What's Wrong with our Concept of Natural Law, in Three Parts

Natural Law:  Part 1

“The forces of nature pay no respect to what we call good and evil.”

                  J. A. Froude, “Times of Erasmus and Luther”

" We speak of the Volume of Nature:  and truly a Volume it is, -- whose author and writer is God.  To read it!  Dost thou, does man, so much as well know the Alphabet thereof? . . . It is a Volume written in celestial hieroglyphs, in the true Sacred writing; of which even the prophets are happy that they can read here a line and there a line.  As for your Institutes and Academies of Science, they strive bravely; and from the thick-crowded, inextricably intertwisted hieroglyphic writing, pick out by dextrous combination in the vulgar Character, and therefrom put together this and the other . . . recipe."

Ewald Flugel, Thomas Carlyle's Moral and religious Development (p. 31)

         In his excellent little volume The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis makes much of what he calls the “Tao” and its virtually universal acceptance as evidence of objective morality and of our knowledge of natural law.

I disagree.

By disagreeing, I do not deny objective morality or its origin in God.  I endorse it heartily.  But I do deny that Lewis’s so-called Tao indicates authentic moral insight on our part.  What he identifies as authentic moral insight on a global scale I see as the burdensome vicissitudes and existential necessities of life in a cursed world imposing themselves upon us, and of our yielding to those gruesome and arduous conditions, however willingly or reluctantly.  I see it as our pragmatic adjustment to reality, not as moral insight.

The so-called Tao is not the result of the human soul rightly grasping righteousness on the basis of nature.  Rather, the Tao is a now cursed world order having its way with us.  The Tao is what arises when we are forced to fit in with the realities of a now cursed and fallen order, groaning as it is, in great travail.  What some call natural law is simply what we deem works most efficiently within that accursed system (at least what works best at this point in its long history of change), rather than us differentiating real moral right from real moral wrong without the aid of Scripture.  Utilitarian efficiency and pragmatic preference are not morality.  They are not moral oughtness.  You cannot move from cursed-world pragmatics to authentic righteousness.  On our part, the Tao is pragmatic preference and utility in the face of hard, cursed, reality.   Moving from what is pragmatically preferable to what is morally obligatory is an unjustifiable move, indeed an enormous leap.  Pragmatic preference and our preferences for social utility are not the same as Divine righteousness or Divine command, especially in a Divinely cursed world as ascertained by fallen persons.  We prefer the principles and actions we do because they yield results that, within this cursed order, seem to work best to some of us.  Morality is a different issue altogether.

To identify either as “law” or as “moral” what might be little more and little else than our pragmatic adjustment to a cursed world order is to say too much because those preferences often look very different from the life of Christ and from His Sermon on the Mount, where authentic righteousness is more accurately articulated and more clearly manifest than it is in cursed nature.  If, as the natural lawyers tell us, natural law and Divine law both come from God, then we might expect them to teach the same thing.  But it looks like they do not, not if Christ and His sermon are the moral measure, and not if His Beatitudes are the Divinely authorized description of righteousness and the path to blessing.  At many points, Christ and nature appear to teach quite different things.  Therefore, to label as “natural law” the pragmatic preferences we derive from our experiences in a cursed world system is too exalted and too self-congratulatory a rubric.  We do not know to what extent the conclusions we draw as we struggle to find convenience, practicality, safety, pleasure, utility, self-justification, and financial profit within this cursed order actually reflect the unsullied and righteous character of God.  Judging from the Sermon on the Mount, the resemblance seems radically imprecise.  What Christ teaches there and what we practice and preach on the basis of nature are sometimes wildly different, both in action and in motive.

Further, even to label this a “law” is to employ loaded language: “Law” seems to me a term too high, too lofty, and too ideologically freighted for what it actually embodies or represents.   It’s not a law; it’s our pragmatically assessment of how to cope with currently prevailing conditions under the world curse.  It’s how we deal most pragmatically with reality as it is at the moment.  To call it a law seems to me tendentious and unwarranted, especially given the wildly contestable content of this supposed law.  To call the pragmatic adjustments we make to life in a cursed world “the moral law,” or “the natural law,” is to overstate and to misstate the case.  By calling it a “law,” we imply a lawgiver.  Natural lawyers assert that the lawgiver in this case is God even though it might be nothing more than our own adjustments to a cursed universe, adjustments generated by us, not by Him.  We, not He, might be the lawgivers in question.  I say we are.

Again, I am not saying there is no moral law.  I am saying that the alleged law in view here might just as truly come from earth as from heaven, from us as from Him.  If it comes from us, then to call it a binding moral law is unjustifiable.  To me, it looks more like a pragmatic adjustment to cursed terrestrial life than it does the righteousness of God as manifested historically in Christ both in the things He said and the things He did, of which nature is a distant and pathetic imitation, occasionally even a contradiction.

To call this human pursuit of terrestrial utility “natural law,” therefore, begs the question.  Simply because we prefer it, or simply because we think it works, does not mean we actually have understood nature or arrived by nature’s tutelage at a proper understanding of righteousness.  Furthermore, insofar as our actions display our real beliefs and our real nature, and insofar as our actions are the opposite of what we profess (and certainly of what Christ embodies and professes), then our assertions cannot be trusted.  Our actions make our moral assertions blush.  On that count, newspaper headlines, not the alleged Tao, tell us the real laws of nature, of which human nature is so significant a part.  Despite the tendentious and honorific name we sometimes give it, we might be dealing with unnatural and contra-natural law, namely the law of fallen humanity and its wicked desires trying to live more efficiently and with less trouble.

In short, the laws of revelation, not the alleged laws of a now-cursed universe, are the laws of God and of morality.  They are found best by reading the Bible and by looking to Christ, not by compiling moral approximations and commonalities from among the nations, as Lewis did.  It seems to me that Lewis has overplayed those commonalities and underplayed the differences -- (1) the differences between the various versions of alleged natural law found around the world, and (2) the difference between how nature itself (including human nature) actually works and what we say it teaches.

What is called “natural law” often seems to be nothing more than subjectivism and preference let loose upon the world, a fact evidenced by the enormous variety of things called by the name “natural law.”  What we have before us looks more like a natural law ideology than a natural law.  What we have is often simply a subjective projection imposed onto the natural world, a projection by which we become a law unto ourselves.  That the natural law theorist must keep trying to convince his or her fellows about the truth and specific content of this or that version of natural law might indicate the opposite point:  Maybe what they call natural law is not what they think it is.  At times, what’s called “natural law” seems both counter-natural and tendentiously selective.  It seems to reflect, at best, only a small part of nature, only a part of what this cursed world is really like and actually teaches (if it teaches anything).  Natural law theorists seem to ignore that nature is “red in tooth and claw.”   They do not advise us to be likewise red, and yet they claim nature is the source of their teaching.  They ignore that the real way of the natural world is to feed on others, devouring them for our own ends, a practice natural law theorists strongly abhor among human beings while at the same time telling those human beings to follow the natural law.

(1) Because nature is cursed and is not now what it once was, (2) because cursed nature does not function in the way it was designed to function, and (3) because fallen humans themselves are part of nature, and subject to the curse, any supposed moral law drawn from nature and from human beings ought to be advanced with the greatest possible humility and reluctance, if at all, especially because those who advance it suffer under the same burdens of curse and of sin as do all things, only in the case of human beings that sin and curse are delusion inducing.  As Kant astutely observed, out of timber so crooked as that from which we are made, nothing straight can be carved.

Understanding righteousness is a branch of theology.  That means it is a matter of supernatural revelation, not something deduced unaided from a cursed world by unabashedly sinful rebels.  Righteousness, therefore, must be understood and pursued on a distinctly Biblical basis, not on some other.  Just as revelation is an event, a sovereign Divine disclosure of God to us, so also is righteousness a matter of Divine Self-disclosure.   It rests not upon the musings and deductions of fallen human nature or on the workings of a cursed world, but upon Divine revelation and Divine act, most specifically and fully in Christ.   Righteousness is a Christological, not philosophical, category.  Righteousness is an unnatural category.  By Christ, not by our own contemplation of humanity in the abstract, or humanity in nature, or nature without humanity, do we know what righteousness is, what righteousness does, and what righteousness looks like.  We learn it from Christ, not from cursed nature as decoded by sinful and rebellious minds.  When we do learn righteousness from Christ, we learn that righteousness means apparently counter-natural things like loving your enemies, which means dying for them, just as you would do for your friends.  Righteousness looks like Christ on the cross, the just dying for the unjust, the innocent pleading for the forgiveness and benefit of the guilty.  It does not look like the survival of the fittest.  It looks like the self-chosen and self-sacrificial death of the highest and the best on behalf of the most unworthy at the moment of their greatest unworthiness.  This revelation of righteousness comes to us not in nature but in Christ and is suffused with grace and redemption.  Righteousness is not a humanly-deduced system drawn by sinners from a selective and tendentious reading of cursed nature.

In other words, just as righteousness is a part of Biblical theology, natural law is a part of natural theology.  The same problems that obtain in natural theology obtain in natural law, namely, fallen human creatures themselves.  What the natural theologian is to natural theology the natural lawyer is to natural law -- its deformer.  Cursed nature does not now teach the righteousness taught by the kenotic Christ and, even if it did, the natural lawyers would foul it up.  Nature does not teach what Christ teaches, and what it does teach they get wrong.  They follow their self-induced delusions into greater and denser obscurity, not light.  To do natural law well, they’d have to free themselves from themselves.  But unless God frees them, that freedom remains impossible.  It is impossible because, like us all, natural lawyers wallow in superbia, the region of spiritual pride and, therefore, of delusion.  It might be, after all, that nature does not teach morality at all.  Do not confuse what nature does or does no teach with what the natural lawyers teach.  They want to speak for nature, but they seem to do a bad job of it. 

Closely related to natural law is conscience, a thing now as fallen and immersed in sin as everything else about us.  Conscience requires grace and redemption, without which it can never be fully trusted because it is not now what it once was and will be again.  Given its currently defective condition, given its radical fallenness, it cannot be trusted.  More often than we know, it lies.  I am willing to admit that the presence of conscience is universal if others are willing to admit that its universality is characterized by moral ignorance and shameless rebellion.

To purge the mind of its debilitating sin is not as easy as the natural law theorists seem to imagine.  They underplay the fact that humanists, modernists, postmodernists, and others sometimes also believe in natural law but read it and apply it quite differently.  If the are Catholics, then they do not realize that the interpretive pluralism they descry in Protestantism they welcome and endorse in natural law.  The competing and alternately prevailing views of nature and of human nature are sometimes profoundly varied, whether we mean those of Nietzsche, Freud, Rousseau, Marx, Sartre, Jaspers, Sade, or Aristotle.  In their uniquely bent ways, all are doing natural theology and natural law, the resultant content and moral requirements of which seem impenetrably murky, even chaotic.

         That chaos raises one final and related point, this one from a long-standing hermeneutical debate within jurisprudence:  In order to adjudicate cases well, judges need a hermeneutic by which to interpret and to apply positive law.  Jurisprudential thinkers debate over what hermeneutic that ought to be.  Natural lawyers and natural judges face the same challenge.  They too require a hermeneutic by which to discern the content and moral demands of the alleged natural law.  They need to tell us precisely what that hermeneutic is and how (and from where) it is gotten.  Without that, there seems little safeguard, if any, against the self-seeking, morally-demented, natural lawyers and natural judges who impose themselves upon the “text” of natural law, being themselves in this field of thought exactly what they abhor elsewhere, namely judicial activists who make the law a vehicle for their own agenda.  Without a clearly articulated hermeneutic for reading and applying natural law, ambiguity reigns.  This elusive and shape-shifting natural law cannot be the basis for state action, something for which natural law advocates frequently advance it.  Following nature more closely will not cure the state of its evils.  Justice is Christological at the root, not anthropological or political.  Justice is rooted in Christ, not in us or in our cursed world.  Anthropocentric law and government are no better than anthropocentric theology.  Both are upside down.  Until we are told explicitly how the self-appointed natural law judges move from (1) an observation of nature to (2) a determination of what nature teaches, and then to (3) a determination of how it ought to be most prudently applied in the political arena, I remain implacably skeptical.  Nothing I’ve seen to date convinces me to be anything else.

Natural Law:  Part 2

         Before natural lawyers start pontificating about natural law and its alleged lessons, they’d better consider all the ways that nature is now unnatural.  They’d better know the difference between nature as created and nature as cursed.  They must understand the difference between what nature is now and what nature ought to be, once was, and will be again.

         All any natural law advocate has ever seen is unnatural, or sub-natural, nature.  Further, the natural lawyers need to understand that they themselves are unnatural, that they universally are fallen, wicked, sinful, and rebellious.  They are unnatural and wicked creatures reasoning on the basis of unnatural nature in order to tell us about real natural law, as if, despite all their incapacities and habitual immoralities, natural lawyers were objective, disinterested, and reliable on the point.

         I’m not convinced.

         The natural law crowd does not know and therefore cannot articulate the difference between natural nature and unnatural nature, whether in themselves or in the world at large.  Those differences are perhaps unimaginable.  Those differences are something akin to the difference between ancient Eden and the Arabian desert.  Such differences are depicted in the eschatological image of the lion lying down with the lamb.   Shockingly, and to us quite unnaturally, the lamb will not be inside the lion when it happens.  That eschatological nature of peace and ours seem to operate on a quite different basis.   The details of that difference we do not know.  Natural lawyers have never seen nature not under a curse, nature unburdened, nature natural.  They have never seen themselves not under that debilitating and burdensome curse or without the noetic effects of sin.  Apart from God telling them, they cannot know and do not know what real lessons real nature might teach, if any, and how those lessons differ from those supposedly taught now by a cursed nature and interpreted by the unnatural lawyers who fancy themselves able to speak for it.

         When unnatural lawyers explain the “laws” of unnatural nature, they do so in a tendentious and highly selective manner.  They do not tell you for your instruction and imitation that nature is vicious, that it is “red in tooth and claw,” that its law is normally to kill in order to live.  They do not tell you that nature is doomed, that it is winding down to a cold, motionless, amorphous mass at a low temperature, that in the end all natural stories reduce to precisely nothing.  That is, they do not tell you that natural law is murderous and nihilistic.  Rather, they want to use nature to teach the things that they want it to teach, not what it actually does teach, if it teaches anything all.

         In nature as it is, the law is either to kill or be killed, even though the natural lawyers will not teach you to live in that brutal fashion, and would be appalled if you seriously undertook to do so.  But the nature they trumpet functions that way.

         Indeed, even if living things in nature escape being killed, they still die.  In other words, selfish predation and both individual and cosmic nihilism are the order of the day in nature, even if the unnatural lawyers don’t recommend that you live accordingly while they crow about natural law.  Unnatural lawyers publically trumpet natural law while ignoring much of it, maybe most of it.  They often alter it to fit their own agenda.  With regard to the real laws of contemporary nature they are what they despise others being with regard to positive law:  They are legal and judicial activists.  They push their own truncated agenda onto the law and subjugate the agenda of nature’s current constitution.  The so-called natural law advocates are unnatural, indeed anti-natural.

         If you want to know real right and real wrong -- and you should -- then you need to go to God’s Word, not to the current workings of a cursed and therefore unnatural natural order or to the self-aggrandizing and twisted mental gymnastics of unnatural lawyers.

Natural Law:  Part 3

         I adduce here two stanzas from Charles Kingsley.  The first depicts natural law; the second supernatural law. 

This is the natural law:

“The heath eats up the green grass and delicate herbs;

The pines eat up the heath. The grub the pine;

The finch the grub; the hawk the silly finch;

And man, the mightiest of all beasts of prey,

Eats what he lists. The strong eat up the weak”

This is the supernatural law:

“Looks patient down the great magnanimous God,

Who, Master of all worlds, did sacrifice

All to Himself?  Nay, but Himself to all;

Who taught mankind, on that first Christmas Day,

What ‘tis to be a man – to give, not take;

To serve, not rule; to nourish, not devour;

To lift, not crush; if need, to die, not live.”

"il primo Amore"

         The connection between ideas and actions is intimate and enduring.  Because ideas have consequences, and because bad ideas have bad ones, it matters what you think.   The differences between natural theology and authentically Christian theology lead, therefore, to differences in spirituality, and they are our focus.

         I begin with an important and fundamental difference:  the difference between the first mover and the first lover, or what Dante called “il primo Amore.”

         If, in some degree, worlds reflect their makers, then consider this:  A world in motion is far different from a world in love.  Aristotle’s first mover is not, and cannot be, the first and greatest Lover, though Dante’s God can be the first mover, if we think of Love as spiritual motion, the way Dante does.  For him, indeed, “love makes the world go round.”  For Dante, God can be, and is, precisely that, the prime Lover, because Dante knows Christ, and knows the God revealed in Christ.  Multi-personal, interpersonal, everlasting Love lies at the core of Dante’s world, but not Aristotle’s, even though Dante inherited much from Aristotle, he did not inherit a prime Lover.  That had to come from elsewhere.  Being an aloof, distant, abstract and sub-personal force, Aristotle’s god could not give rise to Dante’s.  The chasm between the two gods and the two worlds they create is beyond mere difference.  It is incompatibility.  Mere motion, on the one hand, and righteous, self-sacrificial affection, on the other hand, must not to be confused or conflated.  Neither must the Gods from which they spring. 

         Consider, too, the difference in spirituality that the character and commandments pertaining to the two Gods in view (if we can say that Aristotle’s god even has a character or imposes moral requirements):  The difference is between (1) moving, and causing, on the one hand, and (2) loving, communing, incarnating, and self-sacrificing, on the other.  As even a moment’s reflection makes plain, personality-less, morality-less, love-less, and word-less unmoved movers like Aristotle’s cannot give rise to the Divine Comedy or to the spirituality it entails.  Much, very much, needs to be added to it before the piety of the Divine Comedy or the revamped heroism of Paradise Lost emerge.  That “very much” is the Word become flesh, the incarnation of Christ.             

Paul in Athens (part 2)

II.  Exegesis

The following verse-by-verse account of Luke’s text establishes the truth of Cullmann’s and Stonehouses’s view cited above:

Upon entering Athens, Paul’s spirit stirred within him (v. 16).  The word translated here as “stirred” is the Greek word from which we get our word “paroxysm.”  Athenian idolatry made Paul shudder.   He was appalled at the extent to which they worshipped the work of their own hands.  He was in a city full of idols the way a forest is full of trees.  The tense of the Greek verb here indicates that, for as long as Paul continued to behold the idols that surrounded him on all sides, his revulsion and disgust continued.  His response was no mere passing emotion or superficial reaction, but a deep and abiding state of mind triggered by the collision of his theological commitments with the pagan surroundings.  What he saw, he “looked upon with abhorrence.  They were to him impersonations of everything evil; they expressed the deification of lust, cruelty, revenge, fraud, malice, and falsehood, and the deification of those evil things, not in the far-off past, but now at the moment enthralling and debasing the souls for which Christ died; so his spirit was stirred, the spirit of the faithful and devout Jew, on whose heart was written that law of God, ‘Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image, thou shalt not bow down to them, nor worship them.’ . . .  No matter how divine the beauty, their use was accursed” (Sadler, Acts of the Apostles, p. 328).

“What will this babbler say?”  the Greeks around him asked (v. 18).  The word for “babbler” is “seed picker,” which is “a small finch, here standing for those gossip mongers who scuttled about the agora picking up news, novel ideas, they could pass on to other “chattering parasites” (Plumptre, The Acts of the Apostles, p. 27).  Their description of Paul in such derisive terms, of course, was evidence of their contempt and ridicule.

The Greeks leveled against Paul the same sort of charge leveled earlier against Socrates:  He seemed to them to be setting forth strange gods (v. 18).  Conversely, they seemed to Paul to do exactly the same.  They were no more respectful of his views and his God than he was of theirs.  They thought as they did about Paul because he preached Jesus and the resurrection (v. 18), a notion they considered bizarre and impossible.  They themselves called it “strange,” which tells us that, to them, Paul’s gospel was not a mere continuation or supplement to their pre-existing beliefs, and they told him as much.  Their view of the relation between their beliefs and Paul’s is quite distant from the view held by modern advocates of natural theology and the way they tend to meld biblical theology and natural theology indiscriminately together.

According to some commentators, because the Greeks employed the plural word “gods” here, they believed that the Anastasis (resurrection) which Paul preached in conjunction with Jesus, was itself a separate deity (cf. Sadler, Acts of the Apostles, p. 330) a fact indicative of the depth of delusion to which their minds had become habituated by their worship of false gods, and not an indication of how their false gods prepared the way for the gospel.  For bringing up these  “strange things” (v. 20), Paul was brought to Mars Hill, where he was given the chance to explain himself.

Perhaps because he rankled at their arrogant depiction of his teachings as “certain strange things” (which is the sort of demeaning epithet Greeks might use of barbarians and their ideas), and because of his abiding disgust at their idolatry, Paul addressed that idolatry first:  “I see that you are excessively superstitious” (v. 22), he said, an opening not well-suited to win their approval.  Nor was it intended to win it.  Paul was not at all tolerant of those who rejected the resurrection:  Against such views Paul was vehemently opposed, calling those who thought that way “fools” (1 Cor. 15: 35, 36).

Paul’s use of confrontation here is not unique for him.  A man who called even his own Galatian friends and converts fools (Gal. 3: 1), and who corrected the apostle Peter himself in front of his friends (Gal. 2: 11ff.), would not, and did not, shy away from pointing out to the Athenian philosophers who came to hear him speak that they were “excessively superstitious,” a tactic fully in keeping with his clothes-rending rant against idolatry earlier in Lystra (Acts 14: 8ff.) and his subsequent denunciation of what passed for wisdom in Corinth (1 Cor. 1: 17 – 2: 8).  His blunt, confrontational style was sometimes considered “contemptible” (2 Cor. 10: 10).  Perhaps his Greek auditors thought it so this time.

To Luke, the author, the degenerate condition of Greek thought and religion was obvious:  The pursuit of truth in Athens had shrunk to nothing more than a frivolous chase for novelty, he says (v. 21).  With that polluted and shrunken context as the background, Luke explains that, to Paul, Athenian religion was a religion of ignorance (v. 23).  But Paul was there to dispel their ignorance, and he told them so.  He was there to declare to them the truth about the God of whom they were so shamefully ignorant, the God of Whom both the Greeks and their renowned philosophers were ignorant.  To Paul, their religion was characterized by “ignorant reverence” (v. 23), and ignorant reverence is not real worship, and it is not knowing God.

Naturally, his explanation was not well received.  As Plumptre explains, “That any human teacher should have power to proclaim that ‘Unknown God’ as making Himself known to men, was what neither Epicureans nor Stoics had dreamt of” (Plumptre, The Acts of the Apostles, p. 284).

But to Paul, the case was completely different.  He knew what they did not know and could not know:  He knew God.  He knew God because he knew Jesus and the resurrection -- without which God remains unknowable and unknown.

Of course, Paul was not always so.  When confronted by the Lord Himself while on the way to Damascus, the first thing Paul asked was “Who are you?” (Acts 9: 5).  He had to ask because, like the Athenians to whom he now speaks, he simply did not know.  He did not know even though he was “circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee” (Phil. 3: 5), none of which brought knowledge of God, and all of which his Athenian hearers lacked.

In addition to attacking their ignorance, Paul attacks (1) their temples, (2) their worship, and (3) their arrogance.   Surrounded on all sides as he was by buildings dedicated to false gods, Paul told the Athenian philosophers that God does not dwell in temples made with hands (v. 24), something he heard personally from Stephen, the Christian proto-martyr, over whose execution Paul had presided (Acts 7: 48).  In his statement against their temples, Paul employs the words of Isaiah 42:5.   Then, echoing Psalm 50: 9-12, Paul further insisted that God is not worshipped with the work of human hands, as if He needed anything (v. 25).  Interestingly, the word Paul uses here for “worship” he also uses in Romans 1: 25, in reference to worshiping the creature more than the Creator, and in 2 Thess. 2: 4, in reference to worshiping the man of lawlessness.  Finally, Paul tells them that God has made of one blood all nations (v. 26) -- a view to which no self-regarding Athenian could consent.  The distinction between the barbarians and themselves seemed too radical, too obvious, and too persistent to overlook.   They thought that overlooking that distinction was to think of themselves as no better than benighted slaves.  But to Paul, these alleged distinctions were meaningless (Gal. 3: 28).  He undercuts their arrogance by including them in the same boat as all other peoples and all other nations.  By explaining that God had made all nations of one stock, and had set their national and historical limits, Paul was drawing upon the Genesis account of creation and, it seems, upon Deuteronomy 32: 8 and Job 12: 23.

Paul then re-emphasized his contention that under God we all are in the same condition.  God has made us all one, Paul said, and He has providentially laid out his plan for the nations -- where they should live and when they should flourish -- as well as the reason for it all:  that under His guidance we might grope after Him (vv. 26, 27).  That is, God controls the history of all nations.  Because He does, human history is a school, a vale of soul making, in which we all must detect the impossibility of ever satisfying the longings and “gropings” (v. 27) of the human heart by means of the gods of our own making.  They should “seek the Lord,” he told them (v. 27), as well as how that seeking and groping ought to be done (vv. 30, 31).  By explaining to his hearers some of the things God does in human history, Paul is distancing himself quite radically from the Epicurean god, who is detached and aloof from human life, a god absorbed in nothing so much as sloth and cosmic disregard.  

Having hit them twice, once with their own ignorance and once with their likeness to all other persons under God, Paul hits them again, this time with their own writers:  Quoting Aratus (from Paul’s own home region of Cilicia), and perhaps Cleanthes’ hymn to Jupiter, Paul asserts that we all live in the light of God’s omnipresence, because we all are his children (vv. 28, 29).  But because God is Who He is, and because God does what He does, to worship humanly devised images and idols is ignorant and irrational (v. 29).  Yet, despite all their providentially bestowed advantages, they were still ignorant.  In His mercy and patience, however, God momentarily overlooked their universal ignorance and postponed judgment.  He has done so, Paul tells them, with the purpose of eliciting their repentance (vv. 30, 31).   Had God not mercifully and momentarily overlooked their ignorance, his justice long ago would have crushed them under the weight of their own idolatry.  Now, absent their repentance, nothing was left but judgment.  The historical evidence of God’s plan in all this is the resurrection from the dead of the very man who will be universal judge (v. 31). 

At the mention again of bodily resurrection from the dead, the Greek philosophers had had enough.  They mocked.  They subjected Paul to derision.

Paul left. 

From Athens, Paul travelled to Corinth, where his stance toward the alleged wisdom of Greek philosophy remained the same as it was in Athens and before:  antagonism and opposition – a stance notably distant from the theological implementation and apologetic incorporation practiced by our contemporary devotees of natural theology.

            Paul knows pagan literature and thought.  Because he does, he can use against the pagans themselves.  But to say that he knows pagan literature and thought is not to say he endorses it or that he agrees with it.  Using it against them means only that he knows their weaknesses in ways they do not.  He can beat them on their home court and by their own rules.  He defeats them with their own tools.  He knows the ways in which their paganism cannot succeed and cannot be consistent even on its own terms.  He exploits those failings against them, as he does in Acts 17.  He points out the self-refuting character of their thought, which is not to endorse it.   He is not saying that their thoughts lead to God.  The net result of pagans using pagan thought is that God remains unknown.  To know Him means to understand Jesus and the resurrection, which to pagans is folly but to Paul is the deep wisdom form before the dawn of time, to echo C. S. Lewis in a different but related context.

III.  Summary

The general tone and tenor of Paul’s Areopagus speech was one of condemnation and opposition.  In Corinth, that tone and tenor continued.  Paul was not looking for common ground.  He was not building bridges.  He was tearing down strongholds.  Pagan beliefs and practices were his target, not the object of his affirmation.  The perverse beliefs of the Greeks are what separated Paul from them.   Their beliefs were not a truth they and he both owned, but the foolish and wicked errors he intended to correct.  He did not reach out to them on the basis of their beliefs.  He condemned their beliefs.  They returned the favor.

Paul knew the options that fallen life gives us in this regard:  Either we worship God or we worship things that are not God.  To worship God, requires the mediation of Jesus Christ -- a mediation both of knowledge and of salvation -- of which the Greeks philosophers had neither.  In order to fill that staggering lack, Paul determined to know nothing among them except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.  In this regard, just as it was with Jesus Himself, nothing about the god of Aristotle or Plato crossed Paul’s lips.  At the shocking sight of idolatry surrounding him on all sides, Paul’s spirit convulsed and wretched within him, just as ours ought to do within us.

But rather than wretch and convulse, some Christian theologians and apologists attach themselves to Greek errors both for apologetic purposes and for theological method.  Paul did not.  Rather than attaching his preaching and his apologetics to their idolatries, he pointed out to them their superstition and their ignorance and, in order to heal what ailed them, he directed them to Christ and the resurrection.

Paul’s speech was iconoclastic.  Because the Athenian marketplace reflected the hearts of those who made it and who frequented it, Paul cast down their gods, not from pedestals made of marble, but from pedestals in the human heart.  Paul knew that their invocation of an unknown god was a sham and a pose.  He knew it was a suppression of the truth (Rom. 1: 23).  It was an evasion of their obligations before the one God Who is.  It was a substitution of a false god for the real God.  It was not innocent.  It was as wicked as it was false.  Suppression, evasion, substitution:  It was what Cornelius Van Til said it was: “culpable ignorance” (Van Til, Paul at Athens, p. 11).  In Paul’s own words:  “Where is the wise:  where is the scribe?  where is the disputer of this world?  hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?  For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God it pleased God through the foolishness of the preaching to save them that believe.” (1 Cor. 1: 20, 21).

Do not miss Paul’s point:  The wisdom of God decreed that, by means of the wisdom of the world, the world could not know God.  Natural theology simply does not lead to knowledge of God.  To say otherwise is to oppose both Paul and God.  Human wisdom, whether Aristotle’s or someone else’s, is more than merely challenged; it is exposed, debunked, and rejected.  The Greeks, known for their supposed wisdom, could not locate even its beginning (Psalm 111: 10).

Rather than endorsing their natural theology, from verses 24 onward, Paul used it as a weapon against them, resisting them and refuting them, sometimes with their own words and ideas.  He directed them to seek God (v. 27), implying quite clearly that by their philosophy and religion they had missed Him.  Paul told his Greek listeners that, despite their excessive religiosity (v. 22), they failed to know God, and that they were ignorant (vv. 23, 30), in response to which he placed before them the resurrected Jesus as Lord.  Concerning Jesus, Paul mentioned that He is fully human and, as such, is subject to death, and that he is Judge of the world (v. 31).  Apart from knowing that, they could not and did not know God.  No one can.  They were estranged from God, and, by rejecting Paul’s message, remained so.  They demonstrated that amusement and novelty (v. 21) are not the same as the pursuit of Truth.  When the Truth Himself appeared in Paul’s speech, they mocked it and turned away (v. 32).  That was where their natural theology led them.  That is where it always leads, away from God.  Nevertheless, despite their failing and their rejection of the truth, even when it was proclaimed directly before them, the Greeks thought they offered God authentic worship.  Paul, in order to puncture their bubble of delusion, highlighted their ignorance.  By limiting himself here primarily to highlighting their ignorance, Paul declined to trace out in fuller details the whole litany of their evils and errors the way he did in Romans 1.

According to F. F. Bruce, Paul “does not argue from ‘first principles’ of the kind that formed the basis of various systems of Greek philosophy; his exposition and defense of his message are founded upon the biblical revelation and they echo the thought, and at times the very language, of the Old Testament writings.  Like the biblical revelation itself, his speech begins with God the creator of all, continues with God the sustainer of all, and concludes with God the judge of all” (Bruce, Paul: Apostle of the Heart Set Free, p. 239).  To be sure, Paul finds his preaching text in an altar dedication.  But that they know they do not know God, and that Paul knows they do not know God, is hardly an endorsement of their natural theology.  Rather, their ignorance offers Paul a chance to explain to them the history of salvation, which, in this speech, finds its climax in Christ, just as it does in Paul’s epistles.

The Problem with Philosophy is . . . the Philosophers

          If, by “metaphysics,” we mean “the ultimate science of Being and knowing” (OED), then we might rightly conclude that it is a pretentious, ambitious, even audacious enterprise, so much so that with Kant we might question whether or not such knowledge is possible for us, at least as defined.  I am not in the slightest here taking up the cause of the logical positivists, but perhaps we are well advised to think this pursuit beyond our range, like firing a pistol at the moon, or hoping to catch a glimpse of its dark side with a flashlight.  Perhaps all that such immodest speculation yields is a mere word pattern drawing out the implications of such ideas, at least until they meet a wall, a philosophical cul de sac beyond which we cannot pass.  This path might proceed inexorably to some dialectical opposites not reconcilable into a higher, or more basic, synthesis.  We do not know; we cannot tell, at least until God tells.

         The true relation of our ideas to ultimate reality is not something we can well discern unless Ultimate Reality Himself tells us about it.  Until He does, we are constrained to making educated guesses.  These (hopefully) logically derived guesses seem by necessity to proceed according to analogy.  By that I mean that concepts drawn from, or based upon, one mode of our experience are made to stand for or to relate meaningfully to Ultimate Reality.  In what way it does so we cannot say for certain, but we hope that it does.  What precise analogy exists between us and It we do not know, though theories abound.  Short of revelation, those theories seem unable to rise to the level of fact, to knowledge, to Ultimate Reality (whether capitalized or not).  Is the transcendent accessible?  If so, by what means, and how do you know?

         It seems to me that we do not know, and perhaps cannot know, that Ultimate Reality is contained or properly expressed in our language and thoughts about it, even if our analogies, by chance, are apt.   Their actual significance is possibly beyond our ken.  That ought to humble us; it does not.   We might be trafficking in little more or little else than the world pictures our stunted minds toss forth, and the notions we try logically to drawn from them.  When we begin to talk about the world as it is, and about its fundamental basis, we ought to proceed cautiously.  I know of few metaphysicians who do.

         Let us suppose that natural revelation is a perfectly wonderful and accurate revelation of God and that by it He can be well and deeply known.  Even so, it would not follow that natural theology is reliable or is to trusted.  It does not follow because additional correct supposals also are required.  We must suppose also (A) that the human mind is acute enough, all on its own, to decode the divine message of nature, and (B) that the human soul is pious enough to receive that message humbly, to act on it obediently, and not to suppress it, alter it, or exchange it for a lie.  Those supposals are false.

         We are not humble and teachable recipients of nature’s message.  We do not bow reverently before the God thus revealed or receptively to the Truth which He is.   Quite the opposite:  We suppress the Truth and exchange Him for a lie.  In light of the revelation of God in nature, we make new gods, false gods, mind-forged idols, because, as Calvin rightly observed, the human heart is an idol factory, and for its raw materials uses the revelation of God which, because He is the very content of revelation, is God Himself.

         That is exactly what happened:  God made Himself known through nature (Rom. 1: 19, 20).  But, being unthankful and vain, while still thinking ourselves wise, our hearts became darkened (v. 21).  By means of those dark, idol-making hearts, we transformed God into the image of humans, animals, and even less because we did not want to retain God in our knowledge (vv. 23, 28).  God therefore gave us over to the wicked actions that accompany idolatry (vv. 26, 27), the litany of which is shocking and gross (vv. 28-31).  Our idols are of various sorts.  They range from the golden calf of the ancient Jews to the impersonal, inarticulate, mechanistic causes and movers of the Greeks.   Whether they are human, animal or mechanistic in representation, and whether or not they embody some small portion of the Truth, they all are idols.  They all argue against our skills at metaphysics.  They all say that when it comes to “the ultimate science of Being and knowing,” we are worse than rank amateurs.  We are its enemies.

The God of the Philosophers

          When a philosopher tells me that an uncaused cause made the world, I encounter several theological problems.  First is the concept the world-whole, which views the world as “a thing,” not as “all things.”  When all things came into existence, it was not “a thing” that was made, but “all things” that were made.   By so speaking and arguing, the philosopher is seeking a singular cause to a singular thing, which might not be the case at all, either with all things or with their making(s).  The Biblical account of creation is not a singular making, but a series of makings that is progressive and in stages -- the makings of several things, not one.  The philosopher’s alleged making of “one thing” (world) is different from the series of makings of Biblical creation.  Further, the “one thing” thus made is finite and to explain the origin of a finite effect requires only a finite cause, which is not the God of the Bible.  Second, when the philosopher mentions “making,” the making alluded to here is a making within a causal nexus, the sort of making with which our cause/effect analysis has normal connection.  Normally, when we talk about making, we talk about making out of pre-existing matter, as when a sculptor makes a statue out of pre-existing granite, employing a hammer and a chisel to do so, or as when a contractor builds a house out of wood, glass, shaped metal, rubber, etc.  When we speak about cause and effect of this sort, we are not speaking about Biblical creation, which does not entail pre-existent matter.  While our cause/effect reasonings and explanations always entail some material cause, Biblical creation does not.  Cause/effect, as we normally employ it, is irrelevant to Biblical creation which is a creating, not a making, and to which our cause/effect explanations (as normally employed, and as the philosopher employs them here) are something very different.  Creation out of nothing is not what we normally mean when we invoke cause and effect, which stand at the root of the philosopher’s argument.  To get philosophically to God creating the world, we must have a cause/effect sequence without a material cause, but we do not.  Our explanations yield no such results, nor can they.  Third, the “cause” thus allegedly reached is not the God of the Bible -- the infinite, articulate, multi-Personal Elohim Who, in His unsearchable plurality-in-unity, spoke the universe into existence.  All we get, if we get anything at all, is a mere finite, inarticulate, impersonal cause.  In short, with the philosophical conclusion that an uncaused cause made the world, I object to the philosopher’s use of the words “cause,” “made,” and “world,” none of which seem properly commensurate with Biblical doctrine and usage.

           To paraphrase Emil Brunner, any god reached by reason is a mere reason-god, which is always an idol.   Unlike the God of the Bible, Aristotle’s god does not speak, love, or feel.  It cannot become flesh, is not multi-Personal, and did not exist before the world.  To Aristotle, remember, the world is eternal.

John 1 and Greek Philosophy

“The World Knew Him Not” (John 1: 1-34)

The bird that sees a dainty bower

Made in the tree, where she was wont to sit,

Wonders and sings, but not His power

Who made the arbor: this exceeds her wit.

But Man doth know

The spring, whence all things flow:

And yet as though he knew it not,

His knowledge winks, and lets his humors reign:

They make his life a constant blot,

And all the blood of God to run in vain.

Ah wretch! what verse

Can thy strange ways rehearse?

               George Herbert, “The Temple”

Advocates of natural theology often invoke John’s use of the term “logos” in the prologue to his Gospel as evidence of a Biblical endorsement of natural theology and of philosophy.   It is not.

Given the enormous difference between John’s logos and that of the Stoics, and given the way John has so extensively corrected their rampant misconceptions, one could no more assert that John was endorsing natural theology here than one could assert that Friedrich Hayek was endorsing Karl Marx because they both use the word “capital.”  Wholesale correction is not the same as endorsement or implementation, even if a few of the terms used by both sides are the same.  Simply because Hayek and Marx both deal with the financial interactions of human beings, and simply because they employ some of the same language in so doing, it does not mean (1) that Hayek endorses Marx or Marxism, (2) that their views and methods are compatible, or (3) that Hayekian thought subsumes Marxist thought.  Hayek is no Marxist any more than John is a Stoic.  Hayek corrects Marx all along the Marxian path, a path Hayek knows to be “the road to serfdom.”  John corrects the Stoics in the same extensive way, as the analysis below will demonstrate.  John does to the Stoic logos something the Stoics would never do:  He identifies it with a particular Jewish man and then understands that man in light of Jewish history and Scripture, reaching back to Genesis and to the creative and powerful Divine Word, dabar.

John’s use of the phrase “in the beginning” (v. 1) refers back to the time before God had spoken, as does Genesis 1: 1.  In that beginning, the Word was pros ton theon (v.1) -- in front of God, so to speak, before Him, face to face.  That Word was with God and was God:  God and Word, God and God.  They are the same, yet they are distinct.  We arrive again where we began in Genesis 1:1, the Divine unity-in-plurality (a text at which we will look in more detail later).

Christ is called the Word because it is “He by whom God reveals Himself to man, and communicates His mind and will.  Christ Jesus is the Revealer of the Godhead . . . The term ‘Word’ would seem well adapted to express this.  A word is that by which we communicate our thoughts to others” (Jacobus, Notes on the Gospels, p. 20).

The Logos, therefore, is not some distant and abstract principle of making, not a simple uncaused cause of an eternal world.  The Logos is the Divine Person of revealing, not a mere principle of making.  God here is living, creative eloquence; He is Divine speech, utterance, and creative articulation -- Word.  By means of the Divine Word Who is God Himself, God Himself makes the world and thereby imparts Himself to it because the Word is God and God is the world-making Word.  By making the world with his Word, God reveals Himself to us.  From our perspective, in order to know God, that Word is a necessity.

For us to know God, He must reveal Himself to us.  If He remains silent, He remains both unknowable and unknown.  But silent He has not remained.  He has spoken.  To invoke the title of an important little book by Francis Schaeffer, "He is there and He is not silent."  According to John, but against anything to which a Stoic might affirm, God's utterance, God’s speech, God’s Logos, God’s Word, God’s Son, has become identified with a specific human creature in recent Jewish history, a man of flesh and blood, who lived, suffered, died, and rose again in the flesh.  That man is the Utterance or Eloquence of the Father to us, indeed to all creation, because by means of this Utterance, now incarnate, now made human -- by means of this very Logos -- the world itself was spoken into existence and God was revealed.

Notice carefully that the creative and revelatory flow in that Divine action is entirely from God to the world, from God to us, and not vice versa.  The Son is the creative, revelatory, articulation of Elohim; He is the loving and redemptive eloquence of a gracious Father to a fallen world.

Conversely, God conceived in Aristotle's way -- an unspeaking, unhistorical, impersonal cause, an unmoved mover, or a self-thought thought, standing behind an eternal world, something known or reached by our intellectual strivings up to it, and not by its articulations to us, is incompatible with the Biblical account of creation and redemption by a speaking God Who is known to us only by His doings, not ours, and especially by incarnation in a historical person.  Aristotle’s theory goes contrary to them and cannot be reconciled with them.

Only God could be in the very beginning with God, before anything that was made ever existed.  Whatever was not in the beginning with God was not God -- and because only God truly knows God, unless this God who was with God and who was God speaks to us about God, we cannot know Him.  He is too far above us, especially now in our fallenness.  He is the Light (v.4); we are the darkness (v. 5). Our darkness has not understood, or comprehended, the Light, nor can it (v. 5). The Greek word katalambano (v.5) can mean either mental comprehension or seizing by force.  Here, it seems, John means that “the light has been shining and is still shining, and never has the darkness been able to obliterate it” (Tasker, p. 45), though “obliterate it” the world has tried pointedly to do.  “Obliterate” is precisely right, for that is how the children of darkness respond to the Light that reveals their sin, their folly, and their rebellion.  They blot it out, obliterate it, if they can. They suppress it, exchange it for a lie, and they kill it. That is a Johannine notion with which Paul concurs in Romans 1: 18ff.

The world, indeed the whole world -- Greek philosophers included -- “knew Him not” (v. 10) because the world – Greek philosophers included -- “received Him not” (v. 11).  In order to “know” Him, you must “receive” Him.  Unless you know Him Who is the Word and Who is God, you do not, and cannot, know the Father.  Knowing the Father requires receiving the Son.  So far as we can tell, Aristotle did neither.  In that sad and rebellious condition, Aristotle was simply one with a world of human beings who did not receive or know their Maker.  By its own choice, “the world is closed to the Word and its light” (Barth, Witness to the Word, p. 69).

In order to know Him, to receive Him, and to become a child of God, requires a gracious and transcendent “power” (v. 12).  That power is a gift (v. 12), something given, and not something humanly achieved, like Aristotle’s deductions concerning an uncaused cause, an unmoved mover, and self-thought thought.  To receive Him (v. 12), you must believe in his name (v. 12).  Without spiritual life, which comes through belief in his name, there is no Divinely given enlightenment.  Such enlightenment happens because of the will of God, and not the will of anyone else (v. 13).  “Can one fail to see that revelation is presented here as a self-enclosed circle into which one cannot leap from the outside?” (Barth, Witness to the Word, 75).  Revelation, regeneration, enlightenment -- in other words, knowledge and life -- they go inextricably together.  Within that circle, Aristotle is not included.

When the Word came into the world, He did so, contrary to Greek philosophy, by becoming flesh (v. 14).  Flesh is, so to speak, the historical medium of revelation.  To the Greeks, that particular medium was unthinkable and disgusting.  Merely to suggest it was to be scorned.  Therefore, by asserting that the Word dwelt among us in human flesh, that He “tabernacled” with us in that fleshly way, John’s reference and indebtedness is to the Old Testament shekinah glory, and not to Greek philosophy.  In His flesh, the Word was “full of grace and truth” (v.14).   Between “grace” and “truth” is an intimate and unbreakable connection.  Without grace, the truth about God is unknown.  From His fullness of grace and truth, we all have benefited. (v.16).   That benefit comes to us in the form of the Word’s “exegesis” of God, His declaration of the otherwise unseen and, to us sinners, unseeable Father (v. 18).

The contrast here between sinful human creatures, on the one hand, and the incarnate Word, on the other, is startling and humbling.  It silences our pretensions.  None of us, without exception, has -- or can -- see God.  By “see” here, John does not mean mere eyesight.  He means seeing as understanding, as knowing.  For that task, our fallen and merely natural powers of sense and reason are ridiculously inadequate.  By means of them, no one has seen God (v. 18).

But the Son has done what we could not.  He has understood the Divine Mysteries and declared to us what He has seen, much like his disciples have done, who saw Him and declared to us what they saw (1 John 1: 1-3).  They could declare God to others and to us only because the Word had declared God to them.  They could speak because they first were spoken to, and because their minds and hearts were given new life and new light by God.  The Hidden God came out of hiding, declared Himself in history and in the flesh, and renewed the souls of His chosen ones so that they might finally understand. 

The conjunction of “grace” and “truth” here requires further elaboration:  You cannot have truth about God unless you first have grace from God.  That is, knowing the truth about God depends upon the grace of God.  While the law came by Moses, grace and truth came by Jesus Christ (v. 17), Who is the only One Who has ever seen the Father, without whose grace we could not have this divine truth.  The Word has brought us the truth about God.

Though He made us, we do not know Him (v. 10).  No one, indeed, has ever seen God -- except the only begotten Son.  Therefore, unless the Son, the Word, speaks, we cannot and do not know God.  He alone has made Him known (v.14).  Only God knows God.   We cannot know Him or speak of Him, as He Himself teaches (Matt 11: 27).

Put differently, the “light” and the “life” go together (v. 4).  Seeing the light depends upon having the life.  Without that life, we all are still in darkness, Aristotle included.  Without this life (zoe), we are dead, and we cannot see.  You cannot see the light (phos) if you do not have the life (zoe).  He is the Light and the Life.  Both life and light are wrapped up in Christ, Who is the Revealer and the Revealed, the Goal and the Means, the Light and the Life.  Without Him, you do not and cannot know God.  Life is indispensable to seeing the Light.  Death blots out the light, and only Christ can bring the life by which we see, the new life of regeneration, the regeneration exclusively by which we see the kingdom of God (John 3: 16ff.)  The natural man has no life and cannot see things that are spiritually discerned (1 Cor. 2: 14).  Aristotle, being spiritually dead, is blind and cannot see.  To follow him is for the blind to lead the blind or, even more absurdly with regard to Christian advocates of Aristotelian natural theology, is for the blind to lead the sighted.  In either case, the result is sadly predictable:  We remain in darkness.  That darkness is condemnable:  “This is the condemnation, that light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil” (John 3: 19).  In other words, “It was the nature of the darkness -- this deep darkness of the soul -- this human ignorance, depravity and perverseness -- to resist the light -- not to entertain it nor retain it” (Jacobus, Notes on the Gospels, p. 25).  Aristotle and his metaphysical machinations are not exempt from the failings of human nature in this regard.  They are its classical embodiment.

The rejection of the Light by those without the life is universal.  On this point, unless you are born again by the will of God (v. 13) you have no hope.  For those without the life and the light, knowing God is impossible.  Whatever else they might have in this regard, it is not knowledge of God because knowledge of God depends upon divine speech.  The transcendent God can be known no other way -- precisely because He is transcendent.  We know him as imminent only if He speaks, only if He reveals Himself to us -- and only if we understand and do not distort that revelation.  But we distort, and we do not understand.  We are blind in the face of light, dead in the face of life.  We knew Him not and received Him not.

He came bearing gifts.  But they killed Him.  In that horrifying action, they are like us in all ways.  We dwell willingly, and therefore self-destructively, in the darkness that confronts and resists revelation.  We ourselves are that darkness.  He is the Light that scatters darkness and makes clear our path (John 8: 12; cp. 12: 35).

To scatter darkness and set it to flight is a matter of cosmic conflict and conquest, not calm persuasion.  He must destroy within us both Satan’s work and our own.  In response to the Divinely induced destruction that precedes our regeneration and enlightenment, we aim to kill Him.  Both sides, God’s and ours, succeed, but we only temporarily.  We killed Him, but He did not stay dead.  Our rejection and slaughter of Him shows that in us lives no good will toward the Light, no readiness to receive it, but open conflict instead:  opposition, antithesis, animosity, and murder.  The darkness in us can never make itself Light, nor does it want to do so.  It aims rather at making the Light darkness by snuffing it out, by replacing the Light of the world with the garish, self-glorifying, self-reflecting, artificial lights and tinsel trappings of human-made gods, which, like the fires of Hell in Milton’s Paradise Lost, give off not light, but “darkness visible” (Paradise Lost, Bk.1: 63).  Even though the Light enlightens every man, we snuff out the light within us and become endarkened, not enlightened, instead.

No one can see God at any time (v. 18) because for us a direct vision of God is impossible.  John’s words here “do not deny the possibility of a true knowledge of God, but of a natural knowledge of God such as can be described by “sight.” (Westcott, p. 15, emphasis added).  In this sense of seeing God, even the theophanies of the Old Testament fell short.  Any knowledge, any authentic recognition, we have of God, whether as sight or as insight, must be mediated.  That Mediator is Christ.  He mediates both our redemption by God and our knowledge of God.  From His unique position in the Father’s bosom, and as the Father’s only begotten Son, He alone can declare, or "exegete," the Father for us (v. 18).  The argument in vv. 17, 18 is that while Moses was highly esteemed by the Jews, by means of him no one could see God.  By contrast, Jesus Christ has revealed Him.  Aristotle, (1) without benefit of either the Mosaic revelation of earlier centuries, (2) or the Christic revelation of the future, and (3) subject to his own damnable evil and its inevitable suppression of Truth, knows God even less than those who killed Him, which is to say not at all.  There was no knowledge of God, even in the land of Israel (Hosea 4: 1, 2).  Therefore, do not expect to find it in pagan, morally debased, Greece.

Although the Logos made the world, the world did not know Him.  The story here in John’s prologue is not about knowing God from nature and reason; the story here in John 1 is about the breach between the world and its Creator, a breach bridged by Him.  It’s about the shameful fact of the world’s damnable and self-imposed ignorance.  This is a tale of judgment, not of natural theology’s alleged insights.  In other words, this prologue and chapter teach precisely what Paul teaches in Romans 1.  It’s a story of condemnation:  The Light has come into the world, but because of our wickedness and our preference for darkness, a darkness we hope serves to cover our sins, we hate the Light.  Whoever does evil -- Don’t we all? -- hates the light because by it our deeds are exposed for what they are (John 3: 19, 20).
Do you hate the light?  Take your time, and resolve to be absolutely honest, before you answer that question.  

Excursus I:  The Commentators

In order to underscore my contention that John’s use of the term “logos” is not an endorsement of, or even an implementation of, Greek philosophy, in particular, or of natural theology, in general, I cite here twenty passages from the commentary tradition, copied almost at random as I came to them in my study.  The number could easily have been doubled, even tripled.

(1.) “There can be little doubt that the roots of the ideas contained in this term [i.e., “logos”] are to be sought in the O. T.” (Ross, p. 135).

(2.) “[Philo’s] misty, vague philosophizing is worlds away from John’s concrete, historical outlook on the personal Logos, who from times eternal was with God and who became flesh in Jesus Christ.  The theory that John derived the term Logos from Philo is very wide of the mark; there is no real evidence that John had ever heard of Philo.  It is just as wide of the mark to regard John as having derived this term from Greek philosophy” (Ross, 136).

(3.) “But, though [John] would not have been unmindful of the associations aroused by the term, his essential thought does not derive from the Greek background.  His Gospel shows little trace of acquaintance with Greek philosophy and less dependence upon it.  And the really important thing is that John in his use of Logos is cutting clean across one of the fundamental Greek ideas.  The Greeks thought of the gods as detached from the world, as regarding its struggles and heartaches and joys and tears with serene divine lack of feeling.  John’s Logos does not show us a God who is serenely detached, but a God who is passionately involved.  The Logos speaks of God’s coming where we are, taking our nature upon Himself, entering the world’s struggle, and out of this agony winning men’s salvation”  (Morris, pp. 116-17).

(4.) “[T]he “Word” irresistibly turns our attention to the repeated “and God said” of the opening chapter of the Bible.  The Word is God’s creative Word (v. 3).  The atmosphere is unmistakably Hebraic”  (Morris, pp. 117-18).

(5.) “[W]e find that in other biblical authors, as well as in John, the word [i.e., “Logos”] is never used to signify the divine Reason or Mind; nor indeed those of any human creature”  (Alford, p. 677).

(6.) [Comparing Philo and John] “There is a wide and unmistakable difference between his logos and that of the Apostle” (Alford, p. 679).

(7.)“It would be difficult not to recognize in these first verses an allusion to the beginning of Genesis”  (Godet, John, 243).

(8.)“The term Word, no less than the term in the beginning, serves to recall the narrative in Genesis; it alludes to the expression:  and God said, repeated eight times . . . All these sayings of God John gathers into one single, living word” (Godet, John, 245).

(9.) Logos as reason “is foreign to the N.T.” (Godet, John, 246).

(10.) “The word logos in John, signifies as in the whole Biblical text, word.  In Philo, it signifies, as in the philosophical language of the Greeks, reason.  This simple fact reveals a wholly different starting-point in the use which they make of the term. . .

“In Philo, the existence of the Logos is a metaphysical theorem. .  .God being conceived of as the absolutely indeterminate and impersonal being, there is an impassible gulf between Him and the material, finite, varied world which we behold.  To fill this void, Philo needed an intermediate agent, a second God, brought nearer the finite; this is the Logos, the half-personalized divine reason.  The existence of the Logos in John is not the result of such a metaphysical necessity. God is in John, as in all the Scriptures, Creator, Master, Father.  He acts Himself in the world, He loves it, He gives His Son to it:  we shall even see that it is He who serves as intermediate agent between men and the Son (6: 37, 44) . . . in John everything in the relation of the Logos to God is a matter of liberty and of love, while with Philo everything is the result of a logical necessity. . .

“To the view of Philo, as to that of Plato, the principle of evil is matter; the Jewish philosopher nowhere dreams, therefore, of making the Logos descend to earth, and that in bodily form.  In John, on the contrary, the supreme fact of history is this:  “The Logos was made flesh” (Godet, John, pp. 287, 288).

(11.) “It is not in Greek philosophical usage, however, that the background of John’s thought and language should be sought . . . The true background of John’s thought and language is found not in Greek philosophy but in Hebrew revelation.  The ‘word of God’ in the Old Testament denotes God in action, especially in creation, revelation and deliverance” (Bruce, John, 29).

(12.) “John’s standpoint is that of the Old Testament and not that of the Stoics nor even of Philo”(Robertson, 3, 4).

(13.) “It constantly happens in the history of thought that the same terms and phrases are used by schools which have no direct affinity, in senses which are essentially distinct, while they have a superficial likeness . . . A new teacher necessarily uses the heritage which he has received from the past in order to make his message understood”(Westcott, John, p. xv).

(14.) “It is admitted on all hands that [John’s] central affirmation, ‘the Word became flesh,’ which underlies all he wrote, is absolutely unique.  A Greek, an Alexandrine, a Jewish doctor, would have equally refused to admit such a statement as a legitimate deduction from his principles, or as reconcilable with them” (Westcott, John, xv).

(15.) “Philo and St John, in short, found the same term current, and used it according to their respective apprehensions of the truth.  Philo, following the track of Greek philosophy, saw in the Logos the divine Intelligence in relation to the universe:  the Evangelist, trusting firmly in the ethical basis of Judaism, sets forth the Logos mainly as the revealer of God to man, through creation, through theophanies, through prophets, through the Incarnation. . . In short the teaching of St John is characteristically Hebraic and not Alexandrine” (Westcott, John, pp. xvi-xvii).

 (16.) “We must not overlook the fact that the Gospel of John begins with the same words as the first book of the Old Testament.  If we, like the first Christians of the Diaspora, were accustomed to reading the Old Testament in Greek, this would immediately catch our attention” (Cullmann, p. 250).

(17.) “[T]he Gospel of John did not derive from the widely spread Logos idea a doctrine of general, not exclusively Christian, revelation . . . on the contrary it completely subordinated the extra- and pre-Christian Logos to the one revelation of God in Jesus of Nazareth, and in this way, completely re-formed it”  (Cullmann, 254).

(18.) “If the author takes over many statements about the Logos from Hellenism as well as from the Old Testament, he does not mean to say thereby that the Greeks, for instance, because they spoke of the Logos, already possessed true knowledge.   That would be a modern way of thinking.  This is what the evangelist is saying:  The Greeks spoke of the Logos without knowing him” (Cullmann, 264).

(19.) “The word logos was a current term in Greek philosophy to denote the rational principle in man and, on a cosmic scale, the universal principle which imposed order on the raw material of which the world was made. . . But the background of John’s terminology is properly to be sought in the Old Testament, where the “word” of Yahweh is his will in action”  (Bruce, Message, p. 103).

(20.) “False philosophy was dealing out to the world all kinds of error in regard to God and the modes of the Divine existence.  What darkened reason was thus struggling after when ‘the world by wisdom knew not God,’ John was commissioned to set forth, as God’s own revelation of Himself.  The Evangelist borrowed none of his doctrines from those systems.  But he takes, in this case, a term that had become so universally familiar in the chief philosophies of the world before Christ’s coming, and this Logos that they had spoken of so blindly and ignorantly, he declares unto them” (Jacobus, Notes on the Gospels, p. 21).

In short, the Gospel of John emphasizes Jewish history and piety over philosophy.   It focuses on the story of God’s redemptive works in the world, concerning which we find ourselves somewhere in the middle, somewhere short of the end, when all will be made clear, not to unaided human reason and its metaphysical speculations, but to those regenerate persons whom God has chosen for sight, for hearing, and for belief.  John’s gospel does not assume that Biblical knowing and classical knowing are either the same or interchangeable.  That’s another way of saying that the medieval scholastic wrestling grounds and their Aristotelian rules are not the practice field upon which one discovers the mind of Christ or learns to reproduce it.  Bibliocentric thinking is learned and mastered elsewhere and in other ways.

Excursus II:  John the Baptist

I take it to be a widely accepted belief among Christians, including those who advocate natural theology in the Aristotelian vein, that from even before birth (Luke 1: 41), John the Baptist understood God in Christ (and therefore God Himself) better than did Aristotle.  If so, then the point to remember is that John the Baptist did not know Him.  We have John’s own word on it, twice.  The sinful human darkness into which we all are plunged is so deep and so all-engrossing that even John the Baptist himself did not know God when confronted by Him face-to-face (John 1: 31, 33).

We understate the case merely to say that John the Baptist was not the light (John 1: 8, 21).  It’s worse than that:  Even with his impressive devotion to God, even with his prophetic insight, even with his undaunted holy boldness, and even with his compelling articulation of the message of repentance -- all of which combined to make him famous -- John the Baptist himself did not know the Light (John 1: 31, 33) until it had been divinely pointed out to Him by a miraculous, historical revelation, whereby he actually saw with his own eyes the Holy Spirit descending upon Christ like a dove and (presumably) heard with his own ears the heavenly voice uttering its Divine attestation.  John himself twice admits (John 1: 31, 33) that, before witnessing that divine attestation, he did not know Him, and did not recognize the only One who has seen the Father and made Him known.  But because of that divine sign, that descending Dove and attesting Voice, which replaced John’s ignorance with knowledge, John finally knew and John finally testified (John 1: 34).  Without that miraculous sign, John the Baptist was no better off than the Pharisees, who did not know, and did not recognize, God Himself when He stood directly before them (John 1: 26).  They did not know Him Who alone is the Way, the Truth, and the Life (John 14: 6).  They were human creatures, and, on their own, they could not know Him.  Indeed, even with God Himself plainly and directly before their eyes, they did not know Him.  Apart from His saving grace, no one can and no one does.  In their depraved and debilitating solidarity, they were stuck on the wrong side of the canyon of impossibility.  They could not know God by their own devices (John 1: 18).  If, despite all their great revelational advantages, both John the Baptist and the Pharisees were blind and could not know God, how then, one wonders, without all those advantages, but with all their debilitations, could Aristotle, the pagan? 

Though he was not the light, John the Baptist was a witness to it.  But he was a witness to it only as a result of Divine intervention, only as a result of miracle.  Even then, his knowledge of God in Christ and his witness to it were partial and vacillating.  Even at the very end of his life, John still needed to ask Jesus if He were the One, or if he, John, ought to continue looking for someone else (Matt. 11: 2-6).  Jesus replied by saying that He was performing the miracles predicted by Isaiah.   Even at the end of his life, John the Baptist was hesitant and unsure.  Please notice that in order to move from his natural condition of ignorance to his position as witness to Christ, John the Baptist required the miraculous action of God.  He required even more miraculous action in order to keep that witness strong and well directed.  Without miracle(s) John did not know Him, and without miracle(s) John could not maintain his witness to Him.  Knowing God, and staying in that privileged position, required multiple divine actions, even for John the Baptist.  John had to witness the Holy Spirit descending in visible form upon the Son before he knew the very God Who confronted him there, and even after that John had to hear about all the miracles Jesus was performing in fulfillment of Divine prophecy.  Short of those miracles, even John the Baptist did not know, could not know, and could not maintain, what we all need to know, namely God, Who is revealed only in Christ (Matt. 11: 27).

Please remember for whom this impossibility loomed so large.  Please remember what sort of person was stranded on the island of humanly impenetrable ignorance of the Divine.  It was not simply some typological everyman; it was the best and highest of us all:  not just a prophet, but one whom Jesus said was “more than a prophet” (Matt. 11: 9).  We have it on the Highest Authority that John the Baptist was simply the greatest of us all (Matt. 11: 11).  Yet, even the greatest among us is less than the lowest member of the Kingdom of Heaven (Matt. 11: 11).  The momentous God-caused shift from John the Baptist’s (and our) natural condition to knowledge of God indicates that only by means of God’s doing, not ours, do we desperate sinners get placed above even the highest and best of human creatures.  Only then do we get to know God.

If the greatest among us required such remarkable Divine doings both in the beginning and in the sustaining of his knowing God, then how much more does Aristotle need it, and how much greater is Aristotle’s darkness because he had neither of John the Baptist’s advantages?  Yet, despite that Aristotelian darkness, so many Christians turn to him for theological methods, rubric, support, insight, and apologetics.  Jesus was no theological Aristotelian.  Neither was Paul.  Nor should you be.    

From the highest to the lowest, each one of us finds himself or herself in the position of Jacob and his ignorance:  “Surely the Lord is in this place and I did not know it” (Gen. 28: 16).  For this ignorance, Aristotle’s machinations are no cure; they are one more form of its many symptoms.

Excursus III:  “Heard,” “Seen,” “Handled” (I John 1: 1-3)

         In the opening verses of his first epistle, the apostle John further distances himself from the Stoic logos by asserting that his message is based upon what he himself, and others, have heard with their own ears, seen with their own eyes, and touched with their own hands  (vv. 1-3) -- things no Stoic would say about their logos and which Aristotle would not say about his uncaused cause, his unmoved mover, or his self-thought thought.

         The apostles' tangible and visible encounter with the divine was something to which they had given witness from the beginning:  “We cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard,” they testified to the Sanhedrin (Acts 4: 20).  It was a way of thinking and learning they gathered from Jesus Himself when, frightened by his post-resurrection appearance to them He said:  “Handle me and see; for a spirit has not flesh and bones as you see that I have” (Luke 24: 39).  Handling the flesh-and-bones body of the Logos is hardly a Stoic notion, hardly an idea related to Greek natural theology, and is indeed thoroughly inimical to it.  Similarly, while Aristotle saw what he deemed were physical evidences, or consequences, of the uncaused caused and the unmoved mover, he would have ardently objected to any idea that that cause and that mover could themselves be physically and tangibly encountered, just their effects.  That the Stoic logos might become flesh, or that the uncaused caused and the unmoved mover could do so, was utterly unthinkable to those whose notions they were -- though not to some of today’s Christians, who have kidnapped those pagan ideas and made them serve a purpose for which they are ill-suited and were never intended.

         The tangible, audible, and visible manifestations to which the apostles had access were the sorts of epistemological advantages that Aristotle so highly valued.  He valued the human powers of perception and the deductions made logically from them.  With the world his uncaused cause or unmoved mover allegedly produced, Aristotle had plenty of direct contact.  Of that cause and mover behind the world, he had none, nor could have.  That notion he deemed impossible.  But precisely what was impossible in his system -- direct sensory contact with the divine (and not just with the world Aristotle’s "divine" allegedly made) -- that is what John here and elsewhere so boldly asserts:  Aristotelian and Stoic impossibilities are historical realities.  Christianity begins precisely where philosophical possibilities end.  No bridge can span the gap between a logically impossible human incarnation (Aristotelian and Stoic), on the one hand, and a demonstrably human and historical manifestation (Christian), on the other.  No synthesis between true and false, real and unreal, yes and no, is here possible.  You must pick one or the other.  The impossible is not possible; the true is not false; no is not yes.  They cannot both be made to serve the same affirmation without doing violence either to one concept , or the other, or both.  Nevertheless, what Aristotle himself (and the Stoics themselves) considered impossible has been simply overlooked or overruled by their later Christian adherents, who have removed those limits and ignored those implications whenever it suited them.  They want Aristotle, but they do not want Aristotle.

         According to A. E. Brooke, John’s announcement in these verses “is no new discovery.  The revelation began with creation.  It was continued in the history of the nations and the People, in the work of the Prophets, Psalmists, Legislators.  It culminated in the earthly life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth” (Brooke, p. 1), assertions that Aristotle himself, the very one who knew his own system best, considered impossible.  But what was impossible to Aristotle is affirmed by his later Christian devotees.  That affirmation undermines the integrity both of Aristotle’s teachings and the Bible’s.  Aristotle says that direct, sense-based, contact with the divine is impossible.  The Bible says we’ve had it for centuries.