Yesterday, we had a Presbytery meeting at Ichthus Presbyterian Church in Parañaque City. After a long meeting day, we visited one of our colleagues in Barangay Merville. It was so sad to see how cancer destroyed the body of our friend. We could hardly understand his talk and he was no longer capable of eating food. After my two friends prayed for him, I also shared my reading on John Owen about the differences between our experience of Christ's glory here on earth by faith and the glory that he is about to witness in heaven.
Yes, it is sad to see our friend bedridden and struggling. We want to see him rest; he suffered enough.
We stayed for over an hour and cherished our memories of our friend as we shared them with his brother and sisters.
Since it was already late, one of my friends invited me to stay and sleep in their house. I informed my sons that I could not return home.
The above story was the reason why I was not able to publish last night the second part of my lecture on Natural Theology. Last time I said that would pick up the second characteristic of natural theology, which is about authority.
Under this topic, Van Til shared several insights. Under necessity, though Van Til explained the natural character of the supernatural revelation of God about the Tree of Life, still he maintained that a contrast must be made between God's supernatural command "and God's regular way of communication with man" (p. 272). The voice of authority revealed in the supernatural command is the same authority that man hears through the things of nature. This is the case because "Man was created as an analog of God" (p.273). By this idea, Van Til meant that man's thinking, willing, and "doing is properly conceived as at every point analogical to the thinking, willing, and doing of God" (ibid.). For Van Til, this foundational statement is important because if man refuses to be analogous to God, then that's the time man can think of "a contrast between the attitude of reason to one type of revelation and the attitude of faith to another type of revelation" (ibid.).
The second thing that Van Til identified in his discussion of the authority of natural theology is the inclusion of what Francis Schaeffer describes as the "mannishness" of man in addition to man's environment. By this term, I understand anything that makes man a man. In the language of Van Til, man's "constitution as a covenant personality" (ibid.).
After laying down this basic foundation, Van Til concludes that "All created reality is inherently revelational" including man's ethical response. As such, it is authoritative.
Closely related to the constitution of man as part of general revelation, Van Til talks of human conscience as part of God's revelation. Here's how Van Til explains the importance of understanding the role of human conscience concerning God's revelation:
Conscience is man's consciousness speaking on matters of direct moral import. Every act of man's consciousness is moral in the most comprehensive sense of that term (p. 274).
Then he concludes that based on this perspective, man's conscience is revelational and authoritative even after the fall:
Now if man's whole consciousness was originally created perfect, and as such authoritatively expressive of the will of God, that same consciousness is still revelational and authoritative after the entrance of sin to the extent that its voice is still the voice of God (ibid.).
What I find surprising in Van Til's explanation is the idea that even man's "greatest wickedness" cannot escape the fact of God's revelation:
Thoughts and deeds of utmost perversity are themselves revelational, revelational, that is, in their abnormality" (p. 275).
This one is taking me too long, and so I will stop here. In the next article, I will pick the third characteristic of natural revelation, which is its sufficiency.
