This book is a challenging read (especially for those who do not come from a “Reformed” and Presbyterian background, but it is rewarding for those who are able to struggle through it because the stakes are made very clear about the way that Theonomists view Christian Scholarship in a wide variety of fields. The frustration that a reader gets from a book like this, though, is the combination between searching insight, ferocious claims of orthodoxy, and frequent examples of elementary errors of logic (especially false dilemmas and arguing from faulty and unexamined premises). The end result is that the book is important to understand for those who are involved in the struggle for Christian Scholarship but not a word that can be wholeheartedly recommended because of its many and troubling flaws.
The book is organized in a very straightforward way. Despite the difficulty of the language used in these essays, the book has a very simple aim: to examine as many fields of scholarship within the framework of Van Til’s Presuppositional Apologetic (which, stated in layman’s terms, is that all conflicts between people with different worldviews spring from the basis of their presuppositions, and that by attacking flawed and contradictory presuppositions one gets to the heart of a disagreement rather than arguing over twiggy and peripheral issues). In order to deal with such an approach, it is necessary to examine the writings of a Vantilian by their own method, to show how they come up wanting in terms of biblical and logical consistency, showing that the contradictions between their own claims means their conclusions, no matter how scholarly argued, are faulty.
The aims of this work are described, in somewhat challenging language, in the opening section of the work, entitled “Epistemological Concerns,” with two essays from Gary North (on “The Epistemological Crisis of American Universities”) and Rousas Rushdoony (on “The Quest For Common Ground”). These two chapters form the foundation of the work’s approach, and demonstrate admirably that in order to find common ground it is necessary to point out that one’s opponents are borrowing from the only true worldview, that of the Bible, illegitimately, and are therefore “stealing” from God’s foundation of truth in order to make their worldview appear logical and consistent. Likewise, the conflict between the “New Left” and the “Old Left,” between rationalism and relativism, chance and determinism, the many and the one, is a chasm which divides all humanistic knowledge claims. Anarchy and tyranny, or some mixture between the two, are the only tools that an ungodly humanity has to work with. It should be noted, though, that Theonomists fall into the same trap because of their hostility to God’s law insofar as it requires Sabbath obedience and the respect of the dignity and property of the common man (and not only the wealthy). The result is that these Theonomists, despite their very heated rhetoric about the inconsistencies of their opponents, suffer the same problems themselves that they criticize of their “Social Gospel” opponents, due to their inconsistent biblical worldview and their own desire to baptize ungodly secular worldviews (like Austrian economics and neo-Confederate historical revisionism) in the language of Christianity.
The essays of the second section of this work show the same frustrating combination of keen insight along with the consistent refusal to shine that harsh light of criticism on their own perspectives concerning various academic disciplines. The second section contains essays by Rousas Rushdoony (on Psychology), C. Gregg Singer (on History), Gary North (two essays, one on Economics, and the other on Sociology), William Blake (on Education), Lawrence Pratt (on Political Science), and Vern Poythress (on Mathematics). The essays demonstrate very clearly and accurately that mankind’s ways of understanding the world are caught in a net of contradictions between a proiri assumptions of rationality and the subjectivity of sense data and perspective each person has. Over and over again in these disciples they hammer over the conflict between fact and theory, between objectivity and subjectivity, between the many and the one, demolishing the arguments of the academic elite in a wide variety of fields. Combined with these useful and vital insights, though, is the frustrating tendency to argue from unexamined and quite faulty premises. For example, Vern Poythress argues from the writings of Van Til and Rushdoony that “the problem of unity and plurality, of the one and the many…finds its solution only in the doctrine of the ontological Trinity [1].” That this argument is bogus (given the self-contradictions inherent in Trinitarian views as well as the fact that the Godhead is not a closed one, but an open one that will eventually include a large amount of resurrected human beings, a subject for another, more lengthy work yet to come) hardly seems to have crossed the minds of these would-be Christian scholars.
The final section of the book examines the foundations for Christian reconstruction in the fields of apologetics (an essay by Greg Bahnsen), philosophy (another essay by Greg Banhnsen), and theology (an essay by John Frame). Of course, given the flawed theological views of the Theonomists, and their hostile and aggressive form of apologetics (one, I must admit, that has great personal appeal to me as attacking the foundations of thought in opposing worldviews), it seems unlikely that they are able to engage the kind of Bible-centered theological soul-searching and systematic theology that their own worldview would require for them to be consistent with their own claims. Nonetheless, in the short and eminently readable epilogue, Gary North comments on the centrality of the word to Christiantiy (and, to a lesser extent, Judaism and Islam, as fellow “people of the Book”).
The final verdict on a book like this will vary widely based on where you stand. A Theonomist is likely to find it to be a stellar book, a casual Christian is not likely to hazard a reading of it given its difficult language, and a Christian socialist is likely to be extremely insulted (I gather that is part of this book’s purpose). For a reader like myself, sympathetic to the stated claims of the authors to develop a Christian scholarship based on genuine biblical foundations but skeptical of the actual achievement of those aims by this movement, my own personal verdict on it is an A for effort, an F for humility and a C- on achievement. In short–it wouldn’t pass graduate school muster on its merits, but one has to appreciate the sincerity of the effort taken.
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