Bible, Theology & Philosophy

A Reply to Mark Snoeberger

Mark,

Thank you for your interaction with a recent Nick of Time essay on your weblog. My piece was on the necessity of not singing some songs, and your response pointed out the covenantal nature of church membership. I don’t think that there is much real disagreement between us, and I was minded not to spend time on a reply. Evidently, however, your response has attracted a bit of attention around the internet, and I think it might be well to draw attention to the points at which we emphasize things differently.

I should say that I appreciate the concerns you are raising and understand the idea at their center. We live in an age when the covenantal nature of church membership is not taken nearly seriously enough. The last thing that I would want to do is to undermine it any further.

Still, I think that your concerns are unnecessary in this instance. Let me give three reasons why.

First, I think your analogy between eating and singing leads to an equivocation of the term “unhealthy.” In what sense does your wife think that hamburgers are unhealthy? Surely not in the sense that they are poison. Hamburgers are food. If you are starving, they can keep you alive. When she says that they are unhealthy, what she means is that they are not as good for you as some other food might be.

Some hymnody is unhealthy—or less healthy—in exactly this sense. It is not false. It is not overtly demeaning to God. It is simply second-rate (or third, or fourth, or fifth). For example, the better productions of the gospel song era probably fit into this classification. I will sing most of these songs, though I constantly find myself thinking of hymns that could have served the purpose better.

All knowledge begins with divine revelation. The great axiom of all rationality is that God is and that He has spoken. Unless our sensations and perceptions are rightly interpreted—unless they are fit into the correct framework of relationships—then they prove either unintelligible or misleading. In order to know, facts must be connected to other facts, to values, and to persons. Revelation gives us the framework, the great interpretive scheme within which all facts, values, and persons may be assigned their proper meaning.

Revelation does not point out to us all of the details of the world. It leaves plenty of room for the human impulse toward exploration and argumentation. Nor does it guarantee that, when we interpret facts within its framework, every interpretation will be correct. What it does is to provide a foundation upon which we can build and a set of parameters or boundaries upon which our understanding of reality must not encroach.

We cannot argue about axioms. That God is and that God has spoken are first truths. There is no proving them. Either we begin with a commitment to these truths or we begin falsely.

Nor do we need to argue about them. Through revelation, God has brought Himself near to us. He has made Himself both available and comprehensible. He has revealed, not merely propositions, but Himself. He has presented Himself to humanity in an obvious way (Rom. 1:19).

To be sure, God’s self-disclosure is not exhaustive. How could it ever be? God is an infinite person. His intricacy, wisdom, and glory are manifold and beyond comprehension. Even though He is utterly simple as to His being, the divine simplicity surpasses the ability of our minds to grasp. He is not merely more of the same thing that we are—a kind of Übermensch. He is something other than we are.

Yet in His self-disclosure, what He reveals is true. He made our minds knowing exactly how He would present Himself to us, and His self-presentation is designed so that our knowledge of Him will be genuine, even if partial. God never misleads us with respect to Himself.

Republished with permission from Dr. Reluctant. In this series, Dr. Henebury responds to a collection of criticisms of dispensationalism entitled “95 Theses against Dispensationalism” written by a group called “The Nicene Council.” Read the series so far.

Thesis 75

Despite dispensationalism’s “plain and simple” method that undergirds its millennial views, it leads to the bizarre teaching that for 1000 years the earth will be inhabited by a mixed population of resurrected saints who return from heaven with Jesus living side-by-side with non-resurrected people, who will consist of unbelievers who allegedly but unaccountably survive the Second Coming as well as those who enter the millennium from the Great Tribulation as “a new generation of believers” (Walvoord).

Response: The “former dispensationalists” among their number ought to have been able to explain this “problem” to their brethren on the Council.

1. Concerning the “unaccountability” of unbelievers in the Millennium, Robert Thomas writes: “the battle of 19:19-21 resulted in death for all those not faithful to the Messiah. However, the redeemed but nonglorified population on earth survives the battle, enters the Millennium (cf. 11:13, 12:13-17), and reproduces offspring some of whom do not become saved as they mature. These unredeemed will comprise Satan’s rebellious army at the Millennium’s end.” (Revelation 8-22: An Exegetical Commentary, 410-411)

To the question of whether moderns know more than their predecessors, Richard Weaver (one of the three fathers of modern conservatism) responded by noting that “everything depends on what we mean by knowledge.” Then he offered this observation: “[T]here is no knowledge at the level of sensation.” From the perspective of anyone who is not a modernist, Weaver has to be right.

Sensory stimulation alone conveys no knowledge. Sensation alone is meaningless. Sensations do not even register in the consciousness until they have been construed. The act of construal is an interpretive act in which a sensation is connected to other sensations within a web of meaning. Humans never know a thing simply as it is: they know the thing only as it has been interpreted.

The universe has a structure in which everything is related to everything else. If the mind were utterly tabula rasa, no amount of sensation could ever lead to knowledge. Knowledge requires correct interpretation, and correct interpretation requires an interior, mental structure that matches the outer structure of reality—if not in its details, at least in its outlines.

Only one Mind fully comprehends the structure of the universe. It comprehends, not because it has exhaustively studied the universe, but because it planned the universe. Its knowledge is not derivative and inferential, but immediate and intuitive. It never studies and never learns, but simply knows. That Mind is God’s mind.

Consequently, we can speak of reality existing at three levels. One is the external reality of the universe in which all objects and events are related to one another in causal, moral, and personal ways. That reality, however, is secondary and derivative. It exists only because of a prior reality that exists in the mind of God. What God thinks constitutes the pattern, what He creates (or allows to be done) becomes the copy.