Divine Simplicity, Incomprehensibility, Thomistic Dualism and Biblical Inerrancy

". . . 'The supreme Judge by which all controversies of religion are to be determined . . . can be no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture.'  

"Unfortunately the visible churches that have descended from the Protestant Reformation, especially the larger and wealthier denominations, have to a considerable degree repudiated the Bible."

Gordon H. Clark.  What Do Presbyterians Believe?  pp. 24-25.

All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: (2 Tim. 3:16 KJV)

Recently, I was listening to several YouTube videos on the issue of divine simplicity.  It became apparent to me that the Thomistic doctrine has a problem that Dr. Gordon H. Clark called a dual view of truth.  Most of the advocates of the modernized doctrine of divine simplicity have over-emphasized the transcendance of God to the point that nothing can be known of God's archetypal knowledge whatsoever.  Divine simplicity's most basic assertion is that all that is in God's archetypal being is God himself.  The attributes of God are therefore only identifiable from below or from an ectypal understanding of God. 

The Westminster Confession of Faith does indeed insist that God is not a collection of parts or a composite of parts.  The problem, however, is when these same theologians say that God's mercy and God's wrath are the same thing.  God is love.  (1 John 4:7-8).  Is God's love really the same thing as God's justice and God's wrath?  I don't think so.  But does the doctrine of divine simplicity entail that distinctions cannot be made in God's being without His being a composite of parts?  Dr. Gordon H. Clark defined God as the system of propositions that God thinks.  Within the Godhead or divine essence there are three distinct Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  All three Persons are the same God.  If we take the divine simplicity model too far, that would imply that Cornelius Van Til's view of God as both one Person and Three Persons would not matter.  All that is God is God.  This would entail direct contradictions in the Godhead.

Although God is a simple Being, who cannot be divided into composite parts, does this mean that God cannot be defined?  If so, then we have a problem with Scripture, because it is from the propositions in the Bible that we know anything about God at all.  This raises another question.  Is God incomprehensible?  Before we can answer the question, the word "incomprehensible" must be defined.  Dr. Clark defined the word as immeasurable, not unknowable.  Typically, the neo-orthodox view has it that God is so totally transcendent that He cannot be known except through and existential encounter, not through a rational understanding of information in the Bible:

". . . Schleiermacher, Ritschl, and modernism substituted religious experience for the Word of God.  The neo-orthodox also deny the truth of the Bible and substitute something called an existential encounter.  They fail to tell us how this experience determines the number of the sacraments, the mode of baptism, the principles of church government, or even the doctrine of the Atonement. Without such information controversies of religion can be settled only by majority vote, that is, by the whims or ambitions of ecclesiatical politicians.  No wonder there is talk of church union with Rome.  Without information from God, men are left to their own devices."  

Dr. Gordon H. Clark.  What Do Presbyterians Believe?  The Westminster Confession Yesterday and Today.  1965.  (Trinity Foundation:  Unicoi, 2001).  P. 25. 

Frances Turretin did articulate a distinction between the archetypal and ectypal knowledge of God.  I cannot remember exactly what Gordon Clark said about this distinction, so that will have to wait for another blog post.  However, Clark and Cornelius Van Til had a serious disagreement over whether or not God's knowledge and our knowledge coincide at any single point.  Van Til said no and Clark said yes.  In fact, Clark went further than that and insisted that the Bible is univocally the very words of God in a logical and propositional form.  Van Til, on the other hand, following Turretin and Aquinas, insisted that God's archetypal knowledge and our ectypal knowledge do not coincide at any single point.  Clark, utilizing the illustration of geometry, insisted that parallel lines continue into infinity into eternity in both directions without ever intersecting at any single point.  Following this logic then, there could be no coincidence at any single point between God's knowledge and our knowledge whatsoever.  The implications of a Thomistic dualism, then, would be that the Bible is not really God-breathed or even the Word of God.  It could only be a human book based on human logic and a human existential encounter with God.  In other words, it would mean that only God knows any divine information and this information is known only to God in His archetypal knowledge.

I have even heard Dr. James White say that only God knows what the original autographs say, and God knows this in His archetypal knowledge.  The problem here involves the doctrines of both divine inspiration and biblical inerrancy/infallibility.  If the Bible is merely a human book on the ectypal level, then it logically follows that it could contain errors.  The problem is even worse when we consider the issue of reasoned eclecticism in regards to the textual criticism of both the Old Testament and the New Testament.

Even Dr. Richard Mueller has not taken such a strong stance against any interaction between God's archetypal and God's ectypal knowledge:

The issue, here, is a direct reflection of the language of the Reformed prolegomena: the ultimate and therefore perfect archetypal theology is identical with the divine mind—all other theology is, at best, a reflection of this archetype, a form of ectypal theology. Ectypal theology in the human subject (in all systems of theology!) is not only finite and reflective but also limited by human sinfulness and by the mental capacities of the theologian.165 The human author of theology, thus, has little intrinsic authority. If theology is to be authoritative, its source (other than the mind of the theologian) must carry authority with it. That source cannot be the divine archetype, but it must stand in a more direct relation to that archetype than any utterly human effort: the doctrine of inspiration leads, therefore, in many of the orthodox systems, directly to the doctrine of the authority of Scripture.

Muller, Richard A. Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy;  Volume 2: The Cognitive Foundation of Theology. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2003. Print.  Page 261.

The point here is that if the archetypal knowledge of God is known only to Him, how could ectypal knowledge be a reflection of what is totally unknowable?  Gordon H. Clark distinguished between God's intuitive knowledge and human discursive knowledge.  He also agreed with the proposition that the noetic effects of sin cause errors in logic and most likely in theology as well.  But is it really true that 2 + 2 = 4 is the same thing as God's love in God's archetypal knowledge?  How do you know? 

Now, as this relates to the issue of biblical inspiration and biblical inerrancy/infallibility, I would like to raise the problem of textual criticism, reasoned eclecticism, and presuppositional apologetics.  I will delve more into this issue in future posts.  However, for now I would like to ask a few questions.  If the original autographs are only a reflection of the archetypal knowledge of God and can only be known through ectypal reflection and condescension to the human level, and if we do not have the original autographs, does it not follow that there are at least two problems with the doctrine of biblical inspiration and biblical inerrancy?  First of  all, if we do not have the original autographs, we are left with either a reasoned eclectical reconstruction of the autographs by way of a fallible "science" of textual criticism, or we are left with an equally reasoned reconstruction of the autographs from the extant Byzantine majority texts.  Thus, both the critical eclecticism and the reasoned Byzantine text reconstruction are based on some form of textual criticism.  Both positions argue that the Masoretic Text of the Old Testament and the Textus Receptus of the New Testament are flawed.  

So that logically means that no manuscript extant today are without error.  How then can a theoretical biblical inerrancy exist at all?  Logically, it must be as unknowable as God's archetypal knowledge.  In that case, Bart Ehrman's argument that the autographs cannot be reconstructed must be true.  James White has argued that the autographs are available in the critical apparatus of the eclectic editions of the Greek New Testament.  But does this not lead to a form of relativism where the informed reader of the critical editions of the Greek New Testament pick and choose which variant is the original?  Absolute truth is unchanging, yet we have a constantly changing series of translations based on an ever-changing eclectic Greek New Testament.   And, as Maurice Robinson has noted, the reasoned eclectic approach often stitches together disparate fragments to produce a text that does not exist in any extant manuscript of any kind.  The options keep changing from one variant to the next in a constant flux of possibilities, which leads to relativism, not certainty.

But is there another option?  Gordon H. Clark proposed that Scripture is the axiom of Christianity.  Without the Bible there is no basis for Christianity at all.  But more about this in a future post.