“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.
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- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
The Square of Religious Opposition
|
Christian |
Non-Christian |
|
| Transcendence:
1. Absoluteness 2. Control 3. Universals 4. Unity 5. Law |
II: God’s Has Revealed Himself Concretely in His Word and Works (Christian “rationalism” that actualizes that possibility)
|
I: The Human Mind Can Know Everything—Reality Is Exhaustively Cognizable (Rationalism)
|
| Immanence:
1. Relativity 2. Freedom 3. Particulars 4. Diversity 5. Randomness |
III: God Is the Sovereign Creator (Christian “irrationalism” that makes human reasoning possible) | IV: The Human Mind Is Limited—Nobody Can Know for Sure (Irrationalism) |
God not only is the origin of everything that exists, but also He sovereignly controls everything that occurs. His Word, being absolute truth, has ultimate authority. God goes beyond all created things, including human nature. He transcends human experience. When God speaks, He is uttering an unchallengeable truth, not one opinion among many.
Just because God knows and controls everything, there is no obstacle to His coming into our world and providentially controlling whatever happens in it by His wise counsel and plan. He can reveal Himself clearly in the world, as at the Incarnation and on the day of Pentecost. God is “omnisubjective,” that is, intimately aware of the content of our experience as our experience. He has made His glory and holiness known through the created order. He has given Himself to us in an infallible and inerrant Book.
The transcendence of God is identical with His absolute, sovereign control, and it coheres with His immanence, His involvement with the world. God can hold us responsible for what we do, even though He providentially controls everything: human responsibility coheres with that control. So the transcendence of God expresses itself in God’s immanence in creation. These two aspects of our worldview cooperate.
Christian philosophy has elements that seem “irrational,” that is, not based ultimately on the authority of man and his thinking. The Christian’s profession of dependence on an authority beyond himself is a renunciation of rationalism, which will seem “irrational” to the unbeliever.
In the Christian view, man never becomes the ultimate authority. To those who do so exalt man’s mind, our transcendent commitments will seem irrational. But that’s not something we need to be afraid or ashamed of. Our “irrationality” gives us a foundation for rationality, science, morality, logic, and human dignity.
But we also have strong rational elements in our philosophy. This God has revealed Himself in His Word so clearly and authoritatively that I have a basis for philosophy and logic. Because God controls the world and has promised to keep it uniform, you have a basis for science. You can study nature scientifically and expect that the world will behave in a law-like, orderly way, and therefore you can predict.
Ethics based on the authority of God is therefore absolute. But absoluteness does not entail vagueness. God can give specific commandments like, “Don’t put a stumbling block in front of a blind man.” God didn’t leave things at the level of generalities like “Play fair!” “Love one another.” “Be honest.” What do those words mean? God gives specific commandments. In fact, I dare say that the Bible is so specific as to be offensive to fallen man. Nobody would be upset with the Bible if all it said was “Show good will to everybody!” “Good will” means you don’t commit adultery, you don’t engage in fornication, you don’t lust, you don’t defraud, you don’t steal from people, you don’t trip blind people, you don’t talk behind the deaf man’s back.
Now let’s talk about non-Christian philosophy. What is my warrant for referring to “the” non-Christian worldview? There are many non-Christian positions, we’re assured. I agree, but their differences amount to little more than a family squabble.
First, the non-Christian has his transcendent elements which, you recall, are the “irrational” side of a worldview. The primary non-Christian’s “irrational” element is the conviction that the human mind is limited and, consequently, there can be no absolute certainty or universals, no unqualified authority. Anything that would have such authority would transcend the human mind. Every non-Christian philosophy says, in one way or other, that nobody can know for sure. This leads to relativism. Every non-Christian philosophy of life believes that an inscrutable, impersonal chance governs the universe.
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- The universe is ultimately mysterious. If there’s any freedom, it’s part of that mysterious, inscrutable side of reality.
- Human freedom is beyond our ability to understand, for we understand a thing only by putting it in a system, and freedom abhors system.
- If anything can happen, if the universe is the realm of the random, then there is no universal system. But that is how we have to conceive of the universe if we would accommodate freedom in our thinking.
- If the universe is a random realm, then nobody can encompass all the details, no one can know for sure. Therefore, no one can have ultimate ethical authority. Ultimately, every statement is relative to the one making it.
Unbelievers rarely want to stress that. They prefer to talk about the immanent elements of their worldview and escape to the transcendent only when pressed.
For example, unbelievers will say that reality in principle is fully knowable apart from God. Somehow if all human minds put together everything they collectively knew, if they could gather all the historical information, all the scientific information, all the research, for thousands of years, then in principle, they could know everything.
And if the universe is knowable and predictable, then it is a system in which everything that happens does so in accordance with law. In short, the immanent side of the unbeliever’s thinking will be deterministic. They think the universe is deterministic and therefore fully predictable and that’s what makes scientific and technological advances possible.
But there’s a problem. With the non-Christian’s impersonal determinism in mind, you challenge him.
“What you’re telling me is also determined in advance or predictable, right? There’s no rational authority behind what you’re saying, because you’re just a cog in the machine called the universe, and cogs have no rational justification for what they do. Rational justification presupposes the very freedom that determinism makes impossible. Everything’s grinding out what the prior state of the universe has determined it to grind out, and so you’re grinding out your opinion about determinism. But if the latter grinding is happening in accord with deterministic law, then you are not justifying your belief in determinism. Therefore, determinism could not be known to be true, because knowing it to be true, justifying it, is incompatible with its being true.”
When unbelievers say they want to punish criminals, you say,
“That desire makes no sense in a deterministic universe. Ethical evaluation, the punishment of criminals, assumes a measure of freedom and accountability. But given your view of the universe, no one is accountable for anything. It’s just the universal machine grinding things out.”
When you press the unbeliever to be consistent with his immanent elements, he’ll hop from Quadrant IV to Quadrant I. That is, he’ll invoke the transcendent side of his philosophy and protest
“Oh, no, somehow there must be an ‘I-Thou’ dimension. Yes, we live in the universal machine of nature, but somehow human nature is beyond the machine and we are free.”
Once upon a time, we’re told, there was primordial soup whose atmospheric ingredients were exposed to energy. This exposure, amazingly, turned the ingredients into simple organic compounds (monomers). These, equally amazingly, developed into more complex organic compounds (polymers).
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- Polymers developed into living things.
- Intelligent living things arose out of non-intelligent living things.
- Moral intelligent beings came from non-moral intelligent beings.
In short, what was once upon a time wholly determined and purely material—the primordial soup—progressively escaped the constraints of the determined and the material and achieved freedom and dignity. How?
You’re going to get some version of this:
“The human mind can’t account for all the details.”
The non-believer will nakedly and arbitrarily assert the transcendent principle of his thinking.
“Since the human mind can’t account for everything, there’s a realm of mystery, of freedom that goes beyond us. No one can know for sure.”
The non-Christian has an “irrational” transcendental pole that affirms “Nobody knows for sure,” but also a “rational” immanent pole that affirms, “Reality is fully knowable by the human mind and there is an impersonal determinism and predictability about the world.”
And so the human mind is able to know, but no one can know for sure. His confession of skepticism belies his pretense of omniscience.
As Dr. Van Til summarizes the unbeliever’s answer to you as a Christian: ‘Nobody can know for sure—but we’re sure you’re wrong!’” It’s like saying, “Nobody can master all the details, so don’t pretend there’s an authority of universal import. Nobody can know for sure.”
But then they’ll turn around and become immanent in their philosophy and say “You guys are wrong because we’ve studied science, history, psychology, and logic.”
As soon as you show that the rationality of non-Christian philosophy breaks down, the unbeliever will appeal to his irrational or transcendent elements.
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- “The human mind can’t master everything. We’ll have to work on that problem.”
- “You’re teaching me simultaneously that
- (a) I’m nothing but evolved slime and yet
- (b) I have to ethically conform to your non-Christian ethic (i.e., it’s wrong for me to live in a certain way or to hold certain views ). Which is it?”
- “We’re not really sure. When we talk ethics, we stress one aspect of human nature, and when talking science, we stress something else.”
- “But you have an obligation to integrate them!”
- “We’re working on it!”
It’s always beyond and predicated on the human mind.
The Square of Religious Opposition exposes the special relationship between Quadrant II and Quadrant IV: what the Christian says about transcendence contradicts what the non-Christian says about immanence. Quadrant I and Quadrant III are analogously related.
Non-Christian immanence (III) and Christian authority (II) are related antithetically, and so are the Christian view of immanence (IV) and the non-Christian view of the transcendence (or “unknowableness”) of this world (I).
The Christian says that because God is the sovereign creator (II), His Word has ultimate authority over the world’s details (III). The non-Christian asserts both that the human mind is limited (I) and that it can know reality exhaustively apart from God (IV)! The non-Christian’s rationality contradicts the Christian’s “irrationality.”
Because God is the ultimate authority (II), there are concrete details we can rationally discover about God, man, the cosmos, about how we should live our lives, our responsibility (III). According to the non-Christian, however, nobody can know for sure, nobody can have universal knowledge, no one has warrant for appealing to an absolute authority (I). So whenever we appeal to God’s authority (II), the non-Christian counters with the pseudo-authority of the admittedly limited human mind. But when we observe that the admittedly limited human mind cannot be authoritative, the non-Christian repairs to his irrationalism, “Nobody can know for sure.”
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Postscript: For many years Covenant Media Foundation produced and sold hundreds of Greg L. Bahnsen’s recorded lectures, but late last year they decided to give them all away. Explore their site and download promiscuously and spread the word.
I especially recommend items on the Apologetics page (under “Free MP3 Downloads in the top menu), including Bahnsen’s formal debates with Gordon Stein (1985, UC Irvine) and Edward Tabash (1993, UC Davis) and his answer to Michael Martin who backed out of their 1994 scheduled debate.
On the Philosophy page one can audit not only Bahnsen’s history of philosophy series, but also Cornelius Van Til’s. Plenty of free articles as well. (Among my favorites is Bahnsen’s taking me to task in 1988 when I was a defender of Gordon Clark against Bahnsen. My letter (to which Bahnsen responded) had been on CMF’s old site, but thanks to Dave Lull, I can link to its location on the “Wayback Machine.” Thanks, Dave!
