Despite all its efforts, the new reformational movement in philosophy appears to have been forced into isolation in today’s intellectual-spiritual climate. Thus it is compelled to do battle on every front. Indeed, this battle must be waged even with Reformed thinkers as they analyze the spiritual legacy of Abraham Kuyper, the father of the Calvinist revival in the nineteenth century.
jeudi 21 avril 2022
Herman Dooyeweerd: The Philosophy of the Law-Idea: The firm ground of temporal reality is beyond time
Despite all its efforts, the new reformational movement in philosophy appears to have been forced into isolation in today’s intellectual-spiritual climate. Thus it is compelled to do battle on every front. Indeed, this battle must be waged even with Reformed thinkers as they analyze the spiritual legacy of Abraham Kuyper, the father of the Calvinist revival in the nineteenth century.
samedi 9 avril 2022
Herman Dooyeweerd: Christ Jesus the new life-giving Root of humanity
The significance of common grace in the reformational worldview can only be understood in the light of the radical antithesis that exists between the ground-motive of the Divine Word-revelation and the ground-motives of apostate religions. Common grace is the opposite of the Roman Catholic motive of “nature.” In the dialectical ground-motive of nature and grace, human nature remains a relatively autonomous factor over against the grace of Christ Jesus. The realm of nature here is the place where a synthesis is struck between the creation motive of Scripture and the dialectical ground-motive of the Greek world of thought.
The common grace of Scripture, by contrast, is the effect of the antithetical operation of the religious [ie ultimate root] ground-motive of the Divine Word-revelation. Beginning with the promise made in Paradise, which was fulfilled in Christ Jesus in the fullness of time, this ground-motive has been at work in opposition to the principle of apostasy [ie rejection of Christ]. It has suspended the final judgment of our fallen world and held in check the unhindered effects of spiritual death that resulted from the fall into sin.
This grace is a common grace (gratia communis). It is not individual and not particular. It is not mediated through palingenesis [rebirth], but is a grace that is given to the whole human race and to the whole temporal cosmos that is religiously [ie “rootedly”] concentrated in this human race, without distinction between believers and unbelievers.
This common grace preserves human nature in spite of its apostasy from God. It also preserves individual gifts and talents; and it allows remnants of the original perfection to unfold, even in God’s fallen creation. Above all, it upholds the order of creation itself through the divine Word that created everything. Thus it maintains all the structures and ordinances that are founded in this creation order, which stand antithetically opposed to human hubris and force it to capitulate again and again.
There is no dualism between the divine Word that created all things and the incarnation of this Word in Christ Jesus, who brought redemption from sin. God’s Word remains the Word, even in its incarnation.
According to Emil Brunner there is an internal contradiction between God’s will as Creator and God’s will as Redeemer. In this he is obviously under the influence of the dialectical ground-motive of nature and grace. Although common grace finds its origin in the Word of God, it can never be detached from Christ Jesus, the new life-giving root of the human race. Indeed, it is only in Christ that common grace truly becomes grace for mankind; and outside of Him it becomes judgment and curse. For this reason there can be no thought of a “separate domain of common grace” that stands opposed to a “domain of special grace” in Christ Jesus.
The ground-motive of the Divine Word-revelation contains no dualism. It was only because of the influence of the scholastic ground-motive of nature and grace that Reformed Christians detached common grace from the incarnate Word and denied it in its religious root.
If the antithetical principle of life is eliminated from the fallen cosmos, nothing remains but the decay and death of human nature. This antithetical life principle has a preserving effect upon humanity as it stands yet undivided in its apostate natural existence; and it regenerates, through palingenesis, those creatures reborn and renewed in Christ Jesus. But the church of Christ, as such, can only live out of palingenesis, which works all its regenerating wonders even in the fellowship of a common grace shared with fallen mankind.
The life of this church in this fellowship of common grace entails antithesis, incessant struggle, and ongoing reformation. Indeed, it is only in terms of palingenesis [rebirth] that we can understand the reformational dynamic, a dynamic which through its radically changed life-posture transforms not only our worldview, but also, and at its core, our scientific endeavor.
Kuyper’s grasp of this shows that he truly lived out of the Scriptural religious ground-motive of the Reformation. This was the deepest insight in his entire “weltanschauliche” or “worldview-ish” conception of reformational scholarship.
mardi 5 avril 2022
Herman Dooyeweerd: Scripture a coherent unified whole
‘Old Woman Reading’ (Rembrandt van Rijn, 1631) |
[NOTE: “Religious” = “the innate impulse of the human selfhood to direct itself toward the true or toward a pretended absolute Origin of all temporal diversity of meaning” (Dooyeweerd, A New Critique of Theoretical Thought]. |
If anyone approaches Scripture from another religious ground-motive, not even the most extensive theological knowledge of Scripture will protect them from using Scripture in an unscriptural manner. For this simple reason, no intrinsically Reformed philosophy can ever take its starting point in the science of theology. Indeed, a genuinely Scriptural theology can only arise from the ground-motive of Scripture itself.
To remove palingenesis [rebirth - which embraces both the individual and all creation] as an active force from the foundations of the Reformed worldview and Reformed scholarship spells grave danger. It would cause the ground-motive of Scripture to degenerate into a theoretical “principle” for one’s life and thought — a principle which in essence stems from a rationalistic deification of reason, even though the thinker may not be aware of this. Even palingenesis itself would then be turned into something theoretical, that is to say, into a purely theological doctrine. It would, with theoretical detachment, be reduced to our logical function of thought, without having transformed our thinking at its root.
This degeneration can occur unnoticed even among those who place the greatest emphasis on the Scriptural character of their thought. For this reason, the reformational principle is a critical religious principle that becomes active in our thought not through theology, but through the Spirit (Pneuma) of the church of Christ by the Word of God itself.’