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Dooyeweerd – The Four Formative Undercurrents of Western Thought:
2) The Radical Biblical Motive
Excerpt from ‘In the Twilight of Western Thought’, Paideia Press, 2012, pp 39-32)
The second basic motive of Western thought [following the Greek form-matter motive] is the radical and central biblical theme of creation, fall into sin and redemption by Jesus Christ as the incarnate Word of God, in the communion of the Holy Spirit.This basic motive is the central spiritual motive power of every Christian thought worthy of this name. It should not be confused with the ecclesiastical articles of faith, which refer to this motive, and which can be made into the object of a dogmatic theological reflection in the theoretical attitude of thought. As the core of the divine Word-revelation, it is independent of any human theology. Its radical sense can only be explained by the Holy Spirit, operating in the heart, or the religious [ultimate] center of our consciousness, within the communion of the invisible Catholic church.
This basic religious [ultimate] motive has uncovered the real root, or center, of human nature and unmasks the idols of the human ego, which arise by seeking this center within the temporal horizon of our experience with its modal diversity of aspects. It reveals the real positive meaning of the human ego as the religious [ultimate] concentration-point of our integral existence; as the central seat of the imago Dei in the positive direction of the religious [ultimate] impulse of the ego upon its absolute Origin. Furthermore, it uncovers the origin of all absolutizations of the relative, namely, the negative, or apostate direction of the religious [ultimate, deepest-seated] impulse of the human ego. Thereby it reveals the true character of all basic motives of human thought which divert the religious [ultimate] impulse towards the temporal horizon.
This, then, is also the radical critical significance of the biblical basic motive for philosophy since it frees the thinking ego from the prejudices, which, because they originated from absolutizations, fundamentally impede a philosophical insight into the real and integral structure of the temporal order of experience. Therefore, this biblical basic motive is the only possible starting-point of a Christian philosophy in its genuine sense. But the development of such a philosophy has been prevented again and again by the powerful influence of Greek philosophy, and later on by the rise of the scholastic basic motive of nature and grace.
In the first phase of Christian thought, in which the Augustinian influence was predominant, the central working of this biblical basic motive was restricted to dogmatical theology. The latter was erroneously equated with Christian philosophy, which implied that philosophical questions were only treated within a theological context. Accordingly, the Augustinian rejection of the autonomy of philosophical thought over against the divine Word-revelation amounted to the denial of this autonomy over against dogmatical theology, which was considered the queen of the sciences. This latter view was not biblical at all, but rather taken from the Aristotelian metaphysics, which had ascribed this royal position to a philosophical theology of which all other sciences would be the slaves. In fact, the philosophical fundamentals of Augustine’s thought were, in the main, taken from Hellenistic philosophy and only externally accommodated to the doctrine of the Church.
Excerpt from ‘In the Twilight of Western Thought’ by Herman Dooyeweerd, Paideia Press, 2012, pp 29-32)
For similar analyses of religious ground motives, see New Critique Volume I, Part II; and Dooyeweerd, The Roots of Western Culture, Collected Works, Series B, Volume 3.
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