"Set Your Minds on Things That Are Above" -- Colossians 3:1-11

The Seventh in a Series of Sermons on Colossians

A new church had been established in the village of Colossae–a small, backwater town in the Lycus Valley in Asia Minor.  The church was doing well, but was facing a group of false teachers advocating what is known today as the “Colossian Heresy.”  This heresy combined elements of local pagan religion and Judaism.  Its adherents worshiped angels, sought visions, practiced a rigorous asceticism (self-denial), but also observed Jewish feasts, new moons, and the Sabbath.  All of this would have made sense in first century Greco-Roman culture–where syncretistic religions (various religions mixing together) were common–but antithetical to biblical Christianity.

Paul’s instructions to the Colossians as to how to respond to this heretical teaching was crystal clear.  Do not allow false teachers who do not the have the mind of Christ to pass judgment upon you when you refuse to follow their rules or spiritual principles.  Religious rules and regulations taught by these false teachers may have the appearance of wisdom, but can do absolutely nothing to restrain the indulgence of the flesh (the sinful nature).  In the face of this challenge, Paul exhorts the Colossians to stand firm and not allow themselves to be disqualified from the inheritance already won for them by Jesus Christ in his death and resurrection.  

Paul’s answer to the Colossian heresy may be crystal clear but his response raises a question which lurks in the background of all discussions of the Christian life.  If the Colossians were not to be taken in by what Paul calls deceptive philosophy and humanly invented rules and spiritual principles–which he says are contrary to God’s revelation in Jesus Christ–then what standard are the Colossians to follow when seeking to live as the new creatures they now are in Christ?  The answer is equally clear–the standard of conduct for the Christian is law of God as revealed to Israel on Mount Sinai.  In Colossians chapter 3, Paul will exhort the Colossians to adopt a heavenly perspective while living the Christian life–in contrast to the Colossian Heresy which focuses upon earthly things which are destined to perish.  This heaven-focused perspective will enable them to do those things pleasing to God and beneficial to our neighbor  (as revealed in the law of God) and yet obey in such a way that they do not re-enslave themselves to the flesh (the sinful nature) which dominates all Christians before they are united to Christ.  

We are now well into the second half of Paul’s letter to the Colossians (we will be considering chapter 3:1-11), which, as we have saw last time, comes in that section of Paul’s letters usually devoted to commands and instructions for all those who trust in Jesus Christ (as explained in the first half of his letters).  In his death and resurrection, Jesus has already broken the power of sin (which Paul also speaks of as the “flesh”) which enslaved us to sinful desires, caused us to be drawn to false religion, and stake our eternal hopes on earthly things destined to perish.  

Keeping the indicatives (statements of fact–i.e., who Jesus is and what he has done for us) and the imperatives (the commands and instructions which come to those already participants in the new creation through their union with Christ) distinct, is vital in making proper sense of Paul’s letters.  The distinction between what is promised (gospel/indicative) and what is commanded (law/imperative) is the basis for the distinction between law and gospel which is so fundamental in understanding both justification (the once for all declaration that we are righteous before God) and sanctification (the process through which God renews us more and more into the image of Jesus Christ).

As we turn to our text (verse 1 of chapter 3), Paul reminds the Colossians of the indicative of the new creation before exhorting them to think and do certain things which reflect who we are in Christ (the imperative).  Notice how the imperative (the command) flows directly of the indicative (promise).  The apostle writes, “if then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.”  The “if” here is rhetorical.  It should be understood in the sense that “since you have been raised with Christ,” a statement of fact, not something which is still an open question.  Paul is referring to our union with Christ, a major theme in his theology.

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This Week at Christ Reformed Church (September 3-9)

Sunday Morning, September 9:  We continue with our series on the Minor Prophets, and we come to the Book of Haggai.  We will introduce the book and then focus upon the necessity of the people of God to complete the work of rebuilding the temple.  Our text is from the opening chapter of Haggai (vv. 1-11).  Our worship service begins at 10:30 a.m.

Sunday Afternoon:  As we work our way through the Belgic Confession, we now come to article 20, which deals with the justice and mercy of God.  Our catechism service begins @ 1:15 p.m.

Wednesday Night Bible Study:  Resumes on September 12, when we return to our series, Apologetics in a Post-Christian Age.  

The Academy:  Resumes on September 28, when we wrap up our lecture/discussion series based upon Allen Guelzo's Teaching Company Course, The American Mind. 

For more information on Christ Reformed Church you can always find us here (Christ Reformed Church), or on Facebook (Christ Reformed on Facebook).

"The Vision of Obadiah" -- Obadiah 1:1-21

There's the audio from this morning's sermon on the Minor Prophets from the Book of Obadiah: 

The Vision of Obadiah

Reformed Critics of Reid (Part Seven)

The Resurgence of Reid and Common Sense

Reformed Critics of Reid -- Reid and Warfield v. Kant and Van Til (Round Two)

When I mention Thomas Reid in the course of teaching apologetics, or in connection with the philosophical influences of SCSR upon Old Princeton (and the principal theologians who taught there–Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield), many people admit that they have never heard of Reid, or know very little about him.  This is not surprising–given Reid’s unfortunate obscurity.  Others in conservative and confessional Reformed circles have a quite negative impression of Reid, describing his philosophy as “rationalistic” or as a species of Thomism.  These responses are an indication that the party is not very familiar with Reid’s philosophy, has not read Reid, nor understands him correctly–not a surprise given the bad press Reid often gets.  Reid, as we have seen, is not a rationalist, anything but.  With the recent re-discovery of Reid among Reformed Epistemologists, Roman Catholic defenders of Thomism have sought to distance themselves from Reid’s epistemology, seeing his “common sense” formulation as incompatible with the foundationalism of St. Thomas (Russman, “Reformed Epistemology,” in Thomstic Papers IV, ed., Kennedy, 200).

Much of this criticism of Reid and SCSR comes from the camp of the followers of Cornelius Van Til, who contend that Reid’s philosophy lay behind B. B. Warfield’s unwitting compromise of the defense of the faith through Old Princeton’s advocacy of an apologetic method naively grounded in Christian evidences.  Van Tilians are quite correct right to connect Warfield to Reid and SCSR (with certain modifications in the direction of Reformed orthodoxy made by Warfield).  Yet, they regard Warfield’s approach as necessarily entailing an appeal to “right reason” which, to their minds, is an impossibility in light of the damage done to humanity (and to our a priori categories and interpretive abilities) as a consequence of the fall.  Unregenerate people cannot utilize reason “rightly.”  Warfield, supposedly concedes too much to unbelieving thought–a self-defeating move.

To make the case that Van Til’s call for a correction of Old Princeton’s apologetic was necessary, Van Tilians often embrace the critical scholarly consensus (Ernest Sandeen, Jack Rogers, Donald McKim, and John C. Vander Stelt) which concludes that Warfield was a rationalist of sorts who departed from the biblicism of Calvin, even echoing the ill-founded critical observation that Warfield’s endorsement of "right reason" amounts to an implicit exaltation of human reason over divine revelation.  

But Warfield’s comments about right reason fully comport with the way in which the Reformed orthodox of prior generations (i.e., Turretin) spoke of an “ministerial use” of reason which was necessary to interpret the revelation which God gives, while at the same time rejecting a “magisterial” use of reason which determines the content of revelation (Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, Vol. 1:  Prolegomena to Theology, 243).  Warfield’s appeal to right reason amounts to nothing more than the proper utilization of those rational powers given us from birth by our Creator.  To use “right reason” rightly, we must operate within an epistemological framework like that set out by Reid.  Christians can make appeal to those evidences given by God through divine revelation, i.e., our Lord’s resurrection and self-attestation to be the very Son of God, because the Apostles did.  The Christian evidences marshaled by Warfield for Christ’s resurrection have their origin in God’s revelation, not in human reason.  

Reid, Old Princeton, and Warfield are also sharply criticized by American church historians Mark Noll and George Marsden, who both follow the critical and Van Tilian party lines in assuming that Reid’s SCSR has rationalist tendencies which, they contend, are incompatible with Reformed orthodoxy (Riddlebarger, Lion of Princeton, 247-253).  Marsden contends that SCSR was simply not up to the challenge raised by Darwinians regarding what it was exactly that was entailed by primitive common sense beliefs (Marsden, “The Collapse of American Evangelical Academia,” in Plantinga and Wolterstorff, eds., Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God, 244).  Because Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield failed to realized this, Marsden and Noll conclude Old Princeton’s apologetic was severely, if unintentionally, handicapped by their failure to more closely follow Calvin and his true theological heirs, Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck–both of whom B. B. Warfield highly regarded, yet openly criticized for abandoning apologetics altogether.

"The Indulgence of the Flesh" -- Colossians 2:16-23

The Sixth in a Series of Sermons on Colossians

Paul’s letters usually contain two parts.  Generally speaking, the first half of his letters deal with the gospel as grounded in the doing and dying of Jesus, the benefits of which become ours only through faith in Jesus’s person (as Messiah and Son of God) and work (his obedience, death, and resurrection).  These God-given promises (i.e., the indicative mood) are spelled out as facts which believers must understand to be true, and then in which we trust (rely upon) as the basis for our justification before God and the gift of eternal life which flows from a not guilty verdict and our union with Christ.  The second half of Paul’s letters (usually) contain a series of commands or instruction which explain how those who embrace the gospel promises through faith, as explained in the first half of his letters, are now to live in light of their faith in Jesus (the imperative mood).  

Getting this distinction between indicative and imperative right and keeping it clear enables us to understand what is commonly known as the proper distinction between law (command) and gospel (promise).  We can also speak of this as the distinction between justification (being declared righteous before God) and sanctification (in which God conforms us to the image of Christ).  The gospel indicative is exactly what we found in our study of the first half of Colossians (1:1-2:15), which ends with the declaration “and you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross.”  The second half of Colossians (vv. 2:16-4:19), opens with the imperative in verse 16, “therefore let no one pass judgment on you,” letting us know that a series of commands and instructions are coming to all those whose sins have been forgiven through the death and resurrection of Jesus.

When we read Paul’s letter to the Colossians, we are reading Paul’s mail to a church in the Lycus Valley in Asia Minor–a region in southwestern Turkey with several new churches (in Colossae and Laodicea), but which were facing a serious challenge from a destructive heresy sweeping through the region.  Scholars have long debated both the source and the specifics of what is commonly identified as the “Colossian Heresy.”  From what Epaphras told Paul (Epaphras was likely one of the pastors of this new church, who had made his way to Rome, when Paul was imprisoned there), the Colossian heresy was very likely a Jewish heresy which orthodox Jews would have renounced with the same vigor that Christians also opposed it.  It is highly probable (although Paul does not say so) that an unnamed charismatic figure with a new teaching had caused much controversy and attracted many followers.  We know from Epaphras’ report and Paul’s response to it that practioners of this false religion were stirring up trouble for the new churches in the area.  Paul’s letter to the Colossians contains his instructions to the Colossian Christians as to how to respond.  

As we discover in this section of the epistle (the second half of chapter 2), the “Colossian heresy” emphasized participation in Jewish feasts (new moons and Sabbath observance) but to which was added the worship of angels–something which orthodox Jews would have thought blasphemous.  The law of God condemns the worship of any creature, only YHWH who is the true and living God.  This heretical teaching probably took the form of a religious mysticism (emphasizing personal experience) since its adherents worshiped invisible creatures (angels), sought visions, and practiced rigorous forms of self-denial, which, it was thought, made one ready and/or worthy for participation in this group’s various rituals.  Difficult rules keep out the hangers-on, and folks who are not really serious about spiritual things.  Based upon what Paul does tell us in his response, the “Colossian Heresy” is probably a combination of some local pagan religion (found in the Lycus Valley) mixed with traditional Jewish teaching, and would have been condemned by both Christians and Jews.

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This Week at Christ Reformed Church (August 27-September 2)

Sunday Morning, September 2:  This coming Lord's Day we take up the Prophecy of Obadiah and his warning of a coming Day of the Lord.  Our text is the twenty-one verses of Obadiah.  Our worship service begins at 10:30 a.m.

Sunday Afternoon:  We are continuing with our series on the Belgic Confession.  This week we will address the subject of Christ's two natures.  Our catechism service begins @ 1:15 p.m.

Wednesday Night Bible Study:  Resumes on September 12.  

The Academy:  Resumes on September 28.

For more information on Christ Reformed Church you can always find us here (Christ Reformed Church), or on Facebook (Christ Reformed on Facebook).

"Despising His Words and Scoffing at His Prophets" -- 2 Chronicles 36:15–23

Here's the audio from this morning's sermon on those Minor Prophets who write after the exile.  Click Here

The Resurgence of Thomas Reid and "Common Sense" (Part Six)

The Decline of Scottish Common Sense Realism

Reid’s On-Going Influence and Resurgence

Reid and SCSR may have been relegated to the philosophical backwater by Kant’s Critique, but Reid’s influence never entirely abated, especially in America, where Reid was widely read and greatly appreciated.  Thomas Jefferson was glowing in his praise for Dugald Stewart, the Scottish philosopher who did much to popularize Reid and SCSR throughout the English-speaking world.  Several early United States Supreme Court cases make appeal to the “eminent Dr. Reid” when wrestling with the nature of facts and their interpretation.  Scottish-American philosopher and president of Princeton College, James McCosh (1811-1894) and Yale professor and president Noah Porter (1811-1892) maintained strong interest in Reid and SCSR since both were concerned about the “objectivity of truth,” especially in matters of moral philosophy.

Since Kant’s and Hegel’s philosophical systems never became mainstream in America (with several notable exceptions such as Josiah Royce), it was the uniquely American school of philosophy, Pragmatism, which ultimately displaced Reid’s SCSR in America.  Charles Sanders Pierce (1839-1914), the father of American pragmatism, agreed with Reid to a point, and argued that a universal common sense (as expressed by Reid) was worth recovering as a philosophical category, although Pierce thought common sense should be tied to experimental verification and the scientific method in the evolutionary sense of unfolding truth, and not grounded in first principles.  

Following Pierce, the emerging pragmatists understood that outcomes in philosophy and the sciences were directly tied to verifiable consequences, most notably experiential “cash value.”  William James (1842-1910), perhaps America’s most notable pragmatist, gave a well-received lecture on “Pragmatism and Common Sense” (James, Pragmatism, 63-75).  James argued that common sense was compatible with pragmatism because James believed that without any prior self-reflection on such matters people naturally tended to gravitate toward ideas and systems of thought which produced concrete results.  Since pragmatism is grounded in outcomes, there was little interest in anything like Reid’s first principles among the pragmatists.  Pragmatism may make appeal to “common sense,” but such an appeal is actually a negation of common sense as understood by Reid.  Yet, it was an easy intellectual move for Americans to give up SCSR for pragmatism, the nouveau cutting edge philosophy of the day.

Reid’s common sense was popularized on the Continent by French philosopher Victor Cousin (1792-1867) and was begrudgingly praised by Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900), a moral philosopher in the utilitarian tradition and the Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge.  G. E. Moore (1873-1958) one of the founders of the analytic tradition, cites Reid throughout his works.  Reid’s work also had a significant influence upon American philosopher Roderick Chisholm (1916-1999) who trained a number of leading American philosophers, and who acknowledged that his own defense of common sense was indebted to Reid.  More than one philosopher (i.e., Lehrer, Wolterstorff) has noted that in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, Wittgenstein is addressing what he calls “our shared world picture” in a manner strikingly similar to Reid’s “common sense” but without making appeal to our nature (first principles).

Perhaps those who have done the most to rescue Reid from the irrelevance of the philosophical backwater, are the so-called “Reformed Epistemologists,” Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff.  Along with philosopher William Alston, they done much to rekindle current interest in Reid and SCSR, especially within the broader Reformed tradition.  Reformed epistemologists contend that belief in God is “properly basic.”  That is, it is rational to believe in God without any evidence or proof for doing so.  According to Plantinga, religious belief is grounded in what John Calvin identified as an innate human awareness of God’s existence (the so-called sensus divinitatis).

Looking for philosophical antecedents, Reformed Epistemologists make appeal to Reid’s notion that beliefs arise in us spontaneously because we are born with them.  These basic beliefs function like “common sense”–people believe in God without any prior reflection–but such simple belief can be further cultivated through instruction and maturation through the experiences of life.  We may not be able to give a reason for God’s existence, and any reasons we might offer to prove God’s existence, presuppose the very capability of reasoning with which we have been created by God.  For the Reformed Epistemologist, belief in God as properly basic functions as a first principle.  Such belief is rational (and therefore “warranted”) every bit as much as are our belief in the existence of other minds, or our memory of past events.

Reformed Critics of Reid

This Week at Christ Reformed Church (August 20-26)

Sunday Morning, August 26:  We are resuming our series on the Minor Prophets.  This coming Lord's Day we will be considering the historical context of those prophets whom God sends to Israel after the return from exile.  What changes with these prophets (Obadiah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi)?  What did they say to Israel when the people return and rebuild their temple?  What do they say to us?  Our text is 2 Chronicles 36:15-23.  Our worship service begins at 10:30 a.m.

Sunday Afternoon:  We will return to our study of the Belgic Confession and are considering article 18, dealing with the Incarnation.  Our catechism service begins @ 1:15 p.m.

Wednesday Night Bible Study:  Resumes on September 12.  

The Academy:  Resumes on September 28.

For more information on Christ Reformed Church you can always find us here (Christ Reformed Church), or on Facebook (Christ Reformed on Facebook).

The Decline of Scottish Common Sense Realism (Part Five)

Thomas Reid's tombstone

Reid on Perception

The Decline of SCSR

Although more influential during his lifetime than was Hume, one question lurking throughout this discussion is why did Reid and SCSR fall into such relative obscurity so quickly if common sense is self-evident?  The obvious reason is that Reid’s Inquiry was completely overshadowed soon after its publication by Immanuel Kant’s ground-breaking Critique of Pure Reason (1781).  Reid’s philosophy of common sense (along with the Scottish school associated with him), was openly maligned by Kant, who did not read English.  Kant curtly labeled “common sense philosophy” as mere opinion.  It did not help that the notoriously poor translation of Reid’s work Kant had read erroneously translated “common sense” as “public rumor” (Robinson, How Is Nature Possible, 120, n. 6).

Kant dismissed any attempt to establish a rigorous systematic philosophy based upon the opinions of the unlearned masses utilizing something as crude as public rumor (i.e., public opinion).  Common sense had much in common, Kant noted, with the Popularphilosophie, as it was then known and taught in Germany.  Kant, who claimed to be troubled by his personal mania for systematizing, expressed open disdain for the popular philosophy then in vogue.  Kant was a vocal champion of the so-called Schulphilosophie (the philosophy of the schools–i.e., that of professional philosophers).  Kant complained that a philosophy like SCSR could be used by any “wind-bag” to confound even the most sophisticated philosopher–a point which actually works in Reid’s favor!  Kant’s criticism of SCSR boils down to the fact that common sense is not sophisticated, too simplistic, and amounts to nothing but a “herd mentality.”  This is a charge which has been repeated often by critics of SCSR since the days of Reid.  No doubt, such a back-handed dismissal by someone as influential as Kant pushed Reid and SCSR deep into philosophical backwater.

But as recent Kant scholarship has convincingly shown (i.e., Manfred Kuehn, Karl Ameriks, Daniel Robinson), Kant’s negative assessment of SCSR widely misses the mark.  Several of Kant’s proposals were actually quite similar to those previously advocated by Reid.  Many of Kant’s German contemporaries were greatly influenced by the Scottish philosophy and Reid in particular.  When pressed to explain how it was that the a priori categories of his “transcendental idealism” were necessary to explain human sense perception, Kant defaulted to “Mutterwitz,” i.e., to “mother nature” (Kant, Critique, A133-5/B172-4)–a notion virtually identical to that of Reid, who spoke of his first principles as coming from the “mint of nature,” i.e., from God who made us with such capacities  At the end of the day, Kant, quite ironically, ends up where Reid begins–we must utilize a priori categories because we are made this way.  But Kant has no explanation for “mother wit,” while Reid does.

Reid scholars have catalogued additional reasons for the diminished impact of SCSR after Reid’s death.  These include the fact that Reid’s philosophy came under withering attack from a significant English philosopher who came to prominence two generations later, John Stuart Mill (1806-1873).  Mill was the chief proponent of utilitarianism, which held that moral philosophy must give due consideration to the “greater good” for individuals and society, and as such cannot be grounded in moral first principles as Reid insisted.  Mill complained that Reid’s appeal to intuition was just another way of promoting self-interest, not the common good.

Yet, another reason suggested for SCSR’s decline is that the compiler of Reid’s Works, Sir William Hamilton, ham-fistedly attempted to merge his own Kantian affinities with Reid’s SCSR, a matter compounded by the fact that Hamilton was not anywhere near the capable spokesman for SCSR that Reid was.  Finally, some have noted the Scottish Enlightenment simply had run its course, especially when Scottish Universities began to hire non-Reidian professors more inclined to utilitarianism, or the Continental philosophies of Kant and Hegel.  Wolterstorff attributes this, in part, to the rise of Hegel’s imprint upon modern philosophical development which left Reid behind under a wave of continental rationalists, British empiricists (Wolterstorff defends the notion that Reid was neither) and the Kantian-Hegelian synthesis (Wolterstorff, Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology, x).

No doubt, the chief reason for the decline of Reid’s prior wide influence was the triumph of Kant’s “transcendental idealism” over Reid’s “common sense.”

The Resurgence of Reid and Common Sense