Updated: 2/22/20
So the king sent to Dothan horses, chariots, and a large army. They came by night and surrounded the city. When the servant of the man of God had risen early and gone outside, behold, a large army with horses and chariots surrounded the city. His servant said to him, “Oh, my master! What will we do?” Elisha answered, “Do not fear, for those who are with us are more than those who are with them.” Elisha prayed and said, “Lord, I beg that you will open his eyes that he may see.” Then the Lord opened the servant’s eyes, and he saw. Behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire around Elisha” (II Kings 6:14–17)!
I trust that you have read the first three volumes of this book. I especially hope that you have read Volume 2, Teacher’s Edition. If you have decided to read Volume 4, you are persuaded that there may be something to my approach to economics.
Still, you may have doubts about the wisdom of becoming an economic scholar. I do not blame you. The army that is arrayed against you is immense: 20,000 Ph.D.-holding economists, armies of policy-making government bureaucrats in 200 nations, hundreds of academic economics journals, thousands of economics books, and an international system of universities. They are all committed to secular humanism. They are all convinced that the God of the Bible does not exist, that the Bible is not the supreme authority in history, that God’s law is not binding, that God does not bring sanctions in history, and that the idea of a worldwide Christian civilization is preposterous, not to mention morally appalling.
Elisha’s assistant had similar doubts. He saw the invading army. He did not see the host of heaven above his head. Elisha did. Elisha prayed to God, asking Him to open his servant’s eyes. God graciously did as He was asked. The servant saw chariots of fire.
I have prayed a similar prayer on your behalf. I pray that God will open your eyes. Do not expect to see chariots of fire. Chariots are obsolete these days. Here is what I pray that God will reveal to you: the army that confronts us is the equivalent of the army confronting Elisha. It is a horse-based army in the age of high technology. It is like the cavalry in World War I, which did not survive machine guns and tanks. But the generals did not see this coming in the fall of 1914.
Part 1 contains five chapters. My goal for these chapters is simple to describe. I want you to get a preliminary sense that the world of academic humanism is intellectually bankrupt. This bankruptcy is especially evident in the area of economics, both in theory and practice. After you read Part 1, you will better understand that the world of humanism in general and economics in particular is like a card shark playing poker with marked cards. He seems to be on a winning streak. What I want you to understand is this: humanism’s winning streak will not be sustained. What appears to be its amazing good luck will not prevail when the Christian world finally stops playing in humanism’s casino at humanism’s table with humanism’s marked deck.
Humanists heap ridicule on Christians for trusting the Bible rather than trusting humanism’s latest fad. Humanists in academia come in the name of reason, scientific evidence, and open debate. They insist that their way of getting the truth, of “getting to the bottom of things,” is superior to Christianity’s way, since the Bible cannot be trusted as a reliable guide. I invite you in Part 1 to examine the intellectual foundations of humanism’s faith in a worldview based on the following ideas: a chance-based, purposeless universe that is dying (entropy), the benefits of value-free science, and perpetual economic growth.
I am going to show you how to spot humanism’s marked cards.
Where will you put your trust? In the Bible or in the mind of fallen man? I suggest that you trust the Bible. He wrote this.
According to Scripture, God has created the “universe.” God has created time and space. God has created all the facts of science. God has created the human mind. In this human mind God has laid the laws of thought according to which it is to operate. In the facts of science God has laid the laws of being according to which they function. In other words, the impress of God’s plan is upon his whole creation. We may characterize this whole situation by saying that the creation of God is a revelation of God. God revealed himself in nature and God also revealed himself in the mind of man. Thus it is impossible for the mind of man to function except in an atmosphere of revelation. And every thought of man when it functioned normally in this atmosphere of revelation would express the truth as laid in the creation by God. We therefore may call a Christian epistemology a revelational epistemology.
These are the first two paragraphs in Chapter 1 of Van Til’s book, published in 1969, A Survey of Christian Epistemology. This book was originally published in 1932 under this title: The Metaphysics of Apologetics. As Van Til admitted in his 1969 Preface: “How ancient and out of date such a title seems to be now.”
In Chapter 1 and Chapter 4 of this volume, I survey some of the issues that are involved in understanding epistemology. Epistemology is an academic term used by philosophers to deal with this two-part question: “What can man know, and how can he know it?” This raises a secondary question: “What is man? Are we talking about an individual, or are we talking about mankind as a whole?” This is another major question of epistemology.
In the table of contents of A Survey of Christian Epistemology, Van Til took a unique approach. He summarized the key idea in each of the chapters. I have never seen any other author use this technique. He did not do this in any of his other books. Here is his summary of Chapter II. “The question we must ask constantly is how anyone has conceived of the relation of the human mind to the divine mind. It is on this point that the greatest difference obtains between the theistic and the non-theistic position. The former cannot think of the human mind as functioning at all except when it is in contact with God; the latter presupposes it to be possible that the human mind function normally whether or not God exists.” This is the issue that I raise in Chapter 1 and Chapter 4 of this book. My answer corresponds to what Van Til called the theistic position, by which he meant the Christian position. It has undergirded my work in Christian economics from 1962 until today. This is why I have written the four volumes of this book and the 45 support volumes that preceded it.
I am now going to offer an extended quotation from his book. I suggest that you read it carefully. It will help you understand Chapter 1 and Chapter 4. It will also help you understand my life’s calling. If you remember, I define the calling as follows: the most important thing you can do with your life in which you would be most difficult to replace. Van Til wrote about the starting point of consistent covenant-keeping thought.
It is taken for granted that everybody begins the same way with an examination of the facts, and that the differences between systems come only as a result of such investigations. Yet this is not actually the case. It could not actually be the case. In the first place, this could not be the case with a Christian. His fundamental in determining fact is the fact of God’s existence. That is his final conclusion. But that must also be his starting point. If the Christian is right in his final conclusion about God, then he would not even get in touch with any fact unless it was through the medium of God. And since man has, through the fall and Adam, become a sinner, man cannot know and therefore love God except through Christ the Mediator. And it is in Scripture alone that he learns about this Mediator. Scripture is the word of Christ, the Son of God and the Son of Man. No sinner knows anything truly except he knows Christ, and no one knows Christ truly unless the Holy Ghost, the Spirit sent by the Father and the Son, regenerates him (p. 5).
This is supposed to be the starting point of all covenant-keeping thought. It is supposed to be the starting point of all thought, but covenant-breakers deny it. This is why, as Van Til argued throughout his career, there is no common epistemological ground or ethical ground between the covenant-keeper and the covenant-breaker. There is only this common ground: the inescapable revelation by God to all men that they are made in His image.
In Chapters 1 and 4, I do my best to make it clear that the starting point that Van Til spoke of has to do with the doctrine of God. Of course, it also has to do with the doctrine of God’s creation of the universe out of nothing. It has to do with God’s purposes that preceded the creation. Van Til was adamant about this. There is the central idea in his thought: the Creator-creation distinction. He wrote: “The creation idea is an integral part of the Christian theistic system of thought. We accept it because it is in the Bible and we believe that which is in the Bible to be the only defensible philosophical position. Our opponents have no right to reject the creation story unless they can prove that it is not essential to Christianity or that Christianity is not the only position that makes human predication intelligible. Yet the ordinary textbook on philosophy presents the beginning of Greek speculation as something entirely neutral. But to try to be neutral is to speak against God and his Christ” (p. 19).
It is not just the ordinary textbook in philosophy that presupposes intellectual neutrality. It is every textbook assigned in the officially and legally religiously neutral but comprehensively biased tax-funded educational system in the United States and all other nations. Because the same textbooks are assigned in Christian colleges and universities, college students are universally instructed by means of printed materials written with an inherent anti-Christian bias. There is no such thing as neutral education. There is no such thing as value free-education. There is therefore no such thing as value-free economic theory. This was Van Til’s argument throughout his career. You can see this in a collection of his articles that was published in 1971, Essays on Christian Education. He died in 1987.
It was my reading of his materials, beginning in 1962, that persuaded me to devote my calling to a reconstruction of economic theory that is based on a presupposition: the academic authority of the Bible. The Bible teaches the doctrine of God’s creation of the universe out of nothing, and this doctrine affects every academic discipline to some extent. It deeply affects economic theory. That is why this four-volume book is like no other book on economics. It represents a self-conscious challenge to the humanistic presupposition (man’s autonomy) and competing epistemologies of modern economists.
Here is my re-write of Van Til’s two paragraphs which I used to begin this chapter. This shows how I understand what he wrote.
According to Genesis 1, God has created the universe. God has created time and space. God has created all of the facts of science and all of the laws by which the universe operates. The facts of nature are not random. They are not impersonal. The laws of nature are not random. They are not impersonal.All of this follows from point one of the biblical covenant: God’s transcendence. This is manifested in His creation of the cosmos out of nothing. He also created Adam out of dust. God is sovereign. Man is not.God has created the human mind. God actively has impressed the laws of thought according to which the mind must operate. These laws enable individuals to discover laws of nature and facts of nature. The laws of thought correspond to the laws of nature. The laws of mathematics correspond to the operations of inanimate nature. Mathematical laws also apply to some of the operations of human collectives. This is why insurance is possible. The mind is not the product of cosmic evolution. There has been no cosmic evolution. The mind is also not the product of biological evolution. There has been no human evolution. In short, the impress of God’s plan is manifested in the whole creation: natural and human.
To show you what I am attempting to deal with, I refer to Eugene Wigner’s essay, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.” It was published in a scholarly journal, Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics, vol. 13, No. I (February 1960). It may still be posted on the Web here: http://bit.ly/WignerMath. Wigner won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1963. The title of his essay presents a logical dilemma. He wrote:
Most of what will be said on these questions will not be new; it has probably occurred to most scientists in one form or another. My principal aim is to illuminate it from several sides. The first point is that the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and that there is no rational explanation for it. Second, it is just this uncanny usefulness of mathematical concepts that raises the question of the uniqueness of our physical theories. In order to establish the first point, that mathematics plays an unreasonably important role in physics, it will be useful to say a few words on the question, “What is mathematics?”, then, “What is physics?”, then, how mathematics enters physical theories, and last, why the success of mathematics in its role in physics appears so baffling.
Why is this success of mathematics baffling? Because mathematics has its own seemingly autonomous logic. Why should this realm of the mind be effective so often in describing the operations of physical nature? Wigner put it this way: “It is difficult to avoid the impression that a miracle confronts us here, quite comparable in its striking nature to the miracle that the human mind can string a thousand arguments together without getting itself into contradictions, or to the two miracles of the existence of laws of nature and of the human mind’s capacity to divine them.” Notice his selection of the word “divine” to describe our understanding of this correlation of mathematics and physics. Here are his closing words: “The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for better or for worse, to our pleasure, even though perhaps also to our bafflement, to wide branches of learning.”
This brings us to point two of the biblical covenant model: representation. Man is made in God’s image. Therefore, he reflects God. As we learn in the dominion covenant (Genesis 1:26–28), man has authority over the creation. This authority was delegated to mankind by God. Man must use his mind to exercise dominion over nature. God designed his mind to enable him to do this.
Point two of the biblical covenant model relates to hierarchy. It also relates to revelation: nature’s revelation of God and man’s revelation of God. Christian philosophers have long argued that nature is a revelation of God. They derive this idea from what Paul wrote in Romans 1. “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of people, who through unrighteousness hold back the truth. This is because that which is known about God is visible to them. For God has enlightened them. For his invisible qualities, namely his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse” (vv. 18–20).
I now return to my re-write of Van Til’s words. “God has revealed himself in nature, and he has also revealed Himself in the mind of man. Thus, it is impossible for the mind of man to function except in an atmosphere of revelation. And every thought of man when it functioned normally in this atmosphere of revelation would express the truth as laid in the creation by God. We therefore may call a Christian epistemology a revelational epistemology.” Wait! This is not a re-write. This is exactly what he wrote. Now I must explain what he wrote in terms of the biblical covenant model.
The five chapters of Part 1 correspond to the five points of the biblical covenant model. I discuss this model in detail in Chapter 2. I do this in Chapter 2 rather than Chapter 1 because the biblical doctrine of the covenant is an aspect of point two of the covenant model. There are several reasons for this, but this is the main one: the Pentateuch follows this five-point covenant model. The books are Genesis (sovereignty), Exodus (authority), Leviticus (law), Numbers (sanctions), and Deuteronomy (inheritance). Exodus is book two of the Pentateuch. It is the book of the covenant. How do we know this? First, God gave the Ten Commandments to Moses, as God’s representative (point two of the covenant) of Israel, in Exodus 20. God gave the case laws in Exodus 21–23. Second, the text says explicitly that this revelation is the book of the covenant. “He took the book of the Covenant and read it aloud to the people. They said, ‘We will do all that the Lord has spoken. We will be obedient’” (Exodus 24:7).
Chapter 1 is “Presuppositions.” Presuppositions are the starting point of all human thought. I learned this by reading Van Til, beginning in 1962 and continuing today. He developed an approach to philosophy called presuppositionalism. This system investigates covenant-breaking man’s first principles of thought. Covenant-breaking man substitutes man’s thought for God’s thought. This substitutes human logic for the general revelation of God in nature, including man’s nature, and also for the special revelation of God in the Bible. This being the case, the reconstruction of every area of man’s thought must begin with substituting God’s authoritative revelation in the Bible for man’s presumed authoritative revelation without the Bible.
To show how this reconstruction can be done in every area of human thought, I have specialized in economics as an example. I begin with the Bible as the guide for this reconstruction. I begin with the five points. Chapter 1 begins with presuppositions. These identify the sovereign truths of man’s thought. Christian presuppositions are different from autonomous man’s. Chapter 2 covers the covenant model. Chapter 3 deals with the inescapable connection between ethics and economic theory. There is no such thing as value-free economic theory, yet most humanistic economists insist that economic theory is (and should be) value-free. This is because they accept the myth of academic neutrality. Chapter 4 deals with epistemology: “What can man know, and how can he know it?” Why is this an aspect of point four? Because point four has to do with judgment. It therefore has to do with the final judgment: eternal sanctions. The doctrine of the final judgment should govern our discussion of truth and falsehood ethically, but also in every area of life. This is the issue of thinking God’s thoughts after Him. It is therefore the issue of epistemology. Chapter 5 deals with the relationship between compound economic growth and finitude, especially the finitude of time. This culminates with the church’s inheritance: Revelation 21 and 22. Nothing can grow forever in a cursed finite world. So, the growth process must either run out of living space and raw materials or else run out of time. Economists who defend compound economic growth, who are in the majority, have not faced up to this issue.
As always, the biblical covenant model governs my thinking. But it also governs the thinking of humanists. There is no escape from this model. We might as well accept this fact early in our careers. We cannot escape these five questions.
Who’s in charge here?
To whom do I report?
What are the rules?
What do I get if I obey? Disobey?
Does this outfit have a future?
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