Faith, Form, and Fashion: Classical Reformed Theology and Its Postmodern Critics PDF
Preview Faith, Form, and Fashion: Classical Reformed Theology and Its Postmodern Critics
Paul Helm Faith, Form, Fashion and C Classical Reformed Theology and Its Postmodern Critics Faith, Form, and Fashion James Clarke & Co and The Lutterworth Press Click on the links above to see our full catalogue for more excellent titles in Hardback, Paperback, PDF and Epub! Faith, Form, and Fashion ISBN: 978 0 227 90377 3 C L Would you like to join our Mailing List? Click here! Human beings are, necessarily, actors who cannot become something before they have fi rst pretended to be it; and they can be divided, not into the hypocritical and the sincere, but into the sane who know that they are acting and the mad who do not. —W. H. Auden Nothing is more familiar or characteristic among Christians than assertion. Take away assertions, and you take away Christianity. —Martin Luther Faith, Form, and Fashion Classical Reformed Theology and Its Postmodern Critics Paul Helm C James Clarke & Co To Tony and Lynn Cannon. James Clarke & Co P.O. Box 60 Cambridge CB1 2NT United Kingdom www.jamesclarke.co [email protected] ISBN: 978 0 227 17492 0 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A record is available from the British Library First published by James Clarke & Co, 2014 Copyright © Paul Helm, 2014 Published by arrangement with Cascade Books Scripture quotations are from Th e Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. All rights reserved. No part of this edition may be reproduced, stored electronically or in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the Publisher ([email protected]). Contents Preface ix Introduction 1 A. Classic Reformed Theology 1. The Form of Theology 11 2. Epistemology 39 B. Some New Proposals Considered 3. Nature and Narrative 71 4. Being and Doing 103 5. Speech Acts, Propositions, and Assertions 130 6. Propositions, Time, and Truth 155 7. Meaning and Reasoning 179 8. Foundationalism and Its Woes 206 9. Knowing and Believing 235 C. Conclusion 10. CRT and the Future 263 Bibliography 267 Preface This book is the result of thinking about systematic theology from the point of view of an analytic philosopher. In particular, of examining certain revi- sionist proposals regarding the nature of Christian doctrine and theology offered by theologians with a broadly Reformed outlook. I quickly came to the conclusion that these proposals, though sufficiently unclear to prevent serious implementation, would be disastrous if carried through consistently. They embody a series of philosophical errors, mostly of a fundamental and, dare I say it, of an elementary kind, as well as some regrettable errors of fact. This study recognizes that there is an inevitable intertwining of the- ology and philosophy at the systematic theological level. The ordering of theological claims, and an understanding of the claims themselves, requires the use of philosophical tools. My concern is that the great tradition of Re- formed theologizing—benefitting from the catholic conciliar and creedal tradition, and from the theological brilliance of Augustine, reworked in late medievalism and refreshed by the renewed exegetical effort flowing from the Reformation—should not be rejected due to ignorance of the tradition, or by an appeal to jejune intellectual considerations that are destined to pass and no doubt shortly to be replaced by a new wave. It is a concern to uphold this tradition, not as a museum piece, but as an essential part of the life of the church, that I hope prevents this study from being merely negatively critical. Earlier published outings from which I have borrowed are: “Does the Authority of a Tradition Exclude the Possibility of Change?” In Identity and Change in the Christian Tradition, edited by Marcel Sa- rot and Gijsbert van den Brink. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1999. “The Perfect Trustworthiness of God.” In The Trustworthiness of God, edited by Paul Helm and Carl Trueman. Leicester, UK: Apollos, 2002. ix x preface “No Easy Task: John R. Franke and the Character of Theology.” In Reforming or Conforming, edited by Gary L. W. Johnson & Ronald L. Gleason. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008. “B. B. Warfield’s Path to Inerrancy: An Attempt to Correct Some Misun- derstandings.” Westminster Theological Journal 72/1 (2010) 23–42. “Grace Builds upon Nature: Philosophy and the Future of Theology.” In The- ology and the Future: Evangelical Assertions and Explorations, edited by Trevor Cairney and David Starling, London, Bloomsbury T & T Clark, 2014. Much of the material now published has been used in the course of teaching in various places, and I thank the students both for their interest and their patience. I am especially grateful to my friends Oliver Crisp and James Dolezal, among others, and especially to the ever-meticulous Mark Talbot, for helpful suggestions and encouragement of various kinds. But first and foremost I thank my wife Angela for her marvelous support during the somewhat difficult time in which this work was completed. Cold Aston, Gloucestershire, UK Introduction This book is about the form of Reformed theology, about its metaphysical and epistemological character, and about its method or methods. By “Reformed theology” is understood a theology that endeavors to express and to be faithful to Scripture while standing in the tradition of the ecumen- ical creeds, the confessions of faith of the early generations of the Reformed era, and subsequent Reformed Orthodoxy. It professes that faith through successive cultures, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Modernism, and so on. Its articulation has two aspects: the development of its intentions to be consistent with and faithful to Scripture and the creeds, and to express the nature of our knowledge of God and of ourselves that Scripture conveys. This is a tradition of “catholic Protestantism,” as Oliver Crisp has argued. And as Richard Muller and others have convincingly shown, this theology was worked out with great sophistication in the era of Reformed Orthodoxy. Muller has demonstrated that within Reformed Orthodoxy there are various strands of theological thought having a basic unity, and with a somewhat eclectic attitude to philosophy, and thus to the relations between theology and philosophy. The names of French theologians such as John Calvin and Theodore Beza, of Italians such as Jerome Zanchius and Francis Turretin, English Puritans such as Stephen Charnock and John Owen, Scots such as Robert Rollock and Samuel Rutherford, and Dutch theologians such as Peter Van Maastricht and Gisbert Voetius are represen- tative of numerous other theologians whose views are so carefully exam- ined and collated by Muller.1 The work of Jonathan Edwards and the Baptist theologian John Gill, were indebted to this orthodoxy. In the nineteenth century the theology of the Hodges and B. B. Warfield at Princeton, W. G. T. Shedd of Union Theological Seminary, New York, Scottish theologians such as William Cunningham and George Smeaton, and in the early years of the twentieth century, Herman Bavinck of the Free University of Amsterdam, 1. See Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics. 1
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