The innate religious impulse of the human heart does not result from man’s apostate nature, but, as we observed above, from his creation in the image of God.
I was therefore really surprised by your comment on the ambiguous use of the term “religious” in my transcendental critique. “The basic trouble,” you said, “is that the term religious is used by both Dooyeweerd and Berkouwer first in one way and then in another. Basically it means for them the biblical scheme of things.… But then they also use the term religious in a general sense of any position that recognizes the need of religious presuppositions in addition to logical thought or theoretical reason.”
You apparently view this general use of the term (that for the rest of this form is not to be found with me) in close connection with (1) the contradistinction between a transcendent and a transcendental critique and my rejection of the former; (2) my supposed idea that the “states of affairs” “have an objectivity” apart from the biblical presuppositions; and, (3) in particular, my supposed view “that irrationalism and subjectivism can be answered without reference to biblical content.”
The first point can now be considered settled as resting on a misunderstanding.
As to the third point I must remark that I have rejected both rationalism and irrationalism, both subjectivism and objectivism from the biblical view concerning the correlation and mutual irreducibility of law and subject.
As to the second point, I wonder how you could ascribe to me the opinion that the “states of affairs” would have an objectivity which gives them a neutral position over against the biblical presuppositions of my transcendental critique. You have apparently deduced this opinion from my explanation of my standpoint with respect to the “states of affairs” in the controversy with van Peursen in the year 1960 of Philosophia Reformata. You seem to have been particularly impressed by van Peursen’s question if there does not exist a dialectical tension between my statement that there are undeniable states of affairs which can be discovered by both Christian and non-Christian scholars, and my thesis according to which, for instance, the statement 2 x 2 = 4 has no truth in itself, but can function only within the total dynamical meaning-context of our experiential horizon.
You understood van Peursen’s question as follows: “On the one hand, … Dooyeweerd tells us that the truths of arithmetic must be seen as a part of the whole cosmic structure as this in turn is seen in the light of Christian truth, and then again he speaks of it as though it were a truth independent of this Christian scheme.”
This was not exactly the point in van Peursen’s question. Van Peursen started from the erroneous opinion that I would have conceived the “states of affairs” in the sense of “brute facts” apart from their meaning. If this were true there would naturally exist a striking antinomy between my conception of the “states of affairs” and my fundamental view concerning the meaning-character of creaturely reality. In my reply I gave therefore, once more, an ample exposition of my conception concerning this point. In this exposition I stressed the fact that the “states of affairs” have never been conceived by me as “brute facts” in the sense of a positivistic empiricism.
The “states of affairs” presenting themselves within the temporal order of our experience are, in my opinion, of a dynamic meaning-character, i.e. they refer outside and above themselves to the universal meaning-context in time, to the creaturely unity of root and to the absolute Origin of all meaning. This was the religious presupposition resulting from the biblical ground-motive of my philosophical thought. But it would naturally be a serious error to suppose that this religious presupposition as such would provide us with a philosophical insight into the transcendental meaning-structures of our temporal world.
To acquire such an insight we need, in the first place, a careful investigation of a great number of “states of affairs” which appear to be helpful to a theoretical analysis of these meaning-structures, but which, as such, must be considered independent of our subjective philosophical interpretation. Van Peursen wrongly considered my insistence on this latter point as an indication of an objectivistic view of the “states of affairs.”
In fact it was nothing but a result of my biblical conviction that the “states of affairs” in which the transcendental meaning-structures of our temporal horizon of experience reveal themselves are not founded in our subjective consciousness, but in the divine order of creation to which our subjective experience is subject. For this very reason they also cannot be dependent upon the religious conviction of the investigator, so that they may be discovered in a particular context by both Christian and non-Christian thinkers.
It is not so that the discovery of “states of affairs” which turn out to be of great importance for our insight into the modal meaning-structure of a transcendental aspect, is seen by everybody in that way. It may be that they are immediately given a philosophical interpretation which is incompatible with the modal meaning-structure of the aspect concerned.
The “states of affairs” may also be too hastily interpreted in terms of a particular conception of the modal meaning-structure concerned which turns out to be liable to justified criticism. This is why I consider it a critical requirement to suspend our philosophical interpretation of the “states of affairs” at issue until we have so many of them at our disposal, relating to all the modal aspects of our temporal experiential world which until now we have learned to distinguish, that we can try to conceive them in a philosophical total view.
In this whole explanation to van Peursen of my standpoint with respect to the “states of affairs” there is not a trace to be found of the ambiguity which you think to have discovered in it. Nowhere have I said that the “states of affairs,” lying at the foundation of my philosophical theory of the modal spheres, have an “objectivity” apart from the “biblical presuppositions.” On the contrary, I have stressed the fact that they are founded in the divine order of creation. Nowhere have I claimed “to use a transcendental method that is not directly (?) dependent upon the truths of Scripture,” nor have I appealed “to supposedly objective states of affairs that have an objectivity not depending upon the truths of Scripture.”
(Excerpt from the chapter 'Herman Dooyeweerd: II. CORNELIUS VAN TIL AND THE TRANSCENDENTAL CRITIQUE OF THEORETICAL THOUGHT, in the book Jerusalem and Athens: Critical Discussions on the Philosophy and Apologetics of Cornelius Van Til, Edited by E.R. Geehan, Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1974, pp 78-81)
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