America today stands at the cross roads of her destiny. Her situation is remarkably similar to the conditions which prevailed in Western Europe during the later Middle Ages. There is the same disrespect for the authority of government, the same breakdown of social and family life, the same skepticism and uncertainty regarding the nature and destiny of life. In the later Middle Ages it was called nominalism; today it is known as positivism, lingual analysis. The universities of America like the universities of the later Middle Ages have become “multiversity” in which values arc held to be relative and God is unconcerned with the real issues of life. In both cases this revolutionary situation is due to the breakdown of a unified field of knowledge and experience. In both cases the alternative to an inner reformation of culture and social institutions is not stagnation and carrying on in the same old way but revolution. At the Reformation men preferred reformation to revolution and as a result God blessed their efforts to rebuild European civilization upon a scriptural rather than a humanist basis.
The only alternative to revolution has always been a revolution to faithful obedience to God’s Word and Law. The revolutionary spirit of twentieth century unbelief as embodied in the so-called “democratic way of life,” can be attacked effectively only at its roots by returning to utter dependence upon the Sovereign God.
The present revolutionary ferment and spirit gripping American society is merely the outworking of the philosophy of the Enlightenment. As a result the analysis of Groen van Prinsterer in Unbelief and Revolution can be of great help to Christians today in diagnosing the sickness unto death of American civilization. Groen believed that Europe’s apostasy from the Cod of the Bible had led directly to the breakdown of true community between Western men. If such apostasy were allowed to continue it would ultimately result in the emergence of the society of the Anti-Christ, and a totalitarian enslavement of the whole population by a godless scientific and political elite who recognized only their own reason and will to power as absolute in this world.
The antidote to such unbelief and its resulting revolutionary out-workings in society was therefore a return to belief in God as the true sovereign of man in society. Reformation must begin in a return to God’s Word as the ordering principle of human life in its entirety. The central principle of life is the Word of God. It is the only sound basis for a reformational way of life since it is the key to knowledge and hence the only foundation upon which to build a true humanism and personalism.
At the beginning of the sixteenth century the powerful cleansing and reforming Word of God had been buried and silenced. Its clarion call to live in accordance with God’s Plan and Law for human life and society had been muffled by human conceit, ignorance, invention and superstition. A medieval monk called Thomas Aquinas had started the rot with his division of human life into the two realms of Nature and Grace. By so doing he undermined the unified field of knowledge and experience revealed to man in the Scriptures. In the sphere of grace which he called the supernatural, Aquinas placed God in Heaven, the angels, the unseen, man’s soul and the influences of the supernatural upon man through the seven sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church. This realm was the special preserve of the clergy. In the lower realm of nature Aquinas placed all created beings, ali earthly things including man’s animal passions, the State and man’s political and social life. Knowledge of this sphere could be obtained by man’s natural reason which he taught had been uncorrupted by the Fall. Only man’s will had fallen but not man’s reason. From this incomplete view of the biblical fall had flowed the most serious consequences. Man’s intellect became autonomous or independent of God. This autonomy provided the basis for the secularization of European philosophy, law, politics, art, business and economic life, and above all European science and education.
Upon the basis of this autonomy European intellectual and artistic life became free of God’s control and separated from his written revelation in the Scriptures. As a result there was no longer felt any need for a distinctive Christian philosophy of law, politics, economics and art. After Aquinas the tendency increased to discuss the first principles of human conduct and government without any reference whatsoever to the principles laid down by God’s Word and Law for human society. If man can of his own rational faculties and by means of his scientific method build a successful social and legal order, why bring religion into life? Such a process of secularization of European life inevitably developed out of the distinction first drawn by Thomas Aquinas between the order of faith and the order of the uncorrupted natural reason, between the supernatural and the natural, between Grace and Nature.
Nowhere was this tendency more apparent than in the field of European art. The painters began to paint the things of nature as nature, to paint the lesser things in a picture naturalistically, but to continue to portray Mary, for example, as a holy symbol. Then we notice a tremendous change. Once nature was made autonomous, nature began to eat up grace. Through the Renaissance, from the time of Dante to Michelangelo, nature became more and more autonomous. It was set apart from God as the humanistic philosophers, painters and politicians began to operate ever more freely. By the time the Renaissance had reached its climax around 1500, nature had eaten up grace.
This can be demonstrated from the paintings of the time. Let us begin with a miniature entitled Grandes Heures de Rohan, painted about 1415. The story it portrays is a miracle story of the period. Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus, fleeing into Egypt, pass by a field where a man is sowing seed, and a miracle happens. The grain grows up within an hour or so and is ready for harvesting. When the man goes to harvest it, pursuing soldiers come by and ask, “How long ago did they pass by?” He replies that they passed by when he was sowing the seed and so the soldiers tum back. However it is not the story that is important but the way in which the miniature is laid out. First of all, there is a great difference in the size of the figures of Mary and Joseph, the baby, a servant and the donkey which arc at the top of the picture and which dominale it by their size, and the very small figures of the soldier and the man wielding the sickle at the bottom of the picture. Second the message is made clear, not only by the size of the upper figures, but also by the fact that the background of the upper part of the miniature is covered with gold lines. Here is a total pictorial representation of nature and grace. This is the older Christian conception, with grace overwhelmingly important, and nature having little place.
Then a Dutch painter named Van Eyck opened the door for nature in a new way. He began to paint real nature. In 1410, a very important date in the history of art, he produced a tiny miniature containing the first real landscape painting. 1t gave birth to every background that came later during the Renaissance. The theme is Christ’s baptism, but this takes up only a small section of the area. There is a river in the background, a very real castle, houses, hills and so on. Nature for Van Eyck has become more important than grace. Soon we have the next stage. In 1435, Van Eyck painted the Madonna of the Chancellor Rolin. The significant thing is that Chancellor Rolin, facing Mary, is the same size as she is. Mary is no longer remote, the Chancellor no longer a small figure, as would have been the case with painters at an earlier period. In the paintings of Filippo Lippi (1406-1469) the change becomes even more dramatic, as nature begins to “eat up grace.” In 1465 he depicts the Virgin Mary not symbolically as had always been the Christian custom but realistically. He has depicted a very beautiful girl holding a very human looking baby. This Madonna is no longer a heavenly symbol of grace, she is a pretty girl holding a baby. But there is something more we need to know about this painting. The girl he painted as Mary was his mistress. And all Florence knew it was his mistress. Nobody would have dared to do this a few years before. Nature was killing grace.
In France, Fouquet (1416–1480) painted, about 1450, the kings mistress, Agnes Sorel as Mary. Everyone at the king’s court knew that this was the kings current mistress. Fouquet painted her with one breast exposed. Whereas before it would have been Mary feeding the baby Jesus, now it is the king’s mistress with one breast exposed—and grace is dead.
The point to be stressed is that, when nature is made autonomous, it is destructive. As soon as one allows an autonomous realm to exist apart from God one finds that the lower element begins to cat up the higher. Let us call these two elements from now on “the lower story” and the “upper story.”
The Reformation
At this point in history God the Holy Spirit used the Scriptures to bring man back into line with God’s Law. Just as that schoolmaster discovered the tiny seed growing in the old wall, so men such as John Wyclif of England, Martin Luther of Germany and John Calvin of France re-discovered the good seed of God’s Word. As it began to germinate in their hearts it brought forth an abundant and amazing harvest which changed the history of the world. Never had the Christian Church experienced such a spontaneous movement of this type before or since. The Spirit of God moved with power and might in those great days.
By going back to God’s Word as the great ordering principle of their lives the Reformers soon came to realize that the root of the troubles afflicting Europe sprang from the old and growing humanism in the Roman Catholic Church, and the incomplete Fall in the theology of Thomas Aquinas which had set loose an autonomous man and paved the way for the secularization of European life. The Reformers accepted the biblical picture of a total Fall. The whole man had been made by God, but now the whole man is fallen, including his intellect and reason. In contrast to Aquinas, Calvin taught that only God is autonomous and sovereign in this universe. Here, one might say, is the key to the Reformation.
Such a point of view meant first of all that the reformers accepted without question the view that God is uncreated and completely independent of all else. The medieval thinkers had talked of the “great chain of being,” of which God formed the first link. They had in many ways tended to make God dependent upon, even subject to man, as for example in their mariolatry, or in their doctrine concerning the saints. In opposition to this the Reformers held that God stands apart from and above the universe as one who is of a completely different order; “infinite, eternal, unchangeable in his being.” Thus they insisted that God is above time and space, having no defects and no rival. In taking such a stand they ruled out any possibility of dualism between nature and grace, between the heavenly and the earthly, the temporal and the spiritual. Human life is religion in its entirety and there is no sphere of life of which Christ does not claim to be Sovereign and Ruler. Man either serves the One True God or an idol of his own devising.
This was true in all areas. First of all there was nothing autonomous in the area of final authority. For the Reformers 6nal and sufficient knowledge rested in the Bible -that is Scripture Alone, in contrast to Scripture plus anything else parallel to the Scriptures, whether it be the Pope or the Church or natural theology. Second, there could be no idea of man being autonomous in the area of salvation. In medieval Roman Catholic teaching there had been a divided work of salvation—Christ died for our salvation, but man had to merit the work of Christ by his own good works such as penances, fasting, etc. Thus there was a humanistic element involved. The Reformers declared that there is nothing man can do to save himself from God’s wrath upon man’s sin: no autonomous or humanistic, religious or moral effort of man can help. One is saved only on the basis of the finished. work of Christ as he died upon a cross in space and time. Christ alone has achieved the final victory through his vicarious punishment for man’s sin upon the cross, where “he totally blotted out the handwriting of ordinances against us” nailing them to his cross. The only way to be saved is to raise the empty hands of faith, and by God’s sovereign grace to accept God’s free gift by faith alone. When Christ saves a person he saves the whole person, of all his life. Just as man’s fall into sin was radical and total so now his redemption by Christ is to be radical, total and complete.
So there is no division in either of these areas. There is no division in final normative knowledge—on the one hand, between what the church or natural theology would say and what the Bible would say; nor, on the other hand, between what the Bible and rationalistic thinkers would say; neither was there any division in the work of salvation. It was Scripture Alone and Faith Alone. IT WAS GOD’S GRACE ALONE.
It is vitally important to notice, at this point that the Reformation said “Scripture Alone,” and not the “Revelation of God in Christ Alone.” If you do not have the view of the Scriptures that the Reformers had, you really have no content in the word Christ, and this is the modern drift in theology. In most modern preaching the word Christ has become an honorific and emotional term for current socialistic ideals. Modern theology uses the word without any real religious content because “Christ” is cut away from the Scriptures. The Reformation followed the teaching of Christ himself in linking the revelation Christ gave of God to the revelation of the written Scriptures.
The Reformers believed that the Scriptures alone are not only the power of God unto salvation but also unto true knowledge of God, of one’s human self-hood and of the great law-structures of God’s creation. Such knowledge can only be worked by the Holy Spirit through the operation of God’s Word upon the human heart, as the religious root and center of human existence. As Calvin insisted at the beginning of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, “True knowledge of ourselves is dependent on the true knowledge of God.” The Scriptures thus give us knowledge of God, and the knowledge of men and nature. The great Reformation confessions emphasize that God has revealed his attributes to man in the Scriptures and that this revelation is meaningful to God as well as to man. There would have been no Reformation and no Protestant culture in Europe and America without this realization that God has spoken to man in the Scriptures, and that, therefore, we know something truly about God, because God has revealed it to man. Though the Bible does not give us exhaustive truth about reality it gives us “true truth.” The Word of our hearts and therefore reforms our minds. It is the God is the divine spiritual power which regenerates central ordering principle of human life and the key to all true knowledge of reality and hence the foundation of a truly human society and culture. God’s Word alone can provide man with a unified field of knowledge upon which to base his theoretical and practical life. In this way alone we obtain the truth about God, the truth about man and the truth about nature. Thus on the basis of the Scriptures, while we do not have exhaustive and complete knowledge, we have true and unified knowledge. As the psalmist says: “God’s Word is a lamp unto our feet,” directing us along the true way towards life and blessedness.
What the Reformation discovered, therefore is that God has spoken in the Scriptures concerning both the “upstairs” and the “downstairs.” He spoke in a true revelation concerning himself—heavenly things—and he spoke in a true revelation concerning nature—the cosmos and man. Therefore, the Reformers had a real unity of knowledge. They simply did not have the Renaissance problem of nature and grace. They had a real unity, not because they were clever, but because they had a unity on the basis of what God had revealed in both areas. In contrast to the Secular Humanism which had been set free from God’s Word by Thomas Aquinas, and the Roman Catholic Form of Humanism, there was, for the Reformation, 00 autonomous portion.
This did not mean that there was no freedom for art or business or science. It was quite the opposite; true freedom was now possible within the revealed framework of God’s Word. But, though art and science and politics and business and education all gained a new freedom at the Reformation, they did not become autonomous—the artist, the scientist, the magistrate and the business man and the school teacher in Reformation lands discovered a new vocation to glorify God in his church and to serve him in his world.
The Reformation and Modern Science
The re-discovery of God’s sovereignty led to a rediscovery of God’s world. The Protestant laity of Europe and early America came to see that God’s lordship extended far beyond the ecclesiastical church institution to include the “whole realm of nature.” They found themselves obliged to reject the medieval Roman Catholic dichotomy of “nature and grace,” for if God rules sovereignly over all things, the grace of God would extend so far also. Hence you could not adopt the attitude that nature and man’s so called natural life remains outside the purview of God’s sovereign rule and redemption. God’s sovereignty includes all things whatever they may be. Religion has to do with life in this world as well as the next. Life is religion.
With this new outlook came the insistence that man has responsibility first of examining all things in the world in the light of God’s Word and secondly of using all things to God’s glory and the benefit of human need and welfare.
Out of the first concern there arose modern science and out of the second a new impetus for carrying out the great cultural mandate to have dominion over the earth and to subdue it. The Reformation thus led directly to the great Intellectual Revolution of the 17th century and the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century.
As a matter of historical fact it was mainly due to the Reformers’ rejection of the authority of the great classical Greek thinker Aristotle and their return to the biblical doctrine of creation and of nature that modern science was born.
In Calvin’s view of nature the biblical doctrine of creation holds pride of place. The classical deification of nature now gave place in Calvin’s thought to the biblical secularization of nature. According to Calvin the God who has revealed himself in the Scriptures is no immanent principle or demiurge as the pagan Greeks had supposed, but a Personal Ruler, who created the world out of nothing according to his sovereign will. Matter as well as form or design are equally God’s creatures; neither can exist for one moment apart from his will. Calvin insisted that temporal reality forms one vast system, not of substantial forms imposed upon a recalcitrant matter as Aristotle had supposed but of phenomena and laws. The order of nature for Calvin forms one grand machine which manifests God’s wisdom, goodness and power. Writing of the tremendous historical significance of this Reformed return to the biblical conception of nature as the creation of the sovereign God of the Bible, Professor R. Hooykaas, The Free University, Amsterdam writes:
Modern science arose when the consequences of the biblical conception of reality were fully accepted. In the 16th and 17th centuries science was led out of the blind alley into which it had got itself through the philosophy of Antiquity and the Middle Ages. New horizons were opened. The picture of the world as an organism was replaced by that of the world as an mechanism. It is not self-generated but made; it is not self-supporting but needs maintenance.
In his famous essay “Puritanism, Pietism and Science,” now available in Social Theory and Social Structure, Professor R. K. Merton of Columbia University points out that both the Puritans of England and the Pietists of Europe greatly assisted the development of modern science not only by their insistence upon a rational understanding of the Order of Nature but by encouraging men to master their environment so as to improve man’s estate and to testify to the glory of God by revealing the wonders of his handiwork. He says, “The deep-rooted religious interests of the Puritans demanded in their forceful implications the systematic rational and empirical study of Nature for the glorification of God in His works and for the control of the corrupt world” (Free Press, New York, 1967, p. 574). By focussing attention upon the world in which men lived, Merton points out in the same essay, Puritanism had brought about the fusion of rationalism and empiricism, the two values that together constitute the essence of the modern scientific spirit. He writes:
“The combination of rationalism and empiricism which is so pronounced in the Puritan ethic forms the essence of the spirit of modern science…. Empiricism and rationalism were canonized, beatified, so to speak” (ibid, p. 579).
Merton then shows the great part played both by the Puritans in England and America and by the Pietists in Western Europe in establishing new educational institutions where the new Reformation approach to God’s Works in creation could be applied. In no institution did the Puritans play a greater role than in the Royal Society. He says, “Among the original list of members of the Society in 1663, 42 of the 68 concerning whom information about their religious orientation is available were clearly Puritan.” This preponderance of Protestants among scientists has been noted in other countries and has continued to the present. In their book Origins of American Scientists, Messrs. R. H. Knapp and H. B. Goodrich concluded that “the statistics, taken together with other evidence, leave little doubt that scientists have been drawn disproportionately from American Protestant stock” (University of Chicago, 1952, p. 274).
Both Puritans in England and in America and the Pietists in Europe broke with the prevailing Scholastic and medieval methods of education and established Dissenting Academies or schools as well as new universities in America and Europe which broke with the old Scholastic approach to science. Of this development Merton writes, “The emphasis at the Puritans upon utilitarianism and empiricism was likewise manifested in the type of education which they introduced and fostered. The formal grammar grind of the school was criticized by them as much as the formalism of the Church” (Ibid, p. 585).
The Doctrine of the Limited State
The re-discovery of God’s sovereignty over every aspect of human life also meant the limitation of the power of all earthly authorities including that of Government. Our Reformation, Calvinist, Puritan and Covenanting forefathers reasserted the Crown Rights and Prerogatives of Christ the King not only over his Church but over society. When the Huguenots were besieged in St. Quentin by the Spanish representatives of Hapsburg absolutism, and arrow was shot over the city wall into the market place, carrying a scornful demand for surrender; Coligny ordered it to be shot back again bearing the words, Regem habemus (we have a King). The Reformers in Europe and the Puritans in the Anglo-Saxon world first demanded and then obtained freedom of conscience and the right to worship God as they saw fit. The principle of religious freedom established the principle of the limitation of political authority. If the government has no right to interfere with the religious life of its subjects then there is a department of social life in which the political authority has no competence. Democracy, as we have understood the term in America and Britain, is the denial of the omnipotence of the power of government. The opposite of democracy is, therefore, totalitarianism, which rests on the claim of the State to have rightful authority in every department of human life. The recognition of the principle of religious freedom from political control also implied in principle the freedom of all cultural activities from state control. It implied and achieved in the course of two centuries freedom of conscience, freedom of thought, freedom of learning, and of art and science, of business and economic life—in short, all that is involved in the freedom of the mind. In his book Constructive Democracy John Macmurray points out, “The implications of religious toleration run through all our democratic liberties—freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of the press, of cultural association, of public criticism and propaganda. For it accepts the principle that man is more than the citizen, and that the state is merely an aspect, and not the most important aspect of the community.”
The Reformers believed that no earthly institution should ever be permitted to dominate the individual or society. God alone is the absolute sovereign of the consciences of free men. No particular bearer of authority on earth can be thought of as the constitutive power from which all other forms of social organization are derived. Such a scriptural view of society means a respect for the sovereign spheres of society. Each community and association of society is characterized by its own peculiar relationship of authority and obedience and this authority is always limited by its own structural principle or creation ordinance. Such a view of society alone can provide a balance between the needs, rights and duties of both the individual and of the group. For this reason the Reformers and the Puritans refused to absolutize or deify anyone human community or association, be it church or state. God’s Word taught them that the Lord God has entrusted such absolute power to Christ alone (Matt. 28:18). Since Christ alone is supreme, the authority exercised by men over other men is always limited. As the Second Adam only the Lord Jesus Christ possesses absolute sovereignty over men.
Whenever earthly authority and power is divorced from its divine origin and placed in a purely secular context it provides no safeguard against injustice and exploitation. No earthly authority is safe from abuse of power unless it recognizes and is rooted in and limited by the sovereignty of Christ. It is only the presence of the Risen Christ in the Christian’s heart which can give him the courage to defend his freedom against encroachment by the powers of this world. By wrenching freedom from its roots in God we have fallen prey to the false alternatives of individualism or collectivism. Most of the social convulsions of our time started in the name of the secular trinity of ideas, liberty, equality and fraternity first proclaimed more than a century and a half ago in the French Revolution. In that name today flourish more unfreedoms than humanity has ever had to bear. Everywhere on both sides of the Iron Curtain they are imposed by the brute force of the State upon the hard pressed citizens composing both capitalistic and communistic societies. Never have frustrations and disloyalties been so widespread. Never on both sides of the Iron Curtain, have officers and institutions of the State incurred such contempt. Never have law and order, authority and discipline come into such world-wide disregard. Double standards of conduct and dishonesty have leapt into the first place as the common denominator of national and international life, in societies both eastern and western, developed and underdeveloped. It is not a very impressive achievement by six generations of so-called liberators, nationalists, socialists, liberals and scientific humanists: and if it be the chaos of pre-ordination, the order it portends looks even less so.
Nobody is surely so foolish as to imagine that plants and flowers can live for long after their roots have been cut. They soon wilt and die. Yet precisely that seems to be the great delusion entertained about POLITICAL AND LEGAL FREEDOM by our secularized post-Christian social scientists, lawyers, politicians and journalists. The greatest threat to liberal democracy today does NOT come from Communism, great and deadly as that threat most certainly is. A still greater threat lies in the severance of democracy in America today from its spiritual roots in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This is a Western phenomenon as well as a Communist one. Our English speaking world has plucked the plant of democratic liberty loose from its soil in the belief that man was created in the image and likeness of God and that man was redeemed from slavery to sin by the death of Christ. We have forgotten William Penn’s great warning, “Men must choose to be governed by God or they condemn themselves to be ruled by tyrants.”
Events today in both Eastern and Western lands fully and tragically bear out the truth of Penn’s prophecy. They prove that wherever belief in God and his creation of man in his own image is abandoned political freedom perishes. The validity of the struggle for freedom in which the Anglo-Saxon democracies are now engaged against Soviet and Chinese Communism rests ultimately upon the Christian evaluation of human personality being true. And the pursuit of that struggle for freedom by liberal democrats is rendered perilously precarious if the Christian valuation of human personality is banished from the scene. That peril is apparent in many contemporary social trends. It is apparent in the dilemma of the Welfare State. In pursuing the liberation of our poorest citizens from the frustrations of poverty, insecurity and ill-health the Government of the United States now finds itself regimenting the lives of Americans to an extent which the liberalism of a few decades ago would have found intolerable. It is apparent in current trends in education, where it is desired to train boys and girls, not in the discovery of their fullness of personality in Christ but in the discovery of their specialized “category” and function for the efficient working of the social and industrial machine. It is apparent in current trends in modern methods of mass production where our workers are sacrificed on the altar of bigger and better production and profits. It is apparent in the perversion of industrial and trade unions which began in the heroic struggle of the industrial workers during the last century to recover their dignity as persons created in God’s image but which now deny our workers their right to join the union of their choice. In all these cases we are here on the verge of a denial of what the State, education and work have meant in liberal society, and the cause of this denial lies in the more fundamental denial that man is created in God’s image.
Most Americans today seem quite unaware of the fact that the moral dynamic of their democracy is the creation of Reformed and Biblical Christianity and that without such roots the cut flowers of democratic parliaments, secret ballots, constitutions and the rest cannot continue to bloom. The values and moral attitudes underlying our American democracy are derived from the Word of God himself recorded in the Holy Scriptures, and they will only survive as long as we remain loyal to God’s great blue-print for our lives. Our belief in the sacredness of individual personality is a truth conveyed to us only by the Bible, without which we could never have realized it. It was never realized by Hinduism with its rigid caste system, or by Buddhism or by Mohammedanism. Wherever Christianity has failed to penetrate or has decayed there you find intolerance, prejudice and passion at work disrupting human society. Without God human society falls apart into lawless violence, power with no trace of conscience, the jackboot of tyranny and injustice trampling down the weak. When God is rejected by the majority of a nation, all defense against arbitrary power vanishes too at the same time. If Americans won’t have God for their Lord, they too will finish up having tyrants as their masters because it is only God himself who can subject the power of politicians, judges, police, employers and workers, doctors and teachers to conscience. Without such a reformed conscience, a conscience enlightened by God’s Holy Spirit and Word there can be no abiding defence against injustice. Thus the alternative to reformation is not stagnation and going on in the same old way but REVOLUTION. That is the fateful choice now facing America: Reformation or Revolution.
The only alternative to revolution has always been a revolution to faithful obedience to God’s Word and Law. The revolutionary spirit of twentieth century unbelief as embodied in the so-called “democratic way of life,” can be attacked effectively only at its roots by returning to utter dependence upon the Sovereign God.
The present revolutionary ferment and spirit gripping American society is merely the outworking of the philosophy of the Enlightenment. As a result the analysis of Groen van Prinsterer in Unbelief and Revolution can be of great help to Christians today in diagnosing the sickness unto death of American civilization. Groen believed that Europe’s apostasy from the Cod of the Bible had led directly to the breakdown of true community between Western men. If such apostasy were allowed to continue it would ultimately result in the emergence of the society of the Anti-Christ, and a totalitarian enslavement of the whole population by a godless scientific and political elite who recognized only their own reason and will to power as absolute in this world.
The antidote to such unbelief and its resulting revolutionary out-workings in society was therefore a return to belief in God as the true sovereign of man in society. Reformation must begin in a return to God’s Word as the ordering principle of human life in its entirety. The central principle of life is the Word of God. It is the only sound basis for a reformational way of life since it is the key to knowledge and hence the only foundation upon which to build a true humanism and personalism.
At the beginning of the sixteenth century the powerful cleansing and reforming Word of God had been buried and silenced. Its clarion call to live in accordance with God’s Plan and Law for human life and society had been muffled by human conceit, ignorance, invention and superstition. A medieval monk called Thomas Aquinas had started the rot with his division of human life into the two realms of Nature and Grace. By so doing he undermined the unified field of knowledge and experience revealed to man in the Scriptures. In the sphere of grace which he called the supernatural, Aquinas placed God in Heaven, the angels, the unseen, man’s soul and the influences of the supernatural upon man through the seven sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church. This realm was the special preserve of the clergy. In the lower realm of nature Aquinas placed all created beings, ali earthly things including man’s animal passions, the State and man’s political and social life. Knowledge of this sphere could be obtained by man’s natural reason which he taught had been uncorrupted by the Fall. Only man’s will had fallen but not man’s reason. From this incomplete view of the biblical fall had flowed the most serious consequences. Man’s intellect became autonomous or independent of God. This autonomy provided the basis for the secularization of European philosophy, law, politics, art, business and economic life, and above all European science and education.
Upon the basis of this autonomy European intellectual and artistic life became free of God’s control and separated from his written revelation in the Scriptures. As a result there was no longer felt any need for a distinctive Christian philosophy of law, politics, economics and art. After Aquinas the tendency increased to discuss the first principles of human conduct and government without any reference whatsoever to the principles laid down by God’s Word and Law for human society. If man can of his own rational faculties and by means of his scientific method build a successful social and legal order, why bring religion into life? Such a process of secularization of European life inevitably developed out of the distinction first drawn by Thomas Aquinas between the order of faith and the order of the uncorrupted natural reason, between the supernatural and the natural, between Grace and Nature.
Nowhere was this tendency more apparent than in the field of European art. The painters began to paint the things of nature as nature, to paint the lesser things in a picture naturalistically, but to continue to portray Mary, for example, as a holy symbol. Then we notice a tremendous change. Once nature was made autonomous, nature began to eat up grace. Through the Renaissance, from the time of Dante to Michelangelo, nature became more and more autonomous. It was set apart from God as the humanistic philosophers, painters and politicians began to operate ever more freely. By the time the Renaissance had reached its climax around 1500, nature had eaten up grace.
This can be demonstrated from the paintings of the time. Let us begin with a miniature entitled Grandes Heures de Rohan, painted about 1415. The story it portrays is a miracle story of the period. Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus, fleeing into Egypt, pass by a field where a man is sowing seed, and a miracle happens. The grain grows up within an hour or so and is ready for harvesting. When the man goes to harvest it, pursuing soldiers come by and ask, “How long ago did they pass by?” He replies that they passed by when he was sowing the seed and so the soldiers tum back. However it is not the story that is important but the way in which the miniature is laid out. First of all, there is a great difference in the size of the figures of Mary and Joseph, the baby, a servant and the donkey which arc at the top of the picture and which dominale it by their size, and the very small figures of the soldier and the man wielding the sickle at the bottom of the picture. Second the message is made clear, not only by the size of the upper figures, but also by the fact that the background of the upper part of the miniature is covered with gold lines. Here is a total pictorial representation of nature and grace. This is the older Christian conception, with grace overwhelmingly important, and nature having little place.
Then a Dutch painter named Van Eyck opened the door for nature in a new way. He began to paint real nature. In 1410, a very important date in the history of art, he produced a tiny miniature containing the first real landscape painting. 1t gave birth to every background that came later during the Renaissance. The theme is Christ’s baptism, but this takes up only a small section of the area. There is a river in the background, a very real castle, houses, hills and so on. Nature for Van Eyck has become more important than grace. Soon we have the next stage. In 1435, Van Eyck painted the Madonna of the Chancellor Rolin. The significant thing is that Chancellor Rolin, facing Mary, is the same size as she is. Mary is no longer remote, the Chancellor no longer a small figure, as would have been the case with painters at an earlier period. In the paintings of Filippo Lippi (1406-1469) the change becomes even more dramatic, as nature begins to “eat up grace.” In 1465 he depicts the Virgin Mary not symbolically as had always been the Christian custom but realistically. He has depicted a very beautiful girl holding a very human looking baby. This Madonna is no longer a heavenly symbol of grace, she is a pretty girl holding a baby. But there is something more we need to know about this painting. The girl he painted as Mary was his mistress. And all Florence knew it was his mistress. Nobody would have dared to do this a few years before. Nature was killing grace.
In France, Fouquet (1416–1480) painted, about 1450, the kings mistress, Agnes Sorel as Mary. Everyone at the king’s court knew that this was the kings current mistress. Fouquet painted her with one breast exposed. Whereas before it would have been Mary feeding the baby Jesus, now it is the king’s mistress with one breast exposed—and grace is dead.
The point to be stressed is that, when nature is made autonomous, it is destructive. As soon as one allows an autonomous realm to exist apart from God one finds that the lower element begins to cat up the higher. Let us call these two elements from now on “the lower story” and the “upper story.”
The Reformation
At this point in history God the Holy Spirit used the Scriptures to bring man back into line with God’s Law. Just as that schoolmaster discovered the tiny seed growing in the old wall, so men such as John Wyclif of England, Martin Luther of Germany and John Calvin of France re-discovered the good seed of God’s Word. As it began to germinate in their hearts it brought forth an abundant and amazing harvest which changed the history of the world. Never had the Christian Church experienced such a spontaneous movement of this type before or since. The Spirit of God moved with power and might in those great days.
By going back to God’s Word as the great ordering principle of their lives the Reformers soon came to realize that the root of the troubles afflicting Europe sprang from the old and growing humanism in the Roman Catholic Church, and the incomplete Fall in the theology of Thomas Aquinas which had set loose an autonomous man and paved the way for the secularization of European life. The Reformers accepted the biblical picture of a total Fall. The whole man had been made by God, but now the whole man is fallen, including his intellect and reason. In contrast to Aquinas, Calvin taught that only God is autonomous and sovereign in this universe. Here, one might say, is the key to the Reformation.
Such a point of view meant first of all that the reformers accepted without question the view that God is uncreated and completely independent of all else. The medieval thinkers had talked of the “great chain of being,” of which God formed the first link. They had in many ways tended to make God dependent upon, even subject to man, as for example in their mariolatry, or in their doctrine concerning the saints. In opposition to this the Reformers held that God stands apart from and above the universe as one who is of a completely different order; “infinite, eternal, unchangeable in his being.” Thus they insisted that God is above time and space, having no defects and no rival. In taking such a stand they ruled out any possibility of dualism between nature and grace, between the heavenly and the earthly, the temporal and the spiritual. Human life is religion in its entirety and there is no sphere of life of which Christ does not claim to be Sovereign and Ruler. Man either serves the One True God or an idol of his own devising.
This was true in all areas. First of all there was nothing autonomous in the area of final authority. For the Reformers 6nal and sufficient knowledge rested in the Bible -that is Scripture Alone, in contrast to Scripture plus anything else parallel to the Scriptures, whether it be the Pope or the Church or natural theology. Second, there could be no idea of man being autonomous in the area of salvation. In medieval Roman Catholic teaching there had been a divided work of salvation—Christ died for our salvation, but man had to merit the work of Christ by his own good works such as penances, fasting, etc. Thus there was a humanistic element involved. The Reformers declared that there is nothing man can do to save himself from God’s wrath upon man’s sin: no autonomous or humanistic, religious or moral effort of man can help. One is saved only on the basis of the finished. work of Christ as he died upon a cross in space and time. Christ alone has achieved the final victory through his vicarious punishment for man’s sin upon the cross, where “he totally blotted out the handwriting of ordinances against us” nailing them to his cross. The only way to be saved is to raise the empty hands of faith, and by God’s sovereign grace to accept God’s free gift by faith alone. When Christ saves a person he saves the whole person, of all his life. Just as man’s fall into sin was radical and total so now his redemption by Christ is to be radical, total and complete.
So there is no division in either of these areas. There is no division in final normative knowledge—on the one hand, between what the church or natural theology would say and what the Bible would say; nor, on the other hand, between what the Bible and rationalistic thinkers would say; neither was there any division in the work of salvation. It was Scripture Alone and Faith Alone. IT WAS GOD’S GRACE ALONE.
It is vitally important to notice, at this point that the Reformation said “Scripture Alone,” and not the “Revelation of God in Christ Alone.” If you do not have the view of the Scriptures that the Reformers had, you really have no content in the word Christ, and this is the modern drift in theology. In most modern preaching the word Christ has become an honorific and emotional term for current socialistic ideals. Modern theology uses the word without any real religious content because “Christ” is cut away from the Scriptures. The Reformation followed the teaching of Christ himself in linking the revelation Christ gave of God to the revelation of the written Scriptures.
The Reformers believed that the Scriptures alone are not only the power of God unto salvation but also unto true knowledge of God, of one’s human self-hood and of the great law-structures of God’s creation. Such knowledge can only be worked by the Holy Spirit through the operation of God’s Word upon the human heart, as the religious root and center of human existence. As Calvin insisted at the beginning of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, “True knowledge of ourselves is dependent on the true knowledge of God.” The Scriptures thus give us knowledge of God, and the knowledge of men and nature. The great Reformation confessions emphasize that God has revealed his attributes to man in the Scriptures and that this revelation is meaningful to God as well as to man. There would have been no Reformation and no Protestant culture in Europe and America without this realization that God has spoken to man in the Scriptures, and that, therefore, we know something truly about God, because God has revealed it to man. Though the Bible does not give us exhaustive truth about reality it gives us “true truth.” The Word of our hearts and therefore reforms our minds. It is the God is the divine spiritual power which regenerates central ordering principle of human life and the key to all true knowledge of reality and hence the foundation of a truly human society and culture. God’s Word alone can provide man with a unified field of knowledge upon which to base his theoretical and practical life. In this way alone we obtain the truth about God, the truth about man and the truth about nature. Thus on the basis of the Scriptures, while we do not have exhaustive and complete knowledge, we have true and unified knowledge. As the psalmist says: “God’s Word is a lamp unto our feet,” directing us along the true way towards life and blessedness.
What the Reformation discovered, therefore is that God has spoken in the Scriptures concerning both the “upstairs” and the “downstairs.” He spoke in a true revelation concerning himself—heavenly things—and he spoke in a true revelation concerning nature—the cosmos and man. Therefore, the Reformers had a real unity of knowledge. They simply did not have the Renaissance problem of nature and grace. They had a real unity, not because they were clever, but because they had a unity on the basis of what God had revealed in both areas. In contrast to the Secular Humanism which had been set free from God’s Word by Thomas Aquinas, and the Roman Catholic Form of Humanism, there was, for the Reformation, 00 autonomous portion.
This did not mean that there was no freedom for art or business or science. It was quite the opposite; true freedom was now possible within the revealed framework of God’s Word. But, though art and science and politics and business and education all gained a new freedom at the Reformation, they did not become autonomous—the artist, the scientist, the magistrate and the business man and the school teacher in Reformation lands discovered a new vocation to glorify God in his church and to serve him in his world.
The Reformation and Modern Science
The re-discovery of God’s sovereignty led to a rediscovery of God’s world. The Protestant laity of Europe and early America came to see that God’s lordship extended far beyond the ecclesiastical church institution to include the “whole realm of nature.” They found themselves obliged to reject the medieval Roman Catholic dichotomy of “nature and grace,” for if God rules sovereignly over all things, the grace of God would extend so far also. Hence you could not adopt the attitude that nature and man’s so called natural life remains outside the purview of God’s sovereign rule and redemption. God’s sovereignty includes all things whatever they may be. Religion has to do with life in this world as well as the next. Life is religion.
With this new outlook came the insistence that man has responsibility first of examining all things in the world in the light of God’s Word and secondly of using all things to God’s glory and the benefit of human need and welfare.
Out of the first concern there arose modern science and out of the second a new impetus for carrying out the great cultural mandate to have dominion over the earth and to subdue it. The Reformation thus led directly to the great Intellectual Revolution of the 17th century and the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century.
As a matter of historical fact it was mainly due to the Reformers’ rejection of the authority of the great classical Greek thinker Aristotle and their return to the biblical doctrine of creation and of nature that modern science was born.
In Calvin’s view of nature the biblical doctrine of creation holds pride of place. The classical deification of nature now gave place in Calvin’s thought to the biblical secularization of nature. According to Calvin the God who has revealed himself in the Scriptures is no immanent principle or demiurge as the pagan Greeks had supposed, but a Personal Ruler, who created the world out of nothing according to his sovereign will. Matter as well as form or design are equally God’s creatures; neither can exist for one moment apart from his will. Calvin insisted that temporal reality forms one vast system, not of substantial forms imposed upon a recalcitrant matter as Aristotle had supposed but of phenomena and laws. The order of nature for Calvin forms one grand machine which manifests God’s wisdom, goodness and power. Writing of the tremendous historical significance of this Reformed return to the biblical conception of nature as the creation of the sovereign God of the Bible, Professor R. Hooykaas, The Free University, Amsterdam writes:
Modern science arose when the consequences of the biblical conception of reality were fully accepted. In the 16th and 17th centuries science was led out of the blind alley into which it had got itself through the philosophy of Antiquity and the Middle Ages. New horizons were opened. The picture of the world as an organism was replaced by that of the world as an mechanism. It is not self-generated but made; it is not self-supporting but needs maintenance.
In his famous essay “Puritanism, Pietism and Science,” now available in Social Theory and Social Structure, Professor R. K. Merton of Columbia University points out that both the Puritans of England and the Pietists of Europe greatly assisted the development of modern science not only by their insistence upon a rational understanding of the Order of Nature but by encouraging men to master their environment so as to improve man’s estate and to testify to the glory of God by revealing the wonders of his handiwork. He says, “The deep-rooted religious interests of the Puritans demanded in their forceful implications the systematic rational and empirical study of Nature for the glorification of God in His works and for the control of the corrupt world” (Free Press, New York, 1967, p. 574). By focussing attention upon the world in which men lived, Merton points out in the same essay, Puritanism had brought about the fusion of rationalism and empiricism, the two values that together constitute the essence of the modern scientific spirit. He writes:
“The combination of rationalism and empiricism which is so pronounced in the Puritan ethic forms the essence of the spirit of modern science…. Empiricism and rationalism were canonized, beatified, so to speak” (ibid, p. 579).
Merton then shows the great part played both by the Puritans in England and America and by the Pietists in Western Europe in establishing new educational institutions where the new Reformation approach to God’s Works in creation could be applied. In no institution did the Puritans play a greater role than in the Royal Society. He says, “Among the original list of members of the Society in 1663, 42 of the 68 concerning whom information about their religious orientation is available were clearly Puritan.” This preponderance of Protestants among scientists has been noted in other countries and has continued to the present. In their book Origins of American Scientists, Messrs. R. H. Knapp and H. B. Goodrich concluded that “the statistics, taken together with other evidence, leave little doubt that scientists have been drawn disproportionately from American Protestant stock” (University of Chicago, 1952, p. 274).
Both Puritans in England and in America and the Pietists in Europe broke with the prevailing Scholastic and medieval methods of education and established Dissenting Academies or schools as well as new universities in America and Europe which broke with the old Scholastic approach to science. Of this development Merton writes, “The emphasis at the Puritans upon utilitarianism and empiricism was likewise manifested in the type of education which they introduced and fostered. The formal grammar grind of the school was criticized by them as much as the formalism of the Church” (Ibid, p. 585).
The Doctrine of the Limited State
The re-discovery of God’s sovereignty over every aspect of human life also meant the limitation of the power of all earthly authorities including that of Government. Our Reformation, Calvinist, Puritan and Covenanting forefathers reasserted the Crown Rights and Prerogatives of Christ the King not only over his Church but over society. When the Huguenots were besieged in St. Quentin by the Spanish representatives of Hapsburg absolutism, and arrow was shot over the city wall into the market place, carrying a scornful demand for surrender; Coligny ordered it to be shot back again bearing the words, Regem habemus (we have a King). The Reformers in Europe and the Puritans in the Anglo-Saxon world first demanded and then obtained freedom of conscience and the right to worship God as they saw fit. The principle of religious freedom established the principle of the limitation of political authority. If the government has no right to interfere with the religious life of its subjects then there is a department of social life in which the political authority has no competence. Democracy, as we have understood the term in America and Britain, is the denial of the omnipotence of the power of government. The opposite of democracy is, therefore, totalitarianism, which rests on the claim of the State to have rightful authority in every department of human life. The recognition of the principle of religious freedom from political control also implied in principle the freedom of all cultural activities from state control. It implied and achieved in the course of two centuries freedom of conscience, freedom of thought, freedom of learning, and of art and science, of business and economic life—in short, all that is involved in the freedom of the mind. In his book Constructive Democracy John Macmurray points out, “The implications of religious toleration run through all our democratic liberties—freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of the press, of cultural association, of public criticism and propaganda. For it accepts the principle that man is more than the citizen, and that the state is merely an aspect, and not the most important aspect of the community.”
The Reformers believed that no earthly institution should ever be permitted to dominate the individual or society. God alone is the absolute sovereign of the consciences of free men. No particular bearer of authority on earth can be thought of as the constitutive power from which all other forms of social organization are derived. Such a scriptural view of society means a respect for the sovereign spheres of society. Each community and association of society is characterized by its own peculiar relationship of authority and obedience and this authority is always limited by its own structural principle or creation ordinance. Such a view of society alone can provide a balance between the needs, rights and duties of both the individual and of the group. For this reason the Reformers and the Puritans refused to absolutize or deify anyone human community or association, be it church or state. God’s Word taught them that the Lord God has entrusted such absolute power to Christ alone (Matt. 28:18). Since Christ alone is supreme, the authority exercised by men over other men is always limited. As the Second Adam only the Lord Jesus Christ possesses absolute sovereignty over men.
Whenever earthly authority and power is divorced from its divine origin and placed in a purely secular context it provides no safeguard against injustice and exploitation. No earthly authority is safe from abuse of power unless it recognizes and is rooted in and limited by the sovereignty of Christ. It is only the presence of the Risen Christ in the Christian’s heart which can give him the courage to defend his freedom against encroachment by the powers of this world. By wrenching freedom from its roots in God we have fallen prey to the false alternatives of individualism or collectivism. Most of the social convulsions of our time started in the name of the secular trinity of ideas, liberty, equality and fraternity first proclaimed more than a century and a half ago in the French Revolution. In that name today flourish more unfreedoms than humanity has ever had to bear. Everywhere on both sides of the Iron Curtain they are imposed by the brute force of the State upon the hard pressed citizens composing both capitalistic and communistic societies. Never have frustrations and disloyalties been so widespread. Never on both sides of the Iron Curtain, have officers and institutions of the State incurred such contempt. Never have law and order, authority and discipline come into such world-wide disregard. Double standards of conduct and dishonesty have leapt into the first place as the common denominator of national and international life, in societies both eastern and western, developed and underdeveloped. It is not a very impressive achievement by six generations of so-called liberators, nationalists, socialists, liberals and scientific humanists: and if it be the chaos of pre-ordination, the order it portends looks even less so.
Nobody is surely so foolish as to imagine that plants and flowers can live for long after their roots have been cut. They soon wilt and die. Yet precisely that seems to be the great delusion entertained about POLITICAL AND LEGAL FREEDOM by our secularized post-Christian social scientists, lawyers, politicians and journalists. The greatest threat to liberal democracy today does NOT come from Communism, great and deadly as that threat most certainly is. A still greater threat lies in the severance of democracy in America today from its spiritual roots in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This is a Western phenomenon as well as a Communist one. Our English speaking world has plucked the plant of democratic liberty loose from its soil in the belief that man was created in the image and likeness of God and that man was redeemed from slavery to sin by the death of Christ. We have forgotten William Penn’s great warning, “Men must choose to be governed by God or they condemn themselves to be ruled by tyrants.”
Events today in both Eastern and Western lands fully and tragically bear out the truth of Penn’s prophecy. They prove that wherever belief in God and his creation of man in his own image is abandoned political freedom perishes. The validity of the struggle for freedom in which the Anglo-Saxon democracies are now engaged against Soviet and Chinese Communism rests ultimately upon the Christian evaluation of human personality being true. And the pursuit of that struggle for freedom by liberal democrats is rendered perilously precarious if the Christian valuation of human personality is banished from the scene. That peril is apparent in many contemporary social trends. It is apparent in the dilemma of the Welfare State. In pursuing the liberation of our poorest citizens from the frustrations of poverty, insecurity and ill-health the Government of the United States now finds itself regimenting the lives of Americans to an extent which the liberalism of a few decades ago would have found intolerable. It is apparent in current trends in education, where it is desired to train boys and girls, not in the discovery of their fullness of personality in Christ but in the discovery of their specialized “category” and function for the efficient working of the social and industrial machine. It is apparent in current trends in modern methods of mass production where our workers are sacrificed on the altar of bigger and better production and profits. It is apparent in the perversion of industrial and trade unions which began in the heroic struggle of the industrial workers during the last century to recover their dignity as persons created in God’s image but which now deny our workers their right to join the union of their choice. In all these cases we are here on the verge of a denial of what the State, education and work have meant in liberal society, and the cause of this denial lies in the more fundamental denial that man is created in God’s image.
Most Americans today seem quite unaware of the fact that the moral dynamic of their democracy is the creation of Reformed and Biblical Christianity and that without such roots the cut flowers of democratic parliaments, secret ballots, constitutions and the rest cannot continue to bloom. The values and moral attitudes underlying our American democracy are derived from the Word of God himself recorded in the Holy Scriptures, and they will only survive as long as we remain loyal to God’s great blue-print for our lives. Our belief in the sacredness of individual personality is a truth conveyed to us only by the Bible, without which we could never have realized it. It was never realized by Hinduism with its rigid caste system, or by Buddhism or by Mohammedanism. Wherever Christianity has failed to penetrate or has decayed there you find intolerance, prejudice and passion at work disrupting human society. Without God human society falls apart into lawless violence, power with no trace of conscience, the jackboot of tyranny and injustice trampling down the weak. When God is rejected by the majority of a nation, all defense against arbitrary power vanishes too at the same time. If Americans won’t have God for their Lord, they too will finish up having tyrants as their masters because it is only God himself who can subject the power of politicians, judges, police, employers and workers, doctors and teachers to conscience. Without such a reformed conscience, a conscience enlightened by God’s Holy Spirit and Word there can be no abiding defence against injustice. Thus the alternative to reformation is not stagnation and going on in the same old way but REVOLUTION. That is the fateful choice now facing America: Reformation or Revolution.
