God has worked all things according to the counsel of His will.[1]
How do you like them apples, O Man?
Every breathtaking sunset, every animal-immolating forest fire.
Beethoven’s Fifth. Auschwitz’s gas chambers.
The regeneration of every healthy cell, the proliferation of every tumor.
Every orgasm, every rape.
Five hundred eight years ago today, Martin Luther, a Roman Catholic monk of the Augustinian order, proposed to debate in public certain theological propositions, 95 in all. He famously listed them on paper affixed (probably not nailed) to Castle Wittenburg’s door, the German farming town’s bulletin board.
Thus began the “Protestant Reformation,” without which there would be no Christian Individualism. The latter is downstream from the Reformers’ (partial but significant) work of recovering Biblical truth.
As a Christian Individualist, I do not subscribe to any Reformed ecclesiology,[2] yet I happily adopt the motto of Reformer Jodocus Van Lodenstein (1620-1677), semper reformanda.[3]
The object of continuing reformation, however, is not the society we call a “church,” but the individuals whom the Holy Spirit is progressively conforming to Christ through their obedience to His Word.
God “in eternity past” foreordained whatsoever happens, has happened, will happen.[4] The reader of the New Testament has a window into the mind of God, of which He has revealed an inkling to His people.
But not everyone who implicitly affirms this truth as his inheritance embraces it and pursues its implications.
With the Decree in the background of one’s thinking,[5] one can philosophize not only in the sense explored in Philosophy after Christ: Thinking God’s Thoughts after Him, but also in the sense of raising, clarifying, and essaying answers to questions of the greatest generality (e.g., what is real; what, if anything, do we know; what is true, good, just, and beautiful).
Not every Christian is motivated by either interest, but perhaps he should be. The Decree is a topic of systematic theology and is articulated in academic language, but it can be rendered in more down-to-earth lingo.
All believers blessed with normal intelligence, but also childlike submissiveness,[6] naturally raise their minds from time to time to philosophical questions in the second sense. When they do this, however, they are not following non-Christian thinkers, but putting what they have perennially tried to do on the only foundation possible.
The Biblicist does not need explicit metaphysical categories, but if he has absorbed a culture that has use for them, then to function profitably in it, he may creatively indulge in such speculation to the glory of God. It is a way to love God with one’s mind.[7]
Normatively, philosophical analysis and synthesis are not exercises in prideful self-glorification (e.g., “See how smart I am!”), but they may merit satisfaction in a job well done. The latter, however, is akin, but not morally superior, to that of a skilled manual laborer.
Philosophy that is not pursued “after Christ” cannot help but try to subsume all else within it, including theology; necessarily, the result is disorder. He who pursues philosophy’s questions without acknowledging under whose authority he is pursuing them arrogates to himself the status of final authority, the stance of the rebel.
The Decree is the ultimate context of philosophical problems, one that permits the possibility of their fruitful human pursuit. (The non-Christian has an alternative ultimate context, of course, and the Christian must challenge the former to bring it out of the shadows.)
In this life, solutions are guaranteed to no one, but at least their meaningful pursuit is—if one acknowledges the anthropological parameters God has set for the pursuit of analytical and architectonic excellence. That is, if they’re not being pursued quixotically in a void against a backdrop of chance.
The penchant of the Western mind to systematize, to order things to illuminate them, is a good work for which the Scripture can render one fully equipped.[8] Such good works benefit all of God’s people, not just the formally educated and intellectually acute among them.
Biblicists can celebrate the Reformation without subscribing to the errors of its originators. It is a semper (“ever,” “always”) challenge for believers in every walk of life in this Dispensation of Grace. We who occupy its last days should leave no stone unturned in the effort to glorify the Cornerstone of Truth.[9] We do not freeze-dry the symbol “Reformation” but live it according to the Word that illuminates all of life, including the life of the mind on its analytical and system-building side.
Notes
[1] “God, from all eternity, did, by the most wise and holy counsel of His own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass . . . (Ephesians 1:11; Romans 11:33; Hebrews 6:17; Romans 9:15, 18),” The Westminster Confession of 1646, Chapter III: Of God’s Eternal Decree. The language of The 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith, Chapter III: Paragraph 1, is almost identical.
[2] Luther was complicit, ethically if not also juridically, in the cruel imprisonment of Fritz Erbe, an Anabaptist who could find no Biblical support for the baptism of children, which put him afoul of the sacralist regime then governing the German state of Thuringia. In 1840, Erbe was lowered into a subterranean dungeon where he languished until he died in 1848, not having recanted his alleged error. Luther, who held the traditional interpretation of Romans 13—that is, as sanctioning the civil magistrate’s use of the sword to maintain civil order against its enemies (as he viewed the Anabaptists)—knew of this fatal consequence of the sacralist gambit. To this persecution, he turned a deaf ear and blind eye, that is, he broke out of one form of religious repression only to adopt another. Christian Individualists reject Lutheran baptismology along with sacralism. Thus, the imperative semper reformanda. See note 3 below. See also my “Sellers’s Baptismology, Part 7: The Apostles, Governing the Tribes of the Mediatorial Nation Israel, Will Identify the Nations with Christ,” May 22, 2023; and my “Romans 13: another contrarian interpretation,” March 25, 2019, on Sellers’s dispensationalist interpretation.
[3] The phrase ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda (secundum verbum Dei; “the church reformed, always being reformed according to the Word of God”), is found in Van Lodenstein’s 1674 devotional work Beschouwinge van Zion (contemplation of or meditation on Zion).
[4] Isaiah 46:10-11, Psalm 33:11, Ephesians 1:9.
[5] Except, of course, when it is the explicit focus of one’s attention!
[6] Matthew 18:2.
[7] Matthew 22:37.
[8] 2 Timothy 3:17.
[9] Psalm 118:22; Matthew 7:24-27; John 14:6; 1 Peter 2:4-8; Acts 4:11.