HERMAN DOOYEWEERD: LAW, CREATIONAL ORDINANCES, DECALOGUE
(Extracts from New Critique & Roots of Western Culture)
PRO CALVIN / CONTRA ANABAPTISTS
We have already referred to one of CALVIN's statements that occurs several times in his writings: "Deus legibus solutus est" (God is not bound to the Law). This statement necessarily implies that all of the creation is subject to the Law. Christ has freed us from the ‘law of sin’ and from the Jewish ceremonial law. But the cosmic law, in its religious [ie time-transcending] fulness and temporal diversity of meaning, is not a burdensome yoke imposed upon us because of sin, but it is a blessing in Christ. Without its determination and limitation, the subject would sink away into chaos. Therefore, Calvin recognized the intrinsic subjection of the Christian to the Decalogue, and did not see any intrinsic antinomy between the central commandment of love as the religious [ie time-transcending] root of God’s ordinances, and the juridical or economic law-spheres, or the inner structural law of the state. Anabaptists lost sight of the religious [time-transcending] root of the temporal laws, and consequently placed the Sermon on the Mount, with its doctrine of love, in opposition to civil ordinances. CALVIN strongly opposed this error. He proceeded from the radical religious [time-transcending] unity of all temporal divine regulations and could therefore radically combat each absolutization of a temporal aspect of the full Law of God, as well as every spiritualistic revolution against the state and its legal order: "Christ has not received the mandate to loosen or to unbind the Law, but rather to restore the true and pure understanding of its commands which had been badly deformed by the false devices of the Scribes and the Pharisees." (Inst. II, 8, 26). (Herman Dooyeweerd, A New Critique of Theoretical Thought, Vol 1, p 518)
PRO CREATION ORDER / CONTRA BARTH
Some may object by posing the following questions: Is such an intricate investigation really necessary to gain insight into God's ordinances for historical development? Is it not true that God revealed his whole law in the ten commandments? Is this revelation not enough for the simple Christian? I answer with counter questions: Is it not true that God placed all the spheres of temporal life under his laws and ordinances — the laws that govern numerical and spatial relationships, physical and chemical phenomena, organic life, emotional feeling, logical thinking, language, economic life, and beauty? Are not all these laws, without exception, grounded in God's creation order? Can we find explicit scriptural texts for all of them? If not, shall we not acknowledge that God put the painstaking task to humankind to discover them? And admitting this, can we still hold that it makes no difference whether in this search we start from the ground-motive of the Word of God or are guided by unscriptural ground-motives?
Those who think they can derive truly scriptural principles for political policy formation solely from explicit Bible texts have a very mistaken notion of the nature of Scripture. They see only the letter, forgetting that the Word of God is spirit and power which must penetrate our whole attitude of life and thought. God's Word-revelation puts people to work. It claims the whole of our being; where death and spiritual complacency once held sway in us, it wants to conceive new life. Spiritually lethargic people would rather have the ripe fruits of God's revelation fall into their laps, but Jesus Christ tells us that wherever the seed of God's Word falls on good soil, we ourselves must bear fruit.
Today Christians face a fundamental question, namely, what historical yardstick do we possess in this new age for distinguishing between the reactionary and the substantially progressive directions in history? We cannot derive this criterion from the ten commandments, for they were not meant to save us from investigating God's creational ordinances. To answer this basic question, one needs insight into the specific ordinances that God established for historical development. It requires in-depth investigation. Our search will be protected against derailment if the creation motive of God's Word obtains complete control in our thinking.
But I already hear another objection, coming this time from the followers of Karl Barth. The objection is this: what do we know of the original ordinances of creation? How can we speak so confidently of creation ordinances, as if the fall had never happened? Did not sin change them in such a way that they are now ordinances for sinful life? My reply is as follows:
The ground-motive of the divine Word-revelation is an indivisible unity. Creation, fall, and redemption cannot be separated. But Barthians virtually make such a separation when they confess that God created all things but refuse to let this creation motive completely permeate their thinking. Did God reveal himself as the Creator so that we could brush this revelation aside? I venture to say that whoever ignores the revelation of creation understands neither the depth of the fall nor the scope of redemption.
Relegating creation to the background is not scriptural. Just read the Psalms, where the devout poet rejoices in the ordinances that God decreed for creation. Read the book of Job, where God himself speaks to his intensely suffering servant of the richness and depth of the laws which he established for his creatures. Read the gospels, where Christ appeals to the creational ordinance for marriage in order to counter those who aimed at trapping him.
Finally, read Romans 1:19-20, where the creational ordinances are explicitly included in the general revelation to the human race. Whoever holds that the original creational ordinances are unrecognisable for fallen humankind because they were supposedly fundamentally altered by the advent of sin, essentially ends up denying the true significance of God’s common grace which maintains these ordinances. Sin did not change the creational decrees but the direction of the human heart, which turned away from its Creator. Undoubtedly, this radical fall impacts the way in which humankind discloses the powers that God enclosed in creation.
The fall affects natural phenomena, which humankind can no longer control. It impacts itself in theoretical thought led by an idolatrous ground-motive. It appears in the subjective way in which humankind gives form to the principles established by God in his creation as norms for human action. The fall made special institutions necessary, such as the state and the church in its institutional form. But even these special institutions of general and special grace are based upon the ordinances that God established in his creation order.
Neither the structures of the various aspects of reality, nor the structures that determine the nature of concrete creatures, nor the principles which serve as norms for human action, were altered by the fall. A denial of this leads to the unscriptural conclusion that the fall is as broad as creation; i.e., that the fall destroyed the very nature of creation. This would mean that sin plays a self-determining, autonomous role over against God, the creator of all. Whoever maintains such a position denies the absolute sovereignty of God and grants Satan a power equal to that of the Origin of all things. Certainly, then, this objection from the Barthian camp may not keep us from searching for the divine order for historical development as revealed in the light of the creation motive.
(Herman Dooyeweerd, ‘Roots of Western Culture: Pagan, Secular, and Christian’
See also:
« What, then, is the sense in all this extreme endeavor, conflict, and misery to which people submit themselves in order to fulfil their 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 humankind 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 horizon of experience.
« And this horizon itself points at the human ego [ie “image of God” selfhood] as its central locus 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 final analysis the problem of the meaning of history revolves around the central question of who are human beings themselves and what is their origin and their final destination? Outside of the biblical basic motive of creation, 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 hope for humankind and for the whole process of human cultural development, if Jesus Christ had not become the center of world history. This center is bound neither to the Western nor to any other civilization, but it will lead the new humankind as a whole to its true destination, since it has conquered the world by the love revealed in its self-sacrifice. »
(Herman Dooyeweerd, closing paragraphs, CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY AND THE MEANING OF HISTORY: The Criteria of Progressive and Reactionary Tendencies in History’, Paideia Press)
