Okay so Van Til, Kuyper, the Emergents and Common Grace walk into this bar and they say to the bartender…

Our good friend Dan Miller posted a wonderfully thought out comment in our “Flee From the Emergent Church” thread that I thought was post worthy.  I would hate to see it buried amongst all the comments.  So read and reflect. 

In reading the discussion here certain terms keep arising: antithesis, modernism, post-modernism, etc. I just read a review in “Books & Culture” of a new biography about Cornelius Van Til. As for the use of the term “emergent,” at one time Anabaptism, dispensationalsim, and pentecostalism, etc., were emergent movements. But at least most of the time, these movements considered The Bible to be authoritative. Rob Bell and others like him seem to be moving towards a Common Grace authoritarian theology. I will quote from several paragraphs of the review as a way of framing the differences between recent emergen[t]cy movements (O Look, this will save the church and the world!), and Bible-believing, Reformed churches around the globe. Here goes:

“Again and again, Van Til exposed the extent to which the notion of human autonomy functions as a pervasive assumption in modern philosophical thought . . . [Van Til] was after much bigger game in his attack on autonomy . . . For Van Til, Kantian autonomy was merely a technical philosophical formulation of the Serpent’s manifesto in Genesis 3, “and you shall be as gods.” Basic to all sinful life is the desire to place the human self on the throne that is properly occupied by God alone . . .

Indeed, Van Til probed the topic of autonomy more deeply than many the recent critics of modernity. Another of his recurrent themes was the importance of recognizing that sin is essentially an “ethical rebellion.” Our sinful state is not simply the awareness of our finitude, or an angst that emerges out of that awareness. The fall was not about finitude as such, since human beings were at one time both finite and unfallen. What introduced sin into the created order was an act of will, a rebellion against the command of God. What this suggests is that we do not cure what is wrong with the enlightenment’s [modernity's] elevation of human reason by substituting for it a Nietszchean elevation of the creative [emergent] human will. The will itself needs to be turned away from its sinful projects and brought into harmony with the divine will. Van Til’s Calvinist volitionalism, then, can be seen as equally opposed to both Enlightenment rationalism and postmodern volitionalism.

The proper theological framework for understanding all of this, for Van Til, was provided by the Reformed tradition . . . [Thus] Van Til’s lifelong attempt to ‘to combine Dutch and Scottish Reformed traditions.’ This was no simple task. The ‘Old Princeton theologians’ whom Van Til revered drew on philosophical resources that emphasized many elements of commonness (drawing on ‘common sense’ between the redeemed and unredeemed ways of experiencing and understanding reality. In doing so, they paid less attention to what the Dutch Calvinists insisted was a fundamental ‘antithesis’ between belief and unbelief.

The one thinker who provided–in a broad sense–room for both emphases was Abraham Kuyper. . . . [Van Til struggled] with ‘the Kuyperian dilemma of harnessing common grace with the antithesis.’ Of course, Kuyper’s disciples have typically had a difficult time finding the right harness for holding the two together in a healthy tension: some have come down more on the common grace side while others have majored in the antithesis. Van Til was clearly one of the latter school.”

Okay, some thoughts on the discussion so far. Clearly, the emergent movement trusts intrinsically that God’s common grace, His natural revelation, is worth more attention than the church has been giving it, in reaching out to the ‘antithesis.,’ the “antithetics” who don’t believe in Jesus being the only way to salvation. On the other hand, supernatural revelation has been demoted as being contradictory, mysterious, too-in-the-box, mystical, divisive, idolatrous, and completely anti-PC. Most Christians try to develop & bridge the tension between common grace and special grace by maintaining both Romans 1:18-32 and Isaiah 55 as good and necessary components of physical (cultural) and spiritual (religious) reality. However, the emergent movement tends to bracket out Romans 1: 18, 21-32. They keep verses 19-20, and fill in the other verses with “I’m listening to ya–the deep whatever mystery in us.”

As an artist, I love common grace. I love that God’s common grace draws me and others to Him, to the holy, to reverence and awe as ground and prelude to the gospel, but common grace does not take me or anyone far enough to say, “Oh yeah, Jesus is my LORD & Master; I will follow Him though all else is denied me.” No. An artist or poet, in the style of Emerson or Thoreau, may want to ‘marry’ nature and common grace, but they won’t want to ‘marry’ and submit to Jesus who made nature, and us. Moreover, as a Christian pastor and poet, I need to renew that pledge to follow Jesus every morning, and it isn’t easy. And that’s me redeemed on THIS side of the ‘antithesis.’ So how can I expect an unredeemed, common-grace-loving antithetic to Love Jesus and His Word, without believing that the Bible is inerrantly authoritative?! Even artists who are Christians need to harness and harmonize the tension between common and efficacious grace. One grace does not lead necessarily to the other grace, which is not from this world. Ai-ya-yai. I think for all the above reasons, emergents trust the common grace of culture to lead us into truth, and unlike me, they also believe that the common graces of imagination & beauty will lead them to truth. However, Grace needs Special Truth to appreciate and discern beauty and to use imagination in a godly way. The Bible is filled with beautiful idols and things that lead us to Hell. What do you all think? How would you put these things?