Reformed Forum's Review of Fesko's Book on Apologetics

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The desperate critics (as opposed to the more sincere ones). Those who’d interpret “general equity” as applying to ecclesiastical censures.

That’s interesting.

This might be a side topic, but how do they interpret “body politic” and “judicial laws” (both literally in section 4) as relating to the church... unless they’re papist or erastian.
 
That’s interesting.

This might be a side topic, but how do they interpret “body politic” and “judicial laws” (both literally in section 4) as relating to the church... unless they’re papist or erastian.

They acknowledge the laws in view originally pertained to a particular sphere. That’s not the dispute. They go on to say that those laws now are fulfilled by church censure. Of course, that doesn’t preserve in any sense the laws in view but instead obliterates them.
 
I'd agree that the issue with Fesko's book is not one of discipline, but simply evaluating the quality of his historical work. Seem to recall Fesko was criticized previously for cherry picking/misrepresenting Dr. Mark Garcia's work on union with Christ. Perhaps this is a methodological pattern with Dr. Fesko?
 
I'd agree that the issue with Fesko's book is not one of discipline, but simply evaluating the quality of his historical work. Seem to recall Fesko was criticized previously for cherry picking/misrepresenting Dr. Mark Garcia's work on union with Christ. Perhaps this is a methodological pattern with Dr. Fesko?

Didn't Cornelius Venema take Garcia to task as well for reading Gaffin into Calvin? I don't know if Fesko's work there was faultless, but he certainly wasn't the only one that felt that Garcia overstated his case.
 
Who wanted to take, Fesko I assume, to church courts for misrepresenting Van Til? Or maybe I'm reading the earlier posts wrong. If that's the case it's ridiculous. We can all get all along like any good family, albeit with disagreements ranging from polite to scary ( you ought to see my family, loving but tense at times ).
I kinda want to hear someone's review on it before I judge it, to be fair to Fesko. Than I might get it.

On a second point I think Frame, who is critical of Van Til, did get him right even in most criticisms. Which means us Vantillians need good but accurate critiques to help us grow. Maybe Fesko will provide it.
 
I don't know what it's like now but there was a time one couldn't be in the same room with a Theonomist and not be held suspect. My old church was not theonomic but did hold to the orig unAmericanized WCF, and it was fear of theonomy that was one fact that kept the church out of the Presbyterian Reformed Church. I'll edit to say that we did have a thonomist leaning deacon at the time who was one of the Tyler ARC excommunicants and had all the papers and documents of that controversy (often thought someone needs to get to him and perserve those or do a thesis at least on it before its all lost; maybe something positive could come out of it; OTOH, fading into the dustbin of history might not be bad either). But the church's position was not theonomic. One thing positive from Bahnsen's TICE is that it did lead to an interest in the views at the time of the Westminster Assembly (Bahnsen was unaware of key pieces if I recall rightly), witness in 1990 the appearance of Ferguson's Assembly of Theonomists and I also published the first new edition since the assembly of Gillespie's Wholesome Severity (Naphtali Press Anthology vol. 4).

I'm way off topic here but it is fascinating to me from several different vantage points the way Theonomy and its somewhat related cousin Christian Reconstruction, and other associated worlds of the 1970-2000's really fell off the face of the Earth.

Is it because, as I surmise, Bahnsen died "without heirs" in an intellectual sense? (Obviously his son David is quite popular these days in National Review circles). And because so much of the Theonomy stuff got eaten up in the (unrelated) Federal Vision tsunami?
 
I'm just guessing, maybe, at least one factor also, a lot of folks who may had early been somewhat comfortable with theonomy with the growing literature and particularly of puritan writings, simply settled into identifying with the WCF, with maybe a broader view of general equity. Air went out of the balloon of a separate identification.
I'm way off topic here but it is fascinating to me from several different vantage points the way Theonomy and its somewhat related cousin Christian Reconstruction, and other associated worlds of the 1970-2000's really fell off the face of the Earth.

Is it because, as I surmise, Bahnsen died "without heirs" in an intellectual sense? (Obviously his son David is quite popular these days in National Review circles). And because so much of the Theonomy stuff got eaten up in the (unrelated) Federal Vision tsunami?
 
Is it because, as I surmise, Bahnsen died "without heirs" in an intellectual sense? (Obviously his son David is quite popular these days in National Review circles). And because so much of the Theonomy stuff got eaten up in the (unrelated) Federal Vision tsunami?

That's exactly it. Gary North doesn't publish on theology anymore. Ken Gentry has promised his commentary for almost two decades now. The other second generation theonomists who could write now write Federal Vision stuff.

One of Bahnsen's disciples who was going to take his place got in trouble for racial views.

Rushdoony's people don't actually write new material (and one can make the argument that neither did Rushdoony after 1980) and the Faith for all of Life magazine is a joke.
 
I'm way off topic here but it is fascinating to me from several different vantage points the way Theonomy and its somewhat related cousin Christian Reconstruction, and other associated worlds of the 1970-2000's really fell off the face of the Earth.

Is it because, as I surmise, Bahnsen died "without heirs" in an intellectual sense? (Obviously his son David is quite popular these days in National Review circles). And because so much of the Theonomy stuff got eaten up in the (unrelated) Federal Vision tsunami?

It is interesting, I wonder if part of it has to do with the revival of interest in Reformed confessional and high orthodoxy periods. The second half of the 20th century certainly, and perhaps the whole 20th century with a few outliers, witnessed a loss of familiarity with the historic Reformed theological corpus. Between translation efforts of works in Latin or Dutch, the availability of scanned texts online that had been out of print for centuries, and the work of historical theologians like Muller, I wonder if theonomists or would-be theonomists either just found better ways in the older approaches to church-state relationships or left orthodoxy altogether (for FV, for instance). When theonomy could plausibly claim to be bearing the torch for the Reformation it had a lot of appeal. I don't think that it has that anymore.
 
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That's exactly it. Gary North doesn't publish on theology anymore. Ken Gentry has promised his commentary for almost two decades now. The other second generation theonomists who could write now write Federal Vision stuff.

One of Bahnsen's disciples who was going to take his place got in trouble for racial views.

Rushdoony's people don't actually write new material (and one can make the argument that neither did Rushdoony after 1980) and the Faith for all of Life magazine is a joke.
I didn't realise it was that bad for them. I was almost a theonomist once.
 
I didn't realise it was that bad for them. I was almost a theonomist once.

Joel McDurmon was the only one publishing theonomic material, as far as I can tell. It wasn't anything beyond the standard stuff. Then he did the whole "cherem principle" thing and then became a SJW.
 
By "let off" and "dubious" you mean Oliphint intended to teach heterodoxy? I do not believe Dr. Oliphint would ever intentionally teach heterdoxy, that he might err or misspeak etc. is common to all men. As to the commonalities, both are recognized teachers, both have written published works with controversy. It is a similar situation. The subject of controversy is different, but the situation is nearly identical. The question here is whether Fesko intentionally misrepresented or if he is mistaken and will retract or revise accordingly.

It seems rather obvious though grouping Karl Barth and Cornelius Van Til into the same category the pejorative nature of it so as to be purposely offensive.



Apparently you spent no time with the content posted by the OP from the Reformed Forum, otherwise you would have read quotations from sources and or listened to them along with discussion.
I liked most of your post but I agree linking Barth and Van Til together is offensive, most of all to him. So why it "seems obvious though" to "group the two together" is primia facia absurd, given the two books written against Barth. If I misunderstood than please correct.
 
I liked most of your post but I agree linking Barth and Van Til together is offensive, most of all to him. So why it "seems obvious though" to "group the two together" is primia facia absurd, given the two books written against Barth. If I misunderstood than please correct.
Leaving aside the accuracy of the comparison, I gotta say, personally I'm struggling to see what's so offensive about this.

It reminds me a bit of the observation on GK Chesterton: i.e. he may have been one of the strongest and most piercing cultural critics of Modernism... but that doesn't change the fact that, when you read his novels, he was a thoroughgoing Modernist himself, in many ways.

We are all, in one way or another, people of our times. Our POVs are in many interesting ways, closer to our contemporaries we criticize than to our heroes we revere.
 
Leaving aside the accuracy of the comparison, I gotta say, personally I'm struggling to see what's so offensive about this.

It reminds me a bit of the observation on GK Chesterton: i.e. he may have been one of the strongest and most piercing cultural critics of Modernism... but that doesn't change the fact that, when you read his novels, he was a thoroughgoing Modernist himself, in many ways.

We are all, in one way or another, people of our times. Our POVs are in many interesting ways, closer to our contemporaries we criticize than to our heroes we revere.
To compare two thinkers as "obvious together" implies at least enough of an overlap to make it obvious. To compare a guy to someone whom that person vehemently criticized down to the deepest pressupossitons, seems odd to say the least. What do they in common that puts them on same page? Machen utilized modern scholarship in his critique of liberalism, does that make him on the same page as them?
 
To compare two thinkers as "obvious together" implies at least enough of an overlap to make it obvious. To compare a guy to someone whom that person vehemently criticized down to the deepest pressupossitons, seems odd to say the least. What do they in common that puts them on same page? Machen utilized modern scholarship in his critique of liberalism, does that make him on the same page as them?

There are similarities and differences. Both think that since natural man is fallen, he can't use natural theology. Barth's main target, though, was the analogia entis, which he called Antichrist. I think he was a bit silly on that point.

Van Til never really did a systematic analysis of key natural theology thinkers. Sure, he ran Paley and Butler through the ringer. Even his critique of Thomas doesn't actually analyze key passages from Thomas.
 
There are similarities and differences. Both think that since natural man is fallen, he can't use natural theology. Barth's main target, though, was the analogia entis, which he called Antichrist. I think he was a bit silly on that point.

Van Til never really did a systematic analysis of key natural theology thinkers. Sure, he ran Paley and Butler through the ringer. Even his critique of Thomas doesn't actually analyze key passages from Thomas.
Are there enough similarities to link the two together in any significant way?
So they both criticized natural theology and they should be lumped together? That seems odd to me.
 
Both think that since natural man is fallen, he can't use natural theology.

This doesn't seem to square with Van Til himself, and is certainly not nuanced enough. Even just a cursory perusal of Van Til works (all of which I own) shows him saying over and over again that he is not opposed to natural theology, but to natural theology apart from special revelation.

For example, Van Til says:

The distinction between revealed and natural theology as ordinarily understood readily gives rise to a misunderstanding. It seems to indicate that man, though he is a sinner, can have certain true knowledge of God from nature but that for higher things he requires revelation. This is incorrect. It is true that we should make our theology and our ethics wide enough to include man’s moral relationship to the whole universe. But it is not true that any ethical question that deals with man’s place in nature can be interpreted rightly without the light of Scripture.

—Cornelius Van Til, Christian Theistic Ethics, Logos Edition., vol. 3, In Defense of Biblical Christianity (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 1980), ch. 2.​

And it is also important to mention that Van Til makes a crucial distinction between natural theology and natural revelation:

I have never denied that there is a common ground of knowledge between the believer and the unbeliever. I have always affirmed the kind of common ground that is spoken of in Scripture, notably in Romans 1 and 2, and in Calvin’s Institutes. As creatures made in God’s image man cannot help but know God. It is of this revelation to man through “nature” and through his own constitution that Paul speaks of in Romans.

—Cornelius Van Til, A Christian Theory of Knowledge, Logos Edition. (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 1969), ch. 10.​

So, what Van Til is after is an attempt to build any kind of theology, natural or otherwise, apart from the presupposition of the self-attesting Christ as God in Scripture. He is not saying that we cannot derive any knowledge of God through nature, but that such knowledge, which depends on interpretation, will never be right, or known to be right, apart from the sure and firm revelation from God himself in his Word. I am not sure what there is to object to about this.
 
There are similarities and differences. Both think that since natural man is fallen, he can't use natural theology. Barth's main target, though, was the analogia entis, which he called Antichrist. I think he was a bit silly on that point.

Van Til never really did a systematic analysis of key natural theology thinkers. Sure, he ran Paley and Butler through the ringer. Even his critique of Thomas doesn't actually analyze key passages from Thomas.
This doesn't seem to square with Van Til himself, and is certainly not nuanced enough. Even just a cursory perusal of Van Til works (all of which I own) shows him saying over and over again that he is not opposed to natural theology, but to natural theology apart from special revelation.

For example, Van Til says:

The distinction between revealed and natural theology as ordinarily understood readily gives rise to a misunderstanding. It seems to indicate that man, though he is a sinner, can have certain true knowledge of God from nature but that for higher things he requires revelation. This is incorrect. It is true that we should make our theology and our ethics wide enough to include man’s moral relationship to the whole universe. But it is not true that any ethical question that deals with man’s place in nature can be interpreted rightly without the light of Scripture.

—Cornelius Van Til, Christian Theistic Ethics, Logos Edition., vol. 3, In Defense of Biblical Christianity (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 1980), ch. 2.​

And it is also important to mention that Van Til makes a crucial distinction between natural theology and natural revelation:

I have never denied that there is a common ground of knowledge between the believer and the unbeliever. I have always affirmed the kind of common ground that is spoken of in Scripture, notably in Romans 1 and 2, and in Calvin’s Institutes. As creatures made in God’s image man cannot help but know God. It is of this revelation to man through “nature” and through his own constitution that Paul speaks of in Romans.

—Cornelius Van Til, A Christian Theory of Knowledge, Logos Edition. (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 1969), ch. 10.​

So, what Van Til is after is an attempt to build any kind of theology, natural or otherwise, apart from the presupposition of the self-attesting Christ as God in Scripture. He is not saying that we cannot derive any knowledge of God through nature, but that such knowledge, which depends on interpretation, will never be right, or known to be right, apart from the sure and firm revelation from God himself in his Word. I am not sure what there is to object to about this.
Good post. Everyone should read "Revelation and Reason: New Essays in Reformed Apologetics", particularly Jeffery k. Jue's article "Theologia Naturalis: A Reformed Tradition". It is great.
 
Even just a cursory perusal of Van Til works (all of which I own) shows him saying over and over again that he is not opposed to natural theology, but to natural theology apart from special revelation.

That depends. If that is the case, then there is no difference between Thomas Aquinas and Van Til, since Thomas never thought of doing natural theology apart from special revelation. In Summa Theo. II-2 he somewhere says we begin by faith.

I grant that you might find Neo-Thomists like Kreeft arguing such, but he is out of the tradition on that point.
 
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