Truth

Revelation and Reason

Truth, authority, reason, and revelation—these are vital elements in every worldview. To elevate human tradition over divine revelation is to trust in the rituals of man rather than the works of God. And to elevate human reason over divine revelation is to trust in self rather than God. Both are egregious errors that rob God of rightful glory and rob humanity of all true hope.

The Reformation advanced the world by going back to the Scripture. The importance of truth, the recognition of ultimate authority, and the supremacy of revelation over reason were issues that changed both the church and the world—the Reformation recovered a biblical worldview of reality.

The Reformation still matters because truth still matters.

The igniting power that God used to erupt the Reformation came through His very own word. The first and foundational discovery of the Reformation was the voice of God in the Holy Scriptures. In divine irony, while the Renaissance was busy painting new faces on a stagnant culture by ad fontes—“returning to the sources” (of ancient civilization)—so God had another meaning in mind. A return to the source of divine revelation—the Scripture—would result in more than temporal renovation, it would ignite pervasive personal and cultural transformation. Indeed, the fountains of the great deep burst forth as the Holy Scriptures were brought out of obscurity and into contact with Spirit-illumined hearts.

God was at work in a most conspicuous way. Nearly two hundred years before Martin Luther, John Wycliffe, a Roman Catholic priest and Oxford University professor, was given by God the conviction to communicate the Scriptures in the common language of the people. Wycliffe was an exceptional scholar who was the first, along with a team of academic helpers, to translate the Scriptures from the Latin Vulgate into English. The Scripture had awakened Wycliffe to some of the abuses of the Roman Catholic Church, which he began to speak against. Wycliffe and his translation of the Bible were opposed by the established authorities in Rome and Wycliffe was later condemned a heretic. Later, John Huss, a priest in Bohemia, was given some of Wycliffe’s writings and he too came under “God’s spell” (gospel) by studying the Scriptures for himself. He was strongly opposed by the bishops and eventually condemned. He was burned at the stake in 1415. Luther would later claim that what he learned (in appreciating the authority of Scripture), he learned from Huss. In about 1456, God brought about the invention of the movable type printing press through Johannes Gutenberg in Mainz, Germany. This revolutionized the reproduction of written material and proved instrumental in the glorious eruption of the gospel through the Reformation.

The very first book that was printed on Gutenberg's press was the Holy Bible, in Latin of course. Then in 1516, Desiderius Erasmus, the famed humanist, printed the Greek New Testament, making the New Testament available in its original language for the first time in a millennium. This providence of God would be the fuel to the fire of the Reformation. The spark would come soon after as the Holy Spirit would direct men to rediscover the gospel through the Scriptures recovered from their original languages.

How Do We Know?

Beneath every dispute of the Reformation lay a question that philosophers call epistemology: how do we know what is true, and on what authority do we believe it? The medieval answer had two stories. Reason, working on its own, could climb a good way toward God; revelation completed the ascent; and the church stood over both as the final interpreter. The Reformers did not merely correct the conclusions that answer produced. They changed the answer. John Frame calls Calvin’s epistemology “a remarkable departure from medieval and Renaissance thought,” and he names what it offered: “the opportunity to find a sure road to truth through divine revelation. This was the opportunity that had been missed by the medieval and Renaissance Christian thinkers, who to one extent or another compromised with Greek thought.”1

Herman Bavinck described what that road requires of the human mind. On the Christian standpoint, he wrote, “all autonomy of the human mind falls away, as if it could produce truth out of its own reason and through its own means.” Man “is not the creator and former of the world; his understanding does not write its laws on nature… To the contrary, it is the human who has to conform his perception and thinking to God’s revelation in nature and grace.”2 Truth is not something the mind makes. It is something the mind receives.

Revelation Everywhere

Calvin began not with an argument for God but with the claim that no one is without the knowledge of Him. Every human being lives in a world that speaks of its Maker and carries within himself a witness that cannot be silenced:

There is within the human mind, and indeed by natural instinct, an awareness of divinity. This we take to be beyond controversy. To prevent anyone from taking refuge in the pretense of ignorance, God himself has implanted in all men a certain understanding of his divine majesty.3 John CalvinInstitutes I.iii.1

That changes the whole question of unbelief. If God has made Himself plain to every man, as Paul insists, so that “they are without excuse” (Romans 1:20), then unbelief is not a failure of evidence but a refusal of it. Men “hold the truth in unrighteousness” (Romans 1:18). Greg Bahnsen drew the conclusion for every field of thought: “In God’s world neutrality is impossible,” for “there can be no neutral ground, no area which fails to exert revelational pressure upon the sinner.”4

Reason Ruined, Not Removed

None of this made the Reformers enemies of reason. Luther, standing at Worms, said he would not recant unless convinced by “Scripture and right reason,” which Frame glosses as “Scripture rightly interpreted and applied by godly thinking.” His sharp words about reason elsewhere were aimed at reason enthroned as judge over God’s Word, in the scholastic manner; as Frame puts it, “the role of reason is not independent of Scripture, for Luther.”5 Calvin was careful to say exactly what the fall had done to the mind:

Since reason, therefore, by which man distinguishes between good and evil, and by which he understands and judges, is a natural gift, it could not be completely wiped out; but it was partly weakened and partly corrupted, so that its misshapen ruins appear.6 John CalvinInstitutes II.ii.12

Misshapen ruins are still ruins of something noble, and Calvin honored what remained. “If we regard the Spirit of God as the sole fountain of truth,” he wrote, “we shall neither reject the truth itself, nor despise it wherever it shall appear, unless we wish to dishonor the Spirit of God.”7 The Reformation did not set faith against learning. It set revelation over reason, so that reason might serve rather than rule. Cornelius Van Til gave the principle its most careful statement: “Man does not need to know exhaustively in order to know truly and certainly. When on the created level of existence man thinks God’s thoughts after him, that is, when man thinks in self-conscious submission to the voluntary revelation of the self-sufficient God, he has therewith the only possible ground of certainty for his knowledge.”8

Scripture Its Own Witness

If reason cannot sit in judgment over God’s Word, how is the Word known to be God’s? Rome answered: the church vouches for it. The rationalist answered: the scholar proves it. Calvin answered with neither. As Timothy George puts it, “for Calvin there was no independent epistemological platform on which believers could stand and objectively decide for or against the Bible.” To those who demanded rational proof, Calvin replied:9

The testimony of the Spirit is more excellent than all reason. For as God alone is a fit witness of himself in his Word, so also the Word will not find acceptance in men’s hearts before it is sealed by the inward testimony of the Spirit.10 John CalvinInstitutes I.vii.4

And he drew the conclusion that settled the Reformation’s doctrine of knowledge: “Let this point therefore stand: that those whom the Holy Spirit has inwardly taught truly rest upon Scripture, and that Scripture indeed is self-authenticated; hence, it is not right to subject it to proof and reasoning.”11 The Westminster divines wrote the same conviction into their first chapter. The authority of Scripture “dependeth not upon the testimony of any man or church, but wholly upon God, (who is truth itself,) the author thereof.” The church may commend the Bible, and its own excellencies “abundantly evidence” it, yet “our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth, and divine authority thereof, is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit, bearing witness by and with the word in our hearts.”12 And the final court of appeal in every controversy “can be no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture.”13 That is the voice of God in the Holy Scriptures of which the opening of this page speaks.

No Neutral Ground

The modern world still imagines that a man can stand somewhere outside every commitment and weigh the claims of God impartially. The Reformers knew better, and their heirs have said so plainly. Bahnsen observed that the Christian who strives for neutrality “is found actually to be endeavoring to efface the fact that he is a Christian,” and that “in a world where all things have been created by Christ… and where all knowledge is therefore deposited in Him who is The Truth… neutrality is nothing short of immorality.”14 The alternative is not blind faith but a different starting point: “God’s knowledge is primary, and whatever man is to know can only be based upon a reception of what God has originally and ultimately known. Man must think God’s thoughts after Him, for ‘in Thy light shall we see light’ (Ps. 36:9).” Or more simply still: “The foundation of knowledge is God’s revelation.”15

In Thy Light

“The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge” (Proverbs 1:7). That verse is the Reformation’s epistemology in a sentence. Knowledge does not begin with the autonomous mind and climb toward God; it begins with God speaking and the creature listening. And the God who speaks has spoken finally in His Son, in whom “are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2:3), and who said of Himself, “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). He prayed for His people, “Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth” (John 17:17). The Reformers did not invent a new theory of knowledge. They recovered the old one, and it was Christ’s own. That is why, as this page has said, the Reformation still matters: because truth still matters, and truth is found where God has put it, in His Word and in His Son.

Worldview Next: God

Sources

  1. John M. Frame, A History of Western Philosophy and Theology (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2015), chap. 5, “Early Modern Thought,” 172, 174. ↩
  2. Herman Bavinck, Christian Worldview, trans. and ed. N. Gray Sutanto, James Eglinton, and Cory C. Brock (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2019), chap. 1, “Thinking and Being.” ↩
  3. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion I.iii.1 (McNeill-Battles translation), quoted in Cornelius Van Til, The Reformed Pastor and the Defense of Christianity & My Credo (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1980), “The Reformed Pastor and the Defense of Christianity,” §3, “Reformed Apologetics—Calvin’s Institutes”. ↩
  4. Greg L. Bahnsen, Always Ready: Directions for Defending the Faith, ed. Robert R. Booth (Texarkana, AR: Covenant Media Foundation, 1996), chap. 10, “Common Ground Which Is Not Neutral.” ↩
  5. John M. Frame, A History of Western Philosophy and Theology (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2015), chap. 5, “Early Modern Thought,” 170. ↩
  6. Calvin, Institutes II.ii.12 (McNeill-Battles translation), quoted in Cornelius Van Til, The Reformed Pastor and the Defense of Christianity & My Credo (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1980), “The Reformed Pastor and the Defense of Christianity,” §3, “Reformed Apologetics—Calvin’s Institutes”. ↩
  7. Calvin, Institutes II.ii.15 (McNeill-Battles translation), quoted in Cornelius Van Til, The Reformed Pastor and the Defense of Christianity & My Credo (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1980), “The Reformed Pastor and the Defense of Christianity,” §3, “Reformed Apologetics—Calvin’s Institutes”. ↩
  8. Cornelius Van Til, Christian Apologetics (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed), chap. 2, “The Christian Philosophy of Life,” on Christian epistemology. ↩
  9. Timothy George, Theology of the Reformers, rev. ed. (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2013), chap. 5, “Glory unto God: John Calvin.” ↩
  10. Calvin, Institutes I.vii.4 (McNeill-Battles translation), quoted in Timothy George, Theology of the Reformers, rev. ed. (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2013), chap. 5, “Glory unto God: John Calvin.” ↩
  11. Calvin, Institutes I.vii.5 (McNeill-Battles translation), quoted in Cornelius Van Til, The Reformed Pastor and the Defense of Christianity & My Credo (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1980), “The Reformed Pastor and the Defense of Christianity,” §3, “Reformed Apologetics—Calvin’s Institutes”; also in Greg L. Bahnsen, Presuppositional Apologetics: Stated and Defended, ed. Joel McDurmon (Powder Springs, GA: American Vision; Nacogdoches, TX: Covenant Media Press, 2008). ↩
  12. The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), 1.4–1.5. Full text: The Westminster Confession of Faith. ↩
  13. The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), 1.10. Full text: The Westminster Confession of Faith. ↩
  14. Greg L. Bahnsen, Always Ready: Directions for Defending the Faith, ed. Robert R. Booth (Texarkana, AR: Covenant Media Foundation, 1996), chap. 2, “The Immorality of Neutrality.” ↩
  15. Greg L. Bahnsen, Always Ready: Directions for Defending the Faith, ed. Robert R. Booth (Texarkana, AR: Covenant Media Foundation, 1996), chap. 5, “Revelation As the Foundation of Knowledge.” ↩