In Colossians 2:8, Paul warns Christians not to be seduced by philosophy after (κατὰ, kata) “the elementary principles of the cosmos” (τὰ στοιχεῖα τοῦ κόσμου, ta stoicheia tou kosmou, i.e., demonic spirit-beings[1]) and not after Christ. This suggests the possibility of “philosophy after Christ,” a suggestion I pursued in a book with that title.[2]
“After” here doesn’t mean chronologically subsequent, but rather “in the manner or style of,” as one might paint after Rembrandt or after Picasso. When we philosophize, that is, pursue wisdom to help us lead rightly ordered lives, we ought to do so as Christ the Wisdom of God (σοφίᾳ τοῦ Θεοῦ, sophia tou Theou; 1 Corinthians 1:21) counsels. All philosophy that’s not “after Christ” (not only, say, Hermeticism) assumes a “neutral” posture toward God’s self-revelation in Scripture.[3]
Interestingly, twenty verses earlier, Paul taught not only that all things (τὰ πάντα, ta panta) cohere (συνίστημι, sunistēmi) in Christ, but also that He is “before all things (πρὸ τὰ πάντων, pro ta pantōn)” (Colossians 1:17). That is, He ranks above them because He created them: “. . . without Him nothing was made that was made” (John 1:3b). He decrees what is true about anything other than Himself: “All (כֹּ֤ל, kol) whatever (אֲשֶׁר, asher) pleases (חָפֵ֥ץ, hapes) the Lord (יְהוָ֗ה, Yahweh) does (עָ֫שָׂ֥ה asah)” (Psalm 135:6a). That includes the states of affairs we call “facts.”
Christ is not only “temporally” antecedent to (from “eternity past”[4]) His creation, but also pre-eminent over it. The set of “all things” includes His image-bearers: nothing has priority over Him—not even a philosopher’s mind. The thinker who gives epistemic authority to every Word that proceeds from the mouth of God (by which we are to live: Matthew 4:4) is different from the one who awards that status to something else. By “philosophy after Christ” I mean the pursuit of wisdom by practicing what Jesus preached, that is, answering Satan’s lies with Scripture; that is, putting Christ before that pursuit, not the other way around.
Dr. William F. Vallicella, a philosophically acute friend and interlocuter of the past two decades, has confessed (recently here and also here) that “I am a theist and I am sympathetic to Christianity. But although I have one foot in Jerusalem, the other is planted firmly in Athens (philosophy).”
By the standards of “Jerusalem,” however, Bill has only exposed an “Athenian” bias that prejudices his thinking against Christianity. He apparently doesn’t believe Paul’s epistles were breathed out by God (θεόπνευστος, theopneustos; 2 Timothy 3:16) and therefore as epistemologically authoritative as the other Scriptures.[5]
In what follows I will test Bill’s metaphor: “Jerusalem” and “Athens” do not stand for placid mental islands to which his mind may pay alternating visits, but objects competing for his spiritual allegiance. They are more like wild horses galloping off in opposite directions, threatening to tear his mind asunder. They do not form a fence on which he can sit to contemplate the disparate fruits they offer. What, if not God’s communication of His existence and power to Bill, supports the premises of his putative demonstration of that existence (or any demonstration of anything)? For if our knowledge of God is grounded in what God has revealed, then Bill’s argument is but a curiosity in a world dying from the suppression (κατεχόντων, katechontōn) of that knowledge (Romans 1:18).
Christ demands identification with and submission to Him, not “sympathy” for a set of beliefs about Him, for Whom the pretension of neutrality was abhorrent. “He who is not with Me is against Me” (Matthew 12:30).[6] He didn’t exempt intellectuals; neither did His apostles. Paul, for example, trained in the rabbinical school of Gamaliel, dared this eon’s debaters to show their cards.
For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom (σοφίαν, sophian) of the wise (σοφῶν, sophōn), and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent” [i.e., the intelligence (σύνεσιν, sunesin) of the intelligent (συνετῶν, sunetōn)].[7]
Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer (συζητητὴς, syzētētēs) of this world (αἰῶνος, aiōnos)? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world (κόσμου, kosmou)? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world by wisdom did not know God, it pleased God by the foolishness of the message to save those who believe. For Jews request a sign, and Greeks seek after wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God. (1 Corinthians 1:19-24; NKJV)
Does Bill receive Paul as did the Athenians in the agora of Mars (Ares) Hill, whom he engaged between the arguments he had with that city’s rabbis (Acts 17:17-18)? The Epicureans and Stoics within earshot were curious about the doctrine this “babbler” (σπερμολόγος, spermologos) was propagating (v. 18). They had nothing with which to counter Paul’s proclamation of the One Who had predicted His death and resurrection (ἀνάστασις, anastasis). For them, the report of the latter was the latest novelty (τι καινότερον, ti kainoteron) (v. 20).
Noting their religiosity (δεισιδαιμονεστέρους, deisidaimonesterous) (v. 22), that is, their reverence for demons (δαίμονες), Paul contrasted the risen Christ—the creator of all, known by all—against their “Unknown God,”[8] the letters of whose name being chiseled into their altar (v. 22).
Christians are expected to refute arguments (λογισμοὺς, logismous), to dethrone anything (πᾶν ὕψωμα ἐπαιρόμενον, pan hupsōma epairomenon) that exalts itself against the knowledge (γνώσεως, gnōseōs) of God, and bring such a thing—even our power to reason—into captivity to the obedience of Christ (2 Corinthians 10:5-6).
Was Paul wrong to affirm this knowledge? Is Bill willing to bring his mind into such captivity? Or would that entail an abhorrent sacrificium intellectus? I ask because it seems foolish to me for one to try to prove what everyone already knows (Romans 1:18-20), as though they didn’t know it but might psychologically benefit from syllogistic reinforcement. This is not a case of competing authority claims between which one may choose as one chooses hats.[9]
When the disputer demands an argument, he assumes one is possible. But how is argumentation possible unless the world is as the Scriptures describe it, that is, a world (κόσμος, kosmos) in which laws of logical entailment, moral absolutes, and nature’s uniformity (the ground of induction) cohere because the God Who inspired those Scriptures created that world? Does Bill’s worldview account for the intelligible predication on which all demonstration depends? Instead, he focuses on whether the Christian worldview has the power to compel agreement.
One will be hard-pressed to produce a theistic argument with power sufficient to compel acceptance from everyone who understands it. But then no argument for any broadly philosophical thesis has this sort of power. If one is unprejudiced, however, one will have to admit that there are arguments for the existence of God that satisfy the following conditions: (i) they are valid in point of logical form; (ii) they fall afoul of no informal fallacy such as petitio principii; and (iii) they feature premises that it is reasonable to accept given the present state of scientific knowledge.[10]
So, no “broadly philosophical thesis” like a transcendental argument for God has the power to compel acceptance but, if one is unprejudiced, one must acknowledge that there are valid, non-fallacious arguments that are no more than reasonable to accept. The unrighteous suppression of knowledge of God’s existence, however, is a species of prejudice and therefore a factor in resisting or accepting arguments that impinge on the pretension to autonomy vis-à-vis God. As I asked Bill in my book:
Sinners know God, yet they suppress that knowledge. Their knowledge of God (however tacit) makes sense of their knowing other, disparate kinds of things, like logical laws, regularities in nature, and moral absolutes. Showing their presupposition of or intelligible dependence on the “first truth” of God (as creator of the world and of other persons) vindicates theistic belief indirectly.[11]
If Christ is Who He says He is, then all of us, even philosophers who claim to honor rational exigence, live in His world and ought to think accordingly. Such conformity requires more than devising a metaphysical argument that (if the reader will pardon the following anti-intellectual outburst) perhaps only a few hundred people on the planet can follow.[12]
According to Paul, every created divine image bearer already knows Him, but many suppress that knowledge, even professing atheism, yet Bill defends their integrity (at least that of some of them.[13] But the god he argues for is “the wrong god,” to borrow a riposte of the late R. C. Sproul’s,[14] not the object of the faith to which Bill claims to be “sympathetic.” Or better, an idol, as Oliphint, the editor of Van Til’s The Defense of the Faith, characterizes the object of the classical theistic proofs.[15]
Assuming arguendo that Bill’s argument goes through, it infers the existence of a being who cannot infallibly communicate his existence and power to those his creatures—or if he can, won’t—rendering such a deduction irrelevant as to whether the God in Whom we’re interested exists.
The god of Bill’s argument is impotent against the skeptical resistance a creature might offer to this divine self-disclosure. He seems to charitably presume that the resister is a sincere truth-seeker who, like Bertrand Russell, would be within his rights to ask his maker post-mortem for “better evidence.”[16]
Would Adam have been epistemically justified to wonder whether he was
hallucinating God’s speaking to him in the garden (or to conjecture that the serpent might be feeding that semblance of communication to his electrode-studded brain in a vat or trapped in The Matrix)?
Bill mischaracterizes Paul’s teaching that God has made His existence plain (φανερόν, phaneron) to mankind (Romans 1:19) as “begging the question,” as though Paul had been arguing for theism.[17] Paul has credentials for speaking in Christ’s name[18]; what are Bill’s for implicitly rejecting those qualifications?
Proofs of God’s existence may be interesting if they’re examined on the assumption that He exists, but are as useful or as unnecessary as proofs for the existence of “the external world” or of “other minds.” If, however, they prove the wrong god, then they’re worse than useless from a Christian apologetic standpoint. Bill rhetorically asks:
. . . are you [i.e., the Van Tillian] not begging the question once again [that is, after seconding what Paul did in Romans 1:18-20] by assuming the truth of the very framework that is in question?[19]
No, because to assume or presuppose the framework or worldview that makes possible intelligible predication is not (again) begging the question, and whether there is such a worldview is no trivial matter.[20]
Apropos the unrighteous nature of suppression of knowledge of God, Bill asks rhetorically:
. . . how can one be morally responsible for a sin that one has not oneself committed?[21]
If Adam is mankind’s representative or federal head, then his sin is imputable—and, as Romans 5:18 implies, is imputed—to his descendants: Adam’s spiritual DNA, if you will, is as transmissible as his biological. Correspondingly, the righteousness of Christ, the new Adam, is imputable to any descendant of Adam who believes in Him. Does Bill also have an issue with that?
Now, I don’t claim to understand the etiology of either imputation but, as with God’s triune nature, my understanding is irrelevant to its truth and credibility. I suspect Bill is not sympathetic to that basic Christian doctrine.
But whatever an “Athenian” might think, the Christian faith is not reducible to the affirmation of the existence of a theos combined with an optional soteriological thesis. The argument for such a being is irrelevant to the question of whether the God of the Bible exists.
Bill attempts to discredit the noetic effect of Adam’s sin retorsively, that is, by showing it exacts a cost its adherents are unwilling to pay:
. . . if our faculties have been so corrupted by original sin that we can no longer reliably distinguish between the evident and the non-evident, then this corruption will extend to all our cognitive operations including Paul’s theological reasoning, which we therefore should not trust either.[22]
What we find evident or not depends on our assumptions or presuppositions, that is, the ideas we bring to our experience. When Scripture affirms the uniformity of nature (e.g., Genesis 8:22), it reinforces our confidence in our ability to know nature, but that confidence is compatible with sinful, perception-distorting biases. The admission of bias doesn’t destroy the confidence. The professed atheist can be self-deceived about God without his ordinary perceptions being nonveridical. The self-deceived know God but, explicitly or subconsciously, they suppress that knowledge. The suppression doesn’t relieve them of responsibility.[23]
In Defense, a book I know Bill has read, Van Til encapsulated his position: “The best, the only, the absolutely certain proof of the truth of Christianity is that unless its truth be presupposed, there is no proof of anything.”[24] Or, for that matter, disproof of anything. To bring this overlong post to an abrupt halt: Van Til’s transcendental argument, says editor K. Scott Oliphint, should be understood
not as a strict method but as a general approach to a defense of Christianity. It can begin with any fact at all and ask as to the presuppositions that are behind the fact and that make it possible. If such presuppositions are irrational (chance, brute fact), then the “fact” with which one begins cannot be truly known. If such presuppositions are rational, then they can only follow from the truth of Christianity.[25]
Notes
[1] Gary DeLashmutt, “Paul’s Usage of ta stoicheia tou kosmou,” Dwell Community Church (DCC), no date. In this stimulating essay on the attraction of Paul’s contemporaries to demonic principalities, DCC’s pastor relies on F. F. Bruce, Paul: Apostle of the Heart Set Free, Eerdmans, 1977, 231, 232, 254 and The New International Commentary: Ephesians and Colossians, Eerdmans, 1984, 198, 207; Curtis Vaughn, The Expositor’s Commentary, Zondervan, 1978, Vol. 11, 198, 207; Donald Guthrie, New Testament Theology, InterVarsity Press, 1981, 144; and H. M. Carson, Tyndale New Testament Commentaries: Colossians and Philemon, Eerdmans, 1984, 63, 77.
[2] Anthony Flood, Philosophy after Christ: Thinking God’s Thoughts after Him, Amazon, 2022.
[3] Take, for example, the “common ground on which men of intelligence might meet” that Bernard J.F. Lonergan, S.J. sought in Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, Preface (1957 Longman’s edition, xiii). Our position against that of Lonergan and others is that the ground shared by intelligent men (homines, not viri) lies not in their epistemology, but in their status as divine image-bearers. Lonergan merely assumed that what he discovered about how his mind operated was representative of minds whose existence he presupposed. Apart from God’s revelation, however, there are no grounds for that conceit and presupposition. The latter are reasonable, but only if the God-man-world interrelationship is as Scripture indicates. (If not Scripture, then . . . what?)
[4] “. . . from everlasting (מֵ֭עוֹלָם, meowlam) I have been established (נִסַּ֥כְתִּי, nissaḵti)” Proverbs 8:23. The first verse shows that the antecedent of “I” is Divine Wisdom (חָכְמָ֥ה, hakmah, feminine singular). For a discussion of עוֹלָם (olam, the root of מֵ֭עוֹלָם, meowlam), see Flood, “The ‘divine interchange’ principle of Bible interpretation: Otis Q. Sellers on olam’s control of aion,” Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.
[5] See note 18 below.
[6] “He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me. He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for My sake will find it” (Matthew 10:37-39; NKJV)
[7] Paul was invoking Isaiah’s prophecy: “. . . the wisdom (חָכְמַ֣ת, hakemat) of their wise men (חֲכָמָ֔יו, hakamaw) shall perish, and the understanding (וּבִינַ֥ת, ubinat) of their prudent men (נְבֹנָ֖יו, nebonaw) shall be hid” (Isaiah 29:14).
[8] ΑΓΝΩΣΤΩ ΘΕΩ, AGNŌSTŌ THEŌ
[9] “. . . if we develop our reasons for believing that a true knowledge of God and, therefore, also of the world, is possible because actually given in Christ, we have in fact given what goes in philosophy under the name of epistemology. It will then be possible to compare the Christian epistemology with any and with all others. And being thus enabled to compare them all, we are in a position and placed before the responsibility of choosing between them. And this choosing can then . . . no longer be a matter of artistic preference. We cannot choose epistemologies as we choose hats. Such would be the case if it had been once for all established that the whole thing is but a matter of taste. But that is exactly what has not been established. That is exactly the point in dispute.” Cornelius Van Til, A Survey of Christian Epistemology, In Defense of the Faith, Vol. 2, Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1969, xiv.
[10] William F. Vallicella, “From facts to God: An onto-cosmological argument,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion (2000) 48:157. Unless the God of the Bible exists, however, the concepts of formal validity and fallacy ultimately have no purchase, and the phrase “the present state of scientific knowledge” itself begs some questions.
[11] Flood, Philosophy after Christ, 30.
[12] Vallicella, “From facts to God.” I’m not among those few.
[13] William F. Vallicella, “Is Atheism Intellectually Respectable? On Romans 1:18-20,” Philosophy in Progress, January 19, 2024.
[14] American Calvinist theologian and co-author of Classical Apologetics, R. C. Sproul (1939-2017) was not a Van Tillian presuppositionalist (or any other kind). For the life of me, however, I can’t remember where Sproul so characterized alleged theistic proofs, but not crediting him at all didn’t sit right with me. I’d appreciate hearing from anyone who can scratch that memory itch.
[15] “Because of the Reformed notion of the noetic effects of sin . . . the Reformed saw a need to adjust the medieval notion of natural theology such that its conclusions, apart from the Christian context, were basically idolatrous. That is, the best that one could do, outside of Christ, with theistic arguments was to conclude for a god, who was not the true God of Christianity.” K. Scott Oliphint, “Is There a Reformed Objection to Natural Theology?,” Westminster Theological Journal, 71 (2012), 175; PDF. See footnote 22.
[16] Leo Rosten, “Bertrand Russell and God: A Memoir,” The Saturday Review, February 23, 1974, 25-26. See my discussion of Russell’s quip in Flood, Philosophy after Christ, Chapter 5, “Do Atheists Have an Excuse?” The quotation is on page 33.
[17] On this site, see “Did the Apostle Paul argue for God’s existence?,” May 9, 2019.
[18] Like Peter, Paul was an apostle (“commissioned one”) of Jesus Christ; He told 70 of them that “he who hears you, hears me” (Luke 10:17); Peter implied (2 Peter 3:16) that Paul’s letters (ἐπιστολαῖς, epistolais) are like “the other Scriptures” (τὰς λοιπὰς γραφὰς, tas loipas graphas, i.e., the Tanakh; speaking categorically about Scripture, Paul says (2 Timothy 3:16) it’s God-breathed (θεόπνευστος, theopneustos); as Peter noted earlier in the same epistle (2 Peter 1:21), God’s prophets were carried (φερόμενοι, pheromenoi) by the Holy Spirit to speak or write His Word.
[19] Vallicella, “Is Atheism Intellectually Respectable?”
[20] On this site, see “Christian worldview apologists don’t beg questions. We ask them,” February 20, 2020 and “Christian worldview apologists don’t beg questions. We ask them. Part 2,” May 12, 2020.
[21] Vallicella, “Is Atheism Intellectually Respectable?”
[22] Ibid.
[23] See Greg L. Bahnsen, “The Crucial Concept of Self-Deception in Presuppositional Apologetics,” Westminster Theological Journal, LVII (1995) 1-31. Its text (not a facsimile) is available on my old site. It’s a “synopsis” (see its note 54) of the 1978 Ph.D. dissertation written at the University of Southern California (USC), “A Conditional Resolution of the Apparent Paradox of Self-Deception.” USC’s library has made it available for viewing and downloading here.
[24] Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, Fourth Edition, ed. K. Scott Oliphint, Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 381.
[25] Van Til, Defense, 381n54. Emphasis in the original.