Common Grace and Theological Scholarship
Titus 1:5-16
Dennis E. Johnson, Ph.D.
Even one of their own prophets has said, “Cretans are always
liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons.” This testimony is true.
(Titus 1:12-13)
These verses illustrate in a vivid way a tension that we
constantly confront as we study biblical interpretation,
theology, church history, preaching, counseling, administration,
or any other subject: Can non-Christians make true observations
and statements? Can Christians learn aspects of truth from
non-Christians? Should students who believe in the inspiration
of Scripture be expected to read the works of biblical scholars
who reject the Bible's divine origin and authority? Should
students who want to address people's personal problems with a
biblical counseling method be open to the possibility of
learning something from medical science or from secular
psychology? Should students who want to follow God's pattern and
method for the government and growth of his church even consider
what sociologists and teachers of management have said about the
ways in which human beings often interact with each other in
groups?
Reasons To Distrust Non-Christian Scholarship
Several foundational convictions may incline us to give a quick
and confident “No” to all these questions:
The Sufficiency of Scripture
Since the Bible is our only infallible rule for our faith and
life, we may be inclined to conclude that to listen to sociology
or psychology or astronomy or ancient history or archaeology or
philosophy would be to challenge the authority of the Word of
God. Then again, on further reflection we realize that the Bible
itself speaks of God speaking through the created world and not
exclusively in the Scriptures themselves. There is such a thing
as general revelation. We also realize that it is not a
compromise of the sufficiency of Scripture if we at least
pay attention to the vocabulary and syntax of non-biblical Greek
literature as we try to read and understand the New Testament.
And we know that descriptions of the Greek nominative case and
its uses will not differ greatly from each other, whether we
read them in a secular Greek grammar or in J. Gresham Machen's
New Testament Greek for Beginners. To (discerningly!) use
resources outside the Bible in order to understand the Bible's
message is not in itself a compromise of the Bible's authority
over our thoughts and actions.
Reformed Theology and Presuppositional Apologetics
We may be tempted to suspicion regarding ideas and information
from non-Christian sources because of what we have learned from
John Calvin about the radical intellectual effects of sin, and
what we have learned from Cornelius Van Til about the radical
antithesis between the foundational assumptions of Christian and
non-Christian thought.
- Total Depravity
Sin has damaged our ability to gain true knowledge about
ourselves, the universe, and God. Humanity's disobedience in
Adam has affected every aspect of our personality, including our
ability to think. We have no unfallen and neutral reason that
can objectively process the evidence that God presents through
general and special revelation. This leads us to recognize that
no one thinks about God or the world from a standpoint of
neutrality.
- The Absence of Neutrality
Apart from the Holy Spirit's regenerating work, we will, as
human beings, naturally use our intellectual resources to evade
and push from our consciousness the reality of God's existence
and our guilt. Our thinking, learning, and knowing are bound to
be colored by our relation to God the creator, whether a person
is in rebellion against God or reconciled to God.
- The Influence of Presuppositions on Methods and
Conclusions
We recognize that what people see, the facts people notice and
consider important, and the ways they connect those facts, are
all influenced by prior commitments and deep-seated beliefs. If
someone who denies the God of the Bible makes a statement about
what is true, that statement is part of the person's larger
system or worldview, which is rooted in Satan's great lie. How,
then, could such a statement have a shred of truth in it? Or how
could any method that has arisen in non-Christian circles have a
shred of validity to it?
Personal Discomfort
This is not a foundational conviction, but it is a factor that
may motivate us more than we realize, inclining us to avoid
intense mental interaction with the work of non-Christian
scholars. But here we need to honestly sort out the reason or
reasons for our discomfort.
On the one hand, we find ourselves righteously repulsed by
contact with a sinful, unbelieving mindset. If we do, we are in
good company: “While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was
greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols” (Acts
17:16).
On the other hand, we may find ourselves unsettled by our own
personal inability to refute the specific arguments of
intelligent unbelievers. This too is nothing to be ashamed of,
but it can lead to unhealthy reactions. You might be tempted to
confuse your ability to refute unbelief with
trustworthiness of the Word of God itself, so that your faith is
shaken. Rather than being driven back to the Word and to the
writings of others who have joined intellectual battle with the
attackers who are troubling you, you may be tempted to doubt. If
this is what reading the works of unbelieving critics does to
you, it may be a signal that you have slipped into a form of
self-trust, rather than trusting in God and his Word.
Or, when you can't immediately answer a critic, you may take
refuge in a single foundational truth as an all-purpose defense:
“Since all non-Christian thought is polluted at the spring by
unbelieving presuppositions, this truth releases me from all
responsibility to deal with the specifics of the
observations and arguments that non-Christian scholars have
made.” This is a relatively easy way out: “Non--Christians hate
God anyway; why should I dignify their views by reading them,
thinking about them, or answering them in specific detail?”
Reasons to Take Non-Christian Scholarship Seriously
But if we take the path of withdrawal, we are failing in our
role as servants of Christ and protectors of his people. We fail
in two ways:
Our Apologetic Duty to Understand the Opposition
We diminish our usefulness in refuting those who oppose sound
doctrine, a responsibility enjoined upon elders in our text
(verse 9). Paul's example can instruct us. Although he did not
argue as a Greek philosopher, he certainly was not ignorant of
Greek philosophy, nor of the theologies of his opponents at
Corinth or Colossae or Galatia. Like Paul, we are called to
“demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up
against the knowledge of God, and to take every thought captive
to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5). To do that, we
must know the arguments, the arsenal, of the enemies.
Common Grace and Human Inconsistency
But I want to focus our attention this morning on the second
danger in withdrawing from interaction with the secular or
unbelieving thought-world. If we justify our withdrawal by
appeal to the doctrine of total depravity and the insights of
presuppositionalism, we have failed to see an aspect of the
truth that Paul and the other Spirit-controlled writers of the
Bible have seen and have shown to us.
How can Paul quote a pagan prophet in Titus and then pronounce,
“This testimony is true”? How can he quote the Greek poet Aratus
on Mars Hill, “We are his offspring,” as part of Paul's own
argument against idolatry (Acts 17:28)? How can he quote the
Greek playwright Menander, “Bad company corrupts good morals” (1
Cor 15:33)? How can Solomon and the other authors of Proverbs
place in Scripture certain maxims that have parallels in the
wisdom sayings of Mesopotamia and Egypt? How can Paul appeal to
the pagan standards of family ethics to indict an incestuous
couple in the Corinthian church, stating that such immorality
would not be tolerated among unbelievers (I Cor. 5:1)?
The answer is found in the corresponding truths of God's common
grace and of human inconsistency. God's common grace not only
bestows rainfall and sunshine on the rebel as well as the
righteous. Common grace is also demonstrated when, in his
forbearance and kindness, God holds sinful humans back from
expressing consistently their hatred of God, his world, each
other, and the truth.
Apart from the Spirit's regenerating work, our father is the
devil, who was a murderer from the beginning. Were it not for
the restraining power of God's common grace, we would so
consistently follow the nature of our father the devil that we
would destroy the human race in a generation. Our father the
devil is also a liar, and fallen humanity “exchanged the truth
of God for a lie” (Rom. 1:25). But even the children of the
father of lies don't speak lies in every sentence they utter;
and this is because common grace also functions in the area of
our intellectual activities. As Van Til has pointed out, if
non-Christians were consistent with their own starting point and
worldview, they would deny the possibility of knowing anything.
But, God has kept rebellious sinners back from the deadly brink
of that foolish consistency.
Epimenides of Cnossus in northern Crete, a pagan “prophet” (as
the Greeks called him) (1), could make
a true observation about the character of his countrymen – even
as he called all Cretans liars. No doubt the irony of this was
not lost on Paul. William Hendriksen in his commentary mentions
someone who has tried to accuse Paul of self-contradiction here
by arguing as follows:
A Cretan, Epimenides, said that Cretans always lie. He must
therefore himself have lied when he said this. Therefore it is
not true that Cretans always lie. (2)
But, as Hendriksen shows, this is simply playing with words. Six
centuries before Paul wrote to Titus, Epimenides had summed up
the deceitful character for which the people of Crete were
generally known in the ancient world. The verb cretizo
meant to lie, cheat and deceive. (3)
But that did not mean that a citizen of Crete was incapable
of speaking a truth.
Paul says that Epimenides got it right when he called his
countrymen “liars, brutes, and gluttons.” The enemies of the
gospel on Crete fit that description to a “T.” They are liars,
for Paul says in verses 10- 11 that they are deceivers who ruin
households by teaching things they ought not to teach. They are
brutes, for they are rebellious, insubmissive, out of control
(v. 10). And they are gluttons, for their teaching activity is
motivated by a thirst for dishonest gain (v. 11). They need
rebuke and they need repentance, if they are ever to submit to
the truth of the Gospel and actually come to know the God whom
they claim to know (v. 16).
What do we learn from Paul's example in quoting Epimenides,
Aratus, and Menander? John Calvin comments on this verse:
From this passage we may gather that it is superstitious to
refuse to make any use of secular authors. For since all truth
is of God, if any ungodly man has said anything true, we should
not reject it, for it also has come from God.
(4)
You see how careful Calvin is to follow what Scripture says. If
Paul, under the inspiration of the Spirit, says that the
testimony "All Cretans are liars" is true, then certainly it is
true. And the fact that a pagan "prophet" said that sentence
first does not make it false. Calvin does not take the doctrine
of total depravity in isolation from other biblical truths, and
then reason from that one doctrine that because Epimenides was
an unregenerate person, everything Epimenides said must be
false. Calvin has learned from the teaching of Scripture and
from the example of Paul the apostle that God in his common
grace restrains even those who deny him from that utterly
foolish consistency that would make thought itself impossible.
Or, to take another example, Joseph Addison, who wrote the words
that we sang a few minutes ago, was a Deist. But Addison's
serious theological error does not mean that we sing a lie when
we say: “The unwearied sun, from day to day, does his Creator's
power display.” (5)
In a similar vein, Van Til says in his booklet Common Grace
and Witness-Bearing:
Christians and non-Christians... are together confronted with
the natural revelation of God ...men are all of them together,
made in the image of God… they have in them the ineradicable
sense of deity so that God speaks to them by means of their own
constitution... all men have to think according to the rules of
logic according to which alone the human mind can function...
all men can weigh and make many scientific discoveries. All
these things are true and important to maintain.
(6)
Now, Van Til goes on to point out, however, that these common
resources and methods available to Christian and non-Christian
alike must not obscure for us the radical presuppositional
opposition between the two worldviews, the two systems or
frameworks in which "the facts" are placed. The non-Christian
assumes that the facts of this world come from chance. The
Christian presupposes that the facts of this world are created
and controlled by God. (7)
Extremes to Avoid
Undiscerning Consumption
Van Til shows us the balance that we need. Surely to take
Calvin's observation and turn it into a slogan, "All truth is
God's truth," and then to forget what Calvin and Van Til and
(far more importantly) Scripture say about the deceitful effect
of sin in human life will leave us open to an undiscerning
consumption of anti-biblical academic methods and conclusions.
We have to evaluate every method, every observation, and every
conclusion in terms of the foundational worldview, the
interpretive framework in which it is presented to us. Is that
presuppositional starting point an expression of faith and
submission to the God of truth, or of rebellion against him?
Proud isolation
But we cannot, on the other hand, fall into a sort of Christian
solipsism in which we refuse to examine alternative explanations
and observations brought by people outside the faith. By his
grace – and only by his grace – God has given believers a
correct presupposition about the foundational issue: the facts
of this world are created and controlled by God. But that does
not guarantee that we automatically see every aspect of God's
truth, in general revelation or in special revelation, with
absolute clarity. Sanctification is progressive, not immediately
complete at the moment of our conversion. And this applies to
the sanctification of our thoughts and understanding, as well as
our motives and behavior. You don't know everything yet, and
neither do I. You don't understand God's Word (or his world)
perfectly and completely, and neither do I. That fact summons us
both to humility. In fact, it even calls us to a humility that
is ready to hear truth, whoever may speak it. If Paul can call
immoral Corinthian Christians to repentance by referring them to
pagans' ethical standards, who are we to think that we have
nothing to learn from God through the things that he, in his
common grace, has allowed unbelieving scholars and thinkers to
discover?
Discernment: Dangerous and Difficult Labor
You realize, of course, that this makes our study of
theology less outwardly secure. We cannot simply compile a list
of "safe" authors, stamp them with the Reformed equivalent of
imprimatur or nihil obstat, and then confine our
reading to them. We must do the hard work of exercising
discernment – sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph,
argument by argument. Facts, insights, perspectives, and methods
must all be tested in the light of the principles of Scripture.
And we must keep alive our consciousness of dependence on
Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and
knowledge. Our safety is not in avoiding the ideas of the
unbelieving world; our safety is in union with Christ, who
transforms the mind of those who trust in him.
There is hard work to be done in sorting and sifting the
teachings of other humans, especially when we realize that we
cannot simply cubbyhole the unpleasant or challenging ideas away
and ignore them. But this hard work, like other exercise, gives
us the necessary muscle tone to serve and lead God's people.
"Solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained
themselves to distinguish good from evil" (Heb. 5:14).
Footnotes
Dennis E. Johnson is Professor of Practical Theology and
Academic Dean at Westminster Seminary California. This
meditation was first delivered in the seminary's Morning
Devotions on April 16, 1991.
Ó2005
Westminster Seminary California All rights reserved
Footnotes
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S. M. Baugh
R. Scott Clark
Iain M. Duguid
Bryan D. Estelle
W. Robert Godfrey
Michael S. Horton
Dennis E. Johnson
Hywel R. Jones
Peter R. Jones
Joel E. Kim
Julius J. Kim
George C. Scipione
Robert B. Strimple
David M. VanDrunen
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