“The Self-Contained Fullness of God”

Cornelius Van Til never wrote a “Systematic Theology”. He did write an “Introduction to Systematic Theology”. He begins with God. John Frame writes:

Evidently, then, our first priority in trying to understand Van Til’s metaphysics of knowledge is to explore his doctrine of God. On the first page of his Introduction to Systematic Theology, he says, “Fundamental to everything orthodox is the presupposition of the antecedent self-existence of God and his infallible revelation of himself to man in the Bible”.

“Self-existence,” sometimes called aseity, refers to the fact “that God is in no sense correlative to or dependent upon anything besides his own being. God is the source of his own being, or rather the term source cannot be applied to God. God is absolute. He is sufficient unto himself.” Often Van Til summarizes this concept by referring to the “self-contained God.”

He quotes favorably a passage from Bavinck to the effect that all of the other virtues of God are included in his aseity. Thus, when Van Til goes on to discuss God’s immutability, he bases that doctrine on the divine aseity: “Naturally God does not and cannot change since there is nothing besides his own eternal Being upon which he depends (Mal 3:6; James 1:7).” Since God’s immutability is based upon his “self-contained fullness,” it is quite opposite to the immutability of Aristotle’s unmoved mover, an abstract thought [which is] thinking itself.

Notice how [Van Til] moves here from “self-contained” to “self-contained fullness.” That is important…

(From John Frame, “Cornelius Van Til: An Analysis of His Thought”, Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, ©1995, pgs 53-54.)

Reading this, I was struck by the comparative use of the term “fullness” by Rome. Rome says it has “the fullness of the faith”.

Consider that term in juxtaposition with another account of what can be called the “self-contained fullness of God”. Here is the account by Scott Oliphint:

The first thing that is necessary to grasp about the attributes, properties, or perfections (which I use as synonyms) of God, therefore, is that a basic distinction must be made between God as he is and exists in himself and God as he condescends. The theological (i.e. biblical) reason for this distinction is that it is obvious that before anything was created, there was and has always been God. That is, God himself is not essentially subject to time; he does not, according to his essential character, live, move, and have his being in a temporal context. He has no beginning and will have no end. Not only so, but before there was anything created, there was only God. It is not as though things existed—ideas, concepts, properties, and so forth-alongside God prior to creation. Before creation, there was nothing but God. To put it more starkly, before God created, there was not even nothing. There was God and only God.

(K. Scott Oliphint, “God With Us: Divine Condescension and the Attributes of God”, Wheaton IL: Crossway, 2012, from the Introduction, pg 13.)

Consider, for a moment, “the self-contained fullness of God”, compared with what Rome calls “the fullness of the faith”. Let that thought sink in for a few moments.

Agricola, “Loci”, and the Birth of Systematic Theology

The question may be asked as if by a youngster: “Daddy, where did systematic theology come from?”

(For the benefit of the Roman Catholics in our audience, I am making a joke: I’m taking the question that is frequently asked, “where do babies come from”, and applying it to “systematic theology”. This should not be construed as if I’m suggesting that Protestant theologies only came into existence in the 16th century. They did not. The bases for these theologies had existed since Old Testament times. The problem is that Rome, because of its supposed position of authority and influence, had not only allowed but actually fostered some fairly distorted viewpoints and doctrines to flourish; and so the Reformers and the Reformed Orthodox, interested in “how to think rightly about God and the things He is doing in the world”, had to disentangle all of the distortions from all of the right thinking that also been carried through the centuries…)

This blog post will seek to show how the Reformed Orthodox writers (those who wrote in the generations after Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin) came upon their method first of all for understanding what the sources of theology were, and then what the topics of theology were.

Keep in mind that once you reject “Church authority” as a principle of “how we know what to believe” – and that is precisely what was done at the Reformation – you have to try to understand really what it is that you understand, and how you understand it.

That involves understanding the long-term relationship that God, who has the genuine authority, has sought to create and foster with sinful mankind, and also how He communicates to us.

Richard Muller describes “the development of theological method in the mid-sixteenth century…”

“The art of speaking in a probable way”

Down below, in response to the question “how do you know?” Steve Hays commented:

Why must we “know” that we have the right interpretation? Why is it not enough to have the most reasonable interpretation?

If God holds us responsible for what we can know, and if our interpretations come down to the most reasonable or probable interpretation, then that’s all that God requires of us.

A Roman apologist like Bryan Cross will tend to propose that God’s method for creation and revelation involves rigorous logical deduction. The problem with that is, the history that God has given us is not a rigorous sequence of causes and events; Scripture and history are not comprised of rigorously logical arguments or sets of arguments.

For Rome, and for Bryan following, however, “the Church” (meaning the “Roman Catholic Church”) was given by God in a logical and an ontological way in Matt 16:18, never to change. The same exact ontological structure that it has today was ontologically in place at Matt 16:18, and therefore it (and all of its rules and strictures) must be obeyed as if Rome’s rules and strictures come to us directly from the very mouth of Christ.

That, of course, is merely an assumption: it is an empty, unprovable assumption upon which the whole Roman edifice is resting: all of its historical claims to authority, its claims of epistemological certainty, its sacraments, its treadmill of religious practices – all of the Roman Catholic “things you gotta do” to appease God are resting upon a meaningless claim of authority.


There is a way of thinking about these things that is more respectful of both the natural ordering and the history of things, bypassing strictly logical deduction in favor of a more inductive, inferential way of thinking.

This is outlined by Richard Muller in his work “The Unaccommodated Calvin”:

“How do you know?” – How do you begin to know?

Before we go too far into PRRD, Muller clarifies a couple of things about how the Medievals thought about religion. Keep in mind, too, that Muller is distinguishing “the Reformers” from those writers who followed, the “Reformed Orthodox”, in order to show both “continuities and discontinuities” from the times of the Reformers (including Calvin) until the later “Reformed Orthodox” writers of the later 17th and early 18th centuries, from their actual writings. He does this as a response to some of the “Calvin vs the Calvinists” writers of the 20th century who sought to create a wedge between these two.

I want to reiterate that I’m not picking up this information to suggest that we go back to living and worshiping as these men did. Theirs was a completely different era. And yet today, there is a notion that we must “recover” their “Confession” and their “Theology, Piety, and Practice”.

I’m suggesting that there are tremendous things that we can learn from these generations of writers, without “recovering” their every move.

There is a story from an old book that meant a lot to me as a young man, “The Perfect Joy of St. Francis”. This was a “biographical novel” about Francis of Assisi, who, as we know, embraced a simple life of itinerant poverty, and after whom “Pope Bergoglio” seems to have fashioned himself.

Yes, this is directly to address Scott Clark, and the method of “recovery” that he has adopted and that he has been advocating. But Clark is not imitating Francis of Assisi. In this respect, Clark rather reminds me of “Brother Jack”, a character from that novel (and for all I know, a real-life character) who sought in a very simple way to imitate Francis:

Everything was a peaceful as a scene in the Gospels. Francis was in the little chapel, praying. And Brother Jack was behind him. Whenever Francis bent over, Jack bent over too. When Francis sighed, Jack sighed also. When Francis coughed, Jack coughed after him. That was simply Jack’s way of following Francis …

Thereafter he imitated Francis in everything he did … Jack, like the simple dove that he was, merely said, “Francis is a saint. So if I imitate him, the devil will have no hold on me” (pgs 119-120).

The theologians of this era served their times by thinking through what the Christian faith meant to their own times. They did it using a language (Latin) and a philosophical thought-system (largely Aristotelian) that was prevalent in their own era. They wrote “confessionally binding documents” not for people who would live three and four centuries later, but for themselves … to set themselves apart from their own world, in terms that their own world would understand.

They lived at times when “being a Christian” (and specifically, “being a Protestant”) meant going to war and standing up to persecutions while at the same time producing “a clearer identification of the theological task in its university setting. From the very beginning of Luther’s protest, the university and university-trained theologians were at the center of the movement”.

The great mark of this era was not that the great theologians had somehow conformed themselves to some kind of outward “Piety and Practice” or another (although those things were important too, but not in the “Brother Jack” kind of way). It was because they had thought through the challenges of their own day, and they sought to address those challenges in their own terms.

“How do you know?” – Early definitions take shape

From: Muller’s PRRD Chapter 5: The Parts or Divisions of Theology

5.1 The Identification of the Discipline: Changes in Style and Definition between Reformation and Orthodoxy

A. Reformation Era Backgrounds
The theology of the Reformers, even when it attained relatively full systematic expression, as in Melanchthon’s Loci communes, Calvin’s Institutes, Bullinger’s Decades, or Musculus’ Loci communes, did not include a self-conscious definition of the nature of theology as discipline in the traditional sense—whether as scientia or sapientia, and as a theologia in via—or to offer formal prolegomena apart from brief methodological statements.

This is not to ignore the several treatises from the period on the manner or ratio of studying theology, which do offer considerations of the methodus and the loci for study.

The theologies of the Reformers, particularly those that took the form of loci communes, did offer a finely conceived approach to the extraction of topical materials from Scripture and to the gathering of these materials into the topics or loci and did offer a refined sense of method and order for the organization of the loci, in accord with the humanist models of the era.

Still, there remains a formal difference between the large scale theologies of the second generation Reformers and the major dogmatic compendia of their successors, a difference identifiable in part by an increasingly detailed theological definition of the task of theology.

“How do you know?”

It is said:

“The task of giving an authentic interpretation of the Word of God, whether in its written form or in the form of Tradition, has been entrusted to the living teaching office of the [Roman Catholic] Church alone” – quoting CCC 85.

In light of recent blog posts of mine that repeat statements to the effect that “The [Roman Catholic] Church is founded on the Word Incarnate, that is, on a divinely revealed truth” and that Rome, and Rome alone, can define “true biblical faith”, it’s important to look at these presuppositions on the part of the Roman “Church”, and to talk about how such a happy situation [not!] may have come about.

The question of “how do you know?” comes up frequently. It’s a question that is at the heart of Rome’s dismissal of Sola Scriptura, and at the same time, it appears to be at the heart of its own claims for authority.

I’ve been reading through Richard Muller’s “Post Reformation Reformed Theology”. His “Volume 1: Prolegomena”, discusses how the Reformed Orthodox (those writers in the period following the Reformation) thought about their task of understanding God and theology.

Writers from this period genuinely thought about that question, and went to great lengths to respond properly to it.