This article sets out what it calls the ‘scholastic dilemma’ about whether God’s relation to the world is necessary or contingent – the former is based on a view of God primarily as intellect and the latter on a view of God primarily as will. In his dictum,
This article is offered as a preliminary ‘pre-theoretical’ groundwork for systematic Christian thinking. It seeks to describe the ‘scholastic dilemma’, that is the irresolvable question about whether God’s relation to the world is necessary or contingent. One horn of the dilemma derives from the view of God primarily as intellect. The other horn of the dilemma derives from the view of God primarily as will. In his dictum,
The discussion below sets out in outline how a trinitarian approach provides a genuine alternative to scholastic philosophy. The latter is the tradition of the medieval schoolmen that, it is argued, arises from the synthesis of biblical revelation (mediated by the Christian tradition) with Greek thought. It will be described how scholasticism proceeds in its essence from a view of God as single subject giving rise to a dilemma arising from the contradictory positions to which rival scholastic views of God lead.
In response to equally unacceptable alternatives arising from the rival scholastic positions, the trinitarian vision will be outlined as it can be found in the thought of Kuyper and Van Til and arguably implicit in the work of Calvin. It will be indicated how Kuyper and Van Til perceive the need to base one’s understanding of the world on one’s belief in God as Trinity, and how this provides a genuine alternative to the two views of the relation of God to the world, found in scholasticism and a sounder basis for Christian thought and action.
This section seeks first to describe what is meant in this article by ‘scholasticism’, and then describes the classical dilemma which presages the later contradictions at the heart of the scholastic enterprise.
‘Scholasticism’ in this article is used in a polemical-critical sense to denote the influence from earliest times of Greek thought upon Christian thinkers as they attempted to present a coherent and intellectually credible Christian account of God and the world. In so doing, it is argued that Christian thought was seriously compromised in the categories it used to analyse and describe both God and the world. This critical-polemical use of the term
The basic scholastic method uses the procedures of
The term
While there is not a direct correspondence between the different epistemologies just described and what will be characterised as the ‘intellectualist’ and ‘voluntarist’ approaches, the scholastic method of the
It will be the argument in this article that scholasticism in its different forms gives rise to a dilemma which is not capable of resolution within the scholastic problematic.
The dilemma arises from the problem articulated most famously by Plato (428/427–348/347
As we shall see in the following section, the ‘intellectualist’ approach involves the affirmation of the first half of the statement, while the ‘voluntarist’ approach involves the affirmation of the latter half.
In this section, the ‘intellectualist’ and the ‘voluntarist’ approaches and the dilemma in scholasticism to which they respectively give rise against the wider backdrop of the difficulties in the scholastic problematic will be described.
The intellectualist approach starts with the idea of God as a supreme mind that gives the universe its character. Here we see the influence, albeit in different ways, of the philosophical thinking of both Plato (already mentioned) and Aristotle (384–322
Within Christian thought, an intellectualist approach is evident in Boethius (c.480–c.525), who played a critical role in shaping the scholastic tradition. Boethius (
The intellectualist approach can be seen developed especially in the thinking of Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) (Vollenhoven
According to John Milbank, a modern age exponent and re-interpreter of the intellectualist position, we can have ‘participation in the mind of God’ according to a certain kind of cognitive ‘illumination’ through reason and revelation – the latter being a heightened form of the former (Davies, Janz & Sedmak
The intellectualist position sees all things to be ordered through the eternal law (
This is not to say that there is not a reaching out to a trinitarian approach during the medieval period. Aquinas argues that the knowledge of the divine Persons is necessary for correct thinking about God as creator of the world, because to say that God produced all things by his word, the procession of love excludes the possibility that he produced things by necessity (Aquinas
What thus characterises the intellectualist approach with all its qualifications is the view of God as the summit and epitome of reason, and thus the basis for ordering of the world is as good and rationally apprehensible.
Unlike the intellectualist approach, the voluntarist approach rejects any attempt to deduce the character of God from the character of the world or vice-versa and instead stresses the discontinuity between God and the world. In the voluntarist approach, God is seen primarily as the one who exercises sheer will and things are as they are simply because God so decrees. From a voluntarist point of view, God is entirely unknowable and arbitrary. This approach can be identified in both Epicurean and Stoic philosophy (Shults
In Christian medieval scholastic thought, it was chiefly through Duns Scotus (1265/66–1308) (Vollenhoven
While the intellectualist view holds that the being of the world is linked with that of God (even if the ‘Being’, duly capitalised, of God is only analogically related to the being of the world, the voluntarist view denies this. From the voluntarist perspective, all being is ‘univocal’, that is it presents itself to us on its own terms not by virtue of its dependence on something else (Smith
The reformational philosopher, Roy Clouser himself seems to hold what is called here the ‘voluntarist’ position. Clouser qualifies his position with the caution that the term
Scholasticism, whether in its intellectualist or voluntarist forms, presents us with a certain problematic. Shults (
The intellectualist and the voluntarist approaches portray the relationship between God and the world in terms of conjunction or disjunction respectively: either the world is seen as an extension of God’s being or God is seen as entirely separate from the world. The former conception (often called ‘panentheism’ to distinguish it from ‘pantheism’ – an outright identification of the world with God), tends to accord divine status to elements of the world and compromises God’s aseity, that is, God’s self-existence (Shults
There are also difficulties with the Augustinian-Thomist notion of the timeless universals. On one hand, it undercuts the sole eternity of God because there are eternals alongside God, albeit created by him. The reformational philosophical tradition is not free of this: Abraham Kuyper had residual elements of strong realism in this thought. Indeed, the scholastic notion of the
The notion of divine simplicity, as developed by Anselm and Aquinas, is designed to get around the problem that the attributes of God might be thought of as existing independently of God and so compromises God’s aseity. The ‘solution’ it offers is to say that God does not possess his attributes, but rather that God is, in himself, the sum of all the highest attributes as the supreme perfection of them. This reduces any discussion of God to complete unintelligibility because if all the attributes of God are to be identified with God himself, this means that they therefore must be identified with one another. Thus, God’s attributes lose any distinct meaning and the account is in danger of becoming unintelligible (Clouser
Within the scholastic problematic, God is thus seen either as subject to the laws which govern creation as in the intellectualist approach, or in terms of the voluntarist approach, is seen as arbitrary. Scholastic philosophy therefore falls into a dilemma, prefigured as we have seen, in Plato’s
Scholasticism thus leaves us with the question: How is it possible both to understand God as free and transcendent and the same time as knowable and not arbitrary? This is not just a theoretical question, but goes to the roots of who we are as human beings, seeking a purposive basis for our lives within the God-given world order.
Next, three reformed thinkers who together can help to provide a radical alternative to the scholastic problematic.
John Calvin (1509–1564) who gave reformed theology his name, marks a radical break with the scholastic problematic. God is, as Calvin (
Calvin (
The constitution of the world is not arbitrary or
On the one hand according to Calvin, God is free of the law, because laws result from the mutual compact of the three Persons acting out of freedom and love, and not out of submission to any external or impersonal law or principle. On the other hand, God is not arbitrary, because the mutual love of the Father, Son and Spirit gives the universe both stability and settled character.
Shults (
Following on from Calvin, a powerful statement of the trinitarian approach can be found in the writings and lectures of the great Calvinist theologian and statesman, Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920). Kuyper himself is not entirely free from scholastic influences and is not always consistent in the way he develops his systematic thinking. Van Til (
For Kuyper, the Persons of the Trinity bind themselves in a covenant for the existence and wellbeing of the world, and there is constancy in their governance of the world that comes out of their compact with one another. The covenant expresses their mutual, free and loving interdependence. All things hold together just as the Persons of the Trinity are in mutual interrelation. The work of creation and redemption both find their highest unity in Christ. As the eternal Son, He participates in the work of both, not as a foreign element, but as a full co-director of the ‘Eternal Counsel of Peace’ (
Kuyper’s insights were developed further by the Dutch American Calvinist philosopher, Cornelius van Til (1895–1987). Van Til argues that the Trinity is the sole basis for understanding the unity and plurality of the world. The claim about the pluralistic nature of created reality cannot come from the mere consideration of ‘brute facts’, because for Van Til, these do not exist as all experience is subject to one’s interpretation. This rests implicitly on a pre-theoretical vision, or as Van Til puts is, a ‘presupposition’; more specifically, a presupposing about the equal ultimacy of unity and diversity which can only be founded on the prior belief in unity and diversity of the Trinity (Van Til
Van Til argues that to know God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit does not mean that these relationships come into being after the act of creation. God authoritatively reveals his own nature and constitution to us insofar as we can know anything of him at all. Instead of setting the revelation of God against God’s self-revelation in the world, Van Til contends that God’s self-revelation is explicitly or implicitly the basis for one’s understanding of the world (Van Til
God as Trinity is unity in diversity. God does not need to create the world in order to express his diversity. He exists prior to and apart from creation in the mutual and complete relationships between the eternal Persons (Van Til
The immanent relations within the three persons of the holy trinity are the foundation of the relations whereby the triune God sustains to the world [
Tipton (
Thus, the key trinitarian insight such as developed by Kuyper and Van Til following Calvin, is that only the inner-triune relations bind the Persons and not anything external to God. Accordingly, from a trinitarian perspective, God is not seen as subject to the order of the world, although he reveals himself to us sovereignly and definitively in the language of the created order. At the same time, the notion of a discontinuity between the sovereignty of God and the order of the world is also rejected. Rather, the order of the world is determined sovereignly by the Persons acting together in a self-binding covenant among them.
In a trinitarian conception, each Person of the Trinity is immediately and distinctively engaged with the world in creation, redemption and in the bringing of all things to their final glory in a way consistent with their relations to one another. The world is not related to God as an entity over against God, but is the result of the joint action by the three Persons. A trinitarian approach can thus affirm both God’s involvement in the world and his transcendence of it without reducing God to the world, or seeing God as entirely detached from it. It allows us to understand the world as subject to God’s law without implying thereby that God himself is subject to that law.
From a trinitarian perspective, the character of the world thus reflects the character of God, but the world is neither necessary nor contingent to God’ existence. Indeed, God’s existence cannot be categorised in terms of either necessity or contingency. The world is not to be seen as an extension of God, because God does not depend on the world in any way – even as creator. The Persons are fully self-contained in their relations with one another; the world is created freely and not out of necessity. But God is genuinely engaged in the world through the universal action of the Holy Spirit and the embodiment of the Son. The order of the world is constituted by the free covenantal love of the Persons of the Trinity for one another and revealed in the sovereign engagement of all three Persons jointly in the world.
The implications for church and society of the covenantal trinitarian vision are far-reaching. The church, universal as the radical expression of Christian commitment, needs to be seen as the outflowing of the creative, redemptive and transforming love shared by Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Christian vocation needs to be seen as the forming and exercise of right relationships in response to God’s call. God as Trinity calls humanity in the depth dimension of its existence (the ‘heart’ as understood in biblical terms) into the exercise of right relationships according to the law of love (Ive
On the one hand, social entities should not be seen as being constituted by an appeal to a rational order or to natural law. The creation order should not be seen as a quasi-entity in its own right as in the scholastic notion of a natural law, but rather is the outcome of the joint activity of the three Persons sustained moment by moment by God’s creative and providential power. All things point to an Origin beyond themselves, rather than being seen as self-contained, quasi-divine ‘substances’ (Ive
On the other hand, the legitimacy of social entities does not rest either in the fiat of a central authority, as somehow the conduit of God’s will, nor alternatively, on the collective will of its membership. Rather, all entities have as their foundation the eternal covenant flowing from the love among the Three Persons which is the basis for the harmony among the harmony in diversity of all the aspects of creation (Ive
The church as institution (one of the many expressions of the universal church as the body of all believers) is a web of relationships within which this love is proclaimed and identified through the distinctive office of the preaching of God’s self-revelation as found in the Bible, and the correct administration of the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. It is not a link in a hierarchy of being, and on the other hand, not merely a club or social association, but rather the authoritative bearer of the word of apostles as the primary witnesses to the death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus – the one, true Israelite, fully human and fully divine, fulfilling the covenantal promise within the triune co-inherence. These relationships of word and sacrament, embodying the triune love, mark out the church as institution, as it is true to its calling to share the Good News of Jesus and to equip its members to be salt and light within society as a whole to be able in their different callings to address
What has been presented is necessarily a sketch rather than an exhaustive presentation of the positions of the thinkers mentioned to whom it cannot do justice. The argument has focussed on the central scholastic problematic which gives rise to the central dilemma: that God is either seen as supreme intellect or supreme will. What intellectualism and voluntarism, the rival scholastic conceptions, present as alternatives are really rival errors, each giving rise to specific problems.
By contrast a robust covenantal understanding of God as Trinity allows us to conceive of God as at once faithful in his dealing with the world, and yet not dependent on the world for his existence. We see this enunciated powerfully in the thought of Abraham Kuyper and Cornelius van Til, and indeed, implicitly in the thinking of John Calvin himself. Only the love, revealed in the mutual and self-giving love of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, can truly be the basis for a satisfactory view not only of God, but indeed of the world. This is the world which the triune God has created, has redeemed through Christ, and is, through the Holy Spirit, in the process of bringing to its final glory in the diversity of situations and social expressions within which God’s people are called and exercise their service.
The author would like to thank Stephen Bishop for his help in preparing this article, as well as his two sons, Edward and Robert. The author would like to express his indebtedness to Ralph Allen Smith to his key insights about the role of both Abraham Kuyper and Cornelius van Til in developing the covenantal trinitarian vision. However, the development of the context and wider implications of these insights is the authors own. The author would also like to add that while identifying with the ‘reformational’ philosophical tradition of Abraham Kuyper and his later followers, any critique of Kuyper or others is not a criticism of the tradition as such, but is offered from within the tradition in the spirit of
The author declares that he has no financial or personal relationships which may have inappropriately influenced him in writing this article.