January 2021 – Anthony G. Flood

The Square of Religious Opposition: A Van Tillian insight, diagrammed by Frame, taught by Bahnsen, paraphrased by me

“Van Til observed that both the unbeliever and the believer maintain correlative views of continuity (rationalism) and discontinuity (irrationalism), and that these two sets of correlative views stand in contradiction to each other. . . . The Christian holds that God knows and controls all things (resulting in rationality and continuity), which contradicts the non-Christian’s view that reality is an expression of pure chance (resulting in irrationality and discontinuity). The Christian holds that God must reveal Himself and does so with authority over man’s reasoning (stressing discontinuity and ‘irrationality’ or man’s rational inadequacy), which contradicts the non-Christian’s view that reality is controlled and (in principle) completely knowable by the laws of his own mind (stressing rationality and continuity).

“John Frame has often capitalized on this significant insight in Van Til. . . . It is found in ‘the square of religious opposition’ in his The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing Co., 1987), 14-15. . . .” Greg Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic: Readings and Analysis, 399-400, n. 267.

A long excerpt from Frame’s The Doctrine of the Christian Life (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing Co., 2008) is freely available online; his exposition of the square of religious opposition is in chapter 4, 42ff. What follows is my rendering (part transcription, part paraphrase, done at least ten years ago) of Greg L. Bahnsen’s interpretation of Frame’s idea. My source is Bahnsen’s lecture “Disarming Worldviews” in his Loving God with Your Whole Mind series GB1413. (Clicking the link will take you to a file you may play or download.)

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There’s an antithesis between the Christian worldview and the non-Christian worldview, but at least they have being worldviews in common. Every worldview incorporates considerations of transcendence and elements of immanence.

A worldview’s elements of transcendence are the absolutes, authority, and universals it depends on, all of which are prior to experience. They are the controls that provide unity, continuity, and order for experience.

1. What is absolute is not part of transient experience, but renders the latter intelligible and therefore must transcend that person-relative, changing, and qualified experience.
2. Every appeal to authority relativizes momentary thinking. If I claim to live according to a principle, then that principle, and not any thought that happens to cross my mind, functions as an authority for me. That standard, external to my mind and not a product of it, is that to which my thinking must conform.
3. No philosopher looks upon the world as a realm of utter diversity, so it must notice “commonalities” and employ universals to refer to those commonalities in order to conceive and talk about the diversity he or she does find. When we analyze the reality presented in our experience, we use universals that necessarily transcend the experience to be analyzed.

By contrast, immanence is about the here-and-now, the close-at-hand, what is continuous with our experience. It stresses the concrete details over the abstract plan. Every philosophy deals not only in authority and control measures, but also in the freedom we have to change, make our own decisions, to be different. Continue reading “The Square of Religious Opposition: A Van Tillian insight, diagrammed by Frame, taught by Bahnsen, paraphrased by me”

What are we doing when we’re reading? Part 2: Gordon Clark’s occasionalism and Bernard Lonergan’s accumulation of insights converging on a viewpoint

This sequel to “What are we doing when we’re reading? Bernard Lonergan and Gordon Clark on ‘black marks on white paper’” is occasioned by Joseph K. Gordon‘s comment there. He is the author of Divine Scripture in Human Understanding: A Systematic Theology of the Christian Bible (Notre Dame Press, 2019). Another book firmly on my legenda.

Gordon supplied the (for me) elusive passage in Insight where Lonergan elaborates on the role of those marks in human knowing. The narrowing of my search to a half-dozen pages was a godsend, for I would have never made the time to comb the 748 pages of the Longmans edition I’ve used since 1978. In either edition the textual “address” of this portion of Insight is Chapter XVII, “Metaphysics as Dialectic,” Section 3, “The Truth of Interpretation,” Part 7 (or subsection 3.7) “Counterpositions.” In the original edition, it comprises pages 581-86.

Before dipping into that pregnant passage, let me review the problem the previous post touched on. It’s theological. Or rather, it’s a hermeneutical problem governed by theological commitments. My point of departure was Gordon H. Clark’s epistemology, which he believed his commitment to the Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF) logically demanded he adopt.

According to Clark, human knowledge is restricted to the propositions that one either reads in Holy Scripture or can validly infer therefrom. That was Clark’s axiom, his absolute, nondemonstrable starting point. All other beliefs, even if true, are at best opinion if not so stated in or deducible “by good and necessary consequence” (WCF I:VI) from Scripture.

My question continues to be: how did Gordon Clark access the propositions of Scripture? He was adamant that ink marks on a Bible’s white paper pages (or pixels on a computer screen) convey nothing to the mind. The Holy Spirit, however, uses those marks to “stimulate” or occasion the divinely intended proposition in the believer’s mind.

Clark was aware of the issue. As he formulated and rebutted a criticism:

Don’t you have to read the Bible? Well do I know the objections that this [ideal of axiomatization of Biblical propositions] immediately raises. Evidentialist apologists and secular philosophies alike exclaim, “But that assumes the point at issue; you are begging the question; you are arguing in a circle.” The reply to this objection should be obvious. The opponents, both secular and religious, assume the authority of experience, the inerrancy of sensation, the validity of induction. But this assumes the point at issue, this begs the question, and the one is as circular as the other.[1]

Continue reading “What are we doing when we’re reading? Part 2: Gordon Clark’s occasionalism and Bernard Lonergan’s accumulation of insights converging on a viewpoint”

If the problem be electoral, how can the solution be? Thoughts on our parlous state.

Trump supporters, who vastly outnumbered security, could have “stormed” the Capitol building, but didn’t. They had the means and opportunity, but no motive. January 6, 2021

President Trump brushed aside the notion of running again in four years. If the theft of the 2020 general election stands, why wouldn’t the thieves do it again?

In Georgia, the crooked machines that shifted votes away from him eight weeks ago shifted them yesterday to give Democrats control of the Senate. Right under our noses. Should we expect different effects from similar causes four years from now?

Trade Secretary Peter Navarro summarized with great clarity evidence that widespread, results-altering electoral and voter fraud occurred. It’s enough to show probable cause to investigate apparent interstate criminal conspiracy (if there’s ever been such a thing). Navarro’s case remains as unrefuted as it is unexamined.

Trump said “You don’t concede when there’s theft involved.” And when theft is proven, shouldn’t something analogous to asset forfeiture apply? Traces of performance-enhancing drugs cost athletes who ingest them their medals. Drug kingpins lose their homes and cars.

Should political actors who rip off 74 million voters occupy their ill-gotten offices?

Trump’s attorney Rudolph Giuliani tirelessly marshaled the evidence before cameras, at risk to his stellar reputation, but it’s been systematically ignored.

Not only by scores of jurists, who are simply not interested in it and who concoct one erudite rationale after another to evade its force.

Not only by a militant leftist media who for years fantasized about a non-existent Russia-Trump conspiracy, while ignoring massive evidence of Chinese Communist Party-Biden Family collusion .

But some of Trump’s so-called friends have outdone jurists and pundits by stabbing him in the back.

Martin Luther King memorably lamented the silence of friends, but the fair-weather variety that bedevil Trump are profiles in cowardice.

Jeff Sessions’s pathetic recusal led the way. It was followed by Mitt Romney’s impeachment vote and Brian Kemp’s refusal to call the Georgia legislature into session to weigh evidence of fraud there.

State legislatures certified electors chosen in violation of their own state laws, thereby violating the U.S. Constitution. They’re complicit in the theft.

Some of them, however, realizing and regretting their error, petitioned VP Mike Pence, President of the Senate, whose office it is to open the envelope and accept or object to the votes, to send the matter back to them for ten days. That’s all Pence had to do. He didn’t have to assume the role of One-man Decider of the Election.

Instead, he waxed sanctimoniously, and irrelevantly, about his alleged inability to object to electors chosen unconstitutionally. His blather about counting all, but only, legal votes turned out to be just that.

And now Pence is being courted to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Trump with all deliberate speed.

The selective concern about “the sanctity of the American democratic process,”—in short supply the past two months but violated as though on cue by Antifa’s agents provocateurs posing as Trump supporters—would be laughable for its hypocrisy were it not also so insidious.

The half million peaceable assemblers at the Ellipse on January 6th represented Trump’s 74 million voters. They’re now being smeared as “insurrectionists” by the moral equivalent of Der Stürmer, a Nazi rag that didn’t merely lie—as Pravda and Izvestia did daily under Stalin—but also slandered and defamed millions of innocent people.

What is to be done?, Lenin famously asked. Should workers fight only to improve their economic well-being? Or also to rid the country of Czarist tyranny? (Yes, he replaced it with another.)

Should we naively continue run candidates in electoral systems that have no integrity ? How has that worked out?

Yes, we prefer deliberation to violence. But the other side is interested in vengeance—state-directed or otherwise—not deliberation over regular order.

And vengeance not only against Trump, but also his supporters who are being slandered indiscriminately and collectively in the public mind for the misdeeds of a few.

Regarding election integrity, there’s a case to be made for 100% paper ballots. Nothing online. I suggest the same goes for what is to be done about the coup.

In the wake of the Secure the Steal movement’s success, ought we not conclude that the Constitution is a dead letter, a tissue of instructions for ceremonies which the mendacious and vindictive perform to lend their crimes an air of legitimacy?

And people ask me why I ever called myself an anarchocapitalist.

As the Deep State decides on their course of violence against the people who voted for Trump, its corporate, media, and congressional puppets decry violence (which they call “mostly peaceful” when BLM and Antifa perpetrate it).

Patriotic Americans outnumber their enemies, but are not yet strategically positioned to crush the latter. How might they get there?

Again, ask yourself, family members, and friends what is to be done, but before you answer, keep the conversation offline.

Trump has been compared to Lincoln. What we may need at this hour, however, is a George Washington.

Donald Trump gestures as he speaks in front of a painting of George Washington during a Pledge to America’s Workers event in the East Room of the White House on July 19, 2018.