While is it laudable that R. Scott Clark recognizes that the Protestant Reformation and the Council of Trent have not gone away, I have to wonder how he can with a straight face advocate that revelation in Scripture is "objective":
There is a certain disingenuousness afoot here. We see it in the approach of the volume, The Condemnations of the Reformation Era: Do They Still Divide? The objective, historical, theological, and ecclesiological questions are trumped by an appeal to religious experience. Doctrine is not merely or even firstly a reflection of religious experience. It is firstly a statement about what is objectively true. It is an account of objective divine revelation.
I wonder that since in Scotty's book, Recovering the Reformed Confession, he says that anyone who considers the Bible as a univocal and rational revelation of God in propositional form is a "fundamentalist" and a "rationalist" who is guilty of propagating a "quest for illegitimate religious certainty" or QIRC for short. Pentecostals and pietists are bastards, too. The proponents of the "quest for illegitimate religious experience" are called QIREs for short. Depending on how you pronounce that latter acronym you might have been pejoratively referred to as a queer. Nevermind. My point is that Van Tilians are continually confused and contradictory. In some contexts they want revelation to be objective. In other contexts they want everything to be as clear as mud.. The Bible is not really "objective" since it is an analogy to what God "really" knows and there is no point of contact at any single point in the inspired Bible between what we know and what God knows. That would mean that Scripture is not really an "objective revelation" at all. The logical implication of the theology of Van Til is that Scripture is a subjective analogy of what God wants us to know but we can never be absolutely sure of anything the Bible says. To do so is to become a fundamentalist bastard. So if the Bible is not univocally the very words and thoughts of God on a creaturely level that we can rationally and logically understand, then it logically follows that there is no "objective divine revelation".
That's why I call Van Tilians QIRU. They are on a "quest for illegitimate religious uncertainty." Because God is absolutely incomprehensible according to the Van Tilians, univocal revelation is impossible on the creaturely level. From the human perspective when logic requires us to accept what is repugnant to the logical and rational mind, we can just claim it's an apparent contradiction and a paradox. God would not really create evil, would He? (Isaiah 45:7; Amos 3:6; Proverbs 16:4; Romans 9:21-22).
Would that Van Tilians like Scotty would understand that the doctrine of the incomprehensibility of God does not refer to what is revealed to man in Holy Scripture but only to the secret being of God. (Deuteronomy 29:29). Be that as it may, I do agree with Scotty that the Reformation is not over and Rome has not changed one iota. Protestants are officially still under the curses of the Anathemas of the Council of Trent. And even though Mr. Scott is inconsistent I do agree that the Bible is an objective revelation of doctrinal propositions in logical form.
Would that Van Tilians like Scotty would understand that the doctrine of the incomprehensibility of God does not refer to what is revealed to man in Holy Scripture but only to the secret being of God. (Deuteronomy 29:29). Be that as it may, I do agree with Scotty that the Reformation is not over and Rome has not changed one iota. Protestants are officially still under the curses of the Anathemas of the Council of Trent. And even though Mr. Scott is inconsistent I do agree that the Bible is an objective revelation of doctrinal propositions in logical form.
Has Rome Really Changed? | Heidelblog
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2 comments:
The Catholic soul is a mockery of God.
Mac, you'll have to clarify what you mean by "Catholic". If you mean Roman Catholic, then obviously you are 100% correct.
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