Scripture as Principium or Foundation of Theology
A. The Scriptural Foundation of the Theology of the Reformers: The Perspective of the Reformed Confessions
The logical priority of Scripture over all other means of religious knowing in the church—tradition, present-day corporate or official doctrine, and individual insight or illumination—lies at the heart of the teaching of the Reformation and of its great confessional documents. Indeed, it is the unanimous declaration of the Protestant confessions that Scripture is the sole authoritative norm of saving knowledge of God. The Reformed confessions, moreover, tend to manifest this priority and normative character by placing it first in the order of confession, as the explicit ground and foundation of all that follows.
The more systematically ordered Reformed confessions, the First and Second Helvetic, the Gallican, the Belgic, juxtapose the doctrine of God with the doctrine of Scripture—a pattern followed in the seventeenth century by the
Irish Articles and the Westminster Confession. This confessional pattern holds considerable significance for the development of Reformed theology, since it provides the basic form of the orthodox theological system: the confessions present the cognitive foundation or
principium cognoscendi of revealed theology, the Holy Scriptures, and, based upon Scripture, the essential foundation or
principium essendi of all theology, which is to say, God himself.
1 Without the former, theology could not know the truth of God—without the latter, there could be no theology, indeed, no revelation. The movement of faith from one
principium to the other is noted explicitly by the Belgic Confession: “According to this truth and this Word of God, we believe in one only God who is one single essence, in whom there are three persons, really, truly and eternally distinguished according to their incommunicable properties, namely, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.”
2 Thus, Scripture leads us to the consideration of the unity and trinity of God, specifically of the essential unity and personal trinity of God.
As an examination of these several confessions will demonstrate, there are two ways in which this presentation of
principia may proceed. The most direct path is taken by the First and Second Helvetic confessions and, in the era of orthodoxy, by the Irish Articles and the Westminster Confession: the doctrine of Scripture introduces the confession and the doctrine of God follows. The other path, taken by the Gallican and Belgic Confessions, states in brief the existence of the one God, presents the divine attributes, and then moves to the question of revelation, natural and supernatural, finally reaching the doctrine of the Trinity by way of the doctrine of Scripture. Although the former order may seem to be the simpler, more straightforward approach, there are two significant reasons for the latter approach to the doctrines of God and Scripture—one theological and one historical. The theological reason is the intimate relationship of the two
principia: while we cannot know God truly apart from Scripture, the existence of the scriptural revelation also presupposes the existence of God. The Gallican and Belgic standards, therefore, first confess their belief in God and then proceed to the issues of revelation and of the full doctrine of trinity in unity. We observe, also, that both confessions derive their initial statement of belief in God explicitly from Scripture—so that the circle of argument is complete. In the absence of Scripture, human reason could not confess the essential unity or the essential attributes of Almighty God.
The second reason is historical. Before the Reformation, we do not encounter extended discussion of Scripture and certainly not a formal presentation of the doctrine of Scripture as a prologue to theological system. The
Sentences of Peter Lombard, the standard textbook of later medieval theology, began with the doctrine of the Trinity. Aquinas’
Summa and Scotus’ commentaries on the
Sentences have prolegomena in which Scripture is presented as the source of revealed theology, but neither develops a doctrine of Scripture. The development of a doctrine of Scripture belongs to the Reformation—indeed, to the second generation of the Reformation, to writers like Calvin and Bullinger. Even so, most of the early confessions of the Reformers assume the biblical foundation of doctrine but do not state a doctrine of Scripture: the Augsburg Confession, the Confession of Basel, the Confession of Württemberg (1551), written by Johannes Brenz, and Edwardine or Forty-two Articles (1553) of the Church of England all begin with the doctrine of God. The First Helvetic Confession, therefore, is something of an exception to this early pattern and already represents a certain systematizing tendency. The other early confessions simply reflect the shape of the Apostles’ Creed, by moving from God and creation, to salvation, to the articles concerned with the church.
For all of the Reformed confessions, then, the sole foundation of all true knowledge of God is God’s own revelation. There can be no true knowledge of God, indeed, no knowledge of God at all, if God does not manifest himself to his creatures. Not only is human knowledge as it now exists clouded and warped by sin, but even the unfallen reason of the first moments of man’s earthly existence could not have been sufficient to reach out to God unaided by God’s own gracious, self-revealing work of mediation.
3 Of course, the act of creation itself is a movement of holy God toward the creature which, in its completion or result, provides a basis for knowledge of God. We can, therefore, speak of a first form of revelation whereby God makes himself known “in his works, in their creation, as well as in their preservation and control.”
4 God’s universe is set “before our eyes as a beautiful book, wherein all creatures, small and great, serve as signs to lead us to contemplate the invisible things of God, namely, his eternal power and Godhead.”
5 This revelation cannot, however, save mankind from sin—it can only convince sinful mankind of the existence of God and leave the unrepentant world without excuse in its sins.
6
This confession of a revelation of God in and through his works, together with the initial formal confession of the existence of God in his attributes of eternity, incomprehensibility, invisibility, immutability, infinity, omnipotence, omnisapience, justice, and goodness, has led to a criticism of the Reformed confessions themselves as opening the door to a rationalizing natural theology such as would bring the post-Reformation era to an inglorious close at the beginning of the eighteenth century.
7 From this critique we must dissent. Calvin himself had argued a “two-fold knowledge of God” according to which God is known first through the world and through the general revelation recorded in Scripture as Creator and second through the revelation in Christ as Father and Redeemer.
8 Calvin’s contemporaries and the Reformed scholastics were also guided by this distinction, many of them adding to Calvin’s concept the qualification that apart from Christ, God is known as wrathful Judge, not merely as Creator.
9 Calvin and his contemporaries all recognize a non-salvific revelation of God in the natural order—and, from the perspective of faith, can wax eloquent on its fulness, as is the case in many of Calvin’s commentaries on the Psalms.1
0 The critique can, therefore, be dismissed on historical and theological grounds.
Neither does the attempt to force a distinction between Calvin’s views on natural theology and the views expressed in the Reformed confessions make any historical sense. Calvin himself had a hand in the production of the Gallican Confession, and he had access to the Belgic Confession some two years prior to his death. In addition, the final editor of the Belgic Confession, Francis Junius, was one of Calvin’s most eminent students. We have no evidence that Calvin saw any problem with the language or theology of either document or that he viewed these confessions or their authors with anything but approbation.
While there is no foundational status given to natural theology in either the Reformed confessions or in the theology of the Reformers generally, both the confessions and the dogmatic systems acknowledge the presence of a revelation of God in the created order. What is more, this revelation is recognized differently by the regenerate and the unregenerate: the unregenerate mind encounters the revelation of God in nature and fashions not a true description of God but blasphemies and idols; the regenerate or elect, however, see God clearly through the “spectacles” of Scripture, which make sure and certain their knowledge of God as Creator.1
1 There is, therefore, a regenerate view of the created order which, by the grace of God and with the aid of Scripture, recognizes the revelation of God in the created order for what it is—a manifestation of the greatness and goodness of God to his eternal glory.
This means that there are two levels on which the confessional statements concerning natural revelation must be read. On the first level, the confessions declare to the community of faith the Christian perception of the world as an open book declaring the glory of the God and Father of Jesus Christ. The initial declarations of the Belgic and Gallican Confessions are not intended to present the being and attributes of God as known to naked reason but as confessed by the church in faith. Similarly, the church confesses in faith that God is truly manifest in his works. But the church also confesses that this knowledge of God as Creator is utterly insufficient for salvation. Thus, on the second level, the church confesses that those who have only the created order are left without excuse. In the same breath, moreover, the confessions praise the clarity of God’s revelation in Scripture and recognize that there alone is saving knowledge of God bestowed. No Reformed confession, therefore, views natural theology as a preparation for revealed theology, since only the regenerate, who have learned from Scripture, can return to creation and find there the truth of God.
The Scripture, upon which true knowledge of God rests, is the Word of God, not a word of man brought into being “by the will of man” but rather the revealed Word of God put in writing at the command of God and through the agency of the Holy Spirit by the prophets and the apostles.1
2 Since the Scriptures are the “true Word of God” and have “sufficient authority of themselves”, they supersede all human authority in “the confirmation of doctrines” and “the confutation of all errors.1
3 No authority stands above Scripture except the authority of God himself. Even the great ecumenical symbols of the church, the Apostles’ and Nicene creeds, have authority only insofar as they reflect the truth of Scripture.1
4
It is theologically incorrect and historically inaccurate to claim, as some recent writers have done, that the Reformers and the earliest of the Reformed symbols make a distinction between Jesus Christ as the only true Word of God and the Scriptures as Word in the derivative sense of witness to the incarnate Word. Nor can it be argued that any of the confessions—not even the
Articles of the Synod of Bern (1532)—so identify revelation with Word and Word with Jesus Christ as to exclude any revelation of God outside of Christ.1
5 Both the Reformers and the confessions use the term “Word” with reference to Christ and to Scripture, recognizing that the identity of Christ as the incarnation of the eternal Word and Wisdom of God in no way diminishes but instead establishes the status of Scripture as Word.1
6 Thus Scripture is definitively Word, but not exclusively so. Word is, first of all, the eternal Word of God, the personal and archetypal self-knowledge of God. Second, Word is the unwritten revelation of God given to the prophets and the apostles. Third, it is the Word written and, fourth, it is the inward Word of the Spirit which testifies to the heart of truth of Scripture.1
7
1 Cf.
principia theologiae s.v. in Richard A. Muller,
A Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms: Drawn Principally from Protestant Scholastic Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1985), hereinafter
DLGT, with the discussion
PRRD, I,
9.3.
2 Belgic Confession, VIII, in Schaff,
Creeds, III.
3 Calvin,
Institutes,
II.xii.1.
4 Gallican Confession, II, in Schaff,
Creeds, III.
5 Belgic Confession, II.
6 Belgic Confession, II; Westminster Confession,
I.1, in Schaff,
Creeds, III.
7 Gallican Confession, II; Belgic Confession, II; cf. Barth,
CD, II/1, p.
127 with idem,
The Knowledge of God and the Service of God according to the Teaching of the Reformation, trans. J. L. M. Haire and Ian Henderson (London: Hodder and Stoughton), p. 57.
8 Calvin,
Institutes,
I.ii.1;
vi.1;
II.vi.1; and cf. Edward A. Dowey,
The Knowledge of God in Calvin’s Theology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), pp. 41–49. On the limitations of this theme in Calvin see Richard A. Muller,
Unaccommodated Calvin, pp. 133–138.
9 See Richard A. Muller, “ ‘
Duplex cognitio Dei in the Theology of Early Reformed Orthodoxy,’ ” in
Sixteenth Century Journal, X/2 (1979), pp. 51–61.
10 Cf. Calvin’s commentary on
Psalm 19:1–6 (
CTS Psalms, I, pp. 308–316) with the commentary on
Psalm 104:1–4 (
CTS Psalms, IV, pp. 145–147).
11 Calvin,
Institutes,
I.v.4–5; with
I.vi.1.
12 Belgic Confession, III.
13 Second Helvetic Confession, I.i–iii, in Schaff,
Creeds, III.
14 Gallican Confession, V.
15 Contra Jan Rohls,
Reformed Confessions: Theology from Zurich to Barmen, trans. John Hoffmeyer, intro. by Jack Stotts (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998), p. 29.
16 Cf. Calvin,
Institutes,
I.vi.2–4;
vii.1;
ix.3;
xiii.7.
17 See:
verbum internum and
testimonium internum Spiritus Sancti in
DLGT; for a brief description the fourfold paradigm of Word, and further, Richard A. Muller, “Christ—the Revelation or the Revealer? Brunner and Reformed Orthodoxy on the Doctrine of the Word of God,” in
Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, vol. 26/3 (Sept. 1983), pp.
311–315.
