics and the arts specifically and he made the very interesting insight that we included in the note there that Mondrian's returned two primary lines and basic colors it's a desire to indicate that no matter how complex visual aesthetics get you can't get behind primary primary colors and and basic lines and number words basic lines primary color deucedly yeah it's beautifully there so no matter how complex your artist art is it's always going to be composed of that so he wants to return to these basic forms to communicate that art to show that this is all this what's behind the more complex and I think that's like that's the nice way of putting it and we owe Robert Cavallo thanks there you know that's tremendous I really appreciated that and just I wouldn't have thought about it I mean I the the book caught my eye oh so that's an interesting cover but then when I read it I thought wow this is a really tremendous interesting thing to think about and I think for a lot of people unstudied such as myself you might see a work of abstract art such as that and think well that that looks simple well that's that's the point there's a lot more to it and under understanding what the artist is attempting to communicate and the philosophy I can't say every artist is self-conscious that way but we appreciate those who are doing art all right exactly exactly well Corey and gray it's been it's been a pleasure to speak with you and Dan thanks also for joining us but the brothers thanks for for editing this book and I can only say I'll speak on behalf of the everyone at reformed forum and all the listeners thank you and we hope to see more from you in the future on this subject and others thank you anytime we're gonna have to have you back very soon and hopefully we could do a lot more in the field and talk about these things because I think it's on the cutting edge and definitely it's needed in terms of meeting the theological challenges that are out there for the church and Bob incas is certainly somebody we want to we want to plumb the depths of and understand as much as we can and it applies insights to our present day he's well worth the time so you can visit us online at reformed forum org people want to follow up you can find out information about all of our programs as well as a way to get in touch with us you can you can order the voss book but if you'd like to order this book philosophy of Revelation a new annotated edition edited by our guest today and with a foreword by James Eglinton it's published by Hendrix and publishers but you can get a copy of it I'm looking at the website right now on sale for $19 and 83 cents at WTS ebooks.com WTS books calm level link to that in the episode description also on the website at Westminster is Herman Bob Inc on preaching and preachers which believe is a edited and put together translated and edited by James Eglinton that's available there as well a good deal on that for just over 15 bucks you can grab them both if you missed out on the killer sale they had a week or two ago I think though both were running at 50% off or so but you can still get them in an affordable price WTS books calm thanks thanks everybody for listening join us again next time on Christ you [Music]

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Length: 73min 19sec (4399 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 07 2018