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)

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(2) Influence of Friedrich Christoph Oetinger?

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'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) 

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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."

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

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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. 

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