One of
the most popular worldview books after Abraham Kuyper’s Lectures on
Calvinism is Henry Van Til’s The Calvinistic Concept of
Culture. Van Til, in his discussion of Augustine, wrote:
Augustine believed that peace with God
precedes peace in the home, in society, and in the state. The earthly state too
must be converted, transformed into a Christian state by the permeation of
the kingdom of God within her, since true righteousness can only be under the
rule of Christ.
Not only in the realm of ethics and politics must conversion take place
. . . [but also] for knowledge and science. Apart from Christ, man’s wisdom is
but folly, because it begins with faith in itself and proclaims man’s
autonomy. The redeemed man, on the other hand, begins with faith and reason in
subjection to the laws placed in this universe by God: he learns to think
God’s thoughts after him. All of science, fine art and technology, conventions
of dress and rank, coinage, measures and the like, all of these are at the
service of the redeemed man to transform them for the service of his God.1
Van Til
believed, along with Augustine, Calvin, Kuyper, and Klaas Schilder—Christian
scholars whose views are expounded in The Calvinistic Concept of
Culture—that the building of a Christian culture is a Christian imperative.
Van Til castigated the Barthians for their repudiation of a Christian culture.
“For them,” he wrote, “there is no single form of social, political, economic
order that is more in the spirit of the Gospel than another.”2
If there is no specifically biblical blueprint,
we are left with a pluralistic blueprint, no blueprint, or a postponed blueprint
(dispensationalism). When we read that “religious pluralism within a society
is our Lord’s intention for this time in history and hence is biblical,”3 one gets suspicious. First, what biblical justification
does Barker offer? How do we know that it is “our Lord’s intention”?
Are we to assume that whatever is, is right? Could the Lord’s intention change
at some other “time in history”?
Second,
what does this view mean for economics, law, politics, and education? Does
toleration for non-Christian religious groups mean that we should also tolerate
their law systems? If we tolerate the religion of Islam, must we tolerate their
view of economics and civil law? Babylonian law called for the “amputation of
the right hand of the physician whose patient died during surgery.”4 Should this law be placed on the same
platter with biblical law? If not, why not?
Someone
assessing the merits of theonomy should want to know how theonomy and the views
of its critics compare with the Bible, the Westminster Confession of Faith, the
views of the Reformers, and books like Van Til’s Calvinistic Concept of
Culture. There seems to be no room for ethical pluralism for Henry Van
Til. My seminary training never hinted at pluralism. Nothing I read in Henry
Van Til led me to embrace pluralism. In rejecting Karl Barth’s repudiation of
a specifically Christian culture, Van Til assured us that the
Calvinist maintains that the
Word of God has final and absolute authority, and is clear and sufficient in
all matters of faith and conduct. It constitutes the final reference point
for man’s thinking, willing, acting, loving, and hating, for his culture as
well as his cultus. . . . [F]or all practical purposes, the church throughout
history has accepted the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament as the
Word of the living God. Calvinism, also in its cultural aspects, proposes to
continue in this historic perspective, not willing to accept the church or the
religious consciousness, or any other substitute in place of the Word.5
This is the historic position of the
church, Van Til asserted. This is what I was taught in seminary. This is the
view that my professors defended. But there was one problem. Even after finishing Van Til’s
book, I noticed a glaring deficiency: There were few specifics and even fewer
references to the Bible as to how it applies to culture. Van Til, however, was
a few steps beyond Kuyper, but the plane still had no wings. It was not going
to fly.
Henry
Meeter’s The Basic Ideas of Calvinism
I next
turned to H. Henry Meeter’s The Basic Ideas of Calvinism. This work
looked promising even though its focus was on politics. The first edition
(1939) of Meeter’s work was described as “Volume I.” A subsequent volume never
appeared. Again, the Bible was emphasized as the standard for both Christian
and non-Christian.
The Calvinist insists that the
principles of God’s Word are valid not only for himself but all citizens. Since
God is to be owned as Sovereign by everyone, whether he so wishes or not, so
also the Bible should be the determining rule for all. But especially for himself
the Christian, according to the Calvinist, must in politics live by these principles.6
Since God
is the Sovereign of all His creatures, He must be recognized as the lawmaker
for all mankind. How does one determine what that rule is? Meeter
told us that the Bible should be the determining rule for all, not just for
Christians and not just for settling ecclesiastical disputes. So far, so good.
Meeter then moved on to answer the question as to whether the state is to be
Christian.
On the
negative side, he made it clear that the state is still a legitimate sphere of
government even though its laws are not based on the Bible. Of course, this is
not the issue in theonomy. Is the state obligated, when confronted with the
truth of Scripture, to implement those laws which are specifically civil in
application?
On the affirmative side, Meeter
wrote: “Whenever a State is permeated with a Christian spirit and applies
Christian principles in the administration of civil affairs, it is called
‘Christian.’ If that be what is meant by a Christian state, then all States
should be Christian, according to the conscience of the Calvinist, even
though many states are not Christian. If God is the one great Sovereign of the
universe, it is a self-evident fact that His Word should be law to the ends of
the earth.”7
Meeter
had moved from “Christian principles” to “His Word should be law.” The goal,
then, is God’s Word as the “law.” Meeter continues:
If God is Ruler, no man may
ever insist that religion be a merely private matter and be divorced from any
sphere of society, political or otherwise. God must rule everywhere! The
State must bow to His ordinances just as well as the Church or any private
individual. The Calvinist, whose fundamental principle maintains that God shall
be Sovereign in all domains of life, is very insistent on having God recognized
in the political realm also.8
In what way
is the state to “bow to His ordinances”? Where are these ordinances found? “For
matters which relate to its own domain as State, it is bound to the Word of God
as the Church or the individual.” For Meeter, a “State is Christian” when it
uses “God’s Word as its guide.9
Meeter
left the inquiring the Christian with additional questions: “If the Bible,
then, is the ultimate criterion by which the State must be guided in
determining which laws it must administer, the question arises, with how much
of the Bible must the State concern itself?”10 He
told us that “Civil law relates to outward conduct.”11 The inquiring
Christian is looking for specifics, a methodology to determine which laws do
apply to the civil sphere. What “outward conduct” should the State regulate?
Same-sex sexuality and abortion are certainly “outward conduct.”
Like Kuyper and Henry Van Til before him,
Meeter, who asserts that the Bible “is the ultimate criterion by which the
State must be guided in determining which laws it must administer” never set
forth a biblical methodology. In fact, he never quoted one passage of Scripture
to defend his position, although there are vague references to biblical
ideals! Reading Meeter was like reading an unfinished novel. The plane still
had no wings.
1.
Henry R. Van Til, The Calvinistic Concept of Culture (Grand
Rapids: Baker Book House, 1959), 87. [↩]
2.
Van Til, The Calvinistic Concept of Culture, 44. [↩]
3.
William S. Barker, “Theonomy, Pluralism, and the Bible,” Theonomy:
A Reformed Critique, 229. [↩]
4.
Laws of Hammurabi, 218.
Quoted in Gary R. Williams, “The Purpose of Penology in the Mosaic Law and
Today,” Living Ethically in the 90s, ed. J. Kerby Anderson (Wheaton,
Illinois: Victor Books, 1990), 127. [↩]
5.
Van Til, Calvinistic Concept of Culture, 157. [↩]
6.
H. Henry Meeter, The Basic Ideas of Calvinism, 5th
rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, [1939] 1956), 99–100. A 6th edition
appeared in 1990 with three chapters added by Paul A. Marshall. [↩]
7.
Meeter, The Basic Ideas of Calvinism, 111. [↩]
8.
Meeter, The Basic Ideas of Calvinism, 111–112. [↩]
9.
Meeter, The Basic Ideas of Calvinism, 112. [↩]
10.
Meeter, The Basic Ideas of Calvinism, 126. [↩]
11.
Meeter, The Basic Ideas of Calvinism, 127. [↩]
https://americanvision.org/21900/a-biblical-worldview-without-the-bible-how-is-that-possible/
