Herman Dooyeweerd: The Radical Cosmic Fall

Alexander the Great at the Battle of Issus

The 15 EXPERIENTIAL, IRREDUCIBLE, 
LAW-SPHERES of COSMIC TIME 

(Also called Aspects/ Modes of Consciousness/ Modalities/ Meaning-sides) 

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Herman Dooyeweerd: 
The Radical Cosmic Fall 

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1. Sin and the dialectical conception of guilt in Greek ('Form versus Matter') and Humanistic ('Nature versus Freedom') philosophy.

The Greek religious consciousness only recognized the conflict between the principles of form and matter in humanity. Humanism only acknowledged the conflict between sensory nature (determined by the mechanical law of causality) and the "rational autonomous freedom" of human personality. This latter opposition, even in its Kantian conception, only arrived at the recognition of an evil moral inclination of man to substitute in place of the moral law (the categorical imperative) the sensory desires as a motive for action.

Both the Greek and the Humanistic oppositions do not touch the religious root of human existence, but only the temporal branches of human life. They are only absolutized here in a religious sense. Their concept of guilt, in consequence, is of a merely dialectical character. It consists of a depreciation of an abstract complex of functions of the created cosmos over against another abstracted and deified complex.

In its revelation of the fall, however, just like in that of creation, the Word of God penetrates to the root, to the religious centre of human nature.

The fall is the apostasy of this centre, of this radix of existence, it is the falling away from God. This was spiritual death, because it is the apostasy from the absolute source of Life. Consequently the fall was radical. It involved the whole temporal cosmos, since the latter had its religious root only in mankind. Every conception which denies this radical sense of the fall, (even though it uses the term "radical" as in KANT'S conception of the "radical evil" in man), is diametrically opposed to the basic motive of Holy Scripture. Since, as we have seen, the revelation of the fall does not in any way mean the recognition of an antithetic principle of origin which is opposed to the Creator, sin cannot be thought of as standing in a dialectical relation to the creation.

And because of the radical character of sin, redemption in Christ Jesus must also be radical.

The Divine Word, through which, according to the pronouncement of John's gospel, all things were made, became flesh in Jesus Christ. The Word has entered into the root and the temporal ramifications, in body and soul, of human nature. And therefore it has brought about a radical redemption. Sin is not dialectically reconciled, but it is really propitiated. And in Christ as the new root of the human race, the whole temporal cosmos, which was religiously concentrated in man, is in principle again directed toward God and thereby wrested free from the power of Satan. However, until the return of Christ, even humanity which is renewed in Him still shares in the apostate root of mankind. Consequently, the struggle of the Kingdom of God continues to be waged against the kingdom of darkness until the "consommatio saeculi".

God maintains the fallen cosmos in His gratia communis (common grace) by His creating Word. The redeemed creation shall finally be freed from its participation in the sinful root of human nature and shall shine forth in a higher perfection.

2. Once again the inner reformation 
of philosophic thought.

When the central motive of the Christian religion, which we have just described, rules theoretical thought, this must, as we stated in the Prolegomena, necessarily lead to an inner reformation of the theoretical vision of temporal reality. The integral and radical character of this ground-motive destroys at its very roots any dualistic conception of the coherence and mutual relation of the theoretically abstracted modal aspects.

There is no longer room for a so-called dichotomy between the pre-logical aspects on the one hand, and the logical and post-logical on the other. There is no place for a dichotomy between "sensory nature" and "super-sensory freedom" or for a hypostatizing [absolutizing] of the so-called natural laws in opposition to norms which are set in contrast with each other without any mutual coherence and deeper radical unity.

On the contrary, in the structure of every aspect of reality is expressed the unbreakable integral coherence with all the others. This is explained by the fact that the aspects are one in their religious root and Origin, in accordance with the Biblical motive of creation.

And this motive will constantly stimulate theoretical thought to the discovery of the irreducible peculiar nature of the modal aspects, as well as of the total structures of individuality, because God also created the former according to their own nature.

The motives of the fall and redemption, which cannot be understood apart from the creation, shall then operate in the theoretical vision of reality, in the struggle against every absolutizing of the relative, by which the apostate religious motives withdraw thought from the radical unity and integral Origin of the temporal cosmos. They shall also find expression in the complete recognition of the conflicts in temporal reality which exist because of sin, and which cannot be cloaked or reasoned away by any rationalistic theodicy.

However, these conflicts shall never be ascribed to the cosmic order, as is done by dialectical irrationalism under the influence of an irrationalist turn of its dialectic ground-motive. The law of creation has remained the same in spite of sin. In fact, without the lex, sin would not be able to reveal itself in the temporal cosmos.

And finally the motive of sin will guard Christian philosophy from the ὑβρίς (pride) which considered itself to be free of theoretical errors and faults, and which believes itself to have a monopoly on theoretical truth.

Because of the solidarity of the fall and of the conserving operation of common grace, philosophical schools dominated by apostate ground-motives must be taken seriously. And in general the Biblical ground-motive will stimulate philosophic thought to an extremely critical attitude against the disguising of apostate super-theoretical prejudices by clothing them in the form of universally valid theoretical axioms.

If the central ground-motive of creation, the fall and redemption is to have the above-sketched reforming influence upon philosophical thought, this motive must, as we have shown in our transcendental critique, determine the content of our cosmonomic Idea and must exclude all dialectical motives which lead thought in an apostate direction.
However, Christian philosophy did not follow this course in the patristic or medieval period.

In the very first centuries of the Christian church, the latter had to wage a life-and-death struggle in order to save the Biblical ground-motive from being strangled by that of the Greeks. In this struggle was formulated the dogma of the Divine essential unity (homoousia) of the Father and the Son (this was soon to include the Holy Spirit) and the dangerous influence of gnosticism in Christian thought was broken.

3.The speculative logos-theory.

Before this period, we find in various apologists, especially in the Alexandrian school of CLEMENS and ORIGEN, a speculative logos theory derived from the Jewish Hellenistic philosophy of PHILO. This logos-theory basically denaturalized the Biblical motive of creation (and so also the motives of the fall and redemption). It conceived of the divine creating Word (Logos) as a lower divine being which mediates between the divine unity and impure matter. The Alexandrian school thereby actually transformed the Christian religion into a high ethical theory, into a moralistically tinged theological and philosophic system, which as a higher gnosis was placed above the faith of the Church. Similarly, Greek philosophical theology had placed itself above the pistis of the common people.

It is in this period that the Church maintained unequivocally the unbreakable unity of the Old and New Testament in opposition to the gnostic division (which was also defended by MARCION in the second century A.D.). It thus overcame the gnostic religious dualism which had driven a wedge between creation and redemption, and thereby had fallen back into a dualistic principle of origin.

(Herman Dooyeweerd, New Critique of Theoretical Thought, Vol I, pp 175-177)

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See also -
Herman Dooyeweerd:
Key of knowledge - Question of life and death

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NOTE: 

Herman Dooyeweerd thought that the ultimate origin of our temporal Cosmos is scientifically unfathomable. Consequently, humility (from all sides) is the only appropriate stance. Dooyeweerd held that the core plain communication of Scripture precedes theorisation (propositionalisation, theologisation). This has been dismissed as "mysticism", but is actually no more mystical than unrefracted sunshine. Dooyeweerd rejected any rationalist-irrationalist dualism as a reductionism into disembodied theoretical abstraction - a characteristic he detected both in humanism and in much theology. Dooyeweerd rejected any dualism between the Word of God as manifest in Scripture and the Word of God as manifest in Nature. Despite such provisos, however, I do suggest we can yet profit from a "Young Earth" analysis such as:

The Fall: a cosmic catastrophe

by Jonathan Sarfati 

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