Loving God With Your Mind Without Being an Intellectual Pharisee
John M. Frame
The Blackstone
Fellowship, June 7, 2004
First let
me express my sincere thanks to the Alliance Defense Fund for arranging this
program and to Jeff Ventrella for inviting me to come. I don’t have PowerPoint
for you today, just an old-fashioned lecture outline. I don’t normally think of
myself as a traditionalist, but pedagogically, I must admit, time has just
passed me by.
Further, I won’t tell you any
lawyer jokes today, but I will mention that of the three boys in our family my
parents wanted one of us to be a lawyer, one to be a doctor, and one to be a
businessman. They achieved two out of three. I was the one that was supposed to
be the lawyer, and I worked in the offices of a legal firm one summer. But I
turned into a theologian instead, somewhat to my parents’ chagrin.
Yet they weren’t entirely wrong in
their aspirations for me. Theology and law have a lot in common. Both of them
apply principles to cases. In the case of lawyers, the principles are those of
the Constitution, state and local statutes, legal precedents, and so on. In the
case of theology, the principles are those of Scripture, reflected as they may
or may not be in the traditions of the church. Many noted theologians have had
legal training, including Tertullian, John Calvin, and Charles Finney.
What I have to say today will be theology, not law. Other speakers during these lectures will be lawyers, judges and law professors, and they will speak on subjects more specific to your profession. But the whole purpose of the Blackstone Fellowship is to relate the law to a Christian world view, and that brings theology into your studies in a major way. So I hope this presentation will apply theology to law in a number of important ways, and, perhaps even more important, will apply theology to your life, and to the life of any Christian who seeks to honor God in society.
The Gospel of the Covenant
The relations of law and theology
are even deeper than the methodological overlap I mentioned. For it’s possible
to see the biblical message itself in terms of a legal model. God has given us
his written word, which in the interpretation of Meredith G. Kline is a kind of
treaty. In the ancient near east, a great king or emperor would make a treaty,
sometimes called a “covenant,” with a lesser king, dictating the terms of their
future relationship. That treaty would serve as a legal constitution, the
ultimate law. The written law that Moses brought down from
In the legal system of the
covenant, God served as both prosecuting attorney and defense attorney. Through
his prophets, he conducted the “covenant lawsuit,” charging
So we can put the biblical gospel
in terms of a legal transaction. That’s not the whole of the gospel. The gospel
also teaches sanctification, how God progressively makes us holy, and adoption,
how God brings us into a new family. And there are other images, models, ways
of conceiving the wonderful riches of God’s redemption. But the legal model is
important, though many theologians are trying to get away from it today.
Remember that the gospel, the good
news, is the announcement of the coming reign of God. The idea of a “gospel,”
“good news” in the Bible goes back to Isaiah:
Isaiah 52:7 How beautiful upon
the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news, who publishes peace,
who brings good news of happiness, who publishes salvation, who says to Zion, "Your God reigns."
Isaiah 61:1 The Spirit of the
Lord GOD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me to bring good news to the
poor; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the
captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound; 2 to
proclaim the year of the LORD's favor, and the day of vengeance of our God.
(Remember how Jesus preached on this passage
in the synagogue at
The gospel is a political announcement: It
says that a new government, a new order is coming. And the new king will make
everything right that was wrong. When
John the Baptist begins to preach good news, gospel, his message is “Repent,
for the
And after Jesus died for our sins, rose from
the dead, and ascended into heaven, the church went out and proclaimed “Jesus
is Lord.” Salvation comes to those who confess that with their lips and believe
it in their hearts,
“Jesus is Lord” is a highly political
message. The Roman emperors were called “Lord.” When a new emperor was crowned,
announcements through the empire were called “gospel.” Similarly, the gospel
that the church proclaimed was the coming of a new king. The Romans, of course,
misunderstood what kind of king Jesus claimed to be. But they were not wrong to
see him as a rival to Caesar. The church taught, not only a means for
individuals to be reconciled with God, but also that God is coming to bring
radical changes to society. That gospel will not be completely fulfilled until
Jesus comes again and brings us a “new heaven and new earth, wherein dwells
righteousness.” But whenever people’s hearts are changed by God’s Spirit, they
bring their new values into the marketplace, into the arts, into sports and
entertainment, into government, and into law. The laws of nations have been
profoundly changed by the leaven of the gospel. The Gospel is that leaven that
has moved many nations toward democratic institutions, free markets, social
conscience (as in Isaiah’s “good news to the poor”).
Please don’t get the idea that the Gospel is
only about the hearts of individuals and not about social justice. It is
profoundly about both. Indeed, it is even broader than that! It’s about the
whole universe, that is groaning and travailing in pain until the manifestation
of the children of God.
Theologians sometimes make radical
distinctions between law and Gospel, and I think that’s wrong. I believe we are
saved by grace and not by works; so the contrast between grace and works is
very sharp. But that is not the same thing as the contrast between law and
gospel. In the Bible the gospel is the announcement of a new law. Indeed, it is
a law; it’s a command, “Repent!” It commands people to repent, believe, and
obey the coming King.
So I’d like to look with you at the
covenant, the treaty, that is at the heart of that new law which is gospel. I
want to set before you three very important concepts that are found in every
biblical covenant treaty. As I said, God is the author of the treaty
constitution. And in the decalogue and in Deuteronomy, the covenant has a
definite literary form that Meredith Kline identifies with the Hittite
suzerainty treaties. In this form, the great King first identifies himself by
giving his name, "I am the Lord your God." So he identifies himself
as the author of the covenant document. This is his Word, not the Word of any
man.
Then he presents the three elements
I want to draw your attention to. First, he narrates past history: I am the
Lord your God, who brought you out of the
Covenant Christian Ethics
Now this covenantal model tells us
some important things about the nature of Christian ethics. I think also that
Christian ethics has a structure very similar to that of legal practice. There
are three basic elements in it: the law, the situation, and the person.
Somebody comes to your office, asking your help. There are three things you
want to look at. The first is the situation, the problem. The second is the law
that applies to that situation. The third is the person involved: can he pay,
can he testify? What happens to him if the judge or jury rules this way or
that? The situation, the law, and the person.
That triad also describes the
discipline of ethics. With every ethical problem, there are always these three
elements: the situation, the law (in this case the norm or the relevant ethical
principle) and the person.
Secular ethical systems have tried
to focus on one of these factors to the exclusion or neglect of the others.
There is, for example, the tradition of deontologism, represented by the
philosopher Immanuel Kant, in which the only important thing in ethics is
finding your duty: the norm or law. In deontologism, it's wrong to look at
situations or at yourself, for these distract your attention from your duty.
Then there is the teleological or
utilitarian, school of ethics, which focuses on the situation. Utilitarians say
that there is no law or norm above us to tell us what to do. Nor do you look
within yourself to decide what to do. Rather, you look outward. You look at the
situation around you and seek to bring about from that situation the greatest
good (happiness or pleasure) for the greatest number. Here the important thing
is the “consequences” of actions. So this kind of ethics is sometimes called
“consequentialist.”
And then there are the
existentialists, who say that you should look inward. Ethics, they say, is
really a matter of inwardness, a matter of your heart. It is a matter of
character, in Aristotle’s view, acting in accord with what you really are, our
essence or nature as rational animals. Or, for Jean-Paul Sartre, since in his
view we don’t have an essence or nature, it is acting out of our free
decisions.
These three secular traditions each
have a valid ethical intuition: The deontologists are right to say that ethics
is a matter of duty, that it must be based on objective norms. The utilitarians
are right to say that ethical action must be relevant to the situation, that
it's important to know the consequences of your actions. And the
existentialists are right to believe that goodness and badness are basically
located in our hearts: our motives and character.
But secular ethicists have a hard
time making these intuitions work together without friction. Some problems
arise. For example, it's all very well to say that right and wrong must be
objective norms; but where do you find those absolute norms in a relative universe?
And it's understandable to want to derive ethics by calculating what act
maximizes pleasure or happiness. But how can you calculate indefinitely into
the future how much pleasure or pain your action will bring about? And of
course you want your ethical choices to reflect your inwardness. But does that
mean that you can do anything you feel like doing? And if not, why?
As a matter of fact, these three
approaches to ethics are interrelated, so that you can't do one of them without
the others. You can't understand what act brings happiness out of a situation
without having a norm to guide you. People who try to deduce ethical principles from situations alone,
without norms, are often said to be guilty of the naturalistic fallacy. The naturalistic fallacy is the fallacy that
says "Government welfare makes people happy, therefore we ought to have
government welfare." As David Hume showed, the ought doesn't follow from the is. "People love themselves, therefore they ought to love themselves." That's another example. You can't reason from is to ought, from valueless facts
to moral values. So ethical evaluation of a situation requires norms. And
similarly, ethical evaluation of yourself-- your inward character and motives,
requires norms.
But similarly, you can't use a norm
unless you can apply that norm to a situation. Unless your client tells you
what is bugging him, the law is of no use to you or to him. Unless he tells you
the situation he's in, you have no idea what laws to look up. So to rightly use
the law, you must be able to apply it to the situation-- and to the client.
And if you look at the client, the
person, the ethical agent: you can't properly evaluate his motives and
character without the norm, and you can't understand him outside his environment,
the situation.
In one sense, each of these factors
includes the other two. The norm includes the situation and the subject,
because everything is God’s revelation: Scripture, the world, and human beings
all reveal God. The importance of the Bible is not that it is the only
revelation of God, but that it is what theologians call a “special” revelation.
That means it has a special content (redemption), a special medium (written
words), and a special function (it is the gospel that opens our eyes to see the
rest of God’s revelation truly: the “spectacles” by which we see nature aright
(Calvin)). “Norm,” then, is broader than “Scripture,” and it includes
everything.
Similarly, the situation is
everything. It includes Scripture and the self. And the self, too, is
everything, in the sense that everything we know we know through ourselves,
through our reason, sense, and experience.
So norm, situation, and self are
not separate segments of reality. They are the whole of reality, seen from
three different perspectives.
In all these ways, then, law,
situation, and self are inseparable. You can't understand one without the
others, and you cannot have a viable ethical system without all three.
But here is where secular ethics
gets into trouble. As I mentioned, secular ethical systems tend to want to
separate these three factors. They want an ethic of pure duty, or pure
situation, or pure inwardness. Why? Because they feel they have to choose.
Duty, after all, might say one thing, the situation something else, inwardness
still something else. How do you know which to choose?
The Christian says, wait a minute.
You don't have to choose. Ultimately, the three factors agree. Why? Because God
exists. God is the author of the moral law, he's the creator of the world, and
the creator of the self, which bears his image. When we do our duty, we are
maximizing happiness, and we are doing what's in our own self-interest. There
is no conflict between the three. Secular ethics can't get the three together,
because they don't believe in God. They don't believe there is any being big
enough to insure the consistency of duty, situation, and self.
So God's Word provides a far more
credible view of ethics than any secular system. It unites the three factors
and relates them intelligibly to one another. Indeed, each includes the other
two in a sense. The situation includes the self and the law. The law takes
account of every situation and every person. And the person cannot be
understood except in the environment of God's world and God's law; for these
are our environment. Each presuppose the other two, so each is a perspective on
the whole.
So the Christian ethic is
tri-perspectival. The Westminster Confession of Faiith 16.7 raises the question
of what is a good work. It gives three answers: (1) a right standard, the Word
of God, (2) the right inner motive, faith (Rom. 14:23), and (3) the right goal,
the glory of God (1 Cor. 10:31). (This
is what we seek to bring out of every situation we face, the most desirable
consequence of any action.)
Consider how the Bible appeals to
us to do good works. (1) Sometimes it cites divine commandments: Matt. 5:17-20,
19:18-19, Luke 10:26-27, John 14:15, 21. (2) Sometimes it calls on us to keep
in step with the Spirit, who works within (
So for the Christian, ethics is the
application of a norm to a situation by a person. These may be described as "perspectives" on ethics. In each perspective, we ask a certain
question; but all three questions have the same answer. The normative
perspective asks, "What does God's Word say to me about this
situation?" The existential perspective asks, "How must I change if I
am rightly to apply God's Word to the situation I'm in? The situational
perspective asks, "What is (biblically) the best way for me to change this
situation to achieve greater glory for God? This way of putting it brings out
the interdependence of the three perspectives.
This tri-perspectival approach to
ethics has these advantages: it reconciles these three factors that have been
so hard to reconcile in secular ethics: law, situation, and ethical agent. It
reconciles elements of the biblical message that theologians sometimes like to
tear apart: law, gospel, experience. It shows the importance of a theistic
basis for ethics, because only the biblical God is sufficient to bring these
three perspectives together. And this model presents a Christian basis for
making personal decisions and addressing public issues. When you face an
ethical decision it’s often helpful to ask (1) what’s my situation, my problem?
(2) What does God’s Word say about the problem? And (3) how must I change as a
person if I am to make the right decision here?
Excursus on Natural Law
I’m sometimes asked how my tri-perspectival ethics
relates to natural law theory, which is one of the great traditions of
Christian ethics and often presented today as a way of bringing society back to
some level of moral stability. I sat in on J. Budziszewski’s lectures at last
year’s Blackstone Fellowship, and his lectures moved me to buy three of his
books, which I’ve placed in your bibliography. Although I’ve not usually been
seen as an advocate of natural law thinking, I was deeply impressed by Jay’s
lectures and his books. I was especially impressed by the fact that Jay puts a
stronger emphasis on the importance of Scripture than many natural law
theorists do, and that creates a lot of commonalities.
I said earlier that on a biblical
understanding revelation is to be found in Scripture, but also in the world and
in ourselves. Natural law theory focuses primarily on the revelation in the
world and ourselves, though as I mentioned Jay’s version of it also focuses on
the role of Scripture. Romans 1 deals especially with God’s revelation in the
world, in nature, in the creation. It says that God’s eternal power and
deity—his divine nature—are clearly revealed in the world, even to those who don’t
have contact with the Bible. This revelation also has ethical content. Paul
says in that chapter that when the pagans know God, but reject him, that leads
not only to idolatry, but to all forms of immorality. He emphasizes sexual
immorality especially. Then in verse 32, Paul says “Though they know God's
decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do
them but give approval to those who practice them.” So general revelation,
God’s revelation in nature, reveals not only God’s existence, but his moral law
as well. It doesn’t tell people how to be saved, how to be forgiven for their
sin, but it certainly tells them that they have sinned. That we may call the
natural law, God’s moral law discovered in the world and in ourselves.
But of
course Paul also says that apart from God’s grace, apart from regeneration,
people “suppress” this law (verse 18), “exchange it for a lie” (verse 25), “do
not see fit to acknowledge God” (verse 28). How can they stop this and stop
suppressing God’s truth? Only through God’s grace, through the gospel of Jesus
Christ.
Now Jay’s
books are enormously valuable in showing the foolishness of that suppression.
Jay tells them, “you really know that abortion is wrong, that homosexuality is
wrong. You might try to fool others or yourself by denying these things, or by
maintaining a relativistic view of ethics. But when you think about it, you
know that you’ve fallen for a lie.” Then comes the Gospel and the Bible.
It is right, as the natural law tradition does, to bring these arguments to the public square and to use them to influence legislation. But it is also important, as the natural law tradition does not always do, to insist that the whole Bible should be brought into the public square, to bring all of culture, including law, captive to Christ. Some have argued that we should not appeal to any revelation except natural law to influence culture, that we should avoid reference to the Bible. That might be good strategy in some circumstances. But make no mistake. The gospel itself is political and cultural: it announces the coming of a new King. And our culture needs to hear that message just as much as Roman culture needed to hear it.
Covenantal Christian Epistemology
Now let me propose a parallel way of looking at
epistemology, or theory of knowledge. I’m proposing that we look at
epistemology as a subdivision of ethics. That’s not as odd as it may seem at
first glance. A lot of secular and Christian philosophers have been talking
lately about the “ethics of knowledge.” Note especially the titles of Esther
Meek and Jay Wood in your bibliography, as well as the more famous
philosophical works of Alvin Plantinga. At the very least, knowledge seems to
be dependent on ethics in this way: to really know a subject, you need to be
honest with the evidence, honest with yourself and honest with others who are
working in the same area, for knowledge is often a communal effort. That’s an
ethical value. Or perhaps more fundamentally, you need to value truth above falsehood,
truth above what you’d like to believe. That’s an ethical value too.
The philosopher Alvin Plantinga has
much to say about our “epistemic rights,” that is, what we have a right to
believe, given the evidence before us and our mental equipment. Rights are an
ethical topic. For what it’s worth, I think much more should be said, not only
about epistemic rights, but also about epistemic obligations. What ought
we to believe, given the evidence and our mental resources? But oughtness is
certainly an ethical concept.
The word “knowledge” bears several
senses, and it can take different kinds of objects. You can know persons,
skills, or propositions (a proposition being an item of information). When we
say we “know that” something is the case, we’re talking about knowing
propositions, as when I say I know that
In the Bible, the most important
kind of knowledge is the knowledge of persons, or, I should say, one person in
particular. In John 17:3, Jesus says, “Now this is eternal life: that they may
know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” In Phil. 3,
Paul states the great goal of his life: “I want to know Christ and the power of
his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like
him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection of the dead.”
Knowing God, knowing Christ; is
that the center of your life, the center of your quest for knowledge? It ought
to be. And that should mean that all other knowledge is knowledge in relation
to God. On the first page of his Institutes,
Calvin says that he can’t know himself apart from God—or, significantly, God
apart from himself. The most important part of knowing anything is knowing how
that thing is related to God. Proverbs 1:7 tells us that the fear of the Lord
is the beginning of knowledge.
And that’s another ethical element
in knowledge. Knowledge is part of our life before God. When Paul in 1 Cor.
10:31 says, “Whether you eat, or drink, or whatsoever you do, do all to the
glory of God,” what do you think is included in the whatsoever? Everything. Does that include thinking?
2 Cor. 10:5 speaks of bringing every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. Does that include knowing? Of course it
does. Knowing is a human activity among others, like eating and drinking, like
worshiping, honoring your parents, killing, stealing. It’s a human action
subject to ethical predication. In seeking knowledge, you can do it to the
glory of God or in rebellion or disobedience. Your way of seeking can be good
or bad, right or wrong.
The Bible emphasizes the ethics of
knowledge in so many ways. It contrasts wisdom and foolishness in Proverbs and
1 Cor. 1, 2. The wisdom of the world is foolishness to God. 1 Cor. 8:1-3 tells
us that knowledge without love is worthless. Rom. 1 (cf. 1 Cor. 2:14, 2 Cor.
4:4) tells us that God is clearly revealed in his creation, but that sinful
human beings suppressed that revelation, exchanged it for a lie. Here we see a
darkening of knowledge, based on ethical rebellion. And Scripture presents
itself, God’s Word, as the ultimate criterion of truth, the God-breathed Word
that enables us discern between false teaching and true. If we love God, we
will trust his Word and believe what it has to say to us.
When Paul speaks of the
qualifications of elders, those appointed to teach in the church, he says some
things by implication about the level of knowledge required for this office,
but he says much more about the ethical qualities required to be a good teacher
(1 Tim. 3:1-7, Tit. 1:5-9, 2:1; cf. James 3:1-12, 1 Pet. 5:1-4. A teacher is to
be a model of godliness, somebody that other Christians can imitate (1 Tim.
4:12, Heb. 13:7). If you teach true doctrine, but show by your life you are a
hypocrite, your teaching will only confuse your hearers. They will not hear the
truth from your lips; they will hear instead a combination of truth and error
from your lips and from your life. So in many ways, there is an inseparable
connection between teaching and life, knowledge and ethics.
When you study your law books, do
you ask how this study is bringing glory to God? You should. Do you evaluate
your teachers’ lectures by the Word of God? You should. Otherwise, you’re not
learning as you should, as God intended. Otherwise you are accumulating errors
along with truth. We hear a lot about the need to avoid sins like murder,
adultery, dishonesty, but we don’t hear all that much about intellectual sins, sins of the mind. But
those are just as important to God. When we exchange the truth for a lie (Rom.
1:25), God isn’t pleased. Jesus wants us to love God with the mind, as well as
with all our heart, soul, and strength. Hence the title of this lecture. The
rest we’ll get into later.
Now is any of this relevant to the theory of knowledge? I think so.
Given the inseparability of ethics and knowledge, we should
ask if perhaps knowledge has three perspectives, just as ethics does. Notice
first that the traditional philosophical definition of knowledge is “justified,
true belief.” That has three elements. First, knowledge is a belief. A belief
is something subjective, something in the mind. Second, that belief must be
true. Truth is objective: it is agreement with actual states of affairs. Third,
that true belief must be justified: that means there must be a good reason to
believe it. Justification has to do with the laws of logic, the use of
evidence, all the laws that govern thought. This justification is an ethical
category. It suggests that there are norms of thought as there are norms of
behavior, and our beliefs ought to measure up to those criteria.
So, just as in ethics we deal with
the triad of norm, situation, and person, so in knowledge we deal with the
triad of the laws of thought, the object of knowledge, and the subject of
knowledge. Looking at it from the history of secular thought, there is also a
parallel. Just as there have been three emphases in secular ethics: ethics of
duty, situation, and inwardness, so there have been three tendencies in secular
epistemology: rationalism (focusing on the laws of thought, especially logic),
empiricism (focusing on the object of knowledge, the facts of the situation,
the object of knowledge) and subjectivism (focusing on the subject of
knowledge).
As in the ethical case, these
emphases reflect legitimate intuitions about knowledge. Most of us would say
that human thought must obey the laws of thought, must be in accord with the
facts, and must come out of a valid thinking process. But secularists find it
hard to reconcile these intuitions. What happens if the apparent laws of
thought seem to conflict with the objects or the subjects? Which should we
accept? Rationalists have said “reason,”
the norm. Empiricists have said “facts,” the object. Subjectivists have said
“myself,” the subject.
Rationalists have been criticized
for being speculative: letting their minds run wild, without any solid
grounding in sense experience. Empiricists have been criticized because through
the senses they cannot know anything universal, necessary, or normative.
Subjectivists have been criticized, because they make thinking wholly
subjective, relativistic, lacking all claim to truth.
But if God exists, law, subject,
and object cooperate harmoniously. God is the one who legislated the laws of
thought. He has made himself an object of knowledge, and he has created all the
other objects of knowledge. And he has created us as subjects of knowledge, to
live in the world of objects and to know those objects according to his laws of
thought.
So we seek to follow the laws of
thought, but we avoid speculation, because the ultimate laws of thought are
dictated, not by the mind, but by God’s revelation. We seek objective truth in
the situation around us, but an objectivity enhanced by the fact that we have a
knowledge of universal and necessary principles. And we seek knowledge as an
element of our own minds our own subjectivity, without falling into relativism.
So like ethics, knowledge has three
perspectives: The normative perspective asks what laws, norms, standards God
has laid down for human knowledge. The situational perspective asks what we
know about objective reality. The existential perspective asks what the
subject, the self, contributes to his knowledge.
Obviously the three are
inseparable. You can’t understand the laws of thought unless you understand
what realities these laws are legislating for, how the laws apply to the
situation and the self. 2+2=4 would mean nothing unless it could be used to
count pencils, or cars, or tuba players. Further, you can’t understand the situation
or the self except in the light of God’s norms, his Word. And you can’t
understand the self except in its situational environment, or the situation
apart from the selves that are a crucial part of it.
So you can start at any of these
three points, but wherever you start, you’ll encounter the others. If you start
with the situation, part of that situation is God’s revelation, and God’s
revelation will tell you how you should look at the rest of the situation. And
part of the situation is yourself, so you have to give account of that. If you
start with yourself, you’ll look at your own subjective inwardness and
experience. But part of that experience is experience of the world God made,
and of God’s revelatory norms. And if you start with God’s revelation, you will
have to consider the things that revelation is speaking about: the world and
yourself.
Covenantal Christian Psychology
In this
section I will try to extend our model to philosophical and theological
psychology. This is not the kind of psychology where you put somebody on the
couch, but rather an attempt to enumerate and describe the components of human
personality.
One of the main questions among
philosophers and theologians down through the years has concerned the relations
of the intellect (mind, reason), the will, and the emotions (affections,
feelings, passions). The intellect is the faculty that gains knowledge, the
will the faculty that chooses, decides, acts, and the emotions are the faculty
that makes us happy, sad, anxious, etc.
The picture that often emerges is
that these are three things in our heads that are fighting for supremacy. Intellectualists like Plato believed that the
intellect directed the will and the emotions, or at least should direct these
if we know what’s good for us. Voluntarists like John Duns Scotus believed that
the will directed the mind and the emotions. There have also been
emotionalists, like Schleiermacher, who said that all theology is an attempt to
put into words our feeling of absolute dependence, and David Hume, who said
that reason was the slave of the passions.
Reformed theologians, to refer to
my own tradition, have sometimes maintained a form of intellectualism known as
the “primacy of the intellect.” That means basically that God’s revelation comes
first to the intellect, and from there goes on to influence the will and the
emotions. Reformed theology was essentially a scholars’ movement, and it tended
to attract people with high levels of intellectual interest if not attainment.
It’s significant that Ulrich Zwingli, one of the earliest leaders of the Swiss
reformation, banned music from Sunday worship and conducted it as a teaching
meeting. Reformed preachers wore academic gowns rather than priestly vestments,
cultivating a rather academic model of piety. Their picture was that the Word
of God is addressed to the mind and from the mind goes on to the will and the
emotions. In our century, Reformed thinkers like Gordon H. Clark and J. Gresham
Machen have defended the primacy of the intellect.
This approach naturally attracted
many educated people. In our time, it has, I think, been one of the reasons why
Reformed churches appeal mainly to college-educated whites and not much to the
poor, minorities, or people with less education.
I question the primacy of the
intellect on the following grounds:
1.
Obviously,
the intellect influences the will and the emotions, by informing them.
2.
When
we are presented with facts, the will plays a role in deciding whether or not
to believe those facts. In Rom. 1, God revealed himself clearly to people, but
they chose not to accept that revelation. So in their case, we might say, their
will dominated their intellect.
3.
But
the same is true for those who accept and believe God’s revelation. Accepting
revelation is just as much a decision of the will as rejecting it. So, as we
said earlier, belief is an ethical issue.
4.
In
seeking any kind of knowledge, the will makes the decision to examine the
evidence, to interpret it this way rather than that, to evaluate it one way
rather than another.
5.
In
6.
So
Jesus says to inquirers that if anyone chooses to do the will of God, he shall
know whether Jesus’ teaching comes from God (John 7:17).
7.
The
emotions are a route by which data enters the intellect. When I feel hot, or
cold, or happy, or sad, these emotions provide data that the intellect must
deal with.
8.
The
will never acts until it feels like acting.
9.
When
I have studied a matter thoroughly, I often sense an uneasiness with my
conclusions. That is an emotion that drives me back to study some more.
10.
When that
uneasiness goes away, that’s when I say I have “knowledge.” The lack of
uneasiness is a feeling also. It my emotional sense that the work is finished,
a sense of satisfaction with the task. This is what I call “cognitive rest.” So
from one perspective, knowledge is an emotion: a feeling of cognitive rest over
the results of my inquiry.
So emotions, will, and intellect
are mutually dependent. What seems to make most sense to me is the view that
these three are not really distinct from one another, not little people in our
heads contending for dominance. Rather, we make decisions as whole persons. Our
thoughts, decisions, and feelings come from the heart, the center of our
consciousness. Words like “intellect,” “will,” and “emotions” don’t designate
objects, like cerebrum, cerebellum, and brain stem, but rather different aspects of the thinking process, or perspectives on the personality. We can
think of the intellect as normative, the will as situational, the emotions as
existential. The intellect is the self as thinking, the will the self as
choosing, and the emotions the self as feeling.
On this analysis, it’s unnecessary
to insist that one or the other faculty should be primary and the others should
be subordinate. The important thing, rather, is to insist that they all be
subject to the Word of God.
The Bible appeals to all these
aspects of personality. It presents reasoned arguments to the mind, but it also
exhorts the will (“Turn! turn from your evil ways! Why will you die, O house of
Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!
How unsearchable are his judgments,
And his paths beyond tracing out!
Who has known the mind of the Lord?
Or who has been his counselor?
Who has ever given to God that God should repay him?
For from him and through him and to him are all things.
To
him be glory forever! Amen.
Can you feel the emotion pulsing through that passage? That
passage is not meant only to inform you, but to make you feel differently. The emotional content is part of the meaning of
the text. If a preacher doesn’t communicate that feeling, that emotion, he’s
depriving his congregation of an important element of the text. Imagine
somebody reading this text in a monotone. That is a distortion of the text as
much as a theological error would be.
I tried to admonish a Reformed
theologian friend recently for being insensitive to the feelings of someone,
and he replied, “I don’t play the pathos game.” Yes, I’m not wild about all the
sensitivity rhetoric we hear in modern culture. I certainly reject the attempts
on college campuses to try to force people to be sensitive: what a
contradiction that is! But much as we’d like to parade our macho indifference
to people’s tender feelings, Scripture does play the pathos game. Listen to
Paul,
For I wrote you out of great
distress and anguish of heart and with many tears, not to grieve you but to let
you know the depth of my love for you. (2 Cor. 2:4)
1 Thessalonians 2:7, 8 but we were
gentle among you, like a mother caring for her little children. We loved you so
much that we were delighted to share with you not only the gospel of God but
our lives as well, because you had become so dear to us.
1 Thessalonians 2:17 But, brothers,
when we were torn away from you for a short time (in person, not in thought),
out of our intense longing we made every effort to see you.
1 Thess. 3:6-10 But Timothy has just
now come to us from you and has brought good news about your faith and love. He
has told us that you always have pleasant memories of us and that you long to
see us, just as we also long to see you… How can we thank God enough for you in
return for all the joy we have in the presence of the Lord because of you?
Philemon 12 I am sending him
(Onesimus)--- who is my very heart—back to you. I would have liked to keep him
with me so that he could take your place in helping me while I am in chains for
the gospel. But I did not want to do anything without your consent, so that any
favor you do will be spontaneous and not forced.
Again and again, Paul pours out his heart, expresses his own
emotions and expresses his deep care for the emotions of the people.
So my
Reformed community, and perhaps other Christian communities as well, needs to
look at emotions much more positively, as the Bible does. We need to play the
pathos game. There is no reason for us to disparage or try to dampen emotions
in the Christian life, or even in worship. And if we don’t have the resources
in our tradition to express the extreme
emotions found in Scripture itself, then should be humble enough to go beyond
that tradition to use resources from other Christian brothers and sisters.
We should
counsel people not to act on momentary
emotions. We should also counsel them not to act on every idea that pops into their heads, or on every desire or impulse
appears in their thinking. But ideas that are tempered and refined and prayed
over to the point of cognitive rest ought to be acted on. And emotions refined
by thought, maturity, and good habits of decision-making may well be reliable
guides.
Scholarship in Service to Jesus
I want now
to make some applications to ourselves as Christian scholars. Make no mistake,
that’s what you are as you study—a Christian scholar. You’re not going into
theology professionally, but you’re studying law as a Christian. And this week
you are studying the Christian faith as it bears on law. Many will want you to
share with them the insights you’ve learned here. You’ll be considered an
expert in the Christian approach to law. And that’s a very dangerous position
to be in. So I’m going to exhort you along the same lines that I exhort people
studying to be pastors. Just as in their case, I’m concerned about what you do
with what you learn here, how you use it. Briefly: Will you use it to
build up, or to tear down? First, to review:
1.
Epistemology
is a branch of ethics. For knowledge of facts, like knowledge of ethical
values, involves the application of God’s norms to the facts before us, by
persons.
2.
Norm, situation, and person are perspectives on all our experience.
3.
In
the hierarchy of God’s norms, Scripture plays a unique role. It is the written
transcript of God’s covenant with us and therefore must have the final say in
all our life and thought.
4.
Intellect,
will, and emotion are not competing faculties, but aspects of all human thought
and life, mutually dependent.
In discussing the ethical side of epistemology, my
discussion has so far been fairly formalistic. I’ve talked about the factors
involved in ethical decision-making and in epistemological decision-making. So
in effect I’ve proposed a decision-making model or a meta-ethic of knowledge.
But it’s important now for us to move from meta-ethics to ethics, from abstract
questions of method to concrete questions of how to carry on our work as
Christian scholars to the glory of God.
It’s
hard to separate meta-ethics from ethics, especially on the model I’ve given
you. If ethics is applying a norm to a situation by a person, then there is an
ethical aspect in everything we do, including meta-ethics. We are, again, to do
everything to the glory of God. So my meta-ethic has already spilled over into
practical application, as in the last section where I advised you to play the
pathos game. But there is more to be said.
Hear
this passage from James 3:
Not many of you should presume to be
teachers, my brothers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more
strictly. 2 We all stumble in many ways. If anyone is never at fault
in what he says, he is a perfect man, able to keep his whole body in check. 3
When we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we can turn
the whole animal. 4 Or take ships as an example. Although they are
so large and are driven by strong winds, they are steered by a very small
rudder wherever the pilot wants to go. 5 Likewise the tongue is a
small part of the body, but it makes great boasts. Consider what a great forest
is set on fire by a small spark. 6 The tongue also is a fire, a
world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole person, sets
the whole course of his life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell. 7
All kinds of animals, birds, reptiles and creatures of the sea are being tamed
and have been tamed by man, 8 but no man can tame the tongue. It is
a restless evil, full of deadly poison. 9 With the tongue we praise
our Lord and Father, and with it we curse men, who have been made in God's
likeness. 10 Out of the same mouth come praise and cursing. My
brothers, this should not be. 11 Can both fresh water and salt water
flow from the same spring? 12 My brothers, can a fig tree bear
olives, or a grapevine bear figs? Neither can a salt spring produce fresh
water. 13 Who is wise and understanding among you? Let him show it
by his good life, by deeds done in the humility that comes from wisdom. 14
But if you harbor bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast
about it or deny the truth. 15 Such "wisdom" does not come
down from heaven but is earthly, unspiritual, of the devil. 16 For
where you have envy and selfish ambition, there you find disorder and every
evil practice. 17 But the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of
all pure; then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good
fruit, impartial and sincere. 18 Peacemakers who sow in peace raise
a harvest of righteousness.
See again here the ethical aspects of knowledge. And see the
danger here—what danger you are in as a Christian scholar, expert, and teacher.
The Bible is very
hard on professional knowers, those who claim to know and teach God’s truth. In
the Old Testament, it was very dangerous to claim to be a prophet. If your
predictions didn’t come true, you were to be stoned to death. In Jesus’ earthly
ministry, he was subject to constant hostility from the scribes and Pharisees,
those who were regarded as the most learned experts in God’s law. Jesus
condemned them in some of the most severe language in Scripture. You can read
that condemnation in Matt. 23:1-39, a very long chapter filled with devastating
invective. I won’t try to read it to you, but I want to look at some themes. It
begins with what I believe is a summary: Jesus says that the scribes and
Pharisees “tie up heavy loads and put them on men’s shoulders, but they
themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.”
Jesus’ critique of the Pharisees was threefold. First, the Pharisees added to the Word
of God. In Deuteronomy, God had told
That
danger is still with us today. I’ve written critically of some movements in
Christian circles that aim to restore traditional patterns of worship,
evangelism, church life. I think we have much to learn from the past, so I find
much of this discussion valuable. But I do differ very strongly from those who say
that I am not truly evangelical or truly Reformed if I don’t accept all the
Reformed traditions. Protestants believe in sola Scriptura, the sufficiency of
Scripture, and that means that just as Luther and Calvin we need to be critical
of all the traditions of our past, both in the church and in the general
culture, measuring them against the infallible standard of Scripture.
When
you seek to bring God’s standards to bear on cultural, political, social
issues, remember that history and sociology are not enough. Some Christian
writers today seem to base all their thinking on a historical analysis of how
our culture came to be as it is, and a sociological analysis of what culture
has become today. Then the social critic picks up on some historical trend that
he likes or some modern trend that he likes or doesn’t like (usually the
latter) and bases his whole evaluation on that. What one misses among these
Christian culture critics is an analysis of what God’s Word says. Is popular
music a valuable form of culture or not? Some are very sure one way or the
other, but the argument makes little reference to Scripture.
Second,
Jesus says that after the Pharisees lay those heavy loads on people shoulders,
they are not willing to lift a finger to move them. The Pharisees didn’t care
about the hurt they were causing to people. They had made people miserable, and
they did not care about that misery. Maybe they said, look, the law is
objective; it’s true. It’s not important what people feel about it. We don’t
play the pathos game. That’s subjective, sentimental. If people don’t like
keeping the law, that’s their problem. Let them answer to God. Of course in
saying this they would have ignored the fact that much of what they proclaimed
as law was not God’s law at all, but their own creation. But even if their
teaching about the law were rigorously true to God’s Word, they shouldn’t have
been making their people miserable. Learning God’s law should be a delight. And
if people aren’t delighted by it, we ought to care. Caring about this is not
merely sentimental or subjective. God’s law is objectively delightful, and if
it makes people miserable there is something objectively wrong, either with the
preacher or the hearer. Again, if we don’t communicate the emotional aspect of
God’s Word, we haven’t communicated it truly.
But the Pharisees left a trail of misery among
God’s people. What could they have done about it? Some might say that we can do
nothing; it’s all in God’s hands whether people receive the Word with joy or in
misery. No; God is sovereign in this area, to be sure; but there is also a role
for human responsibility here. The Pharisees might have cured the people’s
misery by telling them of God’s grace. They might have taught that God is love,
and he takes away from us the awful burden of trying to earn salvation by
keeping the law. God takes that burden away, even when that law is wrongly
taught and misunderstood. And the Pharisees might have pointed people to Jesus,
who even before the atonement was pronouncing God’s forgiveness, who was
calling, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you
rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in
heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden
is light” (Matt. 11:28). Indeed, it was Jesus himself who was preparing even
then to take on himself the sins of his people, their awful burden of guilt.
But the Pharisees hated Jesus and wanted no part of his free gift of salvation.
This
happens today too. When we communicate to others what we think is the truth,
especially truth about ethics and law, it’s importance also to communicate
God’s love, his forgiveness in Christ. We need to show people what the gospel
means in daily life, how to maintain a grace perspective on everything. When
Christian people help the poor, support their families, honor their parents,
resist temptation, they need to know the difference between just keeping rules
and living out of thankfulness to God. To teach them that requires special
care—not just to cover biblical content, but to present it in such a way as to
convey the full joy of the redeemed life.
I prepared this message originally
as a charge to seminary graduates, many of whom hoped to become preachers. I know
that’s not true of many of you. But you need to learn these lessons too. For
study in any field, whether theology, philosophy, history, science, or law,
involves application of God’s word to your subject matter and communicating it
to people. In the secular academy, and far too often in the Christian academy,
the truth is hindered by squabbles and jealousies, and people communicate their
learning without any sense of how that communication is getting across to
persons. We are often told that academic writing and lecturing should be
impersonal. Certainly there is a difference between preaching and lecturing in
the response we seek from the audience. But in both cases our hearers are
people, human beings, made in God’s image.
Jesus says
that leaders ought to be servants of those they lead, following his example
(Matt. 20:20-28). I think he intended this teaching, not only for the apostles
and preachers, but for all of us who come into some position of responsibility.
Our study and practice of our vocation ought to be a means of service to the
church and to the world. As lawyers, you will be in a great position to help
remove burdens from people’s shoulders. You’ll have opportunities to present
the gospel to people in trouble, but beyond that, through your own legal work,
you can show the love of Christ by going the second mile for your clients.
So the
Pharisees (1) laid heavy loads on people, (2) did nothing to help move them.
They really didn’t care much for the people who heard their teaching. What did
they care about? So we come to the third part of Jesus’ critique. They cared
about themselves. They wanted recognition from people. They made a big show of
their piety, so that people would give them seats of honor and honorific
titles. In their teaching, their main goal was to feed their own pride, not to
build up the people of God.
It’s so
easy to use our knowledge, even the knowledge we gain in seminary, for
ourselves rather than for others. It also happened in the church at
Knowledge puffs up, but
love builds up. The man who thinks he knows something does not yet know as he
ought to know. But the man who loves God is known by him. (1 Cor. 8:1b-3)
I won’t unpack everything in these
remarkable sentences. But the passage certainly challenges us in two areas:
knowledge without humility, and knowledge without love. On the subject of
humility and pride: after several years of education, you probably don’t know
nearly as much as you think you do. There is so much more to learn than anybody
can teach in a normal course of college and grad school. In my seminary
teaching, I confess I’m both amused and appalled at a certain syndrome I’ve
noticed in a few graduates: guys who were C and D students in seminary, who
barely pass their ordination exams, who, after they are ordained, suddenly
decide to present themselves as experts on all the difficult theological issues
of the day. And I urge them to understand that a theological degree does not
automatically entitle them to pontificate thoughtlessly on every theological issue;
only a huge amount of pride could make you think that it does.
Knowledge without humility is
ludicrous and useless. Knowledge without love is also destructive, Paul teaches
us. It tears down rather than building up the church. It feeds the error we just
discussed, for it succeeds only in puffing up the preacher, feeding his pride.
Indeed, knowledge without love is not knowledge in the fullest sense. Knowledge
without love distorts the truth so as to make it unrecognizable, so as to turn
it into falsehood.
What I see
over and over again in young preachers is that they are not conscious of their
audience. They cover biblical material, but they don’t know how to communicate
it; they don’t know how to relate it to where people really are. They don’t know
how to put it in the language of real people. They don’t know how to
illustrate, how to apply. The problem here, I think, is not only immaturity of
preaching skills, though that is part of it. The problem here is often that
there is not enough love. For if the teacher had more love for the people, he
would have a passionate zeal to put the truth where the people could find it.
He would show by his choice of words that he wants them to hear, so that they
will take the Word to heart. And he would, as I emphasized earlier, get
involved with people pastorally to help them, by word and example, to put their
teaching into practice.
The same
advice, mutatis mutandis, goes for Christians in all professions, including the
legal. You have to keep reminding yourself that you are not just dealing with a
case or an issue; you’re dealing with persons. And the goal is not to achieve
some distinction for yourself, though it’s nice if God gives you that. Rather,
the goal is to use your knowledge to glorify God and to help people. Anything
less falls short of the biblical ethics of knowledge.
The lawyer
jokes have proliferated in our time, I think, because a kind of negative
stereotype. A lot of people see attorneys as people who run around playing
“Gotcha.” You make a little mistake, and a lawyer shows up ready to take away
your life savings. As I say, that’s a stereotype, and it certainly doesn’t fit
the majority of lawyers I’ve known. It does fit one, but I won’t get into that.
Most all lawyers I’ve known have been people of integrity, even godliness. But
the legal profession has an image problem in our day.
The
theological profession, my profession, also has an image problem. Our
stereotype looks like this: a church has a vital ministry going, and the
theologian comes in and tears it all down by nitpicking about theological
details. The theologian is the one who finds a peaceful church and turns it
into a battlefield of controversy. Now most theologians I know are pretty good
guys, but that stereotype has an uncomfortable amount of truth in it. I’ve
recently done some study of American Presbyterianism through the twentieth
century for a paper I’m writing: it is a history of battles, 21 of them, by my
count. Twenty-one theological battles that have divided churches, seminaries,
even households. Twenty-one theological battles over things like
premillennialism, Christian liberty, the incomprehensibility of God, apologetic
method, the nature of covenant, theonomy, and on and on. As I study them, I
don’t think many of these battles were worth fighting, and those that were I
think should have been fought very differently. The battles have wasted a lot
of energy that could have been devoted to building churches and reaching the
lost.
I think
when a student gets out of seminary, or out of law school, he often imagine
himself as a kind of warrior who goes into a situation and overwhelms people
with his overwhelming knowledge and devastating ability to destroy another
person’s case. The Bible does use military metaphors in speaking of our
conflict with the world, the flesh, and the devil. But it’s one thing to fight
the devil. It’s another thing to fight people. With people Scripture speaks
over and over of gentleness, graciousness. The exception is the Pharisee, with
whom one must sometimes follow Jesus’ example of harshness and severity.
But with that exception, neither
lawyers nor theologians ought to be in the business of destroying people. Our
business is to serve others in the love of Christ. If a lot more of us did that,
it would help do away with our image problems. But our public image is not the
important thing. The important thing is to know Christ in his sufferings and in
the power of his resurrection, and to make him known to others through our
words and our lives, speaking the truth in love.
Earlier I commended to you a “grace
perspective:” what is that? It’s recognizing that you are just as great a
sinner as any of your clients, bosses, or political opponents. It’s recognizing
that you yourself constantly need God’s forgiveness in Christ for the thoughts,
words, and deeds that go against his will. And it’s recognizing that God’s
grace is greater than you have ever imagined. My friend Jack Miller, now with
the Lord, used to say, “Cheer up; you’re a far worse sinner than you think.” If
you were just a little bit sinful, you might think you can make yourself
better, but even a little moral improvement is very, very hard. But since
you’re a far worse sinner than you think, you can only rely on God’s grace, and
that’s good news. Then Jack said, “Cheer up, God’s grace is far greater than
you have ever imagined.” Christian leaders, especially those well-informed
enough to be considered teachers, need to have and display that kind of cheer.
They need to have that sense of humor about themselves, that readiness to ask
forgiveness of God and others, that openness to others, that love, that alone
is appropriate to the gospel of grace.
May God therefore bless you with the vision of Christ himself as you learn this week, and as you seek to apply his Word to your legal practice.