DEEP CALLS TO DEEP | ADOLPH SAPHIR AND HERMAN DOOYEWEERD (3) Abstraction & The Offence of the Cross

 

DEEP CALLS TO DEEP

ADOLPH SAPHIR AND HERMAN DOOYEWEERD

(3) Abstraction & The Offence of the Cross 

________________________

Adolph Saphir writes 

('Christ and the Scriptures', 1864): 

"The Messiah, the sin-bearing Lamb, the blood of Jesus Christ and its efficacy, the kingdom of Israel, all the great, substantial, and glorious truths of the so-called “New Testament” have been often converted into Japhetic [Hellenistic, European] abstractions, in the well-meant hope of making them thereby accessible, plausible, and practical, to the Occidental mind. But in reality the offence of the cross is the ultimate source of this procedure. “Salvation is of the Jews" and to Gentilise (Platonise) Jewish facts and ideas, is to falsify the Gospel, in order to please the Greeks who desire wisdom. Our theology (even that of believers) is far too abstract, unhistorical; looking at doctrines logically, instead of viewing them in connection with the history of the Kingdom and the Church. It is Japhetic, not Shemitic, it is Roman, logical, well-arranged, methodized, and scheduled; not Eastern according to the spirit and method of Scripture, which breathes in the atmosphere of a living God, who visits his people, and is coming again to manifest his glory. 

"[…] Most of the divergences from scriptural truth in our days have their origin in the attempt to translate Shemitic ideas into Japhetic language, or to interpret the doctrine of the apostles, not according to Moses and the prophets, but according to philosophy. 

"[…] A strict analysis of the teaching of this school shows that we have here a more serious and important change than the substitution of a vague, metaphysical terminology for the concrete and simple words of Scripture. Here is a radical subversion of Bible teaching, eliminating its supernatural character, and thereby destroying its simplicity and power. Thus, the doctrine of substitution, the peculiar importance assigned to the blood in connection with expiation, both in the law of Moses and throughout the apostolic writings, is especially repugnant to the Japhetic European mode of thought. Translated into our philosophical language, what remains of the “offence of the Cross” — that Cross which is the power of God? 

"[…] We have nowadays a popular Christianity; and we know that the Gospel is not popular, but an offence to the Jews, and foolishness to the Greeks.” 

(Adolph Saphir, 'Christ and the Scriptures' pp 60, 150-153)

________________________

Herman Dooyeweerd writes:

 

('A New Critique of Theoretical Thought', 1969):

"At this point, many a reader who has taken the trouble to follow our argument will perhaps turn away annoyed. He will ask: Must epistemology end in a Christian sermon or in a dogmatic statement? I can only answer by means of the question as to whether the dogmatic statement with which the supposed autonomous epistemology opens, viz. the proclamation of the self-sufficiency of the human cognitive functions, has a better claim to our confidence as far as epistemology is concerned.

"Our philosophy makes bold to accept the "stumbling block of the cross of Christ" as the corner stone of epistemology (1 Cor 1:23). And thus it also accepts the cross of scandal, neglect and dogmatic rejection. In the limitation and weakness of the flesh, we grasp the absolute truth in our knowledge of God derived from His revelation, in prayer and worship.

"[...] True self-knowledge opens our eyes to the radical corruption of fallen man, to the radical lie which has caused his spiritual death. It therefore leads to a complete surrender to Him Who is the new root of mankind, and Who overcame death through his sufferings and death on the cross. In Christ's human nature our heavenly Father has revealed the fulness of meaning of all creation (1 Ephes 1:10), and through Him according to His Divine nature, God created all things as through the Word of his power (2 Heb 1:2, 3).

"The primary lie obfuscating the horizon of human experience is the rebellious thought that man could do without this knowledge of God and of himself in any field of knowledge, and could find the ultimate criterion of truth in 'autonomous', i.e. absolutized theoretical thought."

(Herman Dooyeweerd, "New Critique of Theoretical Thought" Vol II pp 562-563)

(The Essence of Christianity by Herman Dooyeweerd, 1942):

"[...] To talk about the essence of Christianity is especially meaningful in our day. Many people barely know what the Christian religion really stands for. That is because of the many caricatures that Christianity has undergone over the centuries. Mankind has always been out to escape its radical claims by adjusting and accommodating it to the religious ground-motives that first governed Greco-Roman civilization and later modern humanistic culture.

Those attempts at accommodation first saw Greek philosophy wrap itself like a parasite around the Christian tenets of faith. In modern times it has been Humanism’s religion of reason and personality that has undermined Christian beliefs by interpreting them in a humanistic spirit. In the eyes of many, the essence of Christianity was reduced to a doctrine of morality: the doctrine of the universal brotherhood of man based on the rational belief in God, virtue and immortality. Christ was recognized only as the ideal man, the exalted example of virtue and self-sacrifice.

[...] God loved the world He created with His perfect divine love. Man, who according to his divine calling and freedom was to dedicate the entire temporal creation to the glory of God, has corrupted this work of creation in its very root.

     

God revealed His unfathomable love for us by sending into this world His Son—the eternal Word by whom all things were created—to suffer the eternal punishment for sin in our place. That is to say, God Himself, in the person of Christ Jesus, took upon Himself the shame and curse of the guilt of our sin. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

     

The whole life of Christ, from His birth to His death on the cross, was one road of sorrow and suffering. But He loved His own to the end. In the terrific battle with Satan He won the decisive victory. He brought about a radical redemption because He transformed the creation in its religious root and restored the communion of love with God.

     

Christ Jesus has said: 'I am the way, the truth and the life.' 

     

He is the Way. There is no other way to God than through Christ Jesus, because the radical guilt of sin cannot be removed except through an equally radical divine sacrifice.

     

He is the Truth. Christ Jesus, and He alone, could say this of Himself. He exposed all lies, all hypocrisy, all duplicity. He entered the homes of the despised, the lepers, the pariahs, and spoke the truth to them, full of love and compassion. He showed them that they were utterly lost. They had to embrace Him with both arms if they wanted to be saved. The orthodox Pharisees could tolerate the blinding light of truth as little as the learned Greek philosophers. This gospel was foolishness to the Greeks and a stumbling block to the Jews. But it was the only way out of death, unto life.

     

Christ is the Life. He became life for us because, moved by boundless love for sinners, he voluntarily suffered eternal spiritual death on our behalf."

(The Essence of Christianity by Herman Dooyeweerd, 1942. Translated by Magnus Verbrugge.)

(Herman Dooyeweerd: 

‘Sin and the dialectical conception of guilt 

in Greek and Humanistic philosophy.’):

“Both the Greek and the Humanistic oppositions do not touch the religious [ultimate, supratemporal] root of human existence, but only the temporal branches of human life. They are only absolutized here in a religious [ie in a hypostasing, idolatrous] sense. Their concept of guilt, in consequence, is of a merely dialectical [logically contradictory] character. It consists of a depreciation of an abstract complex of functions of the created cosmos over against another abstracted and deified complex.

In its revelation of the fall, however, just like in that of creation, the Word of God penetrates to the root, to the religious  [ultimate, supratemporal] centre of human nature.

The fall is the apostasy of this centre, of this radix of existence, it is the falling away from God. This was spiritual death, because it is the apostasy from the absolute source of Life. Consequently the fall was radical. It involved the whole temporal cosmos, since the latter had its religious [ultimate, supratemporal] root only in mankind. Every conception which denies this radical [radix] sense of the fall, (even though it uses the term "radical" as in KANT'S conception of the "radical evil" in man), is diametrically opposed to the basic motive of Holy Scripture. Since, as we have seen, the revelation of the fall does not in any way mean the recognition of an antithetic principle of origin which is opposed to the Creator, sin cannot be thought of as standing in a dialectical relation to the creation.

And because of the radical character of sin, redemption in Christ Jesus must also be radical.

The Divine Word, through which, according to the pronouncement of John's gospel, all things were made, became flesh in Jesus Christ. The Word has entered into the root and the temporal ramifications, in body and soul, of human nature. And therefore it has brought about a radical [ie involving all temporal reality and physicality] redemption. Sin is not dialectically reconciled, but it is really propitiated. And in Christ as the new root of the human race, the whole temporal cosmos, which was religiously [ie in ultimate, supratemporal “radix”] concentrated in man, is in principle again directed toward God and thereby wrested free from the power of Satan. 

However, until the return of Christ, even humanity which is renewed in Him still shares in the apostate root of mankind. Consequently, the struggle of the Kingdom of God continues to be waged against the kingdom of darkness until the "consommatio saeculi" [“consummation of the ages”].

(Herman Dooyeweerd, A New Critique of Theoretical Thought, Vol I, pp 175)

________________________

PREVIOUS ARTICLE IN SERIES:

(2) Influence of Friedrich Christoph Oetinger?

NEXT ARTICLE IN SERIES:

(4) COSMIC MEANING: “From Him, through Him, and to Him are all things”

____________________________

FREE DOWNLOADS OF BOOKS BY DOOYWEERD

____________________________

READ ONLINE: CHRIST AND THE SCRIPTURES by Adolph SAPHIR (1864) -

DEEP CALLS TO DEEP | ADOLPH SAPHIR AND HERMAN DOOYEWEERD (2) Influence of Friedrich Christoph Oetinger?

DEEP CALLS TO DEEP

ADOLPH SAPHIR AND HERMAN DOOYEWEERD

(2) Influence of Friedrich Christoph Oetinger? 

________________________

General Contextual Note

(by J Glenn Friesen): 

‘Abraham Kuyper expresses the wish that modernism would have allowed itself to be led by Franz von Baader to the “Biblical realism” of the Incarnation, as expressed in the life-giving proverb “Embodiment is the goal of the ways of God.”. The original maxim is by Friedrich Christoph Oetinger (1702–1782), one of Baader’s influences. Oetinger refers to the ‘works’ of God instead of the ‘ways’ of God: “Leiblichkeit ist das Ende der Werke Gottes.” The theologian Daniël Chantepie de la Saussaye introduced Baader’s Christian theosophy [no connection with Madame Blavatsky (FMF)] to Reformed theology in the Netherlands. His son said that he saw Chantepie de la Saussaye go about every day with the writings of Oetinger, Hamann and Baader.’ (‘Neo-Calvinism and Christian Theosophy: Franz von Baader, Abraham Kuyper, Herman Dooyeweerd', [Kindle] by J. Glenn Friesen, 2015/2016, pp 76, 94) 

________________________

Note on Johann Georg HAMANN (1730-1788) 

(by Herman Dooyeweerd): 

In his book Christ and the Scriptures (pages 106 & 138), Saphir quotes Hamann, a friend of Kant and translator of David HUME into German. 

Herman Dooyeweerd writes of Hamann: 

“This irrational philosophy of feeling, predominating especially in Hamann, the young Herder and Jacobi, and of which Goethe makes his Faust the mouth-piece in the utterance: ‘Gefühl ist alles’, is the true Humanistic counter-pole of the rationalistic line of thought characteristic of the ‘Enlightenment’ […] Rationalism and irrationalism in their modern sense are merely polar contrasts in the basic structure of the Humanistic cosmonomic Idea. The tension, the inner antinomy that originates for the irrationalist types between absolutized subjective individuality and law, led HAMANN and early romanticism to a dialectical conception of reality which ascribed the character of absolute reality to logical contradiction.” (A New Critique of Theoretical Thought, Vol 1 [Direct 608-pages pdf download] pp 412, 510)

________________________

Note on 

Friedrich Christoph OETINGER (1702–1782)

and Adolph SAPHIR (1831-1891) 

(by Rev Dr Ian Maxwell, Church of Scotland):

Oetinger is an interesting Biblical commentator. He was writing in the mid 18th century in Germany, but almost all of his works were republished in the early 19th century, following Gustav Auberlen's work on Oetinger's thought. Saphir had written the English translation of Auberlen's work on the prophetic relation between Daniel and Revelation, which T & T Clark published (1854?). 

Saphir was chiefly interested in Oetinger's book Etwas Ganzes vom Evangelio which had been republished in a new German edition in 1850. The book consists of a collection of writings and papers by Oetinger. One significant study is on Isaiah 40-66. Rather than theologise, Oetinger carefully works through each chapter of Deutero-Isaiah, producing a single term summary of each chapter. He then brings the summaries together into three main themes: Belief (Isaiah 40-49); Righteousness (50-59); and Glory (60-66). At this point he links Belief, Righteousness and Glory to major themes in the Epistles. However, he states that he will not summarise to a higher level, as this bordered on abstraction. 

So, there are three essential levels in Oetinger's study: the text of Scripture; a single term summary of a chapter of the text of Scripture; and a final single term uniting the chapter summaries. This, he declared, was the final limit, since abstraction lay beyond.

In Christ and the Scriptures, the Saphir quotes of Oetinger are from the Notes concerning Catechetical Teaching (one of the works included in Etwas Ganzes), and Auberlen's work on Oetinger.

________________________ 

SAPHIR's OETINGER QUOTES 

COMPARED with DOOYEWEERD

We observe, therefore, that in Adolph Saphir's Christ and the Scriptures, it is to Friedrich Christoph OETINGER (1702–1782) that Saphir most frequently turns for affinity (pp 112, 114, 115). In this blogpost we will juxtapose these Oetinger quotes with the stated views of Herman Dooyeweerd. To that end we will group our comparisons under the following three themes:

1) 'Scripture and Abstraction', 

2) 'Heart, Root, Branches, and 

3) 'Lookout Tower & Biblical Ground-Motive'.

__________________________

THEME 1) 

SCRIPTURE AND ABSTRACTION 

SAPHIR QUOTES OETINGER: 

‘We all must agree with the quaint remarks of old Oetinger: “The writers of Scripture observe all rules without having rules, because their word proceeds from Life; they never bring forth old things without new, which have never been thus uttered. They avoid abstract definitions like a pestilence; they clothe their ideas and give them a body, but such a body as never misleads us to the sensual.”’

DOOYEWEERD WRITES: 

“It is human personality that operates in cognition; it is not one or more of its abstracted modal functions. In its religious root this personality transcends its temporal acts and modal functions. This holds good no matter whether the cosmological self-consciousness, in the cognitive activity, is directed in Christ to the true Origin of all things, to the sovereign Creator and Heavenly Father, or, in sinful apostasy, seeks itself and the Origin in the temporal. (A New Critique of Theoretical Thought, Vol 2 pp 473, 474). 

“Thus the central theme of the Holy Scriptures, namely, that of creation, fall into sin, and redemption by Jesus Christ in the communion of the Holy Spirit, has a radical unity of meaning, which is related to the central unity of our human existence. It effects the true knowledge of God and ourselves, if our heart is fully opened by the Holy Spirit so that it finds itself in the grip of God's Word and has become the captive of Jesus Christ. So long as this central meaning of the Word-revelation is at issue, we are beyond the scientific problems both of theology and philosophy. Its acceptance or rejection is a matter of life or death to us, and not a question of theoretical reflection. In this sense, the central motive of Holy Scripture is the common supra-scientific starting-point of a truly biblical theology and of a truly Christian philosophy. It is the key of knowledge of which Jesus spoke in his discussion with the Scribes and lawyers. It is the religious presupposition of any theoretical thought which may rightly claim a biblical foundation. But, as such, it can never become the theoretical object of theology - no more than God and the human I can become such an object.

“...I am sorry if my explanation concerning the scientific field of research of dogmatic theology seem not clear at first sight. The difficulties and questions to which it gives rise do not concern the divine Word-revelation, but exclusively the scientific character and bounds of a theological dogmatics and exegesis. And it is necessary 'ad humanam salutem' to go into these difficulties in a serious way. For dogmatic theology is a very dangerous science. Its elevation to a necessary mediator between God's Word and the believer amounts to idolatry and testifies to a fundamental misconception concerning its real character and position. If our salvation be dependent on theological dogmatics and exegesis, we are lost. For both of them are a human work, liable to all kinds of error, disagreement in opinion, and heresy. We can even say that all heresies are of a theological origin. Therefore, the traditional confusion between God's Word as the central principle of knowledge and the scientific object of theological dogmatics and exegesis must be wrong in its fundamentals. For it is this very confusion which has given rise to the false identification of dogmatic theology with the doctrine of Holy Scripture, and to the false conception of theology as the necessary mediator between God's Word and the believers.

“[...]Let us first consider how the Word of God presents itself to us in its full and actual reality. The divine Word-revelation has entered our temporal horizon. The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. This was the 'skandalon' which was equally raised by the incarnation of the Word-revelation in the Holy Scriptures, a collection of books written by different men in the course of ages, be it through divine inspiration, yet related to all the modal aspects of our temporal horizon of experience. It is, however, only under the modal aspect of faith that we can experience that this Word-revelation in the Scriptures has been inspired by the Holy Spirit. And the actual belief through which we know with an ultimate certainty that it is so, cannot be realized in the heart, that religious center of our consciousness, except by the operation of the Word itself, as a spiritual power. What makes the diversity of books of the Old and New Testament into a radical spiritual unity? Their principle of unity can only be the central theme of creation, fall into sin, and redemption by Jesus Christ in the communion of the Holy Spirit, since it is the key to true knowledge of God and self-knowledge. We have established that, in its central spiritual sense, as divine motive power addressing itself to our heart, this theme cannot become the theoretical object of theological thought, since it is the very starting point of the latter, insofar as theology is really biblical.

“From the foregoing it may appear that there must be a difference in principle between creation, fall and redemption in their central sense as the key to knowledge, and in their sense as articles of faith which may be made into the object of theological thought. Insofar as Reformed theology, too, was influenced by the scholastic basic motive of nature and grace, it also developed dogmatic views which must be considered unbiblical. The Jewish Scribes and lawyers had a perfect theological knowledge of the books of the Old Testament. They wished, doubtless, to hold to the creation, the fall, and the promise of the coming Messiah as articles of the orthodox Jewish faith which are also articles of the Christian faith. Nevertheless, Jesus said to them: "Woe unto you, for ye have taken away the key of knowledge!" (Luke 11:52).

“This key of knowledge in its radical and integral sense cannot be made into a theoretical problem. The theologian can only direct his theological thought to it with respect to its necessary supra-theoretical presupposition, if he is really in the grip of it and can bear witness to its radical meaning which transcends all theological concepts. But when he does so, he is not in any different position than the Christian philosopher who accounts for his biblical starting-point, or the ordinary believer who testifies to the radical sense of God's Word as the central motive power of his life in Jesus Christ. In other words, the true knowledge of God in Jesus Christ and true self-knowledge are neither of a dogmatic-theological, nor of a philosophical nature, but have an absolutely central religious [ultimate, supratemporal] significance. This knowledge is a question of spiritual life or death. Even orthodox theological dogmatics, however splendidly elaborated, cannot guarantee this central spiritual knowledge.” (Herman Dooyeweerd, In the Twilight of Western Thought [direct pdf download], from pp 86,87, 100, 134-146).

________________________

THEME 2) 

HEART, ROOT, BRANCHES 

SAPHIR QUOTES OETINGER: 

“Scripture moves, describes, convinces. In Isaiah we have not formal sentences, but real addresses, which re-echo in the heart, calling on us to be comforted by God’s redemption: 'Say unto the cities of Judah, Behold your God! All is full of the nearness of God’s Spirit: ‘Fear not, I am with thee.' The apostolic men had not the habit of prefixing their theme, even as a painter would not write above his picture of a horse, “This is a horse;’ and because divisions are chiefly of use to the learned, the prophets had another method of fastening the great points as nails into the heart, so that people did not require the art of remembering but, as Themistocles said of his bad conscience, the art of forgetting. Isaiah has perfect divisions, but not as a geometrical plane is divided into squares, but as a man consists of members, and a tree of trunk and branches. (Selected from various works of this eminent theologian (Oetinger].’“ (p 114)

DOOYEWEERD SAYS: 

(transcribed from video interview translated by Jack Van Meggelen) 

“And suddenly, as it were by accident, one afternoon, just after four o’ clock, as I was sitting in Kuyper’s old office, sitting at his enormous old desk, I noticed a stack of little booklets, and I picked the first one that came to hand, which was Kuyper’s Meditation on Pentecost. I wouldn’t have done this earlier in my life, but I thought I should see what he said there, and I was still reading by eight o’ clock at night, I was so moved by Kuyper’s meditations. I realized that in these meditations Kuyper was very different from the one in his systematic work. In theology he can be somewhat scholastic, but not at all in these meditations. Here he expressed really lively Biblical thought. And what really gripped me was Kuyper’s rediscovery of something lost in scholasticism, that is the Biblical conception that the center of human existence lies in the heart. In the heart one’s existence is centered. The Bible uses ‘heart’ comprehensively. But the heart has often been considered the seat of the affections, and there is a common dichotomy between head and heart, where the head is intellect, and the heart is emotional feeling. But Kuyper says clearly in one of those meditations that he is speaking of the heart, but not as the organ of feeling, but rather as that central point of one’s existence where God works, that unified point where life is not yet in differentiated expression. He used the example of the root and the branches that stem from it. So not the various branches but the very root of our existence. In this sense, this is the Biblical use of the word ‘heart’. For me this was a clear turning point in my life, and as I reflected on it, I realized that this insight overturned my whole view of man, and my whole view of the reality in which we live, since all reality has in humanity a central point of concentration. And when it comes to the question of man’s self-knowledge, once again, a topic of great interest, What is the Self? What does it mean when one says “I”? And Calvin, in his book ‘Institutes of the Christian Religion’ [cf Chapter 1], speaks of true self-knowledge as completely dependent on true knowledge of God. And this is the heart of the matter, since, if the self is this center, the heart of our existence, a center of all our temporal capabilities and functions, of thinking, of feeling, of biological life, if all these are related to the center, all focused there; so “I” believe, “I” think, “I” feel, “I” live, and all these functions of living, thinking, believing, feeling, and so forth, all of these are unified in the “I” as their center, indeed, as the religious [ultimate, supratemporal] center.’

View full 15 min interview (1973) in Dutch with English subtitles here: 

_______________________________

THEME 3) 

LOOKOUT TOWER & 

BIBLICAL GROUND-MOTIVE 

SAPHIR QUOTES OETINGER: 

“Scripture sees all things from a great height, therefore the expressions it uses are according to a different measure and perspective from those of the world, for which reason to the world the Scripture seems exaggerated. This absolute and perfect view and measure of Scripture, which we ought always to regard as the standard of all our thoughts and words, may be specially noticed in the Scripture description of the creation, redemption, and the end of all things. How paradoxical and above nature!*(*Oetinger, friend of Bengel, who died in 1782, as Prelate of the Würtemberg Church in Murrhardt. Etwas Ganzes vom Evangelio, p148)”.

DOOYEWEERD WRITES:

“The Archimedean point of philosophy and the tendency of philosophical thought towards the Origin: To speak in a figure: In the process of directing my philosophical thought in the idea towards the totality of meaning, I must be able to ascend a lookout-tower above all the modal speciality of meaning that functions within the coherence of the modal aspects. From this tower I must be able to survey this coherence with all the modal diversity of meaning included in it. Here I must find the point of reference to which this modal diversity can be related, and to which I am to return in the process of reflecting thought. In other words, if I am not to lose myself in the modal speciality of meaning during the course of philosophic thought, I must be able to find a standpoint which transcends the special modal aspects. Only by transcending the speciality of meaning, can I attain to the actual view of totality by which the former is to be distinguished as such. This fixed point from which alone, in the course of philosophical thought, we are able to form the idea of the totality of meaning, we call the Archimedean point of philosophy.” (A New Critique of Theoretical Thought VOL 1 p8)

“Since the fall and the promise of the coming Redeemer, there are two central mainsprings operative in the heart of human existence. The first is the dynamis of the Holy Spirit, which by the moving power of God's Word, incarnated in Jesus Christ, re-directs to its Creator the creation that had apostatized in the fall from its true Origin. This dynamis brings man into the relationship of sonship to the Divine Father. Its religious [time-transcending] ground-motive is that of the Divine Word-Revelation, which is the key to the understanding of Holy Scripture: the motive of creation, fall, and redemption by Jesus Christ in the communion of the Holy Spirit.” (A New Critique of Theoretical Thought  VOL 1 p61) [Direct 608-pages pdf download] 

____________________________

PREVIOUS ARTICLE IN SERIES:

(1) Supratemporal Heart: “We are even now in eternity"

NEXT ARTICLE IN SERIES:

(3) Abstraction & The Offence of the Cross

____________________________

FREE DOWNLOADS OF BOOKS BY DOOYWEERD

____________________________

READ ONLINE HERE: 

CHRIST AND THE SCRIPTURES by Adolph SAPHIR (1864):

(FMF Dec 2020)

DEEP CALLS TO DEEP | ADOLPH SAPHIR AND HERMAN DOOYEWEERD (1) Supratemporal Heart: “We are even now in eternity”

DEEP CALLS TO DEEP

ADOLPH SAPHIR AND HERMAN DOOYEWEERD

(1) Supratemporal Heart: 

“We are even now in eternity”

ADOLPH SAPHIR (1831-1891) 

Short Bio:

Adolph Saphir was born in Pesth in Hungary in 1831 into an orthodox Jewish family. The family were converted in 1841 through the Biblical preaching of the Church of Scotland missionaries Dr Keith and, especially, Dr John 'Rabbi' Duncan. Saphir was, then, a messianic Jew, or Hebrew Christian as it was termed in the 19th century. He attended the Berlin Gymnasium from 1844 to 1848 and was trilingual in classical Hebrew, German and English. Invited to Scotland by the Free Church he attended Glasgow University in 1849, moved to Aberdeen University to study theology and in late 1851 he began theological studies with the Free Church at New College, Edinburgh. He was awarded a D.D. from Edinburgh University in 1875 for his theological work. Saphir was a Biblical theologian whose distinctiveness lay in his Christocentric Biblical theology, coupled with a positive, non-polemical understanding of Biblical inspiration and the methodological use of Biblical-relational ideas found in Scripture. (Info, with appreciation, from lost internet source)

Adolph Saphir writes ('Christ and the Scriptures', 1864): 

“The chief purpose, however, is, according to the spirit of parabolic teaching, to impress on us that we are even now in eternity; that everywhere we are surrounded by the same God; that the invisible kingdom is manifested in the visible; that God, and his truth, and his righteousness, are the true reality and substance.” (Christ and the Scriptures, 1869, p98)

[“Het hoofddoel evenwel is, volgens de aard van het parabolisch onderricht, ons te doordringen van het feit, dat wij reeds nu in de eeuwigheid zijn” (Christ und de Schriften, (pdf) translated by A.R. Zalman Marda, 2010, p60)]

 [“Ihr Hauptzweck ist jedoch, dem Geiste der biblischen Offenbarung entsprechend, uns einzuprägen, daß wir schon jetzt in der Ewigkeit leben” (Christus und dei Schrift, translated by J von Lancizolle 1882, p92)]

[“‘S e am prìomh amas, ge-tà, a rèir spiorad an teagaisg pharabalaich, gu bhith stèinneadh dhuinn gu bheil sinn san t-sìorraidheachd an dràsta fhèin.” (Crìosd agus na Sgriobtairean)]

*   *   *

“In the Bible we breathe the atmosphere of eternity...We may also say that He, who alone knows the human heart, is alone able to speak to the heart of man; and while other writings are pre-eminently logical and imaginative, or addressed to the conscience and feelings, Scripture speaks to man, to “all that is in him” (Ps. ciii:1), to the inmost and hidden centre, from which proceed all thoughts, words, and works. This penetrating peculiarity of the Scripture style is another feature of its Divine origin. Scripture speaks to the heart of man (Isaiah xl:1, Heb). That means, not merely to speak so as to influence the will and rouse strong feelings, but to reveal the secrets of the heart (1 Cor. xiv:25; Jer. xvii:10; Prov xv:11), and to fill its desire for eternity with something perfect. Scripture represents the heart as a little world. When the man of God speaks, his word seizes a hundred elements in this little world; what was hidden is brought out, the false imaginations are brought to shame, and despair cries for help and seeks anchorage. The heart feels the difference between a human and a Divine word.” (Christ and the Scriptures, 1869, pp112,113)

HERMAN DOOYEWEERD (1894-1977)

Context note by J Glenn Friesen: 

“In 1937, both Dooyeweerd and Vollenhoven were asked by the Curators of the Vrije Universiteit to respond to accusations about their philosophy, which had been made by the theologian Valentijn Hepp (1879-1950) in a series of brochures that he published entitled Dreigende Deformatie [Threatening Deformation]. Hepp said that the new philosophy threatened the Confessions of Faith of the reformed churches. He argued that the new philosophy showed a ‘sickness of originality” [oorspronkelijkheidsziekte].” 

Herman Dooyeweerd writes 

(Second Letter to the Curators, 1937): 

[The following extracts (translated by Friesen) are from Dooyeweerd’s Response to the Curators, 2nd letter, addressing Hepp’s contention that Dooyeweerd’s view of humanity’s relation to eternity was contrary to reformed orthodoxy]

‘In my view it is indeed the case [that in our heart we also transcend and go out above time]. If that were not so, then the undeniable sense of eternity in man’s heart could not be explained, and it would indeed be difficult to maintain the continued identical existence of the “soul” after bodily death. […] For in the last day, the “soul,” unlike the “body,” does not need to be “resurrected” [opgewekt]’.’

‘In the text that I have brought forward, Ecclesiastes 3:11 ["He has also set eternity in the human heart"], my highly esteemed colleague [Valentijn Hepp] finds no argument for the supratemporality of the heart. And I concede without reservation that the recitation of a text may not be called a “proof text” (however that was intended to mean anyway!). It is indeed possible that there can be various views regarding its meaning, although in all modesty it appears to me that it would be difficult for the word ‘heart’ here to have a sense other than the “religious center of life.”

‘According to my modest opinion, and in the light of the whole Scriptural revelation concerning human nature it is just this possession of a supratemporal root of life, with the simultaneous subjectedness to time of all its earthly expressions, that together belong to the essence [wezen] of man, to the “image of God” in him – by means of which he is able to not only relatively but radically [in radix/root] go out [uitgaat] above all temporal things. And that is how I also understand Ecclesiastes 3:11.

‘‘If in fact man’s heart were also a “temporal thing” among other temporal things, then it would be difficult for this heart to know of the supratemporal. In order to have a religious sense [besef] of eternity, man must in the depths of his being participate in it, although our thinking always remains subjected to time.” [Footnote: ‘I of course do not need to again expressly tell my colleague that this does not relate to “aeternitas”, which applies only to God, but rather to the creaturely aevum, the created supratemporality.’] [Footnote: 'the heart, just like the body, is created, and thus does not exist from eternity.’]

‘This holds absolutely, not only for believers, as my colleague apparently tries to interpret my view, but for every man as such. The [unbeliever’s] sense of eternity expresses itself in the falling away from God only in an idolatrous direction. Men [idolatrously] seek themselves, i.e. the supratemporal center of their existence, together with their God, in the temporal. For example, Aristotle in his doctrine of the immortal and supratemporal substantial form of man (“reason”). I have discussed this point in detail in Volume II Part I of my book [Wijsbegeerte der Wetsidee]. There is thus no need, as my colleague suggests at the top of page 13 of his note, that the Wijsbegeerte der Wetsidee, in order to be consistent, “really would have to introduce a division between temporal and supratemporal hearts.”’

‘[…] That Mr Hepp sees the Scriptural conception of the “human heart,” the religious center of all of human existence, as “a sphinx” which he says belongs in the desert, is not more than a witticism without much style, by which he certainly does not strengthen his position in the present debate. The human heart will remain a “sphinx” as long as he intends to seek a fixed standpoint in “reason,” outside of God’s Word. By doing that, the “heart” will indeed remain in the “desert” of philosophical speculations.’

(Dooyeweerd: Response to the Curators, 2nd letter, (pdf) p34, 35, translated by J Glenn Friesen)

________________________

NEXT ARTICLE IN SERIES:

(2) Influence of Friedrich Christoph Oetinger?

____________________________

FREE DOWNLOADS OF BOOKS BY DOOYWEERD

____________________________

READ ONLINE: CHRIST AND THE SCRIPTURES by Adolph SAPHIR (1864) -

'Bavinck: A critical biography' - Interview with Dr James Eglinton (15 Dec 2020)

Herman Dooyeweerd: Old ontological, modern epistemological a priori

Eduardo Paolozzi: Wittgenstein in New York (1965)

Dooyeweerd: Old ontological, 

modern epistemological a priori

The structural and the subjective a priori in human experience.

Yet there must be some truth in the old ontological view as well as in the modern epistemological conception of the a priori, in spite of the fact that both of them are inacceptable to Chris­tian philosophy, both as regards their exclusiveness of each other and their own foundation and elaboration. To account for this element of truth, we shall have to introduce a distinction in our epistemology which will prove to be of essential importance, but which in this sense is unknown in immanence-philosophy.

There is an a priori complex in the cosmological sense of the structural horizon of human experience. This a priori as such has the character of a law. And there is also a merely subjective a priori complex in the epistemological sense of the subjective a priori insight into that horizon. We can distinguish the two a priori complexes simply as the structural and the subjective a priori. Only the subjective a priori can be true or false in an epistemological sense. As it is subjective insight expressing itself in judgments, it necessarily remains enclosed within the cosmo­logical a priori horizon of human experience. In other words, the subjective a priori always remains determined and delimi­tated by the a priori structure of all human experience. It can never be the self-sufficient foundation of truth which critical epistemology considers it to be. The structural and the subjective a priori principles are related as the law-side and the subject-side of a priori human knowledge.

The horizon of human experience.

In the light of our cosmonomic Idea there can be no doubt that all human experience is bound to some horizon which makes this experience possible. We repeatedly mentioned the transcen­dent and the transcendental conditions of our knowledge. This horizon of experience is not a subjective cadre within which reality appears to us only in a phenomenal shape (deter­mined by a supposedly creative synthesis) and behind which the fundamentally inexperienceable dimensions of some “thing in itself” (“Ding an sich”) are situated.

It is rather the a priori meaning-structure of our cosmos itself in its dependence on the central religious [ie supratemporal] sphere of the creation, and in subjection to the Divine Origin of all things. The horizon of human experience is that of our ‘earthly’ cosmos as it is given in the Divine order of the creation.

This is a truly supra-individual and law-conformable cadre which is constant, in contrast with all change in actual subjective experience.

(Excerpt from A New Critique of Theoretical Thought Vol 2, pp 547-548) 

Get FREE download of this and other books by Herman Dooyeweerd

HERE

_________________________

J. Glenn Friesen: Neo-Calvinism and Christian Theosophy - Franz von Baader, Abraham Kuyper, Herman Dooyeweerd

Neo-Calvinism 

and Christian Theosophy: 

Franz von Baader, Abraham Kuyper, 

Herman Dooyeweerd

by J. Glenn Friesen

Paperback £13.95 (Amazon UK)

"The key ideas of Abraham Kuyper’s Neo-Calvinism do not come from Calvin or from Reformed sources. Their source is the Christian theosophy of Franz von Baader (1765-1841). Among the many ideas derived from Baader are the ideas of a Christian worldview, a Christian philosophy, the idea of sphere sovereignty, opposition to the autonomy of thought, a Free University, the importance of an embodied spirituality, and the idea of our supratemporal heart, the center of our existence. Seeing these ideas in their historical context of Christian theosophy will challenge many of the current assumptions of evangelicals and reformational philosophers who claim to base their worldview and philosophy on Kuyper’s ideas or on the development of these ideas in the Christian philosophy of Herman Dooyeweerd (1894-1977). 

Part 1 of this book traces the reception of Baader's ideas by Daniël Chantepie de la Saussaye and J.H. Gunning Jr., who then introduced Baader’s Christian theosophy ideas to Dutch Reformed theology. Chantepie de la Saussaye and Gunning transmitted these ideas to Kuyper, who acknowledges their influence. Kuyper refers to Baader’s writings with approval, and incorporates many of his ideas. 

Part 2 is a history of the development of Dooyeweerd’s Christian philosophy, and of the very different philosophy of his brother-in-law Dirk Vollenhoven. Whereas Dooyeweerd chose to incorporate the ideas of Christian theosophy, Vollenhoven did not. They disagreed with respect to almost every idea in their philosophies. 

Part 3 is a detailed examination of Dooyeweerd’s Christian philosophy. Although Dooyeweerd was not at all forthcoming about his sources, it is clear that there is a deep historical connection of his philosophy to Baader’s Christian theosophy, as well as to other mystical and non-Reformed sources. This insight allows us to understand many previously obscure parts of his philosophy and to correct previous misinterpretations of his work. It also opens the way for ecumenical and inter-religious dialogue."

_______________________
Interview with Dr J. Glenn Friesen
(courtesy of Steve Bishop's "An Accidental Blog")
Part 1     Part 2
__________________________________
Dr J. Glenn Friesen's
Dooyeweerd Site
__________________________________

Herman Dooyeweerd: Human Heart as Supratemporal Root of Creation

Herman Dooyeweerd: 

Human Heart as Supratemporal 

Root of Creation

God created humanity in His image. In the human heart, the religious root, the center of our being, God concentrated all of creation toward His service; here He laid the supratemporal root of all temporal creatures. This human heart, from which according to Scripture come the wellsprings of life ["Above everything else guard your heart, because from it flow the springs of life." Prov 4:23 NSV], transcends all things temporal in the service of God. The whole religious sense (meaning) of God’s creation lies in our heart, our entire ego, our complete self. This heart, in which according to the Word eternity has been laid ["He has also set eternity in the human heart" Eccles 3:11 NIV], is the true supratemporal center of human existence, and at the same time it is the creaturely center of all of God’s creation. The apostasy of this heart, of this root of creation, necessarily swept with it all temporal creation. In Adam not only all humankind fell, but also that entire temporal cosmos of which the human was the crowned head. And in Christ, the Word become flesh, the second Covenant Head, God gave the new root of His redeemed creation, in Whom true humanity has been implanted through self-surrender, through surrender of the center of existence, the heart. (Herman Dooyeweerd: The Christian Idea of the State, Craig Press 1968, p5)

See also:

ABC Dooyeweerd 3: Inquietum
________________

Dooyeweerd: Humanity has an eternal destination

The Battle of Alexander at Issus by Albrecht Altdorfer (1480–1538)

Humanity has an eternal destination

by Herman Dooyeweerd

(New Critique of Theoretical Thought, Vol 3, pp 783-784)

At least one central point of a truly Christian anthropology must be made perfectly clear. Humanity, as such, has no temporal qualifying function like temporal things and differentiated societal structures, but at the root of its existence it transcends all temporal structures. Therefore the search for a "substantial essential form" of human nature, in the sense of the Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysical anthropology, is incompatible with what the Scriptures have revealed to us about created human nature.

In the radical community of the human race according to the divine order of creation, the human is not qualified as [ie not "framed" or "defined" as] a "rational-moral being", but only by the kingly position as personal religious creaturely centre of the whole earthly cosmos. In humanity the rational-moral functions also find their concentration and through humanity the entire temporal world is included both in apostasy and in salvation. All things, beings, and factual relations qualified by a temporal modal function are transitory, the temporal bonds of love included. But the human has an eternal destination, not as an abstract "rational soul" or spiritual "mind", but in the fulness of one's concrete, individual personality. This puts it beyond any doubt that the various conceptions of "body" and "soul", or of "body", "soul" and "spirit" devised from the immanence stand-point are in principle unserviceable in a Christian anthropology which starts from the radical basic motive of the Word-Revelation. The all-sided temporal existence of a human, i.e. one's "body", in the full Scriptural sense of the word, can only be understood from the supratemporal religious centre, i.e. the "soul", or the "heart", in its Scriptural meaning. Every conception of the so-called "immortal soul", whose supratemporal centre of being must be sought in rational-moral functions, remains rooted in the starting-point of immanence-philosophy [ie "time-enclosed" philosophy].

But all this merely relates to the only possible starting-point of a Christian anthropology. Anyone who imagines that from our standpoint human existence is no more than a complex of temporal functions centering in the "heart", has an all too simple and erroneous idea of what we understand by "anthropology". What has appeared in the course of our investigations in this third volume [of A New Critique of Theoretical Thought] is that in temporal human existence we can point to an extremely intricate system of enkaptic structural interlacements, and that these interlacements presuppose a comprehensive series of individuality structures, bound within an enkaptic structural whole. This insight implies new anthropological problems which cannot in any way be considered as solved. But they do not concern the central sphere of human existence, which transcends the temporal horizon. 

No existentialistic self-interpretation, no "act-psychology", no phenomenology or "metaphysics of the mind" can tell us what the human ego is, but — we repeat it — only the divine Word-Revelation in Christ Jesus. The question: "What is a human?" is unanswerable from the immanence-standpoint. But at the same time it is a problem which will again and again urge itself on apostate thought with relentless insistence, as a symptom of the internal unrest of an uprooted existence which no longer understands itself.

(Herman Dooyeweerd, New Critique of Theoretical Thought, Vol 3, pp 783-784)

Free download of this and other books by Herman Dooyeweerd 

HERE

_________________________________

The Genius of Luther's and Calvin's Musical Reformation by Janet Danielson

THE GENIUS OF LUTHER’S AND CALVIN’S MUSICAL REFORMATION

by Janet Henshaw Danielson 

(The Regent World Dec 07, 2017)

Some myths just won’t die. Myths about music are particularly resistant to evidence or rational persuasion, perhaps because for many people the main feature of music is its style, and style is a matter of personal taste and cultural influence. Myths about the Reformation and music centre around themes of emancipation and development. [...] Little of this narrative stands up to scrutiny. [...] The dynamic new musical syntax forged by the Reformers laid the foundations for the great developments in European art music in subsequent centuries: opera, oratorio, sonata, symphony. 

READ FULL ARTICLE

________________

DOOYEWEERD: Form-Matter ground-motive | Superheroes and Zombies

HERMAN DOOYEWEERD:

Form-Matter Ground-motive:

Superheroes and Zombies 

Dooyeweerd’s analysis related to current movie culture.

The following consists of extracts from the book ‘In The Twilight of Western Thought’ by Herman Dooyeweerd, Paideia Press, 2012

HELLENISTIC FORM-MATTER GROUND-MOTIVE

The central motive of Greek philosophy, which we have designated as the form-matter motive in line with the Aristotelian terminology, originated from the meeting of the pre-Homeric religion of life and death, with the younger, cultural religion of the Olympian gods. The Aristotelian view of nature was no more independent of religious presuppositions than any other philosophical view. It was completely ruled by the dualistic religious basic motive of Greek thought, namely, that of form and matter [...] It originated from the meeting between two antagonistic Greek religions, namely, the older nature religion of life and death, and the younger cultural religion of the Olympian gods. Nietzsche and his friend Rhode were the first to discover the conflict between these religions in the Greek tragedies. Nietzsche spoke of the contest between the Dionysian and the Apollonian spirit in these tragedies. But in fact here was at issue a conflict in the religious basic motive of the whole Greek life and thought. (Herman Dooyeweerd, ‘In The Twilight of Western Thought’, Paideia Press, 2012, pp. 29).

MATTER MOTIVE -

ZOMBIES: the life of the one is the death of the other.

The pre-Olympian religion of life and death deified the ever-flowing stream of organic life which originates from mother earth and cannot be fixed or restricted by any corporeal form. In consequence, the deities of this religion are amorphous. It is from this formless stream of life that, in the order of time, the generations of beings separate themselves and appear in an individual bodily shape. This corporeal form can only be maintained at the cost of other living beings, so that the life of the one is the death of the other. So there is an injustice in any fixed form of life which for this reason must be repaid to the horrible fate of death, designated by the Greek terms anangke (ἀνάγκη, "inevitability, compulsion, necessity") and heimarmene (Εἱμαρμένη - "fate") tuche (τύχη - "luck", "fortuna"). This is the meaning of the mysterious words of the Ionian philosopher of nature, Anaximander: “The divine origin of all things is the apeiron (ἄπειρον, ie. that which lacks a restricting form). The things return to that from which they originate in conformity to the law of justice. For they pay to each other penalty and retribution for their injustice in the order of time.” 

Here the central motive of the archaic religion of life and death has found a clear expression in Anaximander’s philosophical view of physis (φύσις  - "nature"). It is the motive of the formless stream of life, ever-flowing throughout the process of becoming and passing away, and pertaining to all perishable things which are born in a corporeal form, and subjected to anangke. This is the original sense of the Greek matter-motive. It originated from a deification of the biotic aspect of our temporal horizon of experience and found its most spectacular expression in the cult of Dionysius, imported from Thrace.

FORM MOTIVE -

SUPERHEROES: deified cultural powers of American society.

The form-motive, on the other hand, was the central motive of the younger Olympian religion, the religion of form, measure and harmony. It was rooted in the deification of the cultural aspect of classical Greek society. This motive found its most profound expression in the cult of the Delphian god, Apollo, the legislator. The Olympian gods have left mother earth with its ever-flowing stream of organic life and its inescapable anangke. They have acquired the Olympus as their residence and have a personal and immortal form, imperceptible to the eye of sense, an ideal form of a perfect and splendid beauty, the genuine prototype of the Platonic idea as the imperishable metaphysical form of true being. But these immortal gods have no power over the anangke, the inexorable fate of death. Remember the utterance of Homer in his Odyssey: “The immortals too cannot help lamentable man when the cruel anangke strikes him down.” 

This is why the younger Olympian religion was only accepted as the public religion of the Greek polis (πόλις, the city-state). But in their private life the Greeks continued to hold to the old earthly gods of life and death. 

[...] The ancient Greeks, whose conception of human nature had such a predominant influence upon the traditional theological view of man, worshipped their Olympian gods who were merely deified cultural powers of Greek society. These gods were represented as invisible and immortal beings endowed with a splendid beauty and a supra-human power. But these splendid gods had no [ultimate?] power over the fate of death to which mortals are subjected. 

[...] The Olympian gods are personified cultural powers, the genuine prototype of the Platonic notion of the metaphysical eidos (είδος, or "idea").

(Herman Dooyeweerd, ‘In The Twilight of Western Thought’, Paideia Press, 2012, pp. 29, 111, 129).

Direct download of above BOOK (177 page PDF)

HOMEPAGE  for free downloads of Dooyeweerd books

_______________________________________

SEE ALSO:

DOOYEWEERD: The Four Formative Undercurrents of Western Thought: 1) The Greek ‘form-matter’ motive

DOOYEWEERD: The central and radical unity of our existence

DOOYEWEERD: Points of Departure: The Biblical ground-motive as sole guarantor of the Western and Global intellectual community

DOOYEWEERD: Dialectical Theology - Barth & Brunner

FMF: Brief intro to Dooyeweerd: Aspects & Ground-motives
_______________________________________