Geerhardus Vos Was a Natural Theologian

A Review of Geerhardus Vos' Lectures on Natural Theology at American Reformer

Readers, this week I wrote a review of Vos’ lectures on Natural Theology for American Reformer.

Here’s the opening of the piece:

Even before attending Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia, I encountered its governing theological ideology. Central to this strain of Reformed thought were the biblical theology of Geerhardus Vos and the apologetics of Cornelius Van Til, which found their synthesis in the radically non-speculative theology of John Murray and his successors.

Though Vos had refused J. Gresham Machen’s offer to leave Princeton Seminary with him, Westminster claimed Vos’s biblical theology as the intellectual foundation of Van Til’s presuppositionalist apologetic and their radically non-speculative theology.

It comes, then, as a shock to discover that Vos did not teach an incipiently presuppositional apologetic, but rather embraced the classical apologetic method and natural theology.

Vos’s lectures on Natural Theology are available for the first time after being discovered in the archives of Calvin University by James Baird1. Translated by Albert Gootjes under the auspices of the Dutch Reformed Translation Society, it is published by Reformation Heritage Books.

The text of Vos’s Natural Theology is preceded by a foreword by Richard Muller, and an introduction, nearly as long as the lectures themselves, by J. V. Fesko. This turns the publication into a polemical contribution to recent debates over the place of natural theology in Reformed thought.

Click this link to read the rest at American Reformer.