During the air pistol shooting competition in this year’s Paris Olympics, Yusuf Dikeç, a shooter from Turkey, went viral. Why? While most of the shooters used special eyewear and ear protection (and, for that matter, aimed their guns in unnatural positions), Dikeç was different. He stood there casually, pointing his gun at the target with his left hand in his pocket and both eyes open. The contrast between him and his competitors took the internet by storm. Yet regardless of stance or style, each contestant’s sole focus and goal was to consistently hit as close to the bullseye as possible, a very difficult task indeed.
In a sense, theologians are like these shooters—striving to, in various ways, articulate how things truly are. In this article, I want to explore how two contestants would fare against each other in a shooting match, as they take aim at the same target: the doctrine of the natural knowledge of God. The two contestants will be Thomas Aquinas (the Dominican theologian, philosopher, and Angelic Doctor of the Roman Catholic Church) and Herman Bavinck (the eclectic and formidable Dutch Reformed theologian). When these two stand side-by-side, a stark contrast will emerge (indeed, about as stark as Dikeç and his follow contestants!). And as we’ll see, Bavinck earns the gold while Aquinas significantly misses the mark.
Thomas Aquinas
To begin, I will work through three major themes in Aquinas’s doctrine of the natural knowledge of God: (1) the distinction between reason and revelation, (2) the basic mechanics of his natural theology, and (3) his rejection of the implanted knowledge of God.
Reason and Revelation. When it comes to knowing God, Aquinas taught that “there is truth in two ways.”[1] Some truths we come to know only through supernatural biblical revelation (e.g., God’s triunity, what the death of Jesus accomplished, etc.), while other truths can be attained by natural reason (e.g., God’s oneness and simplicity, etc.). For him, natural knowledge of God (or, natural theology) comes about through rational and philosophical reflection on nature, while “articles of faith” that the church affirms can only be found in the Bible.
1. Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles (trans. Fr. Laurence Shapcote), 1.C3.n2.
The Basic Mechanics of Thomistic Natural Theology. If, for Thomas Aquinas, natural theology is knowledge about God that human reason discovers in its interaction with creation—apart from the aid of divine revelation—how exactly does this work? I’ll offer a general overview in two steps.
First, Aquinas believed that human reason operates upon self-evident principles. For example, it is self-evident that my pet rabbit can’t both be safely in my basement and in the jaws of a ferocious hawk at the same time. This would violate the law of non-contradiction. But I didn’t have to prove that idea. It is an example of a universal principle that we all embrace intuitively. But the process of reasoning doesn’t stop there, of course. For Aquinas, these self-evident principles are then used to acquire new knowledge—knowledge which, while not self-evident, must be demonstrated to be true (via, logical proofs, scientific analyses, etc.). In order to understand how this applies to the natural knowledge of God, we must look at Aquinas’s second step.
Aquinas believed that God’s existence is not known self-evidently, but only known in nature through demonstration. Emerging from this foundation are Aquinas’s famous “five proofs” for the existence of God.[2] Aquinas’s philosophy here is tied to notions of cause and effect. An effect is anything that is caused by something else. Footprints (an effect) on a beach are caused by people walking barefoot on the sand. A stunning piece of woodwork (an effect) is caused by a gifted carpenter. Each effect contains evidence of its cause—evidence that human reason can rationally trace back to its cause. In this way, man employs the self-evident principles of reason to determine causes from effects. And this is no less true of coming to know God via nature. He is the Creator of all things, the First Cause. All sensible things—that is, things that can be observed by human senses—are effects, signs, (or some may today even say sacraments) ready to be traced back to their ultimate Cause—the infinite, eternal, simple, and immutable God.
2. Aquinas’s treatment of the five proofs of God’s existence directly proceeds his explanation of demonstration, which is twofold. God’s existence, he says, must be known through a demonstration a posteriori (as opposed to demonstration a priori), which is demonstration of a cause through effects that are known to us. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (trans. Fr. Laurence Shapcote), I.q2.a2. For Aquinas’s five proofs, see Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I.q2.a3.
Aquinas’s Rejection of Self-Evident Knowledge of God. With all this in mind, let’s circle back to Aquinas’s rejection of a self-evident knowledge of God’s existence. In both his works, the Summa Theologia and Summa Contra Gentiles, Aquinas poses the question of whether God’s existence is self-evident.[3] Both treatments outline several arguments of those who affirm God’s existence as self-evident, only for Aquinas to explicitly refute each one! While there are significant metaphysical reasons why Aquinas rejects the self-evident, or implanted, knowledge of God, he instead proposes that—at most—we have a natural desire for God’s likeness. Aquinas says this:
3. Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles, 1.C10–11 and Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I.q2.a1.
To know that God exists in a general and confused way is implanted in us by nature, inasmuch as God is man’s beatitude [blessing]. For man naturally desires happiness, and what is naturally desired by man must be naturally known to him. This, however, is not to know absolutely that God exists; just as to know that someone is approaching is not the same as to know that Peter is approaching, even though it is Peter who is approaching; for many there are who imagine that man’s perfect good which is happiness, consists in riches, and others in pleasures, and others in something else.[4]
4. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I.q2.a1.rep1. This reply is to the first objection, which makes the case that: “those things are said to be self-evident to us the knowledge of which is naturally implanted in us, as we can see in regard to first principles. But as Damascene says (De Fide Orth. i, 1,3), the knowledge of God is naturally implanted in all. Therefore the existence of God is self-evident.” See Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I.q2.a1.obj1. It seems this objector equates implanted knowledge with self-evident knowledge. This as we shall see is much closer to what the Reformed tradition has held. Aquinas, for his part, seems like he wants to distinguish them, as this quotation illustrates.
Thus, according to Aquinas, a distinction is made between natural desire and natural knowledge. Etienne Gilson explains this:
[Thomas Aquinas] notes that what is innate in us is not the actual knowledge that God exists, but the natural light of reason and its principle, through which we can return to God, the first cause, by way of His effects . . . For it is true that man tends naturally towards God, since he tends towards his beatitude, which is God. But a distinction must be made. Man tends towards happiness, and his happiness is God, but he can tend toward happiness without knowing that his happiness is God. Some actually place their sovereign good in riches, others in pleasure.[5]
5. Etienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. L. K. Shook, CSB (New York: Random House,1956), 55–56.
What Aquinas and Gilson are saying is that there is a natural desire in man which naturally tends toward God. But, it encounters divine likenesses in creation—happiness, pleasure, riches, etc.—and is captivated by them. Mankind pursues these desires as ends in themselves, oblivious that their fulfillment is found in God. Therefore, while Aquinas explicitly rejects a self-evident, implanted knowledge of God’s existence for a number of reasons, the closest he gets to affirming it is man’s innate natural tendency, or desire, for God. Yet such a knowledge is so “general and confused” that it is not self-evident, personal knowledge of God himself, but rather a knowledge of his likenesses.
Herman Bavinck
Enter Herman Bavinck, the exceptional Dutch Reformed theologian. Bavinck agrees with Aquinas on some important epistemological and theological issues.[6] But the two theologians clearly differ on this question of the implanted, or self-evident knowledge of God—the idea that God gives a personal knowledge of himself to every human being through creation. Bavinck affirms the implanted knowledge of God, while Aquinas essentially rejects it. To understand why Bavinck affirms it, there are two main factors we must examine.
6. For example, Bavinck agrees that all knowledge begins with our senses and that self-evident principles undergird our reasoning. His treatment on “Realism” highlights this. See Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 4 vols., ed. John Bolt and trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic: 2003), 1:223–233. Also, for further aspects of Bavinck’s alignment with Aquinas, see David Sytsma, “Herman Bavinck’s Thomistic Epistemology: The Argument and Sources of his Principia of Science.” In Five Studies in the Thought of Herman Bavinck, A Creator of Modern Dutch Theology, ed. by John Bolt (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2011).
First, before we speak of our knowledge of God (theology) we must speak of God’s revelation. Revelation is a “conscious, voluntary, intentional disclosure of God to human beings.”[7] And it encompasses both God’s communication through natural phenomena (Ps. 19:1–3; Rom. 1:19–20), as well as his personal “intervention in the natural course of events,” which is aimed toward the redemption of his people in Christ (Heb. 1:1, 2 Tim. 3:16).[8] For simplicity’s sake, the former we call natural revelation (God speaking through creation) and the latter we call supernatural revelation (God speaking through Scripture).[9] As we saw, there is a different emphasis in Aquinas, namely between natural reason and supernatural revelation. While Aquinas would likely affirm some notion of natural revelation, his emphasis on human reason gives his doctrine a much different flavor than those in the Reformed tradition, who, as Bavinck accurately said, “took over this distinction between natural and supernatural revelation while nevertheless in principle assigning a very different meaning to it.”[10]
7. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 1:286.
8. Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology, New Combined Edition (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1996), 1:126 (emphasis mine).
9. Another closely related classification is “general” and “special” revelation, which can be substituted for natural and supernatural, respectively. See Berkhof, Systematic Theology, 1:126–133. The terms general/special consider “the extent and purpose of the revelation rather than its origin and mode” (128). For my purposes, I assume there is enough overlap that we can use them synonymously.
10. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 1:304.
Second, Bavinck embraces the self-evident knowledge of God because of a notion he called “revelatory pressure.” As he writes, “[W]ith his eternal power and deity [God] exerts revelatory pressure upon humans both from without [nature] and from within [the human mind/heart].”[11] So, we see that this pressure is applied by natural revelation to the heart of man, leading to an implanted, or self-evident, knowledge of God and that it has two causes: [12]
- The nature of natural revelation. Even while maintaining the important distinction between natural/supernatural (or general/special) revelation, Bavinck said that all revelation is supernatural—even revelation in nature (sunsets, chameleons, waterfalls, mountains, etc). What’s his point? Just as God’s voice is heard in power and clarity in Scripture, his eternal power, goodness, justice, and glory are “perceptible” in creation and “intelligible to every individual.”[13] In other words, natural, or general revelation, possesses the same qualities that we ascribe to God’s special revelation in Scripture. Specifically, note that natural revelation, therefore, is a clear, authoritative, and necessary revelation from God about God.[14]
- The nature of human beings. Human beings are perfectly fitted in themselves to receive natural revelation. Bavinck affirmed with John Calvin, that “there exists in the human minds and indeed by natural instinct, some sense of Deity.” On the one hand, this sense of Deity is the capacity for receiving God’s external, natural revelation. On the other hand, it too is a natural revelation of God that arises within all people.
11. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 2:73.
12. Bavinck’s phrase, “revelatory pressure,” was brought to my attention by Nathaniel Gray Sutanto in his article “Neo-Calvinism on General Revelation: A Dogmatic Sketch,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 20, no. 4 (2018), 495–516.
13. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 1:310.
14. See Cornelius Van Til’s excellent treatment on this subject. Cornelius Van Til, “Nature and Scripture,” in The Infallible Word: A Symposium by the Members of the Faculty of Westminster Theological Seminary, ed. N. B. Stonehouse and Paul Woolley (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2021).
Taken together, Bavinck affirms that “God speaks so loudly and forcefully and meets with such resonance in everyone’s heart”[15] that a natural knowledge of God inevitably arises in every human mind. God speaks with such clarity and authority through the things that have been made that he exerts “revelatory pressure” upon his image bearers, who possess, by God’s clear design, the sense of Deity. It is through this contact between divine testimony, within and around man, that man’s senses inevitably arise and come into inescapable contact with the personal, omnipotent God who is there. For Bavinck therefore, unlike Aquinas, all men naturally know God: “they accept these truths without any compulsion or proof, because they are self-evident.”[16]
In summary, here is the contrast between Bavinck and Aquinas on the natural knowledge of God:
Figure A: Bavinck and Aquinas on the Natural Knowledge of God | ||
How is Natural Knowledge of God Gained? | How Ought One Understand Implanted Knowledge? | |
| Thomas Aquinas | Natural knowledge of God is acquired through the demonstration of reason alone | There is an implanted natural desire for God, but there is no, strictly speaking, self-evident or implanted knowledge of God |
Herman Bavinck | Natural knowledge of God can be acquired through the demonstration of reason (as long as special revelation undergirds this effort). More foundationally, natural revelation inevitably results in an implanted knowledge of God in all people | Implanted knowledge is a self-evident knowledge of God’s existence, as well as knowledge of his “eternal power and divine nature” (Rom. 1:20). |
15. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 2:72.
16. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 2:72.
A Case Study in “Christian Platonist” Hermeneutics
Now, it is not inconceivable that a shooter might unwittingly misuse his equipment and so miss his target.By contrasting Aquinas and Bavinck, we get a lesson on the impact of biblical interpretation, as well as our use of philosophy on our doctrine, especially as it pertains to contemporary Christian Platonism.[17]
17. As I pointed out in a previous essay, Aquinas has been deemed the “most successful form that Christian Platonism has taken historically.”
Take the two most significant proof texts rightly used to defend natural revelation and the natural knowledge of God, namely Romans 1:19–21 and Psalm 19:1–2. Bavinck employs a traditional, Protestant hermeneutic in his Reformed Dogmatics—a hermeneutic concerned to convey the intent of the biblical authors—leading Bavinck to correctly affirm the implanted knowledge of God from these texts. Aquinas, on the other hand, undermines the literal sense with both philosophical reasoning and allegorical interpretation, respectively.
For example, in his commentary on Romans, Aquinas explains Romans 1:19–21 with philosophical subtleties. Although the text says that what can be known about God is “plain” to people and “clearly perceived” by them, Aquinas explains that, instead, the knowledge of God described by Paul is a knowledge acquired through the operation of the intellect and reasoning process (essentially reflecting the summary I offered above).[18] Psalm 19 famously states “the heavens declare the glory of God” (Ps. 19:1), and here Aquinas likewise falls off the interpretive rails.[19] While Aquinas certainly affirms that the power of God is shown in the works of his hands, he quickly shifts to the “deeper reality” of this Psalm, showing his readers that the “apostles” are the heavens(!)—due to the utter heights of their “conversation”—and, like the stars, they shine with the glory of their “many virtues” by their “teaching and example.” And these heavens—or rather, apostles—show forth the glory of God, by proclaiming the gospel of Jesus Christ. He goes on, but his strained interpretation is clear.[20]
18. Thomas Aquinas, Romans, trans. Fr. Fabian R. Larcher, OP.
19. Thomas Aquinas, Psalms, trans. Sr. Albert Marie Surmanski, OP, and Sr. Maria Veritas Marks, OP.
20. John Calvin offers an excellent response to the allegorizing of this passage, emphasizes the impropriety of such an interpretation, noting that “it is very evident that the inspired poet here treats of the knowledge of God, which is naturally presented to all men in this world as in a mirror.” John Calvin, Commentary on the Psalms, Psalm 19:1–6.
In each case, we have a compelling and intellectually stimulating interpretation from Aquinas, but sadly, one that falls short of what the biblical authors are clearly seeking to communicate. His shots clearly miss the mark. Let us be careful, then, of heeding the call of today’s Christian Platonists who are both retrieving Aquinas, as well as advocating for allegorical interpretation. If the confluence of philosophy and allegory misdirected Aquinas’s aim, surely we will not come away unscathed!
Two Deeper Implications
So, we have the results before us. The scores have been calculated. Bavinck’s aim at this target is clearly superior, as his doctrine best aligns with the conclusions of Scripture. I award him the gold. But, besides declaring Bavinck the winner, what is the significance of all this? Here are two short reflections on the deeper implications at play if we reject, or even diminish, this doctrine of innate, or implanted, natural knowledge of God.
1. We Give the Unbeliever an Excuse
East of Eden, the implanted natural knowledge of God is never salvific—Bavinck and Aquinas agreed on this. It is essentially a condemning knowledge for unbelievers. Those who are not united to Christ in faith suppress the truth about God—the truth they know of the Creator (Rom. 1:21)—in unrighteousness. Natural revelation, what God has shown to them (Rom. 1:19), clearly testifies to his invisible attributes, his eternal power, his divine nature (Rom. 1:20) and even his divine decree (Rom. 1:32). This suppression of knowledge is characterized by Paul not as mere ignorance, accident, or apathy, but inexcusable rejection. To be sure, Aquinas is well known for a robust system of natural law. But even this framework relies upon demonstration and the process of reasoning, which doesn’t take as its starting point a self-evident knowledge of God’s existence. Aquinas, by rejecting this universal, implanted natural knowledge of God, runs the risk of downplaying the inescapable culpability that all men and women have before a holy and righteous Creator, which flies in the face of the biblical testimony.
2. We Diminish the Urgency of Mission
Throughout history, paganism and tribal religions have been an almost ubiquitous phenomenon in cultures around the world. Francis Turretin recognized that
[S]o deeply has this notion [of the existence of God] struck its roots in the minds of men that men would rather believe there is a god than that there is none and prefer to have a false god than no God. Hence it happened that they would rather worship stones and stocks and even the vilest things than be without some deity (which never could have been done by man naturally proud unless he possesses the strongest impression of a divinity).[21]
21. Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, 4 vols. ed. James T. Dennison, Jr. and trans. George Musgrave Giger (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing,1992), 1:174.
Paul himself knew, as he stood in the midst of the Areopagus, that Athenian worship to the unknown god (Acts 17:22–25) was due to the people’s sinful, inexcusable suppression of the self-evident knowledge of God in creation—a suppression that leads anyone outside of Christ to futile thinking and idol worship (Rom. 1:19–23). For Paul, this is not primarily a metaphysical or epistemological issue, but an ethical one. This compelled him to proclaim repentance, the coming judgment, and the gospel of a resurrected Savior (Acts 17:30–31). To affirm the implanted natural knowledge of God taught by Scripture (along with the Reformed tradition), therefore, is to buttress our earnest and urgent evangelical impulse. To deny, or downplay, this doctrine is to run this risk of diminishing it.[22]
22. Other important implications remain, such as questions of apologetic methodology (e.g. the proper “point of contact” with the unbeliever), as well as preserving the foundation and restraint of man’s moral conscience.
Conclusion
In conclusion, we have just seen Bavinck and Aquinas compete in a shooting match. First, by outlining the main features of Aquinas’s epistemology, I showed that he recognizes that truth about God can be found in nature through reason. Yet, he simultaneously rejects a self-evident knowledge of God. Bavinck differs, even as an eclectic theologian himself—unphased by a judicious use of Aquinas. He differs significantly with Aquinas by affirming a self-evident, or implanted, knowledge of God. It seems plain that their results stem from their conflicting hermeneutical approaches, as well as the weight each thinker gives to their philosophical system to shape their doctrinal conclusions. Aquinas didn’t earn any style points here, but simply failed to measure up to Scripture. And as we saw, measuring up to Scripture has real-life implications. If we dismiss the implanted knowledge of God as taught in Scripture, then we give false pardon to those who, in reality, stand under God’s righteous wrath for their false worship of other gods. Therefore, we not only affirm wholeheartedly that Bavinck is the victor of this matchup, but also that he is a model marksman worth emulating. As we step up to line and take aim, we too must ensure that our hermeneutics accord with Scripture if we hope to hit the target.
