a) The Influence of Ground-Motives in the Development of Society⤒🔗

Shortly after the end of the Second World War, F. S. C. Northrop, Professor of Philosophy and Law in Yale University, published his book, The Meeting of East and West, in which he took as his central theme the conflict of ideals and ideologies in the modern world, especially those between East and West, and called for a new and imaginative approach to this intractable subject:

A new kind of attitude and a new type of scholarship are required. We must open our intuitions and imaginations, even our souls, to the possibility of insights, beliefs and values other than our own; and we must bring scholarship to bear upon the world's problems as a whole, seeing local provincial factors in relation to one another and this whole. Such a scholarship will make mistakes, but these are less dangerous than those which result from ignoring the problem.¹

Northrop is convinced that there is a problem and that the methods of scholarship are applicable to it. He tells us at the outset what he thinks this problem is and how he proposes to deal with it:

Each major nation or cultural group in the war and peace of our contemporary world, both Western and Oriental, must be examined and analysed to bring out into the open the particular moral, religious, economic and political doctrine from which it proceeds traditionally. In each instance also an attempt must be made to determine the evidence which led its founders to regard its particular ideology as the correct one. When this is done, certain nations or cultures will probably be found to rest on different but compatible assumptions and ideals; others upon diverse and contradictory ideals. In the case of diverse but compatible cultures the task will then be that of correctly relating the compatible elements of the two cultures by enlarging the ideals of each to include those of the other so that they reinforce, enrich and sustain rather than convert, combat and destroy each other. Between diverse and contradictory doctrines, as, for example, Anglo-American and Russian economic theory, the problem will be to provide foundations for a new and more comprehensive theory, which without contradictions will take care, in a more satisfactory way, of the diverse facts which generated the traditional incompatible doctrines. It is with this complex, difficult, but interesting undertaking, including the major task of relating correctly the East and the West, that this book is concerned.²

Here, plainly stated, were the two assumptions which governed Northrop's whole inquiry, and, once granted, enormously simplified his task. He assumed that each "nation and cultural group" does have a "particular moral, religious, economic, and political doctrine from which it proceeds traditionally"; and that there is a peculiarly close relation, almost an identity, between the moral, religious, economic, and political doctrines of any society, and between all of these and its art. If he could exhibit the precise nature of this relation, he believed that he would have discovered not only a method of interpreting cultures but also a criterion for deciding their value.

Clearly some such criterion is urgently needed, if there is to be any reconciliation of the conflicting ideals, value systems, and ideologies which today threaten to bring about the third world war which will destroy us all. But how can we find a criterion that is not purely subjective?

The difficulty as it presented itself to Northrop is that an ideal, or, to use his own term, a "normative social theory," cannot be verified simply by an appeal to the social facts. These will tell us only how society presently exists, not how it ought to be organized.

He asks the question:

But if correspondence with the social facts is not the criterion of the truth of an ideology, how then can its truth be determined? It would seem that we must have some factual criterion for de­termining the validity of one social ideal rather than another, and yet the character of any normative social theory is such that the failure of social facts to conform to it is in considerable part irrelevant to its validity.³

This is the "paradox" of all purely secular social thought, and it is familiar to all students of modern economics, sociology, and political science. Northrop's originality lies in offering a not less paradoxical solution. Normative social theories, he claims, are indeed verifiable, but the facts which verify them are not those of social science. They are those of natural science.

It follows that the relation between the moral, religious, economic, and political doctrines of a society is one of joint dependence on the science of that society, or rather on the philosophy of that society, which is itself based on its science. Thus Northrop writes:

The normative social theory embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States was determined in considerable part by the philosophy of John Locke. The manner in which the culture of the Church of England goes back to Hooker and Aristotle is equally obvious. Thus an analysis of diverse cultures shows that whereas the formal and empirical methods of natural science applied to social facts is the correct procedure for determining trust-worthy factual social theory, it is the method of philosophy applied to the verified theory not of social science, but of human and natural science, to make articulate one's philosophical conception of man and the universe, which constitutes the correct method for determining trust-worthy normative social theory.⁴

Northrop's method is most fully exemplified in his chapters on "The Free Culture of the United States" and "Roman Catholic Culture and Greek Science," the former based on the philosophy of Locke and the physics of Newton, the latter on the physics and metaphysics of Aristotle.

It is the conviction of the writer that a solution to the normative problem does not lie in an appeal to the "facts" of natural science, as Northrop supposes, but in recognizing the existence of a pre-theoretical realm of presuppositions, which every sociologist brings to his science, the realm of the assumptions and axioms which he takes for granted before he even begins to sociologize. Western scientists along with Western philosophers have assumed that theoretical and scientific thought in the very nature of the case is an autonomous "neutral" activity based upon a supposed universality of reason. Yet this so-called universality of reason itself contains a great problem. If all philosophical and scientific schools choose their points of departure in reason alone and not in deeper presuppositions, it ought to be possible to convince an opponent in a purely theoretical way that his arguments are true or false. But what actually happens is that philosophers and scientists reason at cross purposes; a scientist of the Thomist school, for example, can never succeed in convincing one of the Kantian or operational school. In reality the universality of reason is itself an uncritically accepted dogma, cloaking diverse supra-theoretical points of departure.

In Northrop's methodology, we see a good illustration of Hegelian logic at work, namely, in his attempt to resolve conflicting points of view in terms of a higher synthesis. He supposes that in such a dialectical line of thinking not a single antithesis can have an absolute character since truth itself is relative. Philosophy then has the task of bridging the antithetical gap between the various value-systems and ideologies of the modern world.

Such a "dialectical way of thought" which already appeared in Greek classical philosophy, does not wish to remain content with synthesizing logically determined opposites such as that between motion and rest. It attempts to reconcile these contrasting theses in a higher unity. This higher unity must then be the synthesis, the union, between thesis and antithesis. Thus Plato, for example, found the higher synthesis of motion and rest in the idea of being; because it can be said alike of both that they really are.

Now it is certainly true that motion and rest often appear together in combination in concrete temporal reality. The antithesis taken in this merely theoretical-dialectical sense is, therefore, nothing but a logical pulling apart of that which in reality belongs together. If you wish to obtain an understanding of motion, it is necessary to distinguish it logically from rest.

However, this logical understanding must not lead to a separation. Such an antithesis must indeed acknowledge a higher synthesis.

The dialectical method of thought, therefore, proceeds on the assumption that the contrasting theses which it wishes to synthesize into a higher unity do not have an absolute, but merely a relative character. The ideas which have been set over against each other then appear, upon more profound reflection, to have a mutual relation in which the one cannot exist without the other. Without anything which is thought to be in rest, no motion could ever be determined and vice versa.

From this it should be clear that such a dialectical way of thought, which by means of logical contrasting theses searches for a higher synthesis, is a valid logical method of thought only as long as it concerns itself with relative contrasting theses. As such it has a mere theoretical character and can, provided it is used rightly, make plain to us that nothing in temporal life is absolute. In so far Northrop is only concerned with such relative matters we can agree with his method.

However it must be an entirely different case with the antithesis which Christianity has posited in the world. This antithesis can never be taken up into any higher synthesis without at once losing its absolute character. Biblical religion alone claims to reveal to man his origin in the absolute God, Creator of Heaven and earth. As such the Bible can never compromise its claims by admitting another god alongside its God. The biblical antithesis cannot accept a theoretical synthesis between the Christian starting point and the standpoints set over against this one, for it claims an absolute character. As Herman Dooyeweerd says:

Is it not true that if it is to come to a real synthesis between standpoints which are antithetically set over against each other, a higher starting-point is necessary – one that is elevated above these two opposing camps and which includes both of them? But where would one have to look for this higher starting-point with regard to two opposing religious standpoints, which precisely on account of their religious character raise themselves above the sphere of that which is relative? In philosophy? But philosophy as such is always of a theoretical character and continues to be bound to the relative character of all human thought. In so far as philosophy itself is in need of an absolute starting-point it can derive this only from religion, which even to theoretical thought can provide the only sure ground.⁵

To Northrop's claim to find the starting point in scientific thought itself Dooyeweerd rightly replies:

Even they who think they have found their absolute starting-point in theoretical thought itself have come to this opinion by an essentially religious drive, which simply for lack of true self-knowledge remains concealed from them.

For that which is absolute has right of existence only in religion. A true religious starting-point must claim absoluteness, if it is not to dissolve itself in relativism. As such it can never be a mere theory, which by definition always remains bound to that which is relative. Behind all theory and science it drills for the sure absolute ground of all temporal and, therefore, of relative existence. The antithesis which it posits must also be absolute.⁶

The disunity of the modern world thus arises out of basic philosophical presuppositions or ground-motives which have determined the moral, religious, economic, and political doctrines of various modern nations and cultures. Of the power of these ground-motives to influence the development of culture and society Dooyeweerd writes:

In every religion one can point out such a ground-motive which is operative in human society as a spiritual force. It is the absolutely central force, because out of the religious life-center, it governs all temporal expressions of life and directs it towards the true or pretended origin of existence.

It determines in the most profound sense the entire outlook on life; it impresses its indelible mark on culture, science, and the social structure of a period … The religious ground-motive of a culture can never be approached from the outlook and personal faith of the individual. It really is a community motive that governs the individual even when he is not conscious of it or even when he does not account for it. But do not be mistaken, it is as such not a possible object of a scientific analysis and elucidation. For the latter never touches the spiritual root of community life, but only its temporal manifestations, not the religious life center, but only its temporally distinguished expressions in feeling, in the way of thought, in artistic expressions, in moral standards, in legal forms, and in faith conception.

Even science in its point of departure is itself governed by a religious ground-motive. Therefore, it can never stand in a neutral position over against this motive.

In the religious ground-motive the godly or the ungodly Spirit in whose service man has placed himself and is performing his assigned part is directly operative. It is this spirit that establishes community, a spirit which is not governed by man, but by which he is governed. For it is precisely religion that reveals to us our profound dependence upon a higher power, in which we look for the sure ground and origin of our existence and which we can never encounter as masters, but merely as servants. The religious ground-motives acquire their central influence on the historical development of mankind by means of the cultural powers which are successfully able to gain the directing influence in the historical process. The most important spiritual powers that have governed the development of Western culture are the spirit of Graeco-Roman civilization, of Christianity, and of modern humanism.⁷

The religious ground-motive which dominated classical culture and science, Dooyeweerd has termed the "form-matter" motive. The motive underlying modern humanism he calls the "nature-freedom" motive. A third motive is that of "nature" and "grace," introduced by medieval Roman Catholic scholasticism as an attempted synthesis between the biblical motive of "sin" and "grace" and the Greek motives of "form-matter," but which in modern times has also been directed to a synthesis between the Christian and humanistic "nature-freedom" motive.

Under the influence of the Greek form-matter motive the Roman Catholic Church came to think of man as an individual substance of a rational nature. Likewise it took over from Aristotle the Greek concept of nature, so that Aquinas could say that "Grace does not abolish Nature but perfects it." In the Roman Catholic view, man, as a natural being, is composed of a "rational soul" and a "material body." And the "rational soul," defined as the capacity to think logically, is the invisible "essential form" of the body.

Roman Catholics believe that God, at man's creation, added to this a "super-natural gift of grace," by which he would be able to remain in right communion with God. But this "super-natural gift of grace" was lost at the Fall, so that fallen man had to depend entirely on "human nature," with all the weaknesses attached to it. This "nature," which is guided by the natural light of reason, has not been corrupted by sin, and therefore does not have to be restored by Christ. It has only been "weakened" by the Fall. It continues to follow the "law of nature" with which it has been endowed at the creation, and possesses an "autonomy," a relative self-sufficiency, over against the sphere of grace of the Christian religion. "Nature," is only brought to a higher state of perfection by "grace," a grace which flows to it from Christ by means of the priestly hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church.

It is apparent that this "nature-grace" ground-motive is completely at variance with that of creation, Fall, and redemption. It introduces a split into the creation motive by its distinction between natural and supernatural, and it restricts the effect of the Fall and redemption to the "supernatural sphere." With that the scriptural ground motive has been deprived in the Church of Rome of its integral and radical character. It can no longer lay hold of a man with its full power and absoluteness. It has been broken by the opposition of the Greek conception of nature in its supposed "adaptation" to the biblical account of the creation.

In the Roman Catholic doctrine of the relationship between the soul and the body, it is apparent that no room is left for an understanding of the radical significance of the Fall and of man's redemption by Jesus Christ. For, if the soul of man is not the spiritual root-unity of man's entire temporal existence, but only the rational form of a "material body," what possibility is left of a corruption of man in the roots of his being? God's Word plainly teaches that sin does not originate in our intellectual faculty, but in the human heart, in the religious root of our existence.

Likewise the Roman Catholic view of human society is entirely dominated by the "nature-grace" ground-motive. Its view of society has been borrowed from Aristotle. Man's nature, according to Aristotle, is thought of as a composition of form and matter. In this case "form" is the rational soul, and "matter" is the material body, which comes into being only through the soul. Every creature that is composed of form and matter has become or has come to be. The form principle gives to the process of becoming the direction for the attainment of its proper telos or end. Every creature, including man, strives, by nature after the attainment of its perfection, in that its "essential form" realizes itself in the "matter" of its body. Man can only achieve his true end in the complete development of his rational nature, which distinguishes him from plants and animals.

The "rational law of nature" has been created as part of this "rational nature" and commands him to do good and refrain from evil. Thus man by nature strives after good according to Roman Catholic teaching. Such teaching is diametrically opposed to the biblical revelation of the radical corruption of the human heart (Jer. 17:9; Matt. 15:19; Rom. 3:9-17).

According to Roman Catholic social theory, man, however, cannot attain his natural perfection as an isolated individual. He comes into the world naked and helpless, and he must therefore depend upon society to help acquire for himself the necessities of life. Therefore there has been created in man, in accordance with his rational nature, the social instinct which develops itself step by step in the formation of smaller and larger communities which are interrelated as means to the end, as part of the greater whole.

The lowest in this social ordering of human life is the family, and the highest is the state, in which man's social instinct comes to perfection, since all the subordinate communities only fulfill themselves in the state. The state, therefore, in distinction from the other natural forms of society, is the perfect community. It possesses autonomy or self-sufficiency, since it is the highest and most com­prehensive community in the "sphere of nature."

Here also the biblical view of society is in radical opposition to the Roman Catholic view. According to Genesis, God has created everything after its own kind or type. In such a scriptural conception, there is no room for the idea that the state is the perfect community in the natural sphere, which embraces both the individual and the other communities as its parts. For whether or not something is really a part of the whole is determined exclusively by the intrinsic nature of the whole. Thus the city and the county are parts of the state for they have the same intrinsic nature and are ruled by the same intrinsic law of life. For the same reason our hands, feet, and head are really parts of the body, since they are ruled by the intrinsic law of life.

Yet the relationship of the state to the other spheres of life, considered from the scriptural principle of sphere sovereignty, is quite different, for the family, the business, and the golf club differ radically from the state in their inherent structure and nature. Thus the marriage relationship, the family, the school, the church, and the university by their very nature may never be considered parts of the state. For they are principally of a different nature or structural type from that of the state. They each possess sphere sovereignty, the limits of which are not determined by the common good of the state, but by their own inherent nature and law of life.

This does not mean that these social spheres are not bound to the state. But this binding only applies to that which by its very nature belongs to the authority of the state, and not to these remaining spheres. Thus the state may register a marriage, but it may not tell a young lady that she must marry a man chosen by the government.

This great principle of sphere sovereignty, which is based upon the scriptural account of creation, requires for its practical application a closer investigation of the intrinsic structure of the various spheres of life. In this book we shall examine the structure of society in the light of the biblical principle of sphere sovereignty. Unfortunately, in the Roman Catholic view of society it is the Greek nature motive and not the Word of God which controls its thinking about both church and state. According to the Greek conception, the state has its foundation in the rational nature of man. It is necessary to cause the rational form in this human nature to come to its perfect final development or telos and to hold in check the principle of matter that reveals itself in the sensual desires. The state for Roman Catholics is seen as the absolute and total community in the domain of nature, of which all the other spheres are only subservient parts. The relationship between the state and the other natural spheres of life is conceived of as that of the whole to its parts.

The Roman Catholic ground-motive of "nature" and "grace" requires a superstructure of a supernatural character over the natural substructure of human society. Man not only has a natural purpose of life, but a final purpose, by which his reasonable nature can be elevated to the sphere of grace. On this supernatural level, where the eternal salvation of the soul is at stake, the Roman Church calls a halt to the power of the state. The supernatural graces flow into believers only by means of the Roman Catholic institute of the Church. The Church pours this grace into the believer through its sacramental means of grace.

Just as Roman Catholics think of the state as the perfect community in the natural realm, so they think of their Church as the perfect community in the sphere of grace. According to this conception, the institution of the Roman Catholic Church comprises all of Christianity and all of the Christian life. Rome looks for the whole, the total unity of the Christian society in the temporal institute of the Church.

Here also Rome is in radical opposition to the scriptural ground-motive of creation, fall, and redemption. God's Word makes it plain that the real unity of all truly Christian life can be found only in the supratemporal root-communion of the reborn humanity in Jesus Christ. This is the Kingdom of God, which has its basis not in the temporal church institution at all, but in the hearts of all the faithful in Christ. No doubt the church militant here on earth is a temporal revelation of the Body of Christ in its temporal institutional organization as a community of believers. But it does not coincide completely with the Body of Christ. For this reason we should not separate the so-called "visible church" from the "invisible church," since the latter is the religious root of the former. But this temporal manifestation of Christ's Body is not identical with the so-called "invisible church" as the spiritual realm of Jesus Christ, which supersedes time. Rome can make this identification because she believes that the Church in her mystical sense is Christ. But such an idea is contrary to the Scriptures.

As the religious ground-motive governing the development of modern Western culture, humanism arose during the Renaissance. It originated in the religious absolutization of the autonomous hu­man personality combined with a Faustian passion to dominate nature by means of the new science. Humanism asserts the sovereignty and creative freedom of man in this universe. After the Protestant Reformation had destroyed the unity of medieval Christendom, men concerned for the stability of European civilization sought for a new basis for it other than a common church. Their resort was to reason.

Reason, in this humanistic view, is not identical with the mind or with man's understanding. Reason is not only understanding; it is self-directed understanding. It is understanding which is given direction by a fund of a priori, of innate ideas, the lumen naturale (natural light) of Descartes. Where for Christians God's Holy Scripture is the light which directs their walk through life, for the rational humanist the Law of God becomes the law within. It is now proclaimed that every man has the truth and the light within his deepest self, and only a universal system of education and universal political suffrage is required to bring this truth out in our lives. The characteristics of these innate truths are universality and necessity, which means that the truth and light which each man has within himself is universally the same. The roots of our seeing the light and understanding the truth are everywhere the same.

This religious faith in human reason found expression in a common natural law, a common natural morality, and a common rational core of religious ideas. Thus Herbert of Cherbury spoke in his De Veritate of the "common notions" underlying all religions, and Hugo Grotius worked out a new basis for international relations in human reason rather than in God's Will. While acknowledging that man has been gifted with reason by God, Grotius draws the conclusion from this that it will automatically yield good results if man works with his reason, because God created reason good and capable of correct conclusions. And with this the autonomy of reason has been accepted in principle; the law for Grotius becomes a law-of-reason, severed from its divine origin and standard. He writes in De lure Belli et Pacis:

What we have been saying would have a degree of validity even if we should concede that which cannot be conceded without the utmost wickedness, that there is no God, or that the affairs of men are of no concern to him.⁸

To Grotius this is no final breach with the divine origin of law.

For, God himself having created reason, the law-of-reason conforms to the law as God willed it. This, however, does not render the step he took less decisive; the center of gravity has been placed in human reasoning rather than in God's Word which henceforth becomes the ultimate standard in Western legal and political and economic thought and behavior. In modern humanism man's divine vocation to subject nature and his freedom in Christ thus became secularized. This new nature-freedom ground-motive lies at the basis of the dialectical polarity between individualism and collectivism in modern social and political thought.

Refusing to be directed by the Word of God in their political and social life, Western men for the last three hundred years have instead acted upon the religious presupposition that their rational faculties can produce a common conception of law and social order which possesses a universal validity. This natural law or law of human rational nature is a rational order of human society "in the sense that all men," as Walter Lippman writes in The Public Philosophy, "when they are sincerely and lucidly rational, will regard as self-evident."⁹ Of this new governing concept of Western so­ciety, Evan Runner says:

Humanism was nothing less than an alternative answer (to Christianity) to the fundamental questions of man's life. Instead of seeing man as a religious being (in his wholeness), whose meaning can only be sensed in his covenantal relation to God and His Law, humanism saw man as a rational-moral being, as one who has within himself, in his very structure, quite apart from how he stands before God, a right reason or proper guide to life, a true knowledge of the Law. Where Christianity sees the possibility of a two-fold response (in religious terms obedience or disobedience) to the word-revelation of God, humanism sees the unity of all men in their being directed by Reason, which for it, is always and everywhere the same, the common structure of all men…

Humanism always puts fundamental emphasis on "the common." It may be, in the rationalist phase of humanism, the commonness of Reason, or it may be the common existentialia, or our common commitment to scientific method in the sense of operationalism. But there is always this peculiar and troublesome thing about humanism: it fails to see the religious commitment that is involved in its starting-point, and thus identifies its own private and subjective faith with the common, i.e., objective, and public or universal a priori structure of Reason. Other men's faiths are subjective, partisan, and private; its own is objective, universal and public. It was a sad day when Christians began to buy that bill of goods and accommodate themselves to the "spirit" of the modern age. For thus there developed the view that a man's Christianity was to be limited to the private sphere of subjective opinion whereas the public order of Europe was to be constructed out of the principles of the universally binding natural law, or the natural light of Reason.¹⁰

Part of the responsibility for this development must be ascribed to the divisions within Western society caused by the conflict between the Church of Rome and the Churches of the Reformation. No longer able to find an order of universal agreement based on a common confession in God's Holy Scriptures as the ordering principle of Western life, many leading thinkers instead tried to build a stable European society upon such principles as could be acknowledged readily by every nation, creed, and sect. The ancient Stoic theory of universal and necessary truths of reason, a secularized form of natural law theory, offered itself as the only hope of salvation. The foundation of European culture was now asserted to rest in the a priori ideas of every man in his capacity as a rational rather than religious being instead of in God's Word.¹¹

Just as the Greek form-matter motive has profoundly affected the development of Roman Catholic life and thought about man and society, so the modern humanist nature-freedom motive has determined the direction taken by modern Protestantism. Since the Reformation a tendency has developed in Protestant theology to deny any point of contact between man's "natural" life and God's grace in Jesus Christ.

In the twentieth century this contrast reached its climax in the dialectical theology of Karl Barth. In his famous debate with Emil Brunner called "Nature and Grace" and published in English as Natural Theology, Barth explicitly rejected any point of contact between the Christian faith and natural life. "Nature" and "grace" separated by a fatal line. He had pierced the Roman Catholic synthesis to its central core.

While Rome has accepted the Greek view of nature by accommodating it to the creation motive of the Scriptures, Karl Barth simply turns his back upon, the creation motive altogether. For him, it is completely vindicated by the motives of the fall and redemption in Jesus Christ. Barth will have nothing to do with the creation-ordinances which might act as directives for our "natural life." The fall, according to Barth, has so completely corrupted human "nature" that the knowledge of the creation-ordinances has been utterly lost.

Unlike Barth, Brunner accepts the creation ordinances as valid expressions of "common grace," but he depreciates them by viewing them in dialectical conflict with the divine law of love as the "Gebot der Stunde" (the law of the present moment). The creation-ordinances, precisely because of their universal character, are cold and formal. They are the realm of the law, which Brunner contrasts with the Christian's freedom in Christ, who is set free from the law. The "law" as the frigid framework, within which God has shut up sinful human nature, must be overcome by the evangelical law of love, which knows no universal norm but only a command for the immediate situation. The creation-ordinances, though given by God, do not as law express the actual will of God, who only reveals Himself in Christlike love. For Brunner the Body of Christ has nothing institutional about it.

For this reason Brunner teaches that the state is a worldly order. It is sinful in its very essence since it is supposed to remain necessarily caught in a dialectical tension with the Christian commandment of love and the idea of true communion. For Brunner, a Christian state is thus a contradiction in terms.

This dialectical theology clearly arises from Brunner's irrationalistic humanist standpoint. Unable to develop a truly scripturally motivated doctrine of society, Brunner uncritically relapses into a synthesis with the modern "nature" and "freedom" motive by accepting in principle the dialectical basic problem of this modern religious ground-motive. Falsely, he supposes he can reduce this basic tension between science and free personality to the "basic antithesis" in the biblical view of creation and the fall. At the back of this synthesis emerges the false contrast between nature and grace, which in Brunner's teaching assumes the form of a dialectical tension between the "commandment of love of the moment" and the law or creation ordinances as such. A wedge is thus driven into the ground-motive of the Holy Scriptures, between creation and redemption, between God's will as Creator and as Redeemer.

b) The Problem of the Individual and the Community←⤒🔗

As soon as the individual breaks out of the "closed" condition of primitive undifferentiated tribal society, the problem always arises: how is the individual to be related to the society out of which he has broken free?

Thinkers who make man's reason rather than God's Word the ordering principle of their theorizing have answered this question by falling into the error of individualism or universalism or collectivism. In the history of social thought, there has been a continuous conflict between those views which would make the individual prior to the group of which he is a part and those views which would make the group prior to the individual. In classical Graeco-Roman times, the former view was represented by the school of metaphysical realism or essentialism. The latter view was represented by the nominalistic schools of the Middle Ages. In modern times individualism has tended to be largely psychological. Social groups have been thought to consist of congeries of individuals in their psychical interactions. For this school the actions and decisions of individuals determine social structure and process. Universalistic or collectivistic theories of society, on the other hand, have been associated largely with the irrationalistic, historically oriented idealism which developed out of the teaching of the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant. This historicist type of universalism seeks for some self-sufficient group such as the nation or the state or party in which the individual can discover meaning and purpose to his life. The individual is thought to be embraced in an all-inclusive social group in terms of which he receives his meaning.

1. Universalism←↰⤒🔗

In an attempt to overcome the scepticism of the Greek Sophists, which denied the reality of the Greek City-State, Aristotle developed his doctrine of man as a "political animal." The individual is not essentially isolated nor in conflict with the group, as the Sophists, poets, and dramatists had taught; he is essentially related to the city-state, since it is only in such a group that he can realize his proper and true nature or end as a human being. By himself the individual is incomplete. By nature each person strives towards his own self-realization, and since he cannot attain completion in iso­lation, he is led naturally to attach himself to a group. He is, by reason of his birth, born into a family. His need for self-fulfillment leads him on to membership in his tribe or clan. But these lower societal relationships are not autonomous; only the state can, as the perfectly autonomous community, provide the individual with all that serves the perfection of his rational and moral nature.

Thus the relation between the state and all other societal relationships is constructed by Aristotle according to the scheme of the whole and its parts, of the means to the end, from the "lower" to the "higher." The "lower" relationships, as different kinds of parts of the state, have no goal in themselves, but all exist to serve the interests of the state. Man is by nature a state-oriented being, for already in the forming of marriage, family, kinship groups the natural compulsion to form the state is germinating. The state is implicit in the rational-moral nature of man, as the mature form of a plant is in its seed, or the full-grown body of an animal in its embryo.

During the high Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas carried on the realist tradition, synthesizing elements of the Christian life-and-world-view with that of Aristotle's. Aquinas taught that man only realizes his true "natural" human nature in the state. He viewed the state as the ultimate bond of "natural" human society of which all other associations and communities were only the parts. The state was seen in pagan Greek manner as the totality of all temporal societal relationships in the natural "rational-moral" area of human life. Like Aristotle he believed that all such social relationships are arranged in a hierarchical order with the state being the highest, with the important qualification that it was the highest only within the realm of the "natural." Aquinas looked upon the state as in its turn serving the interests of the church. Man's ultimate end or purpose in life is discovered only in the service of the church. The church was therefore considered to be the total bond of all Christendom, the rule of the realm of grace in its temporal manifestation.

Like Aristotle, Thomas regarded the lower associations of society as related to each other as matter is to form. A lower group is subordinate to a higher group as a means to an end. The individual enjoys only a relative autonomy since he is subject to the state. The state, in its turn, is subject to the church in all matters involving the eternal well-being of the soul. The sufficiency or insufficiency of each group is predetermined in the metaphysical nature of reality. The more inclusive communities have the primacy over the less inclusive communities.

Modern collectivism has two main branches, going back to common roots in European intellectual history; they can be broadly distinguished as those of French rationalism and of German Idealism. In the former tradition we may place Rousseau and Comte; in the latter, Hegel and, in one aspect of his thinking, Karl Marx.

It might be questionable to classify Rousseau as a rationalist, since in many ways he was the fountainhead of Romanticism. However, Rousseau shared in the rationalist conception of a natural order. As Ernst Cassirer has shown in The Myth of the State the basic ideas of his political philosophy are largely to be found in the writings of Locke, Grotius, and Pufendorf. Though on the whole he shared. Locke's conception of the state of nature as one in which each individual had the right to pursue his interests in his own way, Rousseau treated the problem of unifying such discrete individuals to form a political collectivity as a much more positive problem than did the economically oriented individualists in the utilitarian tradition. Rousseau broke through the Hobbes-Locke dilemma, postulating a factor very different from those they had considered, the famous general will. Its difference is made clear by Rousseau's insistence on the distinction between volonte generale and volonte des tous (will of everybody). The general will is generated by a Hobbesian social contract to surrender control of natural rights to an absolute sovereign. The difference is related to the fact that Rousseau's political theory was formulated in the interest of democracy – not as in Hobbes's case of monarchy.

Rousseau found insuperable difficulties in defining an acceptable relationship between his postulated general will and any concrete political institutions which could give expression to it without risking uncontrolled dictatorship by a self-appointed minority or a tyranny of the majority. The difficulties arose from the fact that Rousseau did not consider a basis in societal values and institutionalized norms somehow independent of and underlying the state; he tried to elevate political theory into a general theory of society.

Of Rousseau's totalitarian social philosophy Robert A. Nisbet writes in Community and Power:

What gives uniqueness to Rousseau's doctrine is not so much its severity as its subtle but explicit identification with freedom. What has connoted bondage to the minds of most men is exalted as freedom by Rousseau. To regard the power structure of the State as a device by which the individual is only being compelled to be free is a process of reasoning that sets Rousseau apart from the tradition of liberalism … What Rousseau calls freedom is at bottom no more than the freedom to do what the State in its omniscience determines. Freedom for Rousseau is the synchronization of all social existence to the will of the State, the replacement of cultural diversity by a mechanical equalitarianism. Other writers have idealized such an order in the interests perhaps of justice or of stability, but Rousseau is the first to invest it with the value of freedom. Therein lies the real distinctiveness of his theory of sovereignty.

It is in the bearing of Rousseau's General Will upon traditional society, however, that the full sweep of its totalitarian significance becomes manifest … the object of Rousseau's dislike is society, and the special merit of the State lies in its power to emancipate the individual from traditional society. The relationship among individuals that forms the General Will and is the true State is obviously an exceedingly delicate one. It must be unitary and indivisible for its nature fully to unfold. In short, it must be protected from the operations of extraneous channels of constraint … To achieve a pure sovereignty, one which is untrammeled by social influences, one which will encompass the whole of man's personality, it is necessary that the traditional social loyalties be abrogated. A unified, General Will is incompatible with the existence of minor associations; hence they must be banished…

The proscription of all forms of association except what is identical with the whole being of the State – this is Rousseau's drastic proposal … There is to be no bond of loyalty, no social affiliation, no interdependence save what is symbolized by the General Will. Society is to be an aggregate of atoms held rigidly together by the sovereign will of the State alone.

Nisbet then considers the practical implications of this new apostate humanist social philosophy. For a start it involves the total rejection of Christianity and its replacement by a purely civil religion, for which the sovereign should fix the articles of faith, whose main purpose is the cementing of the social contract.

Respect for the sovereign, allegiance to the State alone, and subordination of all interests to the law of the realm – these are the primary attributes of the civil religion proposed by Rousseau. The symbol of patrie is uppermost; religion and patriotism will be but two aspects of the same thing.

The family itself must be radically adjusted to meet the demands of the General Will since morality is essentially a civic condition. "Create citizens, and you have everything you need." For this purpose the state must take over the function of education from parents. The unitary state in fact calls for a remodeling of human nature so that there shall be no irritants to the body politic. Nisbet continues:

It is necessary to inculcate in the minds of the people from in­fancy the surpassing claim of the State to their loyalty. "If, for example," Rousseau writes, "the people were early accustomed to conceive their individuality only in its connection with the body of the state, and to be aware of their own existence merely as parts of that of the state, they might in time come to identify themselves in some degree with the greater whole." The family should not be granted the all-important duty of education, for too great a responsibility hangs in the balance. The traditional educative function should be transferred from the family to the State, so that, as Rousseau states it, the "prejudices of the father may not interfere with the development of citizens. However, the disintegration of this age-old basis of the family should in no wise create alarm." "Should the public authority, in assuming the place of father and charging itself with this important function, acquire his rights in the discharge of his duties, he should have little cause to protest; for he would only be altering his title, and would have in common, under the name citizen, the same authority over his children, that he was exercising separately under the name of father, and would be no less obeyed when speaking in the name of the law than when he spoke in the name of nature." In this almost incredible statement is to be observed what is surely the ultimate in the totalitarian absorption of society. Fami­ly relationship is transmuted subtly into political relationship; the molecule of the family is broken into the atoms of its individuals, who are coalesced afresh into the single unity of the state. "If the children are reared in common in the bosom of equality, if they are imbued with the laws of the state and the precepts of the General Will, they are taught to respect these above all other things, if they are surrounded by examples and objects which per­petually remind them of the tender mother who nourished them, of the love she bears them, of the inestimable benefits they receive from her, and of the return they owe her, we cannot doubt that they will learn to cherish one another mutually as brothers."

It would be difficult to find anywhere in the history of politics a more powerful and potentially revolutionary doctrine than Rousseau's theory of the General Will. Power is freedom and freedom is power. True freedom consists in the willing subordination of the individual to the whole of the State. If this is not forthcoming, compulsion is necessary; but this merely means that the individual "will be forced to be free" There is no necessity, once the right State is created, for carving out autonomous spheres of right and liberty for individuals and associations. Because the individual is himself a member of the larger association, despotism is impossible. By accepting the power of the State one is but participating in the General Will.

Not without reason has the theory of the General Will been called a theory of permanent revolution. It was Rousseau's subtle achievement to clothe the being of the absolute State in the garments of the terminology of freedom.¹²

In the French tradition of social thought, Rousseau's new note blended with one derived from the conservative thought of writers like De Bonald and De Maistre, who challenged the tradition of the French Revolution and defended the record of the Old Regime. For these conservatives the greatest crimes of the Revolution were those committed not only against individuals but also against the institutions, groups, and associations of the old society. They saw in the Terror no merely fortuitous consequence of war and tyrannic ambition but the inevitable culmination of ideas contained in the rationalistic individualism of the Enlightenment. In this period, the most significant thinker was Auguste Comte. In Comte's theory the concept corresponding to Rousseau's General Will is that of consensus as the essential basis of the cohesion or integration of a society.

According to Comte, the French Revolution was the expression of a spirit which he called metaphysical or critical, and as such it was incapable of rebuilding a social order. The aim which Comte therefore proposed was to establish a social consensus based upon a body of universal beliefs. No society can survive, Comte taught, unless its members have a common scale of values and system of beliefs. These universal, religious beliefs have been destroyed by the metaphysical, critical, and scientific spirit. It is impossible to re-create them in their old form, but it is essential to re-create a system of beliefs which will serve as the basis of a new order. In other words, the French Revolution having been the agent of destruction, we are now in an essentially economic society lacking any religious basis. Having recognized the rise of industry and the French Revolution, we have now to discover the source of a new order which will regulate and guide the functioning of industrial society.¹³

In making science the essential basis of consensus in his final positive stage, Comte approached the position of Godwin in England and other utopian rationalists. While no Christian can accept Comte's account of the basis of integration and of its workings in society, we can applaud him for having posed a problem which had proved essentially insoluble within the utilitarian tradition. He provided, more directly than Rousseau, a fruitful antithesis to laissez faire individualism.

2. Individualism←↰⤒🔗

The ancient world was not altogether given over to universalism. Epicureanism, for instance, was individualistic as well as hedonistic. The later Middle Ages witnessed the breakdown of the great realist and essentialist philosophies and the birth of nominalism. Thus for William of Ockham the concepts of genus and species or the names given to things do not have a real existence apart from the human understanding. All that is known is the individual and the singular, and the process of knowledge is purely intuitional. "This I say," remarks Ockham, "that no universal is existent in any way whatsoever outside the mind of the knower."¹⁴ Such universals are only general concepts which stand for a collection of individuals. Accordingly, nominalism objects to the reification of such abstract concepts as culture, society, the state, etc., as mere abstractions of the concrete individuals whose action and interactions to­gether constitute society and the state. Nominalism supported by the invention of printing and the rise of empirical scientific study and of capitalistic, in place of feudal, methods of production prepared the way for modern individualism.

Perhaps no man has better expressed the philosophy of individualism than Thomas Hobbes. The basis of his social thinking lies in his famous concept of the state of nature as the war of all against all. In this state of nature, before the rise of conventional laws which can act as a restraint, individuals are driven by their own passions, appetites, and inclinations. Hobbes considered the "pas­sions" of the individual to be the ultimate determinants of his action, and he specifically denied that there could be any "common measure" between the passions of different individuals. Perhaps more clearly than any subsequent writer, Hobbes stated the utilitarian postulate of the independence of any one individual's ends from those of any other. He was principally concerned with the implications of this independence of one individual's passions from those of another. By adding the postulate of "equality of hope," and through his fundamental insight that other individuals are important as obstacles or aids to one individual in his gaining the ends dictated by his passions, Hobbes came to his famous proposition: each individual's unregulated attempts to gain his ends would, through all individuals' mutual attempts to "subdue or destroy one another," result in a situation where every man is the enemy of every other man, endeavoring to destroy him by force or fraud or both. This condition of society is nothing but a state of war in which the life of man is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short."¹⁵

The fear of such a state of affairs calls into action, as a servant of the most fundamental of all passions, that of self-preservation, at least a modicum of reason, which Hobbes thinks of only as a servant of the passions. Man's reason soon teaches him that it is not to his own advantage to remain in the state of nature, so his reason finds a solution to his predicament in the social contract. Reason dictates that he gives up some of his rights in order that he might retain something for himself. To obtain a measure of security and peace in which to express some of his passions, the individual must be prepared to surrender some of his rights by joining in a social contract with all other men to live in a civil society or Great Commonwealth. By the terms of this social contract men agree to give up their natural liberty to a sovereign power and authority which in turn guarantees them security, that is, immunity from aggression by the force or fraud of others. It is only through the authority of this sovereign, the great Leviathan, that the war of all against all is held in check and order and security maintained. To this sovereign power and authority Hobbes attributes absolute sovereignty. Law, defined as command, can only proceed from the sovereign. If there are any laws of nature, they are valid only as civil law; "for it is the sovereign power that obliges men to obey them."¹⁶

From a sociological point of view, Hobbes's type of social contract was most unsatisfactory. Yet he posed the problem of order, that is, of the conditions making a stable society possible, which has never been equaled except by Paul in the first chapter of Romans in his description of godless and apostate men (Rom. 1:18-32). In his work, The Structure of Social Action, Talcott Parsons writes:

Hobbes saw the problem with a clarity which has never been surpassed, and his statement of it remains valid today. It is so fundamental that a genuine solution of it has never been attained on a strictly utilitarian basis, but has entailed either recourse to a positivistic expedient, or the breakdown of the whole positivistic framework.¹⁷

In the Leviathan Hobbes has broken away completely from the transcendentally sanctioned basis of society, as revealed in God's Word. Instead of "seeing" the state as instituted by God on account of human sin, he depicts it as a non-moral Leviathan, fulfilling the law of nature, which is the preservation of the human race. For Hobbes the biblical explanation for the origin and nature of the state is mere superstition.

Hobbes's social theory must be seen as an application of his faith in reasoning as man's only savior. He had been trained in the new science of Galileo, with whom he had come in close contact on his journeys. In the Leviathan he tried to geometrize political and social thought. Thus he tried to reduce all human passions and instincts to phenomena of motion, moving in accordance with the laws of motion. They could then be set in mathematical relations to explain more complicated phenomena.

Hobbes saw in this geometrical method the key by which all reality, including man, could be explained. For this reason he refused to recognize any distinction between man's body and soul. Everything, including man's thought life, must be reduced to bodily movement. So gripped had Hobbes become by the modern science ideal that he saw in such scientific method the only hope for man's salvation. The nature motive dominated his thought completely. And yet he, along with Descartes, saw the new science as the only way leading to man's freedom and salvation.

Of Hobbes's sociological significance Robert A. Nisbet writes in Community and Power:

In the social thought of the seventeenth century all relationships were suspect. Man was the solid fact; all else was ephemeral. As the physical scientists of the day dealt with physical atoms in space and relegated to secondary or subjective status all of those qualities and essences medieval philosophers had accepted as fundamental, so the social philosophers sought to build theoretical systems upon human atoms alone. Relationships of tradition and inherited morality were either expelled from theory or were rationalized into relationships proceeding ineluctably from man's pre-social nature.

Given originally a pre-political state of nature, a social vacuum as it were, in which the individual was isolated and free, the chosen by almost every natural-law theorist was: how did man emerge from this socially empty state of nature and by what means? The answer invariably lay in appeal to some form of contract. Contract, conceived as free agreement among self-interested individuals, became the seventeenth-century rationalist's prime response to problems of social cohesion that had commonly been answered in terms of Christian morality or historically derived status by medieval philosophers.

Ernest Barker has perceptively suggested that the seventeenth-century philosophy of natural law was in certain significant respects a kind of subtle rationalization of the principles of Roman law. It adhered to the same conception of the primacy of the individual and individual will in legal matters. It made relationships of contract fundamental in the constitution of society. And, as in the Roman codes, natural-law philosophy in the seventeenth century gave the political state the position of absolute supremacy over all other forms of human association. Roman lawyers ascribed an essentially derivative role to social groups in the State, and natural-law philosophers similarly ascribed a derivative role to all forms of association lying intermediate to the individual and the sovereign. All the symmetry of design and centralization of function and authority to be seen in Roman law are clearly ap­parent in seventeenth-century natural law.

All this is fundamental in Hobbes's approach to a scientific explanation of society. The method of geometry never ceased to fascinate his mind, and his conceptual arrangement of individuals, both in the state of nature and in civil society, looks like nothing so much as it does the geometer's arrangement of lines and angles in a geometrical demonstration. For Hobbes, the abstract individual, contract, and the power of the State are fundamental. All else is to be derived rigorously from these assumptions or else discarded…

With the monolith of power that Hobbes creates in the State, there is little room left for associations or groups. Hobbes does not see in these the multifold sources of sociability and order that Bodin had found in them. They are breeding areas of dissension, of conflict with the requirements of the unitary State, not reinforcements of order and justice. He compares associations within the State "which are as it were many lesser Common-wealths in the bowels of a greater" to "wormes in the entrayles of a natural man." Economic monopolies of any kind, he detests … He is suspicious of the universities … Hobbes is not content to place the family's authority under the strict regulation of the State. He must also do to the family what earlier legal theorists had done to ecclesiastical and economic corporations: that is, individualize them through the fiction of perpetual contract. In discussing the nature of "Dominion Paternall," he insists that it "is not so derived from the Generation, as if therefore the Parent had Dominion over his Child because he begat him; but from the Child's Consent, either express, or by other sufficient arguments declared." In short, contract is, in Hobbes's rigorous terms, the cement of even the family itself. Not from custom, or from divine law itself, does the solidarity of the family proceed. It proceeds from, and can be justified by, voluntary agreement, either express or implied.¹⁸

With John Locke, the individualistic tradition changed in a way which can conveniently be described in terms of Locke's difference from Hobbes in the treatment of normative problems. Locke, through the implicit postulate which Halevy in The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism¹⁹ has called "the natural identity of interests," simply pushed aside the problem of order as Hobbes posed it. Locke assumed that natural rights would be reciprocally respected, except by a minority of "bad men"; and that, on the basis of natural harmony, men could strive to improve their positions, to "appropriate the gifts of nature," rather than trying to "subdue or destroy one another," to exchange goods and services to mutual advantage. Locke contributed almost nothing to analysis of the conditions under which such a harmony of interests would hold; he merely assumed that it would occur in the state of nature.

By nature, Locke taught in his Treatise of Civil Government, all men are "free, equal and independent" and no man can be "subjected to the political power of another without his own consent."²⁰ In the original social contract men did not give up all their rights. They surrendered only so much of their natural liberty as was necessary for the preservation of society; they gave up the right they had in the state of nature of individually judging and punishing, but they retain the remainder of their rights under the protection of the government they had agreed to establish. They certainly did not, as in Hobbes's theory, set up an absolute and arbitrary ruler. Locke began with the inalienable rights of the individual to life, property, and freedom, which could not be given up by the social contract. Therefore, from the beginning he limited the content of the social contract by not giving it any other purpose than the peaceful enjoyment of the individual's natural rights in a civil state. The individual members of society brought to the sovereign nothing else than their natural competence to defend their natural rights against attack by others. Thus Locke laid the basis for the state of old liberalism: the state conceived of as a limited company for the organized maintenance of the civil freedom rights of life and property. In Locke's social philosophy we therefore witness the reaction of the freedom ground-motive against Hobbes's nature motive which resulted in the destruction of corporate freedoms.

Locke spoke of all people in the state of nature as subject to the law of reason. But this law of reason was given a new content quite different from the organic social principle of medieval Scholasticism. For Aristotle and Aquinas, man is by his very nature a political and social animal. In his essential nature, but not merely as a result of his free consent expressed through a majority vote, he is a political animal. For Locke, on the other hand, the basis for ecclesiastical and civil laws is quite different. Nature is made up of material substances which, instead of entering into the teleological hierarchical order of medieval science, obey the purely mechanistic laws of Newton's physics; thus there is no basis for social laws in nature. As far as Locke is concerned the individual person is absolutely free, independent, and autonomous in this universe, and no principle grounded in nature exists to give the state anything more than a conventional status. Thus for Locke and succeeding liberal rationalists, all men are born free and equal, and the origin and basis of government lies in the consent of the governed. In Locke's opinion man does not enter society because organic relations with other men enable one to express more fully one's moral, religious, and political nature, as had been the case in the classical and scholastic concept of the state. Instead, the state is now thought of as a necessary evil forcing the individual to give up part of the ideal good which is complete independence and freedom in order the better to preserve one's private property.

Locke is, thus, if not the founder, at least the spiritual father of laissez faire economic individualism. Within the tradition of philosophical individualism he was the great theorist of the economic aspects of society – of how, within an assumed natural order, the mutual advantages of association could be attained, especially through exchange, and, eventually, the division of labor. He may in fact be regarded as the principal discoverer of the possibility of mutual advantage in exchange, and of capitalistic conceptions of property, prerequisite to such advantage. He originated the concept of property as founded in the functional necessities of individualistic production as a societal function.

In this theory of the origin and nature of organized society, Locke has replaced the medieval organic and functional theory of society with an individualistic and mechanistic one. For Locke, what leads men to enter community and social life is nothing essential but merely outward economic and political convenience. Society is not organically necessary as Aristotle and Aquinas supposed, but only comes about through a social contract whereby each individual hopes to better safeguard his "natural" rights to "life, liberty and property." For such rationalists the tie uniting individuals in society is thus merely external.

A society formed on such a basis is, of course, not a real community at all, but only a combination, and a selfish one at that, of a contractual character. It did not take long for other rationalists to extend this principle of "contract" to other forms of human community. Thus the marriage relationship came to be regarded as resting on a contract which could be broken at the pleasure of one or both parties. Why should one enter into a fundamental interdependence with another human being if every individual is autonomous and sovereign? Within this apostate individualistic frame of reference, community can never be on the same level of importance as autonomous individuality; but only something subordinate and casual.

However, such a view of the state well suited the needs of the rising class of industrial capitalists, merchant adventurers, and business entrepreneurs, who were seeking to overthrow the restrictions imposed upon them by the old mercantilist control of industry, trade, and commerce. Locke's social philosophy provided the new classes in British societies with an ideology in terms of which they could justify their exploitation of the new working classes. His individualistic idea of the state as only a "night-watchman" was soon allied with the program of the classical school of economists which advocated the unrestricted free play of social forces in business and economic life. In this way economic life became strongly rationalized, and the mercantilist control of industry and trade was allowed to wither away.

Such a rationalistic individualism inevitably leads to anarchical consequences for man's life in society as outraged human nature takes its revenge on the capitalist's and the financier's callousness, indifference, and irresponsibility towards other men's sufferings and poverty. It is largely because of Locke's apostate teaching about the nature of man in society that the English-speaking world, in so far as it has relinquished its Christian basis, appears to be in a state of latent anarchy and collapse.

By the middle of the nineteenth century a fierce reaction set in against this rationalistic individualism. Yet this collectivist reaction in its turn was worked out logically from naturalistic apostate humanist presuppositions. The apostate secular humanist alternative to rationalistic individualism is not free community but primitive tribal collectivism. It is the depersonalized mass man, the man forming a mere particle of the social structure, and the centralized impersonal bureaucratic, automatic, mechanical, totalitarian state, which inherits the decaying liberal democracy. Only where a strong federal system of government together with a strong Christian tradition had prevailed was it possible to avoid this fatal alternative of individualism or collectivism, to preserve a federal, non-centralized, pluralistic, organic structure of the state, and therefore to avoid that abrupt transition from a half anarchic individualism into a tyrannical totalitarianism. The American, British, and Canadian societies of the English-speaking world, which abhor the way taken by totalitarian Communist Russia and Red China, do not yet seem to have grasped that, if the process of de-Christianization and neutralization goes on much longer within their societies, then they, too, will inevitably go the same way.

Many Christians apparently see no other remedies than socialistic planning and state intervention in business life for the economic malaise and social distress brought upon society by the attempt to apply economic individualism and technical rationality to economic life. It has been claimed that Anglo-American labor movements are merely "functional" associations for the promotion of the workers' welfare, and that they are free from the doctrinaire dogmatism of their Marxist dominated European counterparts. This has been hailed as an advantage opening the way for common action by people committed to various religious beliefs or none. For this reason, no doubt, many Christians have felt justified in supporting the so-called "neutral" labor unions as well as the British Labor Party and the Canadian New Democratic Party.

Yet such belief in functionalism is a typical example of apostate man-centered thinking, since in the Bible men and their organizations never function as such, because man is not a functional being, but a religious being. To surrender on this point is to render the labor movement completely incapable of righting the wrongs created by capitalism. Was not the error of the capitalist precisely that he treated his workers as tools and a function of the economics system? The functionalistic approach of the labor unions is the result of their falling into the same apostate humanistic error for which they so vehemently condemn and denounce the capitalists.

Both capitalists and socialists make the error of not basing their theories of society, and so their activities, upon the right view of man in society revealed in the Bible. Thus conservatives and liberals and socialists stand revealed in their true colors as radical unbelievers who prefer to trust in their own apostate reason, planning, and science than in God's Word as the ordering principle of their lives.

This explains why the socialist movement and its labor unions have been unable to relieve the real distresses of the modern worker, namely his growing depersonalization and atomization into a particle of mass man. The socialists rightly protested against the exploitation and poverty of the workers of a hundred years ago. Yet, they made the same mistake as the capitalists did in viewing the problems brought upon the world by the Industrial Revolution in the field of labor relations entirely from a rationalistic and materialistic point of view. The socialists bitterly attacked the capitalists for their preoccupation with money and profit at the expense of the worker as a person. However, they, too, have become preoccupied with exactly the same thing. They, too, have become obsessed with the idea of obtaining welfare and security for the worker in terms of material possessions, and they, too, adhere to the narrowed down Marxist view of man as only an "economic animal" whose god is his belly.

c) The Reformation of Social Science←⤒🔗

The antinomy between individualism and universalism or collectivism in apostate political and social science corresponds to that of mechanism versus vitalism in humanist biology and to that of operationalism versus meaning idealism in the realm of modern semantics. Such contradictions and dilemmas arise from an apostate and therefore false way of "seeing" reality in its true coherence, unity and diversity. Lacking a true "ordering" principle for their sociological investigations in the Word of God, neither individualists nor collectivists are able to explain satisfactorily the true nature of societal relationships.

Apostate modern social science builds its paradigms and models upon the postulate of the neutrality idea and the autonomy of man's reason. It supposes that the nature of man, and in it the nature of all temporal things, finds its center and origin in the human "reason." Yet this reason is in reality nothing other than a composite of our temporal functions of consciousness, functions of the human selfhood, only an aspect of what the Bible calls man's heart. Temporal organic life, the sense of beauty, man's function in historical development, in language, in legal and economic life – all these are also functions of the heart in this sense.

Apostate man, however, falsely supposes that human existence has its origin in reason as man's supposed supra-temporal center, and even that God himself is pure and absolute reason. As a result he comes to identify the findings of his reason in scientific abstraction with the full truth and excludes all naive or integral experience of God's creation as only mere ignorant opinion of the uneducated. At the same time the apostate scholar must still have his absolute, even if this means he must distort what his observation discloses only to be relative. His rational analysis of social phenomena is accompanied by a deeper drive, which in his unregenerate state as a sinner requires a distortion of the very "facts" he is in process of analyzing. Apostate scholars do not always agree on what they thus absolutize. This should not surprise Christian scholars, since oneness of mind and of heart, and community and peace in the world of scholarship no less than in the world of politics and industry can only be the result of God's grace in Christ uniting our hearts and minds in his service as a community of scholars and students joined together by the power of God's Word.

Where scholars are not so bound, nothing is there to prevent them seizing first upon one and then upon another of the many aspects of our created world as being in their view the absolute origin of the other aspects. This is made possible by the very relative character of each of the life aspects; being relative, the other meaning-aspects of life are involved in their very nature. The wholeness of meaning is present universally in a certain way in each aspect of God's creation. It only requires a distortion of this creation-structure to see one aspect as the fulness of meaning required by the heart of all the other aspects.

As a result of this temptation a great variety of scientific "isms" have arisen in the course of the history of science. Man has been conceived of as a rational being, as a producer, as an economic animal, as a symbolizer, as a tool-making animal.

These and other views are all "totality" views about man that arise not from a mere observation and analysis of the positive "facts" presented to our "minds" – if such were the case no conflict between them would be possible. Instead, they arise from the failure of apostate scholars to "see" the relative aspects of human life as relative and from the resulting tendency to explain all the remaining aspects in terms of the one aspect that has been religiously absolutizes and thus made the deeper source and unity of all the rest, above all the others, and consider them to be the all-embracing totality which includes the lower relationships as dependent parts. In contradistinction to all such collectivistic conceptions, individualism absolutizes the individual, claiming that he alone is self-sufficient and precedes any societal relationship. Individualism conceives of society only as a function, i.e., as a psychical or juridical phenomenon. Because of its functionalism, individualism overlooks the plastic horizon of reality, and thus denies the structure of individuality of authoritative communities such as the family, state, or church. It denies the reality of societal relationships and thinks of them merely as the name given to the arbitrary union between sovereign individuals. Individualism deifies one of the human subject-functions by refusing to admit that man is made in God's image along with all other men.

The various schools of apostate modern sociology with their corresponding "isms" are characterized by this absolutization of a specific modal aspect of God's creation in a vain attempt to grasp the nature of human society in the theoretical view of totality. Such absolutizations cannot be corrected by other absolutizations. The very problem is how a general sociology may avoid them, that is to say, from what standpoint a sociological view of the totality of the different aspects of society is possible.

Herman Dooyeweerd formulates the three transcendental problems of such a theoretical total view of human society in three questions: (1) Where is the basic denominator to be found needed for a comparison of the different types of societal relationships, set apart and opposed to one another in the antithetic Gegenstand-relation of theoretical thought; (2) How is their mutual relation and coherence to be viewed? (3) Where do they find their radical unity and totality of meaning, or, in other words, from which starting-point can we grasp them in the theoretical view of totality?²¹ He answers:

From the Christian transcendence-standpoint the radical unity and meaning-totality of all temporal societal structures of individuality is only to be found in the central religious community of mankind in its creation, fall and redemption by Jesus Christ. This starting-point excludes in principle every universalist sociological view, which seeks the unity and all-embracing totality of all types of societal relationships in a temporal community of mankind. Neither a nation, nor the Church in the sense of a temporal institution, nor the State, nor an international union of whatever typical character, can be the all-inclusive totality of human social life, because mankind in its spiritual root transcends the temporal order with its diversity of social structures…

It is only from the biblical Christian transcendence-standpoint that the three transcendental basic problems formulated above can be solved in a way which precludes absolutizations. The basic denominator for a theoretical comparison of the different structural types of human society can here only be the temporal world-order rooted in the divine order of creation. The mutual relation between the social structures of individuality (e.g., family, church, state, etc.) is only to be viewed as that of an inner sovereignty of each structure within its own orbit, balanced by its coherence with the other structures in cosmic time; the latter guarantees enkaptic external functions of any particular social relationship in all the others, insofar as their different structural principles are realized. And this theoretical total view is only possible from the starting point that the different societal structures find their radical unity and meaning-totality beyond cosmic time in the central religious community of mankind.²²

Only the Word of God written in the Holy Scriptures can provide us with a sure point of departure for our natural and our social science. What God's Word does not do, of course, is to tell us that there are fifteen law-spheres, law-aspects, and modalities in God's creation. This is strictly a matter of analysis. The Word of God merely directs us to take whatever diversity of natural and social structures we find in God's creation as a diversity of the integral fulness of meaning of our religious life. In this way God's revelation of himself as Creator and Redeemer provides us with the great key to a unified field of human knowledge.

Only by accepting God's Word as the ordering principle of our scientific work can we hope to make sense of the vast array of so-called natural and social "facts" around us. God's Word alone can provide us with a true frame of reference and only sure point of departure for all our thinking about his creation. It does so by working in our hearts a true knowledge of God, of ourselves and of the law-order of his creation. The Word of God is the power by which the Holy Spirit opens our hearts to see things as they really are. True knowledge is thus made possible by true religion, and it can only arise from the knowing activity of the human heart enlightened through the Word of God by the Holy Spirit. The biblical motive of sin and grace alone, by its radical grip upon our hearts, can bring about a real reformation of our view of man and of the society and world in which he has been placed by the Creator. Such an inner reformation of natural and social science is the very opposite of the scholastic device of accommodation which first had to destroy the revealed truth that the human selfhood is the central seat of the image of God, in order to replace it by a dualistic conception of man in which the central religious relation of man to his creator is entirely lost.

At the same time we must point out that this biblical reformation of social and natural science does not involve the subjection of science to theology as such. A truly Christian social science must be based on a renewed biblical insight into the divinely established structures of creation and of society and not upon theology as such, which can be of little help in solving sociological problems. For this reason there must be a directly biblical and not an indirectly theological reformation of modern political and sociological science. Such a reformation of the basic categories of modem sociology in the light of the scriptural rather than the apostate humanist conception of reality has in fact begun in the work of Herman Dooyeweerd as well as other scholars of the Christian school of thought of the Cosmonomic Idea.

According to Dooyeweerd, God's Word alone can provide a solu­tion to the false dilemma of individualism versus collectivism as well as a proper key to an adequate understanding of the problems affecting man in modern society. Such a key is indispensable if modern society is to be rescued from the dangers with which it is today confronted. While many Christians are dissatisfied with both individualism and collectivism, all they seem able to suggest as the only course open to us to follow is to choose an agreeable compromise position somewhere in the middle. It is Dooyeweerd's firm conviction that Christians need not thus be tied by this false dilemma. He suggests another possibility typified by his biblically motivated principle of the balance of authority and freedom under God and of the sovereignty of the various social spheres.

Taking its starting point in a supposedly neutral and unprejudiced trust in thought itself, apostate social science today is forced to interpret the relationship of the individual to the group and of the group to other groups in the general schema of whole and part. Either the individual is thought to be a part of the group, or the group is thought to be composed of congeries of distinct individuals. On this immanence (earthly) standpoint modern social science is bound to drive itself between the horns of the individualist-collectivist dilemma.

In the light of the scriptural conception of man in society, we realize that the truth lies on neither side. The common error of individualism and collectivism, in typically humanistic fashion, is that they take their starting point in man, whether the individual or the group. The biblical view of man in society overcomes this dilemma. In the light of God's Word, we know that God created man for community, first with himself and then with his fellow men, but as a religious being, not an economic or political animal. The individual and the community are equally called to live in obedience to the laws of the Creator since love is the meaning of human life. God is Love (1 John 4:7-17).

The biblical view of man is that in his essential nature man is in community, first with God his creator, and secondly with his fellow man. Thus to man alone is given the gifts of prayer and speech so that he can talk to his God and to his neighbor. Man's life in its inmost essence is conceived of in the Bible as a dialogue and prayer with the Heavenly Father. That man exists not in singularity but in duality is expressed in the biblical account of creation in the statement that "male and female, created He them." The self and the other are like the twin foci of an ellipse, neither of which has meaning apart from the other. Writing of The Biblical Doctrine of Man in Society, G. Ernest Wright says:

The new and responsible individual who is created by God in Christ is not liberated from community in such a manner as would enable us to speak of biblical faith as creating a true individualism over against all collectivism. Man is (in the New Testament) liberated from a false to a true community, and for that reason his first steps in the right direction are to be discovered in conversion. While in modern times we see a rediscovery of community which enslaves man, so that collectivism and individualism appear as opposing concepts, the biblical concentration on God's formation of a people is of such a nature that man, the individual, emerges in society in a manner hitherto unknown. The biblical story must not be interpreted as the progressive emancipation of the individual, but instead as God's action in history to create a community in which the responsible individual finds his true being.²³

The biblical view of man in society safeguards the rights of both the individual and the group. It does not allow any group to destroy man's individuality, since the individuality of a person created in God's holy image is much deeper than any human community. The full individuality of the person cannot be exhausted within the confines of any earthly association or community, whether church or state. He cannot discover his ultimate and eternal destiny in any supposedly all-embracing earthly group, since he is made for everlasting fellowship with God.

Again careful observation makes clear that groups retain their identity even in spite of changes within their membership, so that the individualist theory of reification must be rejected. Groups have a relatively constant structure which is more than a reflection of the subjective will or activity of any one or even all their members. A truly reformational Christian social science will take both these insights into account when re-building the foundations of modern sociology. Such a program involves a radical break with the immanence stand-point.

According to Dooyeweerd, immanence sociology is forced to employ the scheme of the whole or the part because it tries to use as a universal method of interpretation what has really only limited validity. It is forced to construe everything within the schema of genus and species. While this method of concept formation may be valid in biological classification, it cannot be used to express the relationships between the various social spheres such as the family, church, industry, state, etc.

If we try to distinguish the state from the family, for instance, by way of genus and species, we are bound to fall into the whole-part scheme. We must then seek the most inclusive social group of which all other groups are members, or we must seek some other basis for relating what are altogether unrelated individual groupings.

Dooyeweerd teaches that neither individualism nor collectivism recognizes the true structure of societal relationships. The dilemma only arises when the structures of individuality are neglected which alone present a basis for the solution of the problem of the relation of the individual to the group. Outside this biblically based doctrine of man in society, apostate scholars are forced to construct human society rationally out of the wills of sovereign individuals or out of some absolutized single community, be it church or state. The principle of sphere sovereignty, he claims, alone presents us with a proper insight into the connection between man and his social groupings, since by this doctrine the individual is never completely defined or absorbed into any one temporal bond whether nation, party, or state. These are limited in the expression of their authority by their own peculiar God-ordained structural principle or norm.

The error of individualism is that it constructs the communities and associations of society out of elemental atomistic relations between individuals conceived of as sovereign agents, with the result that it does not recognize that these groupings also have their own peculiar structural principles.

But collectivism absolutizes one of the many temporal communities, namely the one that is made to embrace all of the others, as the whole which enfolds the parts. This was true of the classical city-state and all modern totalitarian regimes. The error of such universalistic theories is that then this single all-embracing community is given the place of the religious basic community, namely, the Kingdom of God, which transcends time and place. Man cannot thus be enslaved by any such absolutized earthly community since in the center of his personality, i.e., his "heart," man also transcends time. As long as he remains in history, he functions in a multiplicity of equally significant associations and communities as a parent, as a citizen, as a churchman, as an art lover or music lover, as a consumer or buyer, and so on.

The biblical view of man in society alone provides a way out of the dead-end humanistic street of individualism versus collectivism, for it alone clearly reveals that man has been created as an individual for life in fellowship with God and his neighbor. The Great Commandment in fact calls man to love God with all his heart and his neighbor as himself. This means that man must not find his purpose and meaning in life in himself, as Hobbes and Locke supposed, or in the group, as Rousseau and Marx supposed, but in the God who created him. The individual and the group are equally called to obey God's laws for society. In fact, it is only by such obedience to God's law that the present conflicts rending society apart at the seams both at home and abroad can be resolved. Both the individual and society will then occupy their God-given place in a world dominated by love and service to God and one's neighbor.

It is only through such love of God and of each other that we become human at all. True personality and true community are two sides of the same wonderful coin. This is the meaning of the greatest and most mysterious text of the whole Bible, namely that "God is Love" (1 John 4:8, 16). Love is the meaning and purpose of human life, indeed it is eternal life itself. Therefore the Christian is commissioned to proclaim and demand, on behalf of all men and women, that personal and communal meaning of life which is proper to each, and to oppose everything which obscures or destroys this personal and communal significance of human life. Disharmony and strife are not due, as Northrop thinks, to man's ignorance of natural science, but to man's disobedience to God's law. We must, therefore, break with the superficial dilemma posed by the extremes of both the Left and the Right in modern politics. Until Christians do so, they will be unable to counteract effectively the secularizing influence inherent in the controversy of individualism versus collectivism. Only by returning to the biblical doctrine of sphere sovereignty and the principle of the balance of authority and freedom under God, can we avoid falling into the trap of justifying collectivism on the basis of the defects of individualism. Christian pluralism is thus the answer to both individualism and collectivism.

d) The Antithesis Between Regenerate and Unregenerate Science←⤒🔗

If we accept the biblical doctrine of the fall of man into both original sin and actual rebellion from God, then it follows that all human life, including the life of human science and scholarship has been radically affected by sin and that all life, including the life of theoretical thought, must be reformed by God's special saving grace in Jesus Christ in the communion of the Holy Spirit.

Palingenesis, or rebirth by God's grace acting upon our lives, is therefore not confined to the order of religion as such, but in conformity with the scriptural conception of the radical unity of man in his religious root, what the Bible terms the human "heart," it is of immediate importance for the proper exercise of theoretical thought itself.

According to Kuyper there will thus be two kinds of science, determined by a twofold point of departure: the one rooted in the unregenerate heart, the other in the regenerate. Since there are now two kinds of people in the world, due to the fact of regeneration and election, whereby the unity of human consciousness has been broken, there must of necessity be two kinds of science, of which only one can be essentially true. For this reason "the idea of the unity of science, taken in its absolute sense, implies the denial of the fact of palingenesis, and therefore from principle leads to the rejection of the Christian religion." ²⁴

In the broader cultural field there are, of course, certain activities which are not affected by special grace, such as architecture and dentistry. Special grace does not give the Christian a better under­standing of such technical matters than the non-Christian, nor does it give any additional knowledge or craftsmanship in any of the arts. In science, for example, the difference between a redeemed person and an unredeemed person does not count when they are en­gaged in such simple activities as weighing, measuring, or counting, etc. Observation is actually non-abstract in character, and Kuyper maintains that looking through a microscope or a telescope is a form of observation.

But as soon as an attempt is made to interpret the facts thus empirically gathered, and to arrive at "the thought which governs the whole constellation of phenomena," then we may properly speak of science emerging. It is in this field of the theoretical interpretation of the so-called pure "facts" that the impact of special grace and of revelation becomes very great. As C. Van Til points out in A Christian Theory of Knowledge:

The Christian principle of interpretation is based upon the assumption of God as the final and self-contained reference point. The non-Christian principle of interpretation is that man as self-contained is the final reference point. It is this basic difference that has to be kept in mind all the time…

The non-Christian assumes that man is ultimate, that is, that, he is not created. Christianity assumes that man is created. The non-Christian assumes that the facts of man's environment are not created; the Christian assumes that these facts are created … The two types of system differ because of the fact that their basic assumptions or presuppositions differ.²⁵

Western science has assumed that theoretical thought in the very nature of the case is an autonomous activity based upon a supposed universality of reason. In his book, A New Critique of Theoretical Thought, Herman Dooyeweerd has shown that this so-called un-universality of reason itself contains a great problem. If all philosophical schools chose their points of departure in reason alone, and not in deeper presuppositions, then it ought to be possible to convince an opponent in a purely theoretical way that his arguments are true or false. But what actually happens is that philosophers and scientists tend to reason at cross purposes. A philosopher of the Thomist school, for example, can never succeed in convincing one of the Kantian school. In reality, the universality of reason is an uncritically accepted dogma, cloaking diverse supra-theoretical points of departure for one's thinking about the cosmos.

According to Dooyeweerd, no scientist can avoid this problem of choosing a point of departure for his thought, and he makes it the central feature of his transcendental critique of theoretical thought. By raising it, he claims that every possible starting point of scientific thought is subjected to a fundamental criticism, for a truly critical attitude of thought does not allow us to choose such a starting point in any one special aspect of reality.

By this Dooyeweerd means that there are as many types of theoretical or scientific thought as there are aspects of the cosmos. In every case there is a synthesis of the logical aspect with one of the non-logical aspects as a point of departure. When we take any of these non-logical aspects of reality as a point of departure, we then interpret the whole of reality in terms of that one aspect. This is the remote cause of all "isms" in philosophy, biologism, materialism, historicism, rationalism, etc. Not even mathematics is exempt from this necessity of a point of departure for its thoughts. He writes:

In pure mathematics, the problem immediately arises: How is one to view the mutual relationship between the aspects of number, space, movement, sensory perception, logical thought and symbolical signification? Different schools in pure mathematics such as logicism, symbolistic formalism, empiricism and intuitionism arise in accordance with their respective theoretical visions on this basic problem. These differences are not restricted to the philosophy of mathematics. The famous Dutch mathematician Brouwer, the chief representative of the intuitionistic school, abolished an entire branch of special scientific work which had been built up by the logicist and formalist theories (the theory of the so-called transfinite numbers).

The first three schools, logicism, symbolistic formalism and empiricism, try to reduce the aspects of number and space to the logical, the linguistic and the sensory-perceptual aspects respectively.

Even in logic itself we observe the rise of a great diversity of theoretical schools … determined by a theoretical vision of reality.²⁶

1. Scientific Work as Religious Activity←↰⤒🔗

This means that all the natural sciences as well as the social sciences qua (as) scientific systems of thought are necessarily involved in a prescientific philosophical view as to the relationships and coherence of the several functional aspects of reality, e.g., the numerical, the spatial, the physical-chemical, the biological, the psychical, the logical, the historical-cultural, the linguistic, the social, the economic, the aesthetic, the juridical, the ethical, and the pistical-theological. (See chart of the law-spheres in appendix.)

Dooyeweerd maintains that only the Word of God can provide us with a true point of departure for our theoretical thought and thus enable us to "see" the facts studied in the various sciences in their proper order, structure, and relationships. The facts do not "speak" to us unless we see them in their right order as given at the creation. If the scientist refuses to be taught by the Word of God what this order of the creation is, then he will be forced to substitute some principle of total structuration and explanation of his own devising. Such an apostate thinker will then be forced to seek his ultimate principle of explanation and point of departure in ONE or another aspect of the created universe rather than in the Creator of the Universe. For this reason Dooyeweerd speaks of all non-Christian systems of thought as being immanentistic in character, because they refuse to recognize the ultimate dependence of human thought and science upon God's revelation. As a result, all such immanence philosophy and science, that is, all human thought which takes its origin somewhere in temporal reality and not in God's revelation of himself as Creator of the Universe cannot grasp the intrinsic unity and coherence of all reality but is bound to fall into a false dialectical dualism in which one aspect is played over against another aspect, e.g., matter over against form in the history of Greek philosophy, vitalism over against mechanism in modern biology.

Evan Runner points out in his lectures, The Relation of the Bible to Learning, delivered at the first Conference of the Association of Reformed Scientific Studies held in Canada in 1960, that the apostate scholar:

…thinks of himself as just this thing here. But since this something that is just here, our temporal existence, exhibits a great diversity of moments or aspects – e.g., the numerical, spatial, physical-chemical, biological, psychical, logical, historical-cultural, lingual, social, economic, aesthetic, jural, ethical and pistical – all these are seen in the light of the Word of God as relative aspects of the religious unity of our life. Apostate man, however, is driven by his religious needs for security and meaning in life to find a substitute to fill in for the true unity and to absolutize one of the relative aspects of life and to elevate it to the place of the heart … He must find an absolute in the relative. He is bound to the creation-structure; he must know himself. At the same time we see him willfully substituting his lie to replace the Truth. He must have his absolute, even if it means that he must distort what observation will readily disclose to be relative. His rational analysis is accompanied by a deeper drive, which in the fallen state requires a distortion of the very "facts" he is in process of analyzing.²⁷

In this tendency to absolutize something which is only relative may be found the origin of most of the philosophical and scientific "isms" which have plagued the history of human thought. All these are totality views about man that arise not from a mere scientific observation and analysis of positive facts presented to our minds – if such were in fact the case there would be no conflict between them – but rather from apostate man's failure to realize that these aspects of his life are relative and not absolute and from the consequent effort to explain all the remaining aspects of reality in terms of the one aspect that has been religiously absolutized and so made the source of unity of all the other aspects. As an example we may refer to Hegel's attempt to take the analytical-logical aspect of reality as his point of departure with the consequence that the whole of reality became for him logicised or idealized. For Hegel the rational alone is the real.

Unlike the apostate scientist who takes his point of departure in One of the aspects of God's creation, the Christian scientist takes his point of departure in the Word of God, which provides him with the ordering principle of his scientific thought. It would be impossible, for instance, for a Christian mathematician to accept a view of pure mathematics as a-priori in the sense that pure mathematics could become emancipated from the modal structure of the mathematical aspects of reality, i.e., the numerical and the spatial which are founded in the temporal order of God's creation. The Christian mathematician accepts the universe as something given by God the creator, not as a construct of his own pure rational thought.

There is also a certain a-priori view about scientific models which no true scientific disciple of Christ could accept. For the a-priori theories we have in mind imply a lack of integral coherence between abstract theoretical logical thought and that about which such thought should be concerned, e.g., number, spatial figures, etc., as aspects indissolubly bound up with the other aspects of reality in an integral temporal order. As Dooyeweerd wisely remarks:

It is impossible to establish a line of demarcation between philosophy and science in order to emancipate the latter from the former. Science cannot be isolated in such a way as to give it a completely independent sphere of investigation and any attempt to do so cannot withstand a serious critique. It would make sense to speak of the autonomy of the special sciences, if, and only if, a special science could actually investigate a specific aspect of temporal reality without theoretically considering its coherence with the other aspects. No scientific thought, however, is possible in such isolation with "closed shutters." Scientific thought is constantly confronted with the temporal coherence of meaning among the modal aspects of reality, and cannot escape from following a transcendental idea of this coherence . . . even the sciences investigating the first two modal aspects of human experience, i.e., the numerical and the spatial, cannot avoid making philosophical pre-suppositions in this sense.²⁸

Dooyeweerd then asks the fundamental question:

Is it possible that modern mathematics would escape from philosophical pre-suppositions with respect to the relationships and coherence of the arithmetic aspect with the spatial, the logical, the linguistic and sensory ones? Is it permissible to include, with Dedekind, the original spatial continuity and dimensionality-moments in our concept of number? Is mathematics simply axiomatical symbolic logic whose criterion of truth rests exclusively upon the principle of contradiction and the principle of the excluded middle? Does the "transfinite number" really possess numerical meaning? Is it permitted, in a rationalist way, to reduce the subject-side of the numerical aspect to a function of the principle of progression (which is a numerical law) and can we consequently speak of an actually infinitesimal number? Is it justified to conceive of space as a continuum of points? Is it permitted to designate real numbers as spatial points? Is motion possible in the original (mathematical) sense of the spatial aspect?

This whole series of basic philosophical questions strikes the very heart of mathematical thought. No mathematician can remain neutral to them. With or without philosophical reflection on his presuppositions he must make a choice. The possibility of effecting a separation completely between philosophy and mathematics is especially problematical with respect to so-called pure (non-applied) mathematics, because it is conceived of as an apriori science and its results cannot be tested by natural scientific experiments.²⁹

Here Dooyeweerd has inserted a footnote, which reads as follows:

The opinion that pure mathematics would be apriori in this sense, that it may proceed from fully arbitrary axioms, is incompatible with the Christian conception of the divine world-order as the ultimate foundation of all scientific investigation. From our viewpoint the apriori character of pure mathematics cannot mean that the latter would be emancipated from the modal structures of the mathematical aspects which are founded in the temporal order of experience.

The investigation of these structures can only occur in an empirical way, since they are not created by human thought and are no more apriori "thought-forms," but rather included in the "modal horizon" of our experience as apriori data. They must be discovered in reflection upon our experience of the mathematical aspects. The Kantian conception of the apriori and the empirical moments in human knowledge identifies the "empirical" with the sensory impressions. We have again and again to establish that this sensationalistic conception of the "empirical" is incompatible with our integral (biblical) conception of human experience.³⁰

After this footnote Dooyeweerd continues:

Is it not the very task of the philosophy of mathematics to investigate the modal structures of the mathematical aspects on which depend all well-founded judgements in pure mathematics?

Is it possible to separate the task of mathematical science from that of the philosophy of mathematics by saying that the latter only seeks to explain the epistemological possibility of apriori mathematical knowledge, whose methods and contents must be accepted without any critique?

But, by such an attempt at demarcation, mathematics is made a "factum," a "fait accompli," and the possibility of a real philosophical criticism of the latter is precluded.

Such an attitude toward the special sciences may be acceptable in the cadre of a transcendental ground-Idea, in which the Humanistic ideal of science has a foundational function, but, in the light of our transcendental critique of theoretical thought, it must be rejected as false and dogmatical.

It is true that philosophy can only explain the foundations of mathematics, but this does not warrant the ascription of autonomy to mathematical thought, which reaches its focal point in the technique of reckoning, construction, and deduction. Philosophy cannot attribute this autonomy to it, because the mathematician must necessarily work with subjective philosophical presuppositions, whose consequences are evident in mathematical theory itself, as we have explained in the Prolegomena.³¹

The analysis of the basic presuppositions of mathematical science thus described by Dooyeweerd surely reveals that the so-called factual states of affairs with which the scientist deals cannot be regarded as a separate structural element in the creation, so that scientific method may be thought of as concerned only with the so-called "brute facts." The "facts" studied by the scientist are always "interpretative" facts, that is to say, that the scientist always "sees" the various aspects, functions, and coherences of the world around him through the spectacles of his own prescientific pre­suppositions and initial point of departure. The truly Christian scientist will differ radically from an apostate scholar in that he will "see" these various aspects, functions, and coherences of God's creation in the light of the ordering principle of the Word of God.

It follows that scientific thought and work are fundamentally religious activities in the sense that they depend upon ultimate presuppositions which are accepted in faith. Dr. J. D. Dengerink, writing of this problem with evangelical scholars in mind, points out:

One still frequently finds the conception among Christians and even in more narrowly defined Evangelical circles that, although scholarship is bound to certain external limits by religion and morality, nevertheless in terms of its own inner nature it is a more less neutral, autonomous concern. Even those who explicitly confront the problem of Christian faith and scientific knowledge frequently fall victim to this conception. They accept the premise that facts are facts, and facts are the same for Christians. That can hardly be denied. Christians and non-Christians live and think in terms of the same created reality. But frequently they lose sight of the notion that scientific work consists not in giving a photographic but an interpretative and elucidative account of reality by way of a process of analysis and conceptualization. And they forget that in this process the whole man continues to function in all his particularity, including the religious choice of position which motivates his selection of a certain path in his scientific study. In that light it may not even be correct to speak of faith and science. Such a formula may leave the impression that these two are relatively independent magnitudes which man, in this case the Christian, must somehow integrate. It is much closer to the truth to say that scientific work itself, due to its creaturely character, is nothing but a believing, religious activity and that this work of faith and religion can proceed in divergent directions either towards God or away from Him. Varying between different individuals, these two directions and movements are, due to the surd of sin in the lives of Christians, interwoven in a remarkable way.³²

If scientific work is itself a religious activity, then there can be no conflict between faith and science. What Dooyeweerd terms Kuyper's "great Scriptural conception" is his insight that all science is rooted in faith. According to Kuyper faith is the presupposition of every science. Faith is "that formal function of the life of our soul which is fundamental to every fact of our human consciousness."³³ Without believing in oneself one cannot take the first step in the quest of science; it is the starting point of conduct for which there is no empirical or demonstrative proof. All rational demon­stration proceeds on unproved axioms accepted by faith. As a matter of fact, all of life proceeds on faith. In every expression of his personality as well as in the acquisition of scientific conviction, every man starts out from faith.

For this reason it follows that the whole scale of the Christian sciences, theology included, must be contrasted with the whole scale of the non-Christian or apostate sciences, modernistic "liberal" theology included. While formally faith functions in both cases, so that we may say that "Christianity and paganism stand to each other as the plus and minus of the same series,"³⁴ they are at the same time absolutely antithetical to each other, because both proceed from a central religious attitude of the heart, the one Christian, the other apostate.

With regard to this antithesis that characterizes the world in which we live and extends to the realm of scientific and so-called neutral academic thought, Kuyper states that it is not a conflict of faith and science, but a conflict between two different kinds of faith, the one Christian and the other apostate. Thus he writes:

Not faith and science, therefore, but two scientific systems, or if you choose, two scientific elaborations, are opposed, to each other, each having its own faith. Nor may it be said that it is here science which opposes theology, for we have to do with two absolute forms of science, both of which claim the whole domain of human knowledge, and both of which have a suggestion about the supreme Being of their own as the point of departure of their world-view. Pantheism as well as Deism is a system about God, and without reserve the entire system of modern theology finds its home in the science of the Normalists. And finally these two scientific systems of the Normalists and Abnormalists are not relative opponents, walking together halfway, and further on peaceably suffering one another to choose different paths, but they are both in earnest, disputing with one another the whole domain of life, and they cannot desist from the constant endeavour to pull down to the ground the entire edifice of their respective controverted assertions, all the supports included, upon which their assertions rest. If they did not try this, they would thereby show on both sides, that they did not honestly believe in their point of departure, that they were not serious combatants, and that they did not understand the primordial demand of science, which of course claims unity of conception.³⁵

In spite of Kuyper's radical distinction between apostate and Christian thought, between a degenerate and a regenerate science, he nevertheless, like Calvin himself, acknowledges that pagan thought both ancient and modern reveals many excellent characteristics. The names of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are still honored by Christian thinkers, and the philosophy of Aristotle has been an invaluable aid in the training of the Christian scholar. This is explained by Kuyper in terms of the doctrine of common grace first formulated by John Calvin.

How can we account for the good with the bad in the unregenerate? Calvin had asked. Whereas Luther had clung to the idea of a lower earthly sphere in which man is capable of doing much good, Calvin's logical mind could not put up with such a dualism. On the one hand, his deep insight into the terrible consequences of sin did not allow him to admit that fallen man, when left wholly to himself, could produce any good in any domain whatsoever. On the other hand he found it impossible to subscribe to the view of Zwingli, who virtually surrendered the absoluteness of Christianity by teaching that at least certain heathen philosophers who remained utter strangers to the Gospel of Christ participated in God's saving grace. Calvin found the solution for the problem how we must account for the good and the true with the bad and the false in the unregenerate in the concept of Common Grace. He was the first Christian thinker who drew a clear-cut distinction between common and special grace, between the operations of the Spirit of God which are common to mankind at large, and the sanctifying work of the same Spirit which is limited to God's elect (Institutes, Book Two, Chapter 3, par. three).

In his great work on Common Grace, Kuyper points out that Calvin's doctrine did not arise out of mere philosophical invention but out of the confession of the mortal character of sin:

Yet apparently this confession of the mortal character of sin did not square with reality. There was in the sinful world outside the Church so much that was beautiful, so much to be respected, so much that provoked to envy. This placed the formulators of the Reformed Confession before the dilemma: either to deny all this good against their better knowledge, and thus to err with the anabaptists; or to view man as not so deeply fallen, and thus to stray into the Pelagian and Arminian heresy. And placed before that choice, the Reformed Confession has refused to travel either of these roads. We might not close our eyes to the good and the beautiful outside the Church among unbelievers in the world. This good was there and that had to be acknowledged. And just as little might the least bit be detracted from the total depravity of sinful nature. But herein lay the solution of this apparent contradiction, that also outside the Church, among the heathen, in the midst of the world, God's grace was at work, grace not eternal, nor unto salvation, but temporal and for the stemming of the destruction that lurked in sin.³⁶

By means of His common or temporal conserving grace, God maintains the life of all men, relaxes the curse which rests upon them by reason of their disobedience, and arrests the process of cor­ruption and decay, while the Church mediates to men His saving grace in Jesus Christ. Without God's common grace, which thus curbs the effects of sin in human life, there could be no possibility of human science and culture at all and apostate pagan life would collapse in chaos.

Thus man's temporal life with its family, state, marriage, legal and economic relationships is preserved in heathen lands which have not heard the Gospel even when renewing, regenerating grace is not available. Even when men deny God, His goodness and favor enable them to perform civil good, to honor legal contracts, think rational thoughts, compose great music and create great art, to love each other, and to enjoy social graces and virtues. According to Kuyper it is God's common grace which makes human culture and science possible. Human society would have been utterly destroyed if the common grace of the Lord had not intervened. As such common grace is the foundation of culture, since God's great plan for the creation is achieved through common grace. It is not spiritual and regenerative but temporal and material. It is based upon and flows forth from the confession of the absolute sovereignty of God, for, says Kuyper, not only the church but the whole world must give God the honor that is His due; hence the world received common grace in order to honor Him through it. Thus Kuyper upholds the catholic claims of Christianity and urges its validity for all men.

Common grace, although non-saving and restricted to this life, has its source in Christ as mediator of the creation, since all things exist through the Eternal Word. Hence, the point of departure for common grace is creation and the sphere of the natural. But it may also be called supernatural, because it is God's longsuffering mercy to which man as such has no right. As such it is a glimmer of light in the midst of darkness.

While common grace does not change the depraved heart of man, it does restrain him from spending all his energies in building a tower of Babel. And while restraining the downward and destructive tendency of sin, it even enables him to labor alongside the believer in bringing to light the potentialities of God's created universe. The chief task of human culture and science, Kuyper argues, is the development of the potentialities God has placed in his created world. Culture and science is the fulfillment of the great cultural mandate given to man at the beginning of his history. "Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it and have dominion over it" (Gen. 1:28); and "Keep the garden and dress it." Man's culture and science are thus understood to be the result of a divinely imposed cultural mandate. Culture and science are man's life task and it is through common grace that man can alone fulfill this task. Thanks to common grace the powers of creation come to fruition in spite of sin. This preserving and development of the creation to God's greater glory is the goal of common grace.

2. The Christian Scholar's Ordering Principle of Studies←↰⤒🔗

Both Kuyper and Dooyeweerd have thus made it abundantly clear that scientific work is itself a form of religious activity because human life in its entirety is religion. Man is so created that he is forced to find the meaning of his life either in the God who created him or in some idol or false absolute of his own devising. Both claim that life is religion, not that life is religious. Now it may be objected that one cannot say in English that life is religion, and that the structure of the language will only allow one to say that life is religious. To this objection Dooyeweerd would reply that the statement "life is religious" is not what he wants to say at all. He claims that life is religion. It is like the difference between saying that life is sexual and life is sex. In this second example the statement life is sexual is true and the statement life is sex is false, and that is enough to show that there is a difference between having an adjective and having a noun in the predicate. Dooyeweerd does not want to say that there is a religious aspect of life, as there is, for instance, a sexual or an aesthetic aspect (life is beautiful); on the contrary, he is saying that human life in ALL its aspects is religion. He requires in the predicate a word coextensive with the subject, and that requires a noun. Life is religion. To say that is at once to reject all views which identify human life with one or another of its aspects, as for example, when men identify life with its material aspects (materialism), or when men say that the essence of man is to be found in his reason or logical faculty (rationalism) or in morality (Natural Law); or the Marxist school of thought which identifies man's life with his tool-making capacity and his socio-economic functions; or the symbolist school led by Ernst Cassirer which identifies man with his ability to communicate by means of signs and symbols (Essay on Man).³⁷ What Dooyeweerd is saying when he claims that life is religion is that all these other things that have been noted as having a place in man's life are only aspects of that all-inclusive life which, as a whole, can only properly be described as religion.

Religion is man's specific condition. It is what makes us human rather than animal. It is the existent condition in which the human ego is bound to its true or pretended firm ground and origin which is revealed in the restlessness of man in search of the Absolute. Sharing in the meaning character of all created reality, the selfhood can find no rest in itself, but restlessly seeks its origin in order to understand its own meaning, and in its own meaning the meaning of all created reality.

This restlessness of the selfhood is transmitted to all the temporal functions in which it is actually operative. In this way scientific thought as an activity of the selfhood also comes to share in the restless search for the Absolute. As Dooyeweerd puts it:

Thought will not be set at rest in the preliminary philosophical questions, until the Arche is discovered, which alone gives meaning and existence to philosophic thought itself. Philosophic thought cannot withdraw itself from this tendency towards the Origin. It is an immanent conformity to law for it to find no rest in meaning, but to think from and to the origin to which meaning owes its ground.³⁸

If theoretical thought is not able to reach the true absolute Origin of meaning in God, it is forced to raise some aspect of the cosmos to the status of being absolute. In Dooyeweerd's opinion this is the cause of all absolutization of the relative. Every such absolutization of a theoretically isolated aspect of reality to act as root and origin of all the others is basically of a religious nature and a manifestation of the law of religious concentration to which theoretical thought is subjected. Hence Dooyeweerd's definition of religion as "the innate impulse of human selfhood to direct itself towards the true or pretended absolute origin of all the temporal diversity of meaning."³⁹

On account of this law of religious concentration, Aristotle's view of man as a rational animal, a being defined in terms of his analytical-logical function, is determined by his view of God as noesis noesoos; and Kant's view of noumenal man, as a being qualified by a transcendent moral function, is determined by his moralistic view of God as a postulate of practical reason.

If the selfhood is unable to find the true absolute in God, it is forced to absolutize some aspect of the relative in order to give itself content in the light of the absolutized aspect. In the final analysis religion is absolute self-surrender. The selfhood can only find its own meaning and content in self-surrender to the Absolute God, or in the case of apostasy, to the absolutized relative.

In Dooyeweerd's opinion all theoretical knowledge thus presupposes self-knowledge, while the latter is only possible in religious self-surrender to the one true God or of an absolutized relative aspect of God's creation. The self-knowledge gained in this way is therefore of a religious and not of a theoretical or scientific character. From this Dooyeweerd rightly concludes that theoretical and scientific thought is not self-sufficient and the pretended autonomy of scientific thought is therefore exposed as a myth. The content and direction of theoretical thought are determined by a supra-theoretical and scientific starting point in which the selfhood participates and whence it receives the direction of its activity.

For this reason the Christian scholar must work under the guidance and standards of critical judgment provided in the Holy Scriptures. If he were to set aside the Word of God as the directing principle of his life he could no longer claim to apply a Christian criterion to his studies nor could his own scientific pursuits proceed in a Christian direction. For the Christian scholar, as for every member of the New Covenant, God's Word is that "arche" or ordering principle of life the Greek philosophers were forever seeking after; God's Word is for every Christian the starting point of both his theoretical and practical activities which governs his life in this world. It provides him with his Christian principle of interpretation or principium, meaning "beginning," or "origin" for his thinking and acting in life. Thus the Shorter Westminster Catechism asks, "What rule hath God given to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy Him?" and it answers, "The Word of God which is contained in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments is the only rule to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy Him."

According to Dooyeweerd the biblical ground motive or basic pre­supposition of the creation, fall of man into sin, and his redemption by Jesus Christ in the communion of the Holy Spirit is the central motivating and reforming power of every Christian thought or theory worthy of the name. The Word of God provides those who accept it with an ordering principle of life that gives order, coherence, and meaning to all our experience.

For the Christian scholar the Word of God alone is the power which can inform, i.e., put form and shape into his scholarship. God's revelation of himself as creator, redeemer and sanctifier revealed in the Scriptures is the power by which He opens up our hearts to see our human situation in the framework of reality as it really is by working in us a true knowledge of God, of ourselves and of the law-order and structure of God's creation. The Word of God thus makes us aware of our place in God's creation and provides all our science and learning with its proper frame of reference and its only sure point of departure.

Scripture is the Truth of God which reveals to us and makes us see how we stand in relation to God, to our fellow men, and to the world. In its dynamic character God's Word impinges upon our hearts and directs our scientific thinking in the proper direction. Accordingly, although the Scriptures should not be regarded as the source book for the "facts" of science, they would put the set into the scientific saw. The great delusion of scientific humanism is that the saw of science is able to set itself. The Word of God enables us to see the facts studied in the various sciences in their true order, structure, and relationships. The facts do not speak to us unless we see them in their proper order. Thus the Word of God clarifies our view of the world at the outset. It provides us with our archimedean point of departure for all our scientific thought by revealing that we did not arrive on this planet by chance but that God created the universe. When the Bible speaks of creation it does so to reveal to us the central origin, the ultimate source of all reality, and thus it tells us something about reality that man could not discover by means of his own unaided reason. The biblical revelation of creation thus gives us an insight into the "being" or the Dasein of reality, viz., its ultimate dependence upon Almighty God. That revelation may never be put upon the same mundane level as the data discovered by research, since in the Christian view this revelation is the very given, the very condition and presupposition of any scientific theories about reality whatsoever. The condition of human knowledge about reality stands on a different level than the effect. This revelatory condition of all human thought and science is what Christians should understand by the claim that the Bible is the Word of God. It is the Word of God because it brings us into touch with the creator or the world and because it makes us see our "place" in God's creation. It is God's Word of Truth about the ultimate nature of things; it tells us who we men are (our heredity); in what kind of location we have been put by God (our environ­ment); and what, in the light of the previous two, we now have to do, namely become reconciled to God through Christ. As such the Word of God is the only true statement by which the nature of our life in this world can be elucidated and its way thus properly directed. As the psalmist says: "Thy Word is a lamp unto my feet" (Psalm 119:105).

What God's Word does not do, of course, is to tell us that there are fourteen or so law-spheres or aspects in God's creation; that is a matter strictly of a scientific analysis. The Bible is not a textbook of science; the purpose and nature of God's Word is not to be scientific but to orient our hearts in the true religious dimension of reality. No less a theologian that John Calvin recognized this truth. To the question, "Is the Bible the final authority on matters scientific?" Calvin replied that when the Spirit of God speaks through the Law and the Prophets He does so not with rigorous exactness, "but in a style suited to the common capacities of man."⁴⁰ This of course would not involve the question of miracles, for they are special occurrences for some particular purpose, but for the knowledge of all normal natural happenings Calvin teaches in his great Commentary on Genesis that the study of the phenomena, not of the Scriptures, brings men true knowledge (Gen. 1:16).

W. Stanford Reid, in his fascinating study of Natural Science in Sixteenth Century Calvinistic Thought, points out that: "Such an attitude to the Bible and nature meant that Calvin and his followers flatly rejected any form of biblicistic rationalism or mysticism. As Calvin put it: "He who would learn astronomy and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere." (Comment on Genesis 1:6) … It is through the facts of nature that one learns about nature."⁴¹

Instead the Word of God directs us to take whatever diversity of "modal moments" or aspects we find in the creation as a diversity of the integral fulness of meaning of our religious life. In this way God's revelation of Himself in the Scriptures directs us to the integral creation-order concentrated in man's heart and thus shows us our true place in God's creation. By refusing to accept this ordering principle for their studies apostate scholars have become blind to the true nature of reality. Lacking such a true ordering principle, they are forced to interpret the whole of their experience in terms of one or another aspect which they religiously absolutize instead of in terms of man's covenantal relationship with God. As a result their experience has defied explanation. Yet the reason is not because it has not been given to man "to see" his life and his world, but because apostate scholars have not been standing in the right place to see it properly, that place where all the complex functions of human life assume a meaningful place within the whole creation. That meaningful place is the central place; it is religion; man created and placed before his Creator in a covenantal fellowship with his God to render Him praise and service in his threefold office of God's prophet, priest, and king called to carry out the great cultural and scientific mandate "to have dominion over the earth and to subdue it" in singleness of heart to the Creator's glory.

By describing religion as a "place" we are not referring, of course, to a spatial place, because when we say religion is a place we mean something beyond all merely temporal aspects of reality. Evan Runner points out in The Bible in Relation to Learning:

The word "place" is the bearer of many meanings; it is, as we say, multivocal, as opposed to univocal. It can have any number of modal meanings. For example, when my friend suddenly does something that hurts me I can say that there was no place for such an act, that it was not "fitting." I mean then an ethical "place." I mean that our friendship excludes what he did. Of a musical composition I can hold the opinion that some subordinate motif or part does not belong, does not have a place in the whole. Then I mean an aesthetic "place." … besides all these modal meanings of the word "place" there is that fulness or fulfillment of meaning of the word "place" when we speak of place in its central religious sense.⁴²

According to the Christian basic religious ground-motive or presupposition the world is not fundamentally the aesthetic "world" or the "world" of science or the "world" of thought or the "world" of sports or the "world" of politics or the "world" of business. These are all "worlds," aspects of man's life in this world, universes of discourse. The world in its deepest sense is the world as it is being re-created and re-formed by Jesus Christ, the world of religion, the world of God's wonderful covenant fellowship with man; the world in which all these other "worlds" or aspects of man's life in God's creation assume their rightful or meaningful place. Nature as such only exists as a functional area of God's creation.

When God asked Adam the question, "Where art thou?" He was not asking, "Behind which bush art thou?" He was saying that He did not find man in the place in which the Lord had put him in the creation. This is the religious meaning of place, and this is what we mean when we claim that man cannot really "see" the world and truly understand the meaning of his life in it unless he stands in his rightful place in God's creation. If man does not stand in this place, then he absolutizes an aspect of creation.

Once we are standing by God's own sovereign grace in this rightful position which is religion, we come to realize the necessity for the reformation of all aspects of modern culture, science, and society. The scriptural ground-motive by which we have become gripped drives us into a struggle with all unreformed elements both in our hearts and in the world around us, not out of any pride in ourselves but out of a deep concern for our fellow man. As Hendrik Hart well puts it:

The matter of the antithesis is not an inheritance from Hegel nor even an achievement of Kuyper. It is no more than the plain teaching of Scripture with respect to the Christ and the anti-Christ. It seems that in reformed circles this confession of the antithesis is no longer fashionable. We would do well to remember two things before we abolish it. The first is that a denial of the antithesis is a denial of Christ because it is a denial of the anti in anti-Christ. The second is that if we deny the antithetical character of the Spirit of God in relation to every other spirit in the universe we deny the non-believer his chance to realize that he must make a radical turn-about in his life, that he must move in a direction which runs opposite to the one he now follows. The doctrine of the antithesis is not a doctrine of pride or of seclusion but a doctrine of love; love for the man whose soul has fallen prey to the spirit of the anti-Christ and who must be made to see that living the life of this spirit is indeed living anti Christ.⁴³

The Word of God is thus the divine spiritual power which re­generates our hearts and reforms our minds. It is the central ordering principle of the Christian's life and the key to all true knowledge of reality and hence the foundation of a truly Christian culture and society. God's Word alone can provide us with a unified field of knowledge. God's Word alone can make us wise about the conditions of human existence.

e) The Reformational Understanding of History and Social Change←⤒🔗

Before we can study any period of history with any hope of understanding it, we must first define what we mean by history. As Christians we must find our principles of selection of the so-called "historical facts" and ordering principle by means of which to put meaning into such facts in the great scriptural ground-motive of man's creation by Almighty God, man's radical fall into sin, and his equally radical redemption by Jesus Christ in the communion of the Holy Spirit. Only in God's Word can we hope to find an antidote to the modern poison of historical relativism or historicism. In Renewal and Reflection, Herman Dooyeweerd writes:

"Historicism," which allows reality to be absorbed in her historical aspect, is the deadly disease of our "dynamic" age. And no adequate cure will be found against it as long as the Scriptural creation-motif has not completely regained control of our way of life as well as of our thinking. It robs you of your faith in abiding standards; it even preys on your faith in the eternal truth of God's Word. According to historicism all things are relative, all things are historically determined, even our faith in ultimate values.⁴⁴

Both the English philosopher of history, R. G. Collingwood, and W. Dilthey, the German philosopher of culture, succumbed to historicism.⁴⁵ Having exposed the underlying faith-principles and presuppositions of the various life and world-views which have governed the development of various civilizations and historical societies, they failed to provide a standard by which we could judge which philosophy of life is true and which is false. In his Essay on Metaphysics and in his Autobiography, as well as in The Idea of History, Collingwood suggested that we cannot properly speak of one set of absolute presuppositions as being truer than any other. For since it is the very function of absolute presuppositions to make coherent thinking and historical enquiry possible, it follows that they themselves cannot be established or overthrown by any enquiry. Investigation can never furnish evidence for or against them. And therefore, Collingwood argues, they cannot be judged true or false. The only enquiry which can be made concerning absolute presuppositions or faith principles or ground-motives, as we shall call them, is the enquiry what presuppositions or faith principles or ground-motives are actually adopted by men to guide them at a given time by a given group of thinkers and leaders of a society. And if metaphysics is by definition the science of absolute presuppositions, it must be the history of such absolute presuppositions, for a historical science is the only science of them which is possible.

Dooyeweerd teaches that the only defense against such an uncompromising historical relativism is to realize that historicism is the product of an absolutizing or deification of the historical aspect of reality, as it becomes the object of special research by the science of history. Historicism arises and takes hold on our view of reality whenever the creation motive of God's Revelation in the Bible has ceased to determine and direct our view of reality.

As a result of the abandonment of the biblical creation motive, the historical aspect of reality, in terms of which the science of history investigates the "facts" and events of the past, is identified with history in the concrete sense of "what actually happened in the past" or of what Michael Oakeshott defines in his great book, Experience and Its Modes, as "the practical past." The "practical past" may never thus be identified with the historical aspect of reality in terms of which history is today scientifically investigated. The reason is given by Dooyeweerd as follows:

Concrete events such as wars, famines, revolutions, etc. are a part of concrete reality which functions in principle in all aspects of God's creation without fail … As soon as you identify the historical aspect of reality with that which has happened you forget that concrete history or "the practical past" displays many other aspects which are not themselves of an historical nature. Reality in its broadest sense is then identified with one of the several aspects of creation – the one abstracted by the science of history. Then you become an historicist in your vision of reality and you abandon the scriptural creation-motive.⁴⁶

How then may we distinguish the historical aspect or law-sphere of God's creation from the other law-spheres? Dooyeweerd answers:

The historical aspect distinguishes itself from the other aspects such as organic life, emotional feeling, logical distinction, etc., not by what happens within its realm but by how it happens, the manner in which it takes place. For the historian, therefore, the important thing is to discover the modal moment of the historical manner in which a concrete event of the past took place. He needs a criterion to enable him to distinguish the historical aspect from all other modes of reality.⁴⁷

Dooyeweerd finds the modal moment or core of the historical aspect, which guarantees her peculiarity as a "sovereign" science and her irreducibility to any other science in the cultural.

The cultural is the manner in which reality reveals itself in the historical aspect. As used by Dooyeweerd culture refers to all that which owes its existence to human "form-giving," in distinction from that which develops naturally such as a biological organism or a chemical crystal. The design of honeycombs is not a form of culture because it is not developed according to the free choice of design on the part of bees but rather according to the bees' instincts.

The cultural form giving of which historiography seeks to give an account is founded in God's creation and in God's great cultural mandate to man given to him at the beginning of his history to subdue the earth and to have dominion over it. It touches only on the historical aspect of creation, which is subjected to man's cultural formation. As Dooyeweerd makes clear:

The cultural is the manner in which reality reveals itself in the historical aspect. Usually the word culture is understood to refer to all that which owes its existence to human form giving in distinction from that which develops by virtue of "nature."⁴⁸

Nevertheless this cultural formation is itself merely an aspect of real things, events, etc., and a so-called cultural object such as the American Constitution or Magna Carta functions also in all other aspects of reality which do not bear a cultural character as for example, the numerical, the spatial, the physical, the psychical, the logical-analytical, the lingual, the economic, the aesthetic, and the pistical or faith aspect.

Once we realize that every event of the past functions in all these aspects of reality as well as in the historical-cultural, we need never again become victimized by the relativistic and historicistic attitude.

Only when the biblical motive of creation of the world by God grips our thinking will historicism have lost its control upon our thinking and doing. Only then shall we be in a position to make sense of the "facts" and "events" of the past.

Modern historicism denies the constant structure of the historical aspect itself, in which the divine laws for historical development and cultural unfolding have been enclosed. For the same reason it has no abiding standard by means of which to judge the reactionary and the truly progressive lines of historical development.

What norms then govern the historical aspect?←↰⤒🔗

According to Dooyeweerd's evangelical and scripturally oriented philosophy of history, the norms of history that obtain for the unfolding process of history and culture are (1) historical continuity, (2) cultural differentiation, (3) cultural integration, (4) cultural individualization, and (5) the ground-motive in control of a given culture and society.

Historical Norms and Standards←↰⤒🔗

Dooyeweerd views history as the "opening-up" process which discloses the full meaning of God's creation by making explicit in time the rich modal aspects of God's creation (see chart of the Law-Spheres). In every modal moment of the divine cosmic structure there are given certain principles which should become concretized and emergent in the development of human culture. In a primitive "unhistorical" society and culture, this is not fully accomplished, since the life of primitive man is bound up and identified with the natural, physical, and biological aspects of reality, as is evident in such primitive institutions as totemism, animism, animal art, and tribal organization based upon animal life. As a result of this mythopoeic identification of himself with nature due to man's radical fall into sin, primitive man had enclosed himself by the natural givenness of reality. That is to say, he did not adequately distinguish between himself and his natural environment. As Henri Frankfort says in Before Philosophy:

The fundamental difference between the attitudes of modern and ancient man as regards the surrounding world is this: for modern scientific man the phenomenal world is primarily an "it"; for ancient – and also for primitive man – the world is looked upon as a "Thou."⁴⁹

As a result of this identification progress and historical development for primitive man became next to impossible, and he became bound by many traditions, superstitions, and tribal mores.

As long as men thus personified natural forces as divine and saw their lives as being embedded in nature they could not develop any sense of the dignity and worth of human nature or conceive of the uniqueness of individuals as persons created in God's holy image. Instead, the individual was constricted by the collectivity of his tribe or clan.

The first step, therefore, for the emergence of both humanism and personalism had to be the emancipation of human thought from primitive superstition and myth. That is to say, before men could discover themselves as individual persons they had to establish a radical discontinuity between themselves and nature; they had to overcome the primitive view which ranged man entirely with nature.

The decisive step in the "opening up" process of human history and cultural differentiation by which this mythopoeic tradition and primitive and ancient collectivism was finally overcome occurred in two societies, namely in ancient Israel, which came under the control of the biblical motive of creation and looked forward to a future redemption by the Messiah, and in ancient Greece. The former established the religious and moral breakthrough, the latter the logical and the scientific. For this reason Matthew Arnold, in Culture and Anarchy, in the famous chapter on "Hebraism and Hellenism," wrote:

Hebraism and Hellenism – between these two points of influence moves our world. At one time it feels more powerfully the attraction of one of them, at another time the other; and it ought to be, though it never is, evenly and happily balanced between them. The final aim of both Hellenism and Hebraism, as of all great spiritual disciplines, is no doubt the same: man's perfection or salvation … their final aim is "that we might be partakers of the divine nature."⁵⁰

Human historical progress and cultural development began to take place when Greek and Hebrew men became open to the higher norms given by God in cosmic structure of creation, beginning with the logical modality or law-sphere. Man had to break through the mythopoeic thought barrier and tribal collectivism into a scientific and religious way of looking at the world before history in the true sense of the word could begin. It is the lasting achievement of the Greeks to have achieved the scientific breakthrough, and of the Hebrews the moral and religious breakthrough. But even when such a breakthrough occurs as in Classical Greece, human sin may still have the effect of opposing the disclosure of the higher aspects of reality in their full religious depths, so that the religious totality of meaning of God's creation was never fully realized by the Greeks throughout their history, while man's rational and logical faculties became absolutized. God was conceived of as the Absolute Nous or Mind.

Dooyeweerd speaks of a meaningful development of culture only when the historical aspect comes into focus. This aspect is the foundation of the entire opening process of the higher modalities and norms. According to Dooyeweerd, culture is the core of this function. Culture, he teaches, is characterized by "form-giving to material which is freely controlled," a form giving according to a free design. He defines the modal moment of the historical aspect of God's creation as "the controlled formation of a given aptitude, structure, or situation to be something which it otherwise would not have been. It is the normative free realization of a thing in the process of culture."

By controlled formation Dooyeweerd intends to convey the idea that every individual does not form history to the same degree. History is primarily formed by the possessors of historical power.

Only by the exercise of such power either over other people or over things can there be a development of a culture.

Without such personal exercise of power a discovery or an invention by means of which we gain control over nature cannot as such, be of history making character. Thus Leonardo da Vinci's discovery of the airplane and the submarine never assumed any historical significance because it remained his private possession. It could have become an effective influence in the making of history only if he had won the support of other people for his invention. But to do that it was necessary to have power-formation and an historical influence which da Vinci had as an artist but not as an inventor or scientist.

Such a use of power in cultural formation is not to be identified with brute force. Misled by this identification many Christians consider it to be unchristian to strive for the acquisition of political power for the purpose of making Christian principles permeate life by means of Christian power organizations.

Such an attitude merely ignores the creation-motive of the Christian religion and makes it impossible to understand Christ's redemptive work in all its full scriptural sense.

The unbiblical nature of this pietistic view should become readily apparent when we remember that God has revealed himself as Creator in the original fulness of power. God is the Almighty One. At creation He gave man the cultural mandate to use his powers to God's glory and the benefit of human need. As a result of the fall the position of power to which God called man took on an idola­trous direction.

Yet Christ the Redeemer revealed himself anew as the One who possesses power in the fullest sense of the word. "All power hath been given me in heaven and earth," Christ told his disciples just before His ascension into Heaven (Matt. 28:18).

This spiritual power of the gospel differs from the power of the sword of government, and both of them differ radically from the power of science, of art, of love and sex, of industry, etc.

But regardless of the concrete structure in which the historical formation of power reveals itself, it is never brute force. It is always grounded in God's creation, and as such it has nothing demonic about it. Our Lord explicitly calls himself the ruler of the kings of the earth and as the King of Common as well as Special Grace. He rules sovereignly over all the states of this world regardless of whether they acknowledge His sovereignty or not. Christ claims for His service even the power of the sword of government because by means of the sword of justice the earthly state restrains the worst consequences of sin while Christ's Church mediates to men the saving power of the Gospel.

Only sin can place power in the service of the demonic and idola­trous, but this is true of all the other good gifts of God, including our science, our emotions, our legal, educational, and political institutions, woman's beauty, and man's physical strength. Power, in so far as it has been entrusted to man as God's servant, always bears a cultural stamp. It brings with it an historical calling, the task of form giving, of which the bearer of power, whether president, manager, parent, teacher, or even a friend will each one day have to give an account. Every ruler who has ever lived will one day appear before the judgment seat of God.

For this reason power as such may never be used just for the furtherance of one's own personal ambition, as if it were a personal possession. Power has been the driving force behind the cultural development and historical change. The question is: In whose service has it been used, in God's or Satan's, on behalf of one's selfish interest or for the good of the nation and the world?

The formation and exercise of power is subject to essential norms and divine standards, and thus it may not be exercised arbitrarily. Dooyeweerd thus does not agree with historians such as Spengler who conceive of the laws of history as biological laws, so that a civilization once born is bound to grow up, decay, and eventually die. These norms for historical development are of an intrinsically historical nature. For the process of historical development has been placed under certain norms by God himself as the Lord of History as well as of Nature. Both rulers and ruled in each nation are subject to these norms. No nation may claim to be the source of these norms governing its historical development, as the German and English Historical School of the 19^th century taught.

The creation motive forces us, as soon as it has taken control of our lives, to recognize that God's Law is sovereign over every sphere of man's life. Man is that being who has been called to obey his Creator. He is created as a responsible being, being answerable to God for all his actions. Unlike the animals, man alone can transgress these norms and directives for his life. The laws governing God's creation up to the logical law-sphere cannot be transgressed; e.g., man cannot transgress the law of gravity. If he jumps off a skyscraper, he falls down rather than up.

In practical life everyone, including apostate liberal humanist historians, sociologists, and lawyers, recognize the relevance and validity of such historical norms as soon as they speak of their opponents as being reactionary. Yet as soon as they call someone else reactionary they are making a value judgment which, presupposes the assumption in their minds that they uphold a norm for historical development. It is ironic, to say the least, that the very same "liberals" who teach historical relativism in the lecture room are the very first to brand their conservative political opponents as fascist beasts or right-wing die-hards!

But how do we know that the historical development of a given society or culture is progressive or reactionary? The answer is from the place which God has given to the historical aspect in His creation order.

The distinction between historical and unhistorical, or progressive or reactionary, goes back by analogy to the distinction which we meet with in the logical aspect of reality between a statement which is true or false. The historical mode of experience is thus founded in the logical mode of distinguishing our experiences. Without the basis of logical distinction no single historical experience is possible. As an example Dooyeweerd takes the Battle of Waterloo as an historical fact.

Let us take for example the battle of Waterloo as a historical fact. The famous Austrian economist, Hayek, raised the question whether the work of farmers, who tried desperately to save their crops on the battlefields, also belonged to the battle.

This question is very instructive. For it proves that our historical mode of experiencing the battle of Waterloo cannot be founded on a record of sensory perception alone. From the sensory viewpoint the work of the farmers took place without a doubt on the battlefield. But, implicitly, we make an analytical, or logical distinction, between the action of persons, whether or not they pertain to the battle as a historical contest of power between Napoleon's forces and those of his allied opponents.⁵¹

He goes on to point out that the idea of historical development is connected with the contrast historical-unhistorical or progressive-reactionary.

By this contrast we mean that the behavior or program of a leading figure or group is in line with, or contrary to the requirements of historical development. As a clear analogy of the logical relation of contradiction, this contrast implies a normative criterion, so that the concept of historical development must itself have a normative cultural meaning. And since the contrast concerned appeared to be founded in the modal structure of the historical aspect itself, its normative sense cannot be reduced to a merely subjective evaluation of the factual course of history. Rather it must be founded on an objective norm of historical development which implicitly lies at the foundation of the cultural historical mode of experience.⁵²

All the aspects which follow the logical aspect have their own normative character in contrast to the pre-logical which are a-normative. Norms are only possible to creatures endowed with the ability to make rational distinctions between true or false, i.e., with the power to think logically.

These norms have been laid down in principle at creation as the principial starting points for human conduct. And as such they demand to be positivized or made concrete by human agents in terms of the historical situation in which they find themselves. This process of giving form to the norms laid down at creation must always correspond to the historical level of development of a given nation or people. For in the process of form giving all the other aspects of human life are intertwined with the historical aspect. This process always goes back to the cultural form giving at a given level of historical development. It is in this sense, for instance, that the basic principles of etiquette call for further development. King Henry VIII of England used to eat his dinner with his bare hands. Such behavior is no longer considered to be in good taste unless you happen to have returned to medieval conduct. Likewise, the ground rules of language and grammar call for further form-giving in the lingual law-sphere. The English we speak today is vastly different from the English of Chaucer; likewise, the ground rules for economic behavior have developed since medieval times, and the canons for aesthetic appreciation have developed in the structure of modern design, art, and music.

Because of the inseparable coherence between all the later aspects and the historical aspect, it begins to appear, as soon as the creation motive of God's Word looses its hold upon our thinking, as if all forms of social life, language, economics, art, justice, and religious belief are basically historically determined and of historical origin. As soon as we thus absolutize the historical aspect and seek to explain all the other aspects in terms of it, we lose our hold on reality and become the slaves of cultural relativism and historicism. Thus does God the Holy Ghost blind our eyes to the Truth when we refuse to abide in the Truth of God's Holy Word.

Only the creation motive of God's Word which constantly impresses upon us that God created all things after their own kind can prevent us from falling into this relativistic and historicistic trap and error. Again the scriptural revelation that God created everything each after its own kind sharpens our ability to distinguish the various aspects of reality and we no longer seek a monistic answer to the problems of life and of change.

And so, for instance, it becomes impossible that justice in its human formulation can be reduced to history without destroying its nature as justice. The making of history calls for power on the part of those who are called to the task of form giving to the basic principles of culture. The construction of a code of laws, for instance, as is done by such law-givers as Justinian or Napoleon, calls for legal power and competence. But such juridical power cannot be reduced to power in a historical sense. As soon as we attempt to do that, we place justice and power on the same level, thus negating justice. Right becomes might.

The fact that the German Nazi Party taught that a nation proves its right to exist by means of an historical struggle for power and the "survival of the fittest nation," was a typical outcome of an historicistic view of life. "Right is Might" was and still is the basic slogan of the political views of Communism. Such teaching is all the more dangerous since it contains an element of truth in it. For it is true that within the history of the world God's judgments of various nations has been taking place. Thus the Lord of History used the power of Assyria and Babylon to punish Israel and Judah, of the German barbarians to punish the Romans, of the Spaniards to punish the Italian city states at the time of the Renaissance, and of the Allied armies in the Second World War to defeat Nazism. But this never happens in the sense that justice dissolves itself in power.

It is true, however, that within the framework of juridical power the legal aspect of reality coheres inseparably with the historical aspect. Without power in history in the historical sense of military might and the police power, power in the juridical sense cannot exist. "Covenants without the Sword are but words." Nevertheless both of them must be differentiated according to their own inner nature.

Historical development serves, when seen in the light of the creation motive of God's Word to bring the richness of God's creation structures into focus in the cultural aspect of reality and to full differentiated development. For the individual character of the separate creation structures and law-spheres can only come to completion and be made manifest in time in the differentiation of culture.

Historical development simply means this unfolding process by means of the norm of the differentiation of God's higher law-aspects. History is the womb of time which brings forth the richness of His creation structures and makes their existence possible. In this way there gradually emerged out of the undifferentiated closed society of primitive man the state, the Church, university, medieval guild, and modern business enterprise and modern labor union. But this process of coming into being presupposes God's original creation of these creation structures and social ordinances; it is indeed only the fulfillment and realization of the latter in time. And time is itself part of God's creation.

This process of coming into being is thus not something independent over against God's creation but an essential part of God's world plan. Just as the development of a child begins from the still undifferentiated germ cell in the mother's womb, out of which the different organs of the child's body become differentiated, so in human society and history the development begins with undifferentiated social forms such as the gens, tribe, and primitive collectivity. After a lengthy process of development it "opens out" into the differentiated societal structures of modern times. And this differentiation fulfills itself according to its historical aspect by means of a branching off or opening up process of culture in which the power spheres of church, state, science, business, school appear upon the stage of world history. Such differentiation of culture of necessity terminates the absolute and exclusive power of the primitive undifferentiated spheres of life.

The norm of cultural differentiation thus requires that in the development of civilization from a primitive phase, the new forms of association and community must become concretized into new social forms. In man's historical development out of primitive undifferentiated social groupings he gradually found greater freedom in the emergence of separate cultural spheres, e.g., Plato's Academy, Israel's school of prophets, medieval universities, Renaissance artists colonies and workshops, modern businesses, theatres, newspapers. All of these separate cultural spheres are valid concretizations within the temporal world order of the structural principles given at creation. The historical norm of differentiation thus guarantees the individualizing tendency of persons, nations, and societal relationships. As a normative law-sphere this norm requires positivization or specifica­tion. It is not possible to determine beforehand what ought to emerge in a given societal relationship. It is up to the cultural leaders and statesmen who possess historical power to formulate the concrete requirements of culture for their own day, but their power must not be exercised arbitrarily. But since the historical sphere is normative, violations of historical norms are possible, and leaders and statesmen may fail to act normatively. Conservative "reaction" against necessary social changes brought about by scientific and technological advance within a given society is anti-normative. Reactionaries praise the good old days and, if they had their way, would roll back the progress of cultural and social advance. By the same token, left-wing revolutionaries are also anti-normative. The revolutionary intentionally breaks with the historical past and dis­avows the norm of continuity of history. He would dare to sweep the cultural slate clean and start de novo; e.g., the French Revolution, Hitler's New Order, and Lenin's and Stalin's and Mao Tse Tung's New Communist Paradise.

The process by which the cultural aspect of a society is opened up always occurs in a conflict between the guardians of tradition and the propounders of new ideas. The formative power of tradi­tion is enormous, for, in a concentrated form it embodies cultural treasures and wisdom amassed over hundreds of years. Every generation is historically bound to former generations by its tradition. We are all dominated by it to a much greater extent than we often realize. In a primitive closed society its power is nearly absolute. In an "open society," tradition is no longer unassailable, but it has the indispensable function of guarding that measure of continuity in cultural progress without which cultural life would be impossible.

In the struggle with the power of tradition the progressive ideas of new cultural leaders have themselves to be purged of their revolutionary subjectivity and adjusted to the great norm of historical continuity. Even Jacob Burckhardt held to the norm of continuity as a last guarantee against the decline of all civilization.

The norm of continuity demands that cultural form-giving must give due respect to tradition as well as to progress. Progress takes place when the principles contained in the post-historical law-spheres are realized in human society. But this realization must not occur in a revolutionary fashion destroying what is good in the tradition of the past. The past must serve as the basis for the new advance. Thus the invention of the automobile must not be allowed to destroy our respect for the sanctity of innocent human life. Today reformers complain about the execution of murderers but not about the enormous slaughter on America's highways. We have anti-war and anti-execution resolutions in plenty, but one has yet to hear of any for the suppression of the automobile. Why not? Why is the one kind of killing by automobiles condoned and the other condemned? Is it because the pleasure and the profit of the one exceed those of the other? Is it that the moral sense must give way to convenience? Why does this wholesale slaughter of the innocents not distress our progressives at all, while the thought of the execution of a few murderers a year nearly drives them around the bend?

The opening process of cultural life is characterized by the destruction of the undifferentiated and exclusive power of primitive communities. It is a process of cultural differentiation which is balanced by an increasing cultural integration. From one point of view the role of the state in history can be looked upon as a role of integration. The state appears in the arena of history when primitive, feudal, or tribal power-structures are broken up by new cultural forces guided by statesmen and rulers to make place for the state's monopoly of the power of the sword of justice and of political and police power. At this early stage of the state's development it be­comes apparent to the new monarchs of Western Europe in the later Middle Ages that political and legal power must no longer be considered the "private property" of those who happen to own extensive territories, but that the ownership of land or other feudal "privileges" must not become the basis for the exercise of political power. Instead the exercise of the latter comes to be seen as a public matter, a res publica. We can detect the origins of this legal and political development in the rise of the Roman Res Publica on the basis of the earlier tribal political organization in the years 600 to 200 B.C. It is apparent also in the rise of the modern nation state at the close of the Middle Ages. The first thinker to refer to it was Jean Bodin. According to Bodin the aim of the state is the maintenance of law and order upon the basis of the king's absolute sovereignty. He defined the state as "the right government of several families, and of what is common to them, with sovereign power." The word "right" in this definition implied that the power is exercised for the common good. Sovereignty he defined as the "absolute and perpetual power in a republic." Bodin was concerned to distinguish between the French nobility's rights to property and their claim to exercise rights of jurisdiction based upon their feudal land tenure. He insisted that they are quite different in kind, since the first kind are exercised for the sake of the second kind. No public office can be a part of any man's private estate, and whoever exercises rights of jurisdiction holds a public office. To hold any public office, except the highest, is to be the agent of whoever holds the highest office in the state, namely the sovereign himself. Bernard Zylstra points out that we can see a similar process of political integration at work in the new nation-states of Asia and Africa. He adds:

That this mandatory process of political integration – in a sinful world – is often accompanied by a severe struggle between feudal or tribal power and the new nation-state is tragically illustrated today by Vietnam and the Biafran conflicts. Political integration can be obstructed by an exaggerated and anachronistic stress upon the autonomy of the parts of the state at the expense of the whole. This was evident in Germany's and Italy's struggle toward statehood in the early 19^th Century.⁵³

The opening-up process of culture is characterized by the destruction of the undifferentiated and exclusive power of primitive communities. It is a process of cultural differentiation which is balanced by an increasing cultural integration. Since August Comte, Herbert Spencer, and Emile Durkheim, the criterion of differentiation and integration has been accepted by many historians and soci­ologists to distinguish more highly developed from primitive societies. The process of differentiation was viewed as a consequence of the division of labor, and an attempt was made to explain it in a natural scientific manner in analogy to the increasing differentiation of organic life in the higher developed organisms. The Reformational perspective on historical change does not understand the term "cultural differentiation" in this pseudo-naturalistic sense. Human societies are not biological organisms. Thus Dooyeweerd points out that by cultural differentiation he understands:

…a differentiation in the typical structures of the different social relationships presenting themselves in human society. A primitive sib or clan displays mixed traits of an extended family, a business organization, a club or a school, a state, a religious community, and so forth. In a differentiated society, on the other hand, all these communities are sharply distinguished from one another, so that each of them can reveal its proper inner nature, notwithstanding the fact that there are all kinds of interrelations between them. Each of these differentiated communities has its own typical historico-cultural sphere of formative power, whose inner boundaries are determined by the inner nature of the communities to which they belong.

The typical structures of these communities are really structures of individuality, since they are typical structures of an individual societal whole. With the exception of the natural communities such as marriage and family, which have a typical biological foundation, they are all typically founded in historico-cultural power formations, which presuppose the process of cultural differentiation and integration. Consequently, although they cannot be realized before this historical process has started, their typical structures can no more be variable than the modal structures of their different aspects, since they determine the inner nature of the differentiated communities. As such, they must he founded in the order of creation, which has determined the inner nature of all that is present within our temporal world…

In the temporal world-order norms are only given as principles which need a formation by man in accordance with the level of historical development of a differentiated society. The social forms which they assume in this way, are consequently of a variable character; but the structural principles, to which these forms give a variable positive content, are not variable historical phenomena, since they alone make all variable formations of the societal communities possible. Neither the inner nature of marriage, nor that if the family, the state, the church, an industrial community, and the like are variable in time, but only the social form in which they are realized.⁵⁴

The great German Historical school of jurisprudence in the 19^th century, led by Karl Von Savigny, started from the absolute individuality of any socio-cultural community, especially the nation-state. It personified the people or nation as the basic denominator of every human society and social activity, thereby proclaiming one temporal human relation as the whole of which all the other societal relations of church, art, science, education, the business firm are but subservient parts. According to Dooyeweerd, this absolutization of the nation-state is completely at variance with the fundamental motive of the Christian religion. Only God can thus claim to be the absolute sovereign. No bearer of authority on this earth is the highest power from which other forms of authority are derived. Ultimate sovereignty belongs only to God.

The historical school of law not only ignored God's ultimate and absolute sovereignty, but it also overlooked the typical structures of individuality which determine the inner nature of the communities, and which, as such, cannot be of a variable historical character. Nevertheless it is true that the process of cultural differentiation and integration is at the same time a process of increasing individualization of human culture, in so far as it is only in a culture which has been opened up and differentiated that individual personality assumes a really historical significance. While it is true that in a primitive closed society such individual personality is not lacking, the power of tradition and custom is such that individuality remains restricted. Innovation is not welcomed in such a closed society, and pressure is continually exerted upon the individual to conform with custom.

As soon, however, as the process of differentiation and integration commences, the individual emerges upon the stage of history as a person in his own right and personal talents become welcomed. It was Burckhardt's thesis that the Renaissance meant the re-discovery of individual personality. He quotes Pico Della Mirandola's famous oration on "The Dignity of Man" in which Pico argued that man's existence precedes his essence, which he makes himself.

It is the state's task of political and legal integration to provide the legal and political framework in which such individuality can express itself. On the basis of the state as a public-legal entity it becomes possible to protect human individuality from absorption into collectivistic power-structures. In the history of Western states the Christian conception of man as created in God's image has been legally safeguarded by such laws as habeas corpus, freedom of conscience and worship; in short, all the civil rights guaranteeing an area of freedom for human personality on the basis of equality. Here lies the historical significance of the American Bill of Rights, adopted soon after the ratification of the American Constitution, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948.

According to the Reformational perspective on history, such rights find their foundation in the divine creation order which channels the growth of individual and communal liberties in history. Civil rights, therefore, do not find their source in the state. The state, rather, if it is a constitutional law-state rather than a power-hungry totalitarian state, is the divinely appointed instrument for implementing human rights (Rom. 13). Nevertheless this implementation requires a ripening process. Thus Paul in his letter to Philemon did not advise Onesimus to run away from his master, but to return, but he called upon both to accept each other as brothers for whom Christ died. Some modern liberal Christians have read this letter with surprise and disappointment. They feel that Paul should have seized this opportunity to call for the abolition of slavery. Commenting upon this modern attitude, Emil Brunner points out in Justice and the Social Order:

Paul was by no means restoring his protege to slavery. He had a quite different fate in mind for him, and was striving to obtain it. But what he wanted, he wanted not only for the slave, but for his master Philemon too. The new thing was only to be achieved by a transformation in both. He calls on Philemon to receive his slave as he would receive the Apostle himself, to whom, like his slave, he owes his Christian faith. He wishes to see the relationship between Onesimus and his master based not on justice, but on love, on the love by which Paul is bound not only to the slave Onesimus but also to his master Philemon … The new relationship is to spring from Christian love, the love which unites all three, the whole household, the whole Christian community … What rises before our eyes is the picture of a Christian fellowship of love which leaves far beneath it anything that enters the systems of justice. The institution or order of slavery is dissolved from within and replaced by the order of fellowship in love … The problem of the injustice of slavery fades into the background. Without even being mentioned, it has been solved by something which no claim for justice can achieve, by fellowship in Jesus Christ.⁵⁵

For this reason the content of human rights may well differ in time and place, depending upon the historical situation and the level of human sensitivity to other peoples' sufferings. This gives us a more flexible approach to the problems created by human sin and rapid social change. In the developing Afro-Asian states we simply cannot expect a fully implemented system of civil rights, as we can in the so-called "civilized" Western nations. Until these nations also undergo a great spiritual revolution we cannot expect them to treat individuals with the same concern and respect which Western nations do after a thousand years of prodding by God's Word in the power of the Holy Spirit. Nevertheless, if the age-long hold of tyranny and superstition is to be overcome we must work and pray that the norm of individualization and personal freedom will also be realized in due course in Asia and Africa. The Christian understanding of justice implies that in the long run the state will maintain law and order protecting the rights of minorities against exploitation by majorities The state's main task, in fact, is to integrate, that is, hold the ring and see that no one community or association seeks to ride rough shod over the rights and liberties of other groups or individuals.

The confusion in contemporary sociological thought about such matters as race relations and treatment of minorities arises from the fact that it takes place largely within the conceptual social thinking of Rousseau's apostate social philosophy. Rousseau's social philosophy lost sight of the great social spheres of family, church, school, etc., and conceived of society as composed of absolute individuals over against the absolute sovereign state, endowed with a "general will." When the biblical cultural norm of differentiation is taken into account the polarity of individualism versus collectivism is in principle eliminated. This norm requires that as soon as the historical unfolding process has begun the various social structures must be sharply distinguished but not separated from each other, so that each can display its proper character for the enrichment of human culture. The structure of society, therefore, in the state of cultural and his­torical differentiation is not individualistic as conservatives suppose nor collectivistic as liberals and socialists suppose, but pluralistic.

Whenever these great norms governing the unfolding of history are ignored or transgressed then society suffers. Many examples come to mind to prove Hegel's dictum that "the history of the world is the judgment of the world." Whenever men choose to violate these normative principles to which the unfolding process of the cultural historical aspect of human society is subject, then these norms are avenged by social misery, chaos, and upheaval. As Dooyeweerd says:

It was an unmistakable proof of the reactionary character of the myth of blood and soil propagated by German Nazism that it tried to undermine the national consciousness of the Germanic peoples by reviving the primitive ethnic idea of Volkstum. Similarly, it is an unmistakable proof of the retrograde tendency of all modern totalitarian political systems that they attempt to annihilate the process of cultural differentiation and individualization by a methodical mental equalizing of all cultural spheres; for this equalizing implies a fundamental denial of the value of the individual personality in the unfolding (opening-up) process of history.

So we may posit that the norm of cultural differentiation, integration and individualization is really an objective norm of the historical unfolding process of human society. It is founded in the divine world-order, since it indicates the necessary conditions of this prospective unfolding process, without which mankind cannot fulfill its historical task committed to it by the great cultural commandment. Furthermore, it provides us with an objective criterion to distinguish truly progressive from reactionary tendencies in history.⁵⁶

In the last resort the whole direction which the unfolding process of culture and society displays is determined by the faith motivating the leaders of a given society. The religious ground-motive of the whole cultural development of an historical era manifests itself first of all in the faith of those who are called to mold history. The disclosure of the normative spheres is in the last instance dependent on the disclosing function of faith, which has no anticipatory functions but is a window opening out onto eternity. Among the normative spheres the historical occupies a unique position, for it reveals itself as the foundation of all normative disclosure. Only with historical and cultural development is the disclosure of the higher spheres made possible; e.g., historical consciousness, a differentiated economic life, a deepened conception of law. Dooyeweerd teaches that the disclosure of the normative spheres demands both retrocipations on the historical and anticipations of faith.

In primitive life the restrictive function of faith finds its expression in the absolutization of the prelogical aspects of reality. Here the forces of nature are deified in such practices as mana, totemism, magic, etc. In civilized communities man creates his idol in the image of the normative functions of his own personality, for example, the Greek deification of man's intellectual functions or Nous or the Marxist deification of man's tool-making productive functions. In claiming that man today is "an industrial animal" Ernest Gellner in Thought and Change has fallen into the same apostate trap.⁵⁷ As a result of all such absolutizations the opening up process of history develops along deformed rather than reformed lines.

In his book, History and the Gospel, C. H. Dodd of Cambridge writes:

At the present time, the existence of the Church has become one of the crucial problems of European civilization … The Church, whether as a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense, or as the headstone of the corner, is destined to be a determining factor in contemporary events.

Whatever part the Church has played in the crises of history, whether negative or positive, whether conservative or revolutionary, it is always a disturbing factor, upsetting human calculations and opening up unforeseen possibilities. It is a standing protest against any conception of history as a closed order, naturally determined. For it witnesses to the creative energies of God in this world, and offers itself to Him as an instrument of His good pleasure. It is in the Church, so far as it realizes its vocation, that history is made, not by us but by the power of God. History is finally to be judged not as a simple succession in time, but as a process determined by the creative act of God vertically from above – if we must use spatial metaphors – and not by the vis a tergo of physical and psychological causation … History is "sacred history." Whenever the Gospel is proclaimed, it brings about a crisis, as in the experience of the individual, so also in the experience of whole communities and civilizations. Out of the crisis (judgment) comes a new creation by the power of God … The events recorded in the biblical record are presented as a history of the dealings of God with men … As such, the biblical history is denominated by German theologians, Heilsgeschicte, that is history as a redemptive process … as "sacred history."⁵⁸

C. H. Dodd continues:

It is important to bear in mind that the same events enter into sacred and secular history; the events are the same, but they form two distinguishable series.

The empirical series which is secular history extends over all recorded time, to our own day, and is still unfinished. In this series events are linked together by succession in time, and by the operation of efficient causes, whether these be physical or psychological…

But there is another series into which the historical events may fall, that which I have called "sacred history," or history as a process of redemption and revelation. Of this series biblical history forms the inner core. But the Bible always assumes that the meaning of this inner core is the ultimate meaning of all history, since God is the Maker and Ruler of all mankind, who created all things for Himself and redeemed the world to Himself. That is to say, the whole of history is in the last resort sacred history, or Heilsgeschichte.⁵⁹

In terms of this biblical perspective we must therefore view history not only as the expression of man's reaction to a divinely given mandate but also as the record of God's dealings with the human race. Dooyeweerd also teaches that no sense can be made of secular history without understanding it in the light of sacred biblical history, and that it is man's faith either in the God of the Bible or in some false idol of his own devising which determines whether man's cultural activities will be blessed or come under God's judgement. He writes:

When finally the question is asked what is the deepest cause of disharmony in the opening up process of history we come face to face with the problem concerning the relationship between faith and culture and with the religious basic motives which operate in the central sphere of life. The disharmony in question belongs, alas, to the progressive line of cultural development, since it can only reveal itself in the historical opening-up process of cultural differentiation. In a primitive closed culture the conflicts and tensions which are in particular to be observed in modern Western civilization cannot occur. As a consequence of the fact that any expansion of the formative power of mankind gives rise to an increasing manifestation of human sin, the historical opening-up process is marked by blood and tears, and it does not lead to an earthly paradise.

What, then, is the sense in all this endeavour, conflict and misery to which man submits in order to fulfill his cultural task in the world? Radical historicism, as it manifested itself in all its consequences in Spengler's Decline of the West, deprived the history of mankind of any hope for the future and made it meaningless. This is the result of the absolutization of the historical aspect of experience; for we have seen that the latter can only reveal its significance in an unbreakable coherence with all the other aspects of our temporal experiential horizon; and this hori­zon itself refers to the human ego as its central point of reference both in its spiritual communion with all other human egos and in its central relationship to the Divine Author of all that has been created.

In the ultimate issue that problem of the meaning of history revolves on the central question: Who is man himself and what is his origin and his final destination? Outside of the biblical basic motive of creation, the fall and redemption through Jesus Christ, no real answer is, in my opinion, to be found to this question. The conflicts and dialectical tensions which occur in the process of the opening up of human culture result from the absolutization of what is relative. And every absolutization takes its origin from the spirit of apostasy, from the spirit of the civitas terrena, as Augustine called it.

There would be no future for mankind for the whole process of man's cultural development, if Jesus Christ had not become the spiritual center of world history. This center is bound neither to the Western nor to any other civilization, but it will lead the new mankind as a whole to its true destination, since it has conquered the world by the love revealed in Christ's self-sacrifice.⁶⁰

In this chapter we have sought to establish a scriptural criterion both for the norms of historical change and for man's social structures. Society in all its aspects is a product of human cultural formation. Society is not a natural but a cultural entity. As we have shown, this means that any conception of social change must be rooted in a conception of history, and this, in turn, requires a foundation in a scripturally oriented idea of divine creation. According to God's Word all aspects of reality find their ultimate origin in God's creation (Gen. 1:1; Job 41:11; John 1:3,4; Col. 1:16). Accordingly, human history and culture ought to be the expression of God's cultural mandate, which requires human implementation in the historical unfolding process of culture and society. Man is called by God to make both his own history and his own society. Neither history nor society are the products of an evolutionary process, as apostate historians and sociologists suppose, but rather represent various types of response of man to his cultural task in God's creation. A society will develop harmoniously if man carries out his task in obedience both to God's creational structures and to His historical norms.

Social disorganization will take place whenever these structures and norms are out of harmony with God's will for man and out of balance with each other. If, for example, the norm of differentiation results in social injustice, then it needs re-directing along its proper tendency.

In the history of sociological thought Karl Marx laid all the emphasis upon the structural features of society, while Max Weber emphasized the cultural norms. Marx argued that the ideological superstructure of society was built up on the material basis of a society, and reflected the techniques of production in use at any given period of history, and the mode of production to which these techniques gave rise. Ideology or cultural norms and values he taught could only hasten or retard the process of change, but they could not in the long run stand against it.

Max Weber, on the other hand, maintained that ideological and normative changes were a necessary pre-condition for the rise of modern capitalism, and attributed the emergence of "the spirit of capitalism" to the influence of Calvinism. Weber, that is, tried to refute Marx by explaining economic changes in the modes of production by changes which took place at the Reformation in Christianity. According to Weber the behavior of men in various societies is intelligible only in the context of their general conception of existence. Religious dogmas and their interpretation are an integral part of the world views that render the behavior of groups, including their economic behavior, intelligible. Religious conceptions, as a matter of historical fact, had played a decisive part in determining economic behavior and Weber therefore concluded they must be considered a cause of economic change.

In the light of our reformational sociology we can realize that both men were correct in what they affirmed and wrong in what they denied. Marx was concerned with the importance of structures and Weber with the importance of cultural norms. The former had absolutized the economic aspect of reality and the other the historical. In actual fact social change cannot be understood without reference to both. Culture in general and socio-economic-political structures in particular reflect human ideas and ideals. The political order; the economic order of society; relations between races, employers, and employees; developed and under-developed nations, etc.– all are expressions of man's view of the nature of the universe and of his society, which in turn gives rise to views concerning what validates society's arrangements or "symbols of legitimation."

Men have sought to validate the social order and its cultural norms within this world or in a revelation from another. Of the former Ernest Gellner asks in Thought and Change:

Within the flux and uncertainties, the rivalries and oppositions and complexities of this world, where is one to seek the firm base, the premise on which one can rest, the criterion to which one may apply?⁶¹

The answer is that most humanist thinkers in their quest for basic principles have raised some aspect of the universe to the status of being absolute and then sought to explain everything else in terms of it. It is the firm conviction of the writer that we should look outside the universe for the key to its meaning and of the nature of man's life in society. The key can be found only in the biblical revelation.

The reformation for which we are encouraged to work, to pray, and to hope on the basis of Christ's finished work on the Cross, as the years of grace flow on, is not the emergence of a more consecrated type of Christian character than past ages have to show us. There is in this respect no carry-over from generation to generation, but every individual Christian must make a new beginning for himself. It is only insight and understanding of God's creational norms and structures for our lives and societies that are cumulative, and while this means that a new generation of Christians is likely to be confronted with new, and in a sense, more advanced alternatives than were presented to the old, it does not mean that the former is any more likely than the latter to act according to the divine wisdom and knowledge which is hid in Christ Jesus. If today we can see further than our Christian forebears did, it is only because we are standing on their shoulders. What may legitimately be hoped for, as the pattern of the years of grace unfolds itself, is not the emergence of a better race of Christians, but a wider and fuller understanding of the tasks to which God's people must devote themselves in their service of Jesus Christ; not a more scrupulous conscientiousness but an enlarged and better instructed conscience; a conscience enlightened by God's Word in the power of the Holy Spirit.

By what standard does the Christian evaluate the changes which take place in history? How can we tell whether any given change is for the better or for the worse? The word "progress" may be used to connote a continued movement or series of changes in any given direction, as when we speak of our progress on a journey, of the progress of a disease, or even, with Hogarth, of the Rake's Progress.

Must not the Christian be concerned with progress as a movement in the direction deemed most desirable, a continued change for the better? And where else can he find the criterion for such an evaluation except in the Word of God made flesh? The further progress for which all Christians must work and pray can only be that which radiates from the Christian center of history, and this means the progressive embodiment in the life of humanity and of society of the mind that was in Christ Jesus and "a growing up in all things unto Him who is the Head … till we all come in the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ" (Eph. 4:13-15).