The Natural Man Does Not Accept the Things of the Spirit of God - But He Can Accept Natural Theology
A Response to Brian Mattson and Richard Gaffin
On Friday, two people, completely independently, brought to my attention
’s challenge to Reformed defenders of natural law and natural theology.In “An Apologetic Thermopylae,” Mattson challenged us to answer Richard Gaffin’s exegetical defense of Van Til and presuppositionalism from 1 Corinthians 2:6-16: “The natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God.”
(Cornelius Van Til was the foremost proponent of presuppositionalism, the view that Christianity can only be defended by beginning from Christian, biblical presuppositions.)
Mattson writes:
“The question is and should be: are Van Til’s ideas biblical? And it is on this question that his critics simply fail. They fail because they never even engage the salient biblical texts in any rigorous way.”
Van Til’s views, Mattson argues, are based on biblical exegesis, and the views of enthusiasts for natural law and natural theology are not.
(I’ll leave aside, for the time being, that that is the point of natural theology.)
Mattson really throws down the gauntlet, however, with this statement:
I am making this my new personal code: Unless you can show me (or point me to somebody who has shown) any fundamental flaw in Richard B. Gaffin, Jr.'s exegesis of 1 Corinthians 2:6-16, or (to be more reasonable) that you have read it, digested it, and understood it, I cannot and will not take your enthusiasm for natural law/theology seriously, nor your smug dismissals of Cornelius Van Til and “presuppositionalism.”
Happily, I meet Mattson’s code. Ten years ago, before and as I was entering Westminster Theological Seminary, I read Gaffin’s article, “Some Epistemological Reflections on 1 Cor 2:6-16,” and wrote my first non-Van Tillian thoughts. (Here is the document I last modified September 18, 2014.)
In summary, Gaffin argues that “the things of the Spirit of God” which “the natural man does not accept” include all things, not only the content of special revelation but also knowledge of the whole creation which falls under the influence of the inaugurated and coming kingdom of God.
Gaffin concludes: “1 Cor 2:6-16 (1:18-3:23) is the death blow to all natural theology” (123).
But rather than this providing a firm exegetical basis for presuppositionalism, Gaffin, in order to extract his desired exegetical conclusion, assumes a controversial philosophical doctrine: The British idealist doctrine of holism.
Holism is the doctrine that all truths are connected such that a difference at one point affects all points. Only by assuming this doctrine can Gaffin, and Mattson, argue that the natural man’s inability to understand the things of the Spirit of God obviates the possibility of natural law and natural theology.
On the contrary, 1 Corinthians 2 was a favorite passage of Thomas Aquinas’s, which provided an exegetical basis for a distinction between the realm of nature and that of grace. Radically non-speculative exegesis of 1 Corinthians 2:6-16, I argue, leaves open all possible orthodox positions on this matter, from Van Til’s to Aquinas’s to my own.
If the debates about apologetics are to find a terminus, it will not be in virtue of biblical exegesis of this passage alone.
The Gospels Background of 1 Cor. 2:6-16
Gaffin begins with the background in Christ’s teaching for 1 Cor. 2:6-16.
Paul draws a contrast between “the wisdom of this age” and a “hidden wisdom” revealed to us by his Spirit. Gaffin argues that Paul’s statements are “a virtual commentary on” Christ’s teaching about hidden things in Luke 10:21-22 and Matthew 11:25-27.
Consider Luke 10:21-22:
(21) At that time Jesus, full of joy through the Holy Spirit, said, “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this is what you were pleased to do.
(22) “All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows who the Son is except the Father, and no one knows who the Father is except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.”
“These things,” Christ says, have been hidden from “the wise and learned.” What things are they?
It would be easy to read “these things” as the special content of Christ’s teaching, or the Gospel itself. However, Gaffin, noting that verse 22 speaks of “all things” as having been “committed to me by the Father,” argues that “these things” - apparently limited in scope - now include our knowledge of all things. Everything is hidden from the unbeliever; knowledge of anything requires revelation and belief.
Following Herman Ridderbos, Gaffin argues that the content of Jesus’ and Paul’s teaching is unified by, and can be summed up under the heading of “the kingdom of God.” But with “all things” having been committed to Christ, the kingdom of God now includes all things within its scope. Accordingly, it follows that this hidden knowledge has wide epistemological implications; the revelation of the kingdom of God in the Gospel of Christ is now the epistemological principium of all knowledge (107).
Gaffin considers the objection that “the hidden things” has a smaller scope:
It might appear that this kingdom-qualification somehow limits the scope of “all things.” But, to the contrary according to the NT, there is nothing in the entire creation that is irrelevant to the kingdom; absolutely nothing falls outside the eschatological rule of Christ. (106)
Gaffin concludes, before even arriving at 1 Cor. 2:6-16:
In sum: according to Jesus, revelation is the exclusive and comprehensive principium (foundation and norm) for human knowledge.
While Gaffin presents this as unfiltered biblical exegesis of the relevant passage, the passage underdetermines Gaffin’s theological conclusion. The passage does not of itself indicate how the peculiar and limited scope of “the hidden things,” “these things,” connects to “all things.”
The passage does not say that, now that Christ has come, you must know the Gospel of Christ in order to know anything at all. The passage is equally compatible with the reading that the “hidden things” are a special subset of knowledge, say, that which pertains to salvation. This subset has implications for other areas of our knowledge without becoming its principium or source.
Gaffin draws the former conclusion. I draw — well, I won’t say that I draw the latter conclusion from this passage alone. Rather, Luke 10:21-22 does not provide enough detail about epistemology to decide between the two.
And here I must raise my first objection to Mattson’s and Gaffin’s method. Their method is the theological method I was taught at Westminster Seminary, what John Murray called, “radically non-speculative theology.” It is the idea that the content of systematic theology can be read directly off the pages of Scripture, redemptive-historically interpreted.
However, from underdetermined exegetical grounds, Gaffin reads the particulars of Kuyperian-cum-Van Tillian epistemology. In doing so, Gaffin appears to bypass the history of Christian debates concerning Christ and culture, nature and grace, faith and reason.
The idea appears to be that speculative Christian theology has too long ignored the biblical evidence, but Vos, Ridderbos, and Van Til (they would also claim Bavinck) have now made that biblical evidence public.
On the contrary, an idea like “there is nothing in the entire creation that is irrelevant to the kingdom” is not one of the positions on Christ and culture, a distinctively presuppositionalist one. That is all of the positions. (Or almost all.)
Gaffin provides biblical evidence that the message of Christ is pertinent to all nature and culture. But this is the starting-point of reflection on Christ and culture, faith and reason, nature and grace. It does not decide one of the particular positions.
The Hidden Philosophical Premise: Holism
Gaffin highlights the pertinence of “the hidden things of God” to all things in creation. But his inference to presuppositionalism conceals a hidden premise: Holism.
Gaffin infers that, if all things are impacted by the “hidden things,” then our knowledge of anything must begin from knowledge of the “hidden things.” But this inference only follows, given the truth of epistemological holism: The doctrine that the content of truths or facts are not separable but a unified, systematic whole.
The authors of Classical Apologetics put it this way:
To know the flower in the wall, you have to know the world and all.
Holism was a central doctrine of the British Idealist philosophers. Cornelius Van Til’s philosophy Ph.D. at Princeton University was on the Idealists (“God and the Absolute”). Gaffin then imbibed this doctrine as a student of Van Til’s.
Van Til held that, if the Christian faith is true, then no truth is unaffected, truths of logic, mathematics, and scientific observation not excepted. Accordingly, no natural human knowledge, no science or philosophy, is fully true. (It might be “true so far as it goes.”) No natural theology or natural law can be built up from below, because all is affected by the content of special revelation.
The question of the legitimacy of this logical leap is a philosophical question, and it is one that divides presuppositionalists from classical apologists.
It also divides philosophers. Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, Wittgenstein, Jerry Fodor, and myself defend epistemological atomism, the idea that there are multiple truths. People can differ on particular points without this meaning that they disagree entirely.
Epistemological holists, by contrast, hold that if thinkers have a difference at one point, then they effectively differ at all points. There are no individual truths, only holistic worldviews. Likewise, you cannot accurately perceive some of the world, some of the truth, but misunderstand other parts. The failure to understand the whole undermines apparent success in analyzing the parts.
(For more on epistemological holism and the philosophical underpinnings of presuppositionalism, check out the second lecture of my theological epistemology course: “Bertrand Russell Refutes Cornelius Van Til.”)
So Gaffin’s first exegetical point underdetermines his epistemological conclusion. Without the hidden philosophical premise of holism, Matthew 11:25-27 and Luke 10:21-22 merely state that the content of special revelation, particularly the proclamation of the kingdom of God, has been hidden from unbelievers. It says nothing about the possibility or reality of natural law or natural theology. It says nothing about special revelation as epistemological principium of all knowledge.
The passages are compatible with Van Til, Gaffin, and Mattson’s view but are equally compatible with those of natural lawyers and theologians.
1 Corinthians 2 and the Wisdom of this Age
Gaffin’s exegesis of 1 Corinthians 2 is shaped by Vos’s analysis of Paul’s “Two-age” eschatology.
This age is “doomed to pass away”; the age to come has been inaugurated in Jesus Christ, even if it won’t be consummated until his return.
1 Corinthians 2 contrasts “a wisdom of this age” with “a secret and hidden wisdom of God.” These are species of wisdoms that belong to this age and the age to come, and inherit all the contrast and opposition of those two ages.
[6] Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away. [7] But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. [8] None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. (ESV)
Gaffin argues that the contrast between the ages is eschatological and antithetical.
Given the contrast in wisdom, epistemological conclusions follow:
14 The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. 15 The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. 16 “For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ.
The natural person is the person of this age, without the Spirit, possessing “the wisdom of this age.” The spiritual person is the person who already participates in the age to come, possessing the Spirit - who is himself the mark of that new age.
Now the Spiritual person has special knowledge of something: “the things of the Spirit of God.” But once again, the passage also speaks of a wider scope: “The spiritual person judges all things.”
From this, Gaffin concludes:
Coming to light in this passage, therefore, is the epistemological difference between believers and unbelievers, a difference of the most radical and far-reaching sort, in that—it does not go too far to say—believers and unbelievers belong to two different worlds; they exist in not only separate but antithetical ‘universes of discourse.’ (110)
Up to this point, Gaffin had argued that what is specifically revealed by the Spirit is those things pertaining to kingdom of God, inaugurated by Christ’s death and resurrection. At this point, the argument takes a turn, and Gaffin asserts that such wisdom has a bearing on a true knowledge of everything and that it is in fact essential for true knowledge of everything.
But the passage does not obligate us to come to that conclusion.
Once again, the hidden premise is the doctrine of epistemological holism. One piece of knowledge affects all knowledge. “The things of the Spirit of God” effect a paradigm-shift for our knowledge of all things, rendering the “wisdom of this age” useless. Once again, Gaffin leaps to a Van Tillian idealist and holist conclusion without exegetical justification.
How Many Things Is the Natural Man Unable to Accept?
The central point of 1 Cor. 2:6-16 is the inability of the natural man to understand the things of the Spirit of God. But the question for Gaffin’s exegesis is of the scope of this inability. Is it an inability to understand some limited range of spiritual things, leaving room for natural law and theology? Or does it extend to all things?
If we were radically non-speculative, we would note that it is “the things of the Spirit of God” that fail to be understood. This failure of understanding is sometimes ascribed to “the rulers of this age,” sometimes to “the natural man” as such. Likewise, it is contrasted with “a wisdom of this age” or of “the rulers of this age.”
There are a wide variety of ways in which each of these phrases suggests a limitation of scope. First of all, “the things of the Spirit of God” is most naturally read as the distinctive content of the Christian gospel, summarized as “the word of the cross” (1 Cor. 1:17). If this is so, it is a very specific element of knowledge that is unique to those who have the Spirit of God. One might even call this special revelation. It is specific content pertaining to salvation.
It is contrasted with “a wisdom of this age.” This is not immediately to contrast it with every single idea that has arisen by human capacity apart from the regenerating, salvific work of the Holy Spirit. There is diversity among human forms of wisdom. After all, in chapter 1, Paul has already noted that different non-Christian populations are hostile to the gospel for different reasons. It is the Greeks who “seek wisdom,” in particular, while the Jews are more after “signs.” In our day, the secular liberal public might seek “science,” while the culturally Christian masses seek “spectacle.”
In other words, the passage speaks indefinitely. It does not characterize all human intellectual activity apart from the gospel as the same in all respects.
In one respect, however, it does. When Paul speaks of “the natural man,” he speaks theologically and generally. The natural man has not been regenerated by the Spirit of God, and Paul ascribes to him an epistemological limitation when it comes to the things of the Spirit of God. The natural man cannot understand this: the distinctive content of special revelation, “the word of the cross.”
Whatever the diversity of natural, human thinking, it all has the limitation of failing to understand, anticipate, or apprehend the Gospel, the content of special and supernatural revelation.
If we are to be radically non-speculative, we will not extend this incapacity to anything other than the distinctive content of the Gospel, “the word of the cross.” We will certainly not smuggle in F. H. Bradley’s doctrine of holism in order to make speculative theological leaps.
There is one more element of a limitation of scope. There is a class analysis to be had in the first two chapters of 1 Corinthians. In chapter 1, Paul focused on God’s election of people of relatively low social class, status, and intellectual capacity to receive the hidden things. In chapter 2, he has spoken of the wisdom of “the rulers of this age.” There is a sense that the particular wisdom of this age which Paul seeks to oppose is an elite zeitgeist or ideology with respect to which Christian belief is uncouth or low-status.
By contrast, we could suppose that someone like Socrates was an opponent of just such wisdom, the purported wisdom of elite opinion. Therefore, the mainstream of Greek philosophy was as much an opponent of the wisdom of the age as is the Christian faith. Now Greek philosophy did not have the things of the Spirit of God. But it detected the inadequacy of elite opinion, the wisdom of the age.
At least this possibility is not precluded by the passage.
Accordingly, if we wish to be radically non-speculative in our theology, we must leave open the whole realm of theological epistemological positions from Van Til’s to my own “Protestant Thomist” one. Radically non-speculative biblical exegesis radically underdetermines our theological conclusions.
Aquinas’s Exegesis
What is more, Thomas Aquinas took 1 Corinthians 2 to have very different implications for his theology and epistemology. In particular, 1 Cor. 2:9 was the locus classicus, key proof-text, for Aquinas’s doctrine of supernature and the beatific vision.
In Aquinas’s theology, man has a natural end (short of “man’s chief end” as described by Westminster). It is something like human flourishing as described in Aristotle.
Then, in a covenant in the Garden, God offered Adam a higher, supernatural end, the beatific vision, for obedience in the face of trial and temptation. Adam failed this, but Christ succeeded, offering us again the offer of a supernatural end.
However, there is a huge debate among Catholic theologians about, not whether, but to what extent and in what way the supernatural end is anticipated in our nature. Could God really just have left human beings in a state of pure nature? See my discussion with Catholic theologian Dr. Lawrence Feingold for the details of this debate. (“The Natural Desire to See God.”)
In 1 Cor. 2:9, Aquinas found an articulation of the divide between nature and supernature. The ultimate end of man is something that could not be guessed at by a pagan philosopher. It is something that exceeds all expectation, that transcends human nature itself:
But, as it is written, “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him”— (1 Cor. 2:9 ESV)
For Aquinas, 1 Cor. 2 articulated the way that grace/supernature transcends nature. It does not articulate the utter futility of nature and its dependence on supernatural revelation for all things.
Now, I do not accept the doctrine of grace transcending and elevating nature, in Aquinas’s sense. (My demurral took Dr. Feingold by surprise at this point in the podcast discussion.) I believe that grace restores nature, rather than elevates it.
However, I do accept a Protestant modification of Aquinas’s doctrine. On account of sin, God, by his grace, does indeed do something more than was anticipated in the garden. God’s plan of salvation we could not have predicted, the Incarnation of God, his death and resurrection for us. Nor can we predict the paradise we will enjoy. (Even if, as I believe, it will be proportionate to our nature.)
While Protestant theology has never had the same doctrine of supernature as Aquinas and Catholic theology, it has always accepted the category of supernatural revelation for this reason. God’s project of redemption is supernatural. It is a second act of God beyond the creation of nature. It is not anticipated in nature.
Likewise, natural human epistemic capacities do not, of themselves, equip us or enable us to believe that God humbled himself for us, that he became man, that he has redeemed us by an act of shameful death and humiliation, that we can save our lives by losing them, that we should hope in the promise of a life we cannot yet see.
In all sorts of ways, this supernatural and spiritual revelation transcends what can be known by man by nature. Per Reformed teaching, the regenerating power of the Spirit of God is required to know and understand these things (WCF 10.1). We need the enlightening work of the Spirit.
But the enlightening work of the Spirit is necessary to accept the content of supernatural revelation. It is not necessary in order to understand the revelation of God and his law in nature (Rom 1:19-20 and 2:14-15).
In fact, without the ability, in principle, to understand natural theology and the natural law, the natural man would be with excuse for sin. Instead, we are rendered accountable by God’s natural revelation, accessible in nature, and articulable as natural law and theology.
The Inevitability of Philosophy
Now, while I have operated by Mattson’s terms, focusing on the exegesis of a particular passage, there are shortcomings to the theological method of trying to do theology from only the Bible. Radically non-speculative theology ended up relying on hidden philosophical premises.
What is more, our theological method must allow for the intake of information about the actual content and practice of philosophy. Otherwise, it will seem to follow from exegesis of this passage and others (i.e., Col. 2:8) that all human, Greek, pagan philosophy are bad; all are false. None of the views in philosophy are better or worse.
But this view cannot survive familiarity with philosophy. From more than a decade of study of philosophy, I know it to be false. It is certainly not obviously “the biblical view.”
Quite simply, philosophers argue all points of view, including some of the ones that are entailed by the Bible. If a presuppositionalist tried to disagree with every philosopher, he would find himself having to disagree with much of the Bible.
In many cases, there is not a distinct and separate position for the presuppositionalist to take on a philosophical question. The bases are already covered.
Consider causality. Here are four philosophical positions you could hold:
Only God has causal power. (Occasionalism)
Nothing has causal power, things just happen to move in certain ways onto which the mind projects generalizations. (Humeanism)
Secondary causality exists; things other than God have causal power. (Thomism)
Finite things have causal power; drop the bit about God. (Secular Aristotelianism)
From a presuppositionalist perspective, one will think that, while the wisdom of this age led modern philosophers to these four positions, the Christian thinker can find a fifth.
But the problem is there aren’t any other options. And, I’ve watched presuppositionalists try to solve this one. They almost always cite favorably David Hume’s skepticism about causality. Then they proceed to occasionalism, joining arms together with Medieval Islamic philosopher Al-Ghazali, and modern (Christian) philosophers Malebranche, Berkeley, and Leibniz.
However, in my view, the idea that things have causal power (3 & 4) is the superior view of causality, for a number of reasons. (King Laugh and I discussed these with Dr. James Orr in a recent interview.) This position is simply better able to explain the world around us. The other positions are worse, or even absurd. (Imagine thinking that fire does not have the power to burn wood. God just jigs it up to look that way.)
Presuppositionalism does not result in avoiding philosophy. It results in unstudied, tendentious philosophical conclusions.
Nothing Worse, Nothing Better
The idea that no philosophies are better than other has also only become less plausible in the last ten years.
Since I began my studies at Westminster in 2014, I and the whole Western world have observed a renewed philosophical interest in “the word of the cross.” It began with, and continues to center upon, Jordan B. Peterson, who has recently been releasing his round-tables on the Gospels.
The idea that there are no gradations among secular thinkers with regard to natural theology and natural law or even the hidden things is empirically disproven by Jordan Peterson and like thinkers.
Some object that Jordan Peterson “does not understand the things of the Spirit of God.” My response is, of course he doesn’t! That’s the limitation of natural knowledge, or in this case, of proceeding only by psychological reconstruction of biblical truth.
But Jordan Peterson is certainly bucking the wisdom of the age and of the rulers of this age. He has almost single-handedly overturned the intellectual pre-eminence of rationalism and New Atheism. He has even done so while retaining his epistemological principles, operating only in a scientific, evolutionary, and psychological way. In other words, he has retained certain presuppositions or methods of knowing. But he has arrived at a raft of different conclusions than the wisdom of the age.
To discount the difference between the “modern wisdom” of Peterson and the wisdom of the rulers of this age, which is vast and consequential, is to succumb to what I call “Christian nihilism.” (While many Christians focus on the moral difference between good and evil, I find it much more consequential whether people acknowledge the difference between better and worse.)
“Nothing worse, nothing better, ’cuz nothing matters.” - Renegade Sage
Cornelius Van Til and Karl Barth both argued that, among all the various positions of philosophers, we should not acknowledge that some are better and others worse. They are all equally the wisdom of this age to which the hidden wisdom of Christ is opposed.
Emil Brunner came back with a rebuttal, affirming the betterness of the kind of anti-materialist and moral realist philosophy of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle and their modern successors, as opposed to the naturalism of Darwin, Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. I would say the same for Jordan Peterson with respect to the New Atheists.
Jordan Peterson’s habit of finding the boundary of natural knowledge and sitting on the threshold of the things of the Spirit is frustrating to many people. But to me, it is intellectually illuminating. It helps me, as a theologian and philosopher, to limn the boundary of natural and spiritual knowledge. How much can be known or believed short of accepting the supernatural, the miraculous, the metaphysical?
(I don’t claim that Peterson accepts the content of natural theology and natural law either. His pragmatism remains an obstacle.)
Similarly, it is no criticism of natural theology or natural law to point out that one who understands them does not understand the things of the Spirit of God. That is the very point of Aquinas’s doctrine of nature and grace. Nature has its place, but also its limit. Grace and the supernatural introduce something novel.
First the Natural, then the Spiritual
Mattson’s and Gaffin’s intention of grounding a Reformed apologetic in the Scriptures is laudable.
However, the Scriptures do not decide between epistemological holism and atomism (anymore than they decide between occasionalism and Aristotelianism).
And it is the doctrine of holism that is the crucial premise in Gaffin’s and Van Til’s argument.
Without that, the special, hidden-and-then-revealed knowledge of those who have the Spirit remains limited to matters of the kingdom of God. These have implications for all of life, but they do not undermine the legitimacy of natural knowledge, without special revelation. This natural knowledge may include everything from up to natural law and natural theology. At least 1 Cor. 2:6-16 does not exclude the possibility.
Accordingly, the attempt to deduce presuppositionalism from these scriptures falls short.
And on philosophical grounds, I would argue that holism is false. While the world is a unity and one part affects another, our knowledge of the world is separable and incomplete. Some people are masters of international finance and failures at emotional intelligence. Some people know every jot and tittle of Reformed theology but are ignorant of philosophy, economics, and politics. It happens.
Likewise, it is possible for someone to come to believe, on natural and philosophical grounds, that God exists while yet being uncertain whether God is a Trinity or whether God became incarnate in Jesus Christ. (See Substack’s own Bentham’s Bulldog for a recent example: “How I Came to Believe in God.”)
In the same way, it is possible for someone to come to believe that traditional social morality is advisable and that there is moral reality and truth, while remaining ignorant or uncertain of their metaphysical foundation. Several of you are readers of this Substack.
The incompleteness of this knowledge of morality and God is no knock against it. In fact, on biblical grounds, I would claim that it is such incomplete knowledge that renders people accountable to God (Rom 1:19-20). Often, it is such incomplete knowledge that leads people toward a more complete knowledge of God.
And sometimes, one who has, at first, accepted only the contents of natural revelation come to accept the things of the Spirit as well. And when he does, the angels rejoice.
Thank you for reading The Natural Theologian. And a Merry Christmas to you all!
Outstanding work, Joel: your line of argument was very clear and eloquent. I enjoyed it and will be sending people this way when the topic comes up.