Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ (00:00.752)
Hello and welcome to Chasing Leviathan. I'm your host PJ Weary and I'm here today with Dr. Gray Sutanto, Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at Reformed Theological Seminary. And we're talking about the book that he edited and annotated with Dr. Corey Brock called Philosophy of Revelation. And it's by Herman Boving. It's a series of lectures, I think started with the stone lectures at Princeton. Dr. Sutanto, wonderful to have you on today.
Gray (00:24.97)
That's right.
Gray (00:28.65)
Thanks for having me on.
PJ (00:30.896)
So first and foremost, why this book? I think the original translation is 1909, and you felt like it was time for an update. Why is Boving important? Why is this particular series of lectures important?
Gray (00:45.258)
Yeah, I think it's probably no understatement to say that this is probably the most significant Boving text, or at least the most mature, the most substantive, at least as a standalone text. I don't know what we need to talk about. Herman Boving will talk about the four volume reform dogmatics, which came out in the English translation between 2003 to 2008. And of course, that's his magnum opus. I mean, he covered every systematic theological loci.
in that particular work, all the way from prolegomena or first things to eschatology. But with respect to his standalone single work, Philosophy of Revelation, marks his most mature development as a thinker, and it really presents his emphasis later in his life. This is 1908, so this is later in his life, he died in 1921, on the inescapability of Christian revelation in all philosophical knowing. So...
We see in this project really the emphasis that we've already found in the reform dogmatics really culminate in this particular project is trying to make a case for this inescapability thesis. We'll try to call it for now. So when we were doing our doctoral work together, Cory Brock and I and the University of Edinburgh, we were constantly wrestling with this particular text and we're thinking about how significant it was, but also how difficult it was.
And even now, you know, we just covered this text with a class that I teach here at Reformed Theological Seminary on Boving. And we closed the class basically the last three weeks on this particular book. And as I was revisiting it again, I was reminded of how difficult it was and I was still relearning things. He was naming a lot of names that perhaps I had to review on as I had to teach a text to the students. But yeah, it's very rewarding once we see.
his arguments therein. And you know, when a lot of Christian apologists or Christian theologians say things like, well, you need revelation, you need the Bible to know things or to know God, oftentimes is done in a more simplistic way. Like it's used as a weapon, you need a Christian worldview, you need Christian revelation, or else you can't really see anything clearly. What Boving does in this particular work, and it's so exciting and informative and really quite instructive, is that he refuses that deductive approach, that a priori approach.
Gray (02:58.346)
And he argues for it in an inductive fashion. So he goes through, and the reason why it's so difficult is that he goes through all of the scholarly literature that he found in his own day. And he tried to argue from those sources themselves to show that even when they're denying the Christian faith, they're still implicitly standing upon the Christian faith in some way. So instead of showing it, instead of proving it from the outset, he shows it inductively and demonstrates it.
by looking at these sources very closely. So you got to go through all these texts with him and be patient with it because he's really only get to his thesis or his conclusions at the very end.
PJ (03:38.896)
And just for the title, this is really interesting. It's kind of got a polysemic bent to it that you have the philosophy of revelation in both senses, that it's a revelational philosophy, and it's a philosophy of revelation. Can you talk a little bit about how he utilizes both meanings?
Gray (03:58.153)
Great.
Gray (04:03.69)
Yeah, that's great. So theology, classically speaking, is God and all things in relation to God. And so theology has a sort of vertical dimension, right? You're taking a look at doctrines like theology proper, the doctrine of the Trinity, creation, providence, theological anthropology, and so on. So we're taking a look at God and all of his works. So there's that vertical dimension, but the philosophy of revelation, Babing argues in that first chapter, is a kind of horizontalization. It's asking the question of what are the
implications of theology or what we learn from revelation to the other disciplines of life. So what are the implications of revelation for, you know, as you cover the different topics in these lectures, for the discipline of history, for the discipline of religious studies, for the discipline of the natural sciences, and how we understand culture, how we understand even the hopes of humanity, what he calls the future, simply revelation and the future.
which is really about the the ascatalogical or the utopian hopes of humanity for instance. So he's trying to say okay we have all these resources in theology let's take a look at how that bears out in relation to the other fields of life and that's what he calls the philosophy of revelation. It's really asking the question of how and the why theology why theology matters and how theology plays out in these different fields that's what he's trying to get at there.
PJ (05:27.032)
And what does he mean by revelation? Because I was actually surprised I've been reading Charles Taylor's The Language Animal and he mentions, you know, he's talking about this idea of different theories of language and he mentions Haman and Herder and so now I have them up on my shelf and I haven't read them yet and then I'm looking through here and I'm like, Bovink is using Haman and Herder and I know that there's this anti -
Gray (05:47.145)
Yeah.
PJ (05:56.912)
enlightenment bent there with the romantics. So there is like the from this time period you expect a certain modernist definition of revelation, but he obviously has something else in mind.
Gray (06:05.386)
All right. All right. Yeah, I love that you brought that up. I mean, that's a deep cut with Heyman and Herder. Heyman particularly is very hard to read because he writes in almost proverbial fashion with aphorisms and things like that. It's kind of like isolated statement sometimes. Yeah, so, so Boving refuses to, to separate what, what some people might call general and special revelation or between natural and supernatural revelation.
So in classical Christian thinking or reformed theology, you oftentimes see the distinction between natural revelation on the one hand and supernatural revelation on the other hand. So natural revelation refers to what you can know about God and morality, the soul, the self, and so on from nature alone. So from creation, what can you tell about morality? What can you tell about God from creation alone? Whereas special revelation or what some
other authors call supernatural revelation is what you can know about God from verbal biblical revelation. So what God has revealed to us through the apostles and the prophets specifically now, all these topics could be deepened and broadened. But basically that's the distinction. And Boving refuses to make a strong distinction between the two. He actually argues that this distinction between general and special revelation began at the calling of Abraham.
So before Abraham, God was always addressing humanity as a whole. So when he spoke to the original Adamic humanity, for instance, Adam was representing all of humanity. And so when God spoke to him verbally, this was not just special to a specific people, but this was universal. This was creational in a sense. All of creation was addressed by it. So one of the assumptions between this distinction between general and special revelation is that general revelation is universal.
Special revelation biblical revelation is specific only a few people have access to it in a sense But before the calling of Abraham where Abraham was actually separated out from his original community To go on this journey for God and so on this verbal revelation was given to Adam was given to Noah In a way that in a way that that that highlights a representative function to to to mediate the revelation to the rest of humanity and so
Gray (08:26.218)
God's verbal revelation back then was a universal, creational revelation in a sense. So that's what happened before the call of Abraham. And so, Baving wants to emphasize that unity between general and special revelation. With that being said, he does focus for the most part, in most of these chapters, on what we might call general revelation, which anticipates, because of their close unity, special revelation. And there's a pivotal section,
in chapter three specifically where he appeals to St. Augustine and what he tries to show there is that in St. Augustine's writings you have this doctrine of illumination where when you take a look inside one's own consciousness, one's own soul, you'll actually see there not a kind of blank slate but rather notions or senses of the good and the true and the beautiful.
that you'll see traces of God, even traces of the Trinity in one's consciousness. And so he tries to say that Augustine prompts us to turn inward and by turning inward, we'll actually look upward in a sense, we'll be in touch with the realm of the good and the true and the beautiful. And we'll find that this consciousness of the good and the true and the beautiful is primordial, it is basic precisely because it was implemented.
implemented by God himself, it was implanted by God. And what he's going to argue is that this Augustinian turn to the self to turn up is actually complimented by the romantic tradition that you mentioned. The romantics argued it is not by reasoning upwards that we see the transcendence, but it's rather by a kind of immediate consciousness of the good and the true and the beautiful. It's immediate contact with it. So we don't have to demonstrate that we know these things. We are already always in contact with it.
and Friage Schlarmacher, the father of modern theology, would argue that we are conscious of these things by way of feeling. Not feeling in the sense of high emotions, but rather we are immediately, directly, always wrestling with the good and true and the beautiful prior to reasoning. And so Boving would argue when you take a look at all these different texts in the 19th century, 20th century that he's dealing with, even by materialists, even by naturalists, even by non -Christians,
Gray (10:51.21)
Even when they're saying that all we are just mechanical beings made up of atoms and physical parts and so on, they're still smuggling in their direct contact with the good and the true and the beautiful. They're making evaluative judgments. They're making adjudications on here's the dark ages of history, here's the light ages of history, here's the better parts of history, here's the worst parts of history. Now, where do those instincts come in? And if you don't have special revelation come in and say these instincts come from the Triune God,
who forgives us in Jesus Christ, you're gonna end up arguing that the good and the true and the beautiful, these instincts that you have, these feelings that you have, are to be identified with something other than God. And that leads to disastrous consequences. So that's his broad argument. So it's this interplay between general and special revelation, this immediate contact with the divine in a sense, the good and true and the beautiful, and our resistance of identifying those things with God.
And our insistence that those things need to be identified with creational things rather than God, which leads to disastrous consequences. And Bovins desire to reconnect those immediate feelings to special revelation. That makes sense.
PJ (12:00.848)
Yeah, absolutely. It's interesting. I'm wrestling through that. It makes sense. And I find it valuable. I had come to similar conclusions about the natural supernatural slightly different, but it's actually from reading Spinoza. And because he talks about he's like, it's all God's laws, then he can't with God acting can't break those laws, he can't break his own laws. So therefore, everything that happens is natural or
Gray (12:16.65)
Hmm.
PJ (12:31.024)
And reading Spinoza is obviously trying to get us to say there's no supernatural, but the other response is to say his argument's right, you could just say it's all supernatural, right? That when God created, like those are his acts, and when he's spoken to history, those are also his acts. There's obviously a unity between those two things at the core of it. But that's slightly different from what Babin can say. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Gray (12:53.29)
right. Though which leads into a kind of, yes, well, it leads into a kind of pantheistic conclusion, right? Because of course, everything is supernatural, if all that we are is merely extensions of the singular infinite substance. But you know, what Bobbing is getting at is that human beings are always in contact with this divinity, the sense of the divine, Calvin would call it, right? But because we repress the truth, we're always going to end up
identifying the sense with something else other than the divine. And that leads to, I mean, he goes through lots of different examples here, but at least to a kind of nationalism, he argues. Well, we have the sense of the good and the true and the beautiful, but we refuse to locate that in God. And so we're going to locate that in something other than God usually is going to be in ourselves. And conveniently in that time, who are the best German philosophers who are writing on these things? Well, they were normally anti -Christian.
And they were saying things like, well, the good and the true and the beautiful are located in our own culture. And then they were projecting themselves as the source of normativity and the source of human hope. And by cutting out the transcendence, all of the hope is this worldly, but it's our culture's representation and every other culture needs to catch up. And so he was actually trying to, well, not trying to, he was, I mean, looking back now in the 21st century, he was predicting in a way.
the rise of German nationalism and German socialism and so on that came up in the 1940s of course, but he was writing in 1908 so it was pretty predictive.
PJ (14:24.272)
Yeah, actually, and this comes up part of the reason why you updated this is because the original translation didn't know when he used different languages, but he did that quite a bit. So he's writing in Dutch, but he's, or this is in Dutch, right? Or, yeah, yeah, and then he's interjecting German because most of his dialogue is with the German philosophers.
Gray (14:39.146)
Yeah Dutch.
Gray (14:49.738)
That's right, yeah, and sometimes he would use English as well and French and Latin, so we try to really mark that out and just to show the eclecticism of his sources. One more thing to say about Revelation before I forget, is you know, you pulled up the books just now and you can see that it's a nice Mondrian cover and people are wondering, okay, why do you have a Mondrian cover? What does that have to do with Herman Boving? So Robert Cavolo, who's a scholar in Los Angeles, you know, he showed us that actually Mondrian...
PJ (14:59.16)
Yeah, sure.
PJ (15:06.64)
Yes.
Gray (15:18.538)
was inspired by what we now know as the neo Calvinist tradition, which was the tradition that came from boving and Kuiper, this revival of Calvinism for the modern world in 19th century, 20th century Netherlands. And, and so, so he was inspired by this movement. And what we try to communicate with Mondrian and what Mondrian took from that movement is that the reason why he's emphasizing primary colors and basic shapes like squares and red and blue is that
All of these aspects, this visual aspect of squares and primary colors is always that which is presupposed in every visual representation in art. Like you can't get behind or beyond the primary colors and the squares. Whatever visual image you can create or you can see always presupposes these things. And in a similar fashion, you can't get beyond revelation. It's that which you assume.
in every act of the intellect, in every act of the imagination, every visual perception you see in the world, you are always in contact with the good and treat the beautiful in some way. So that's what we're trying to communicate there.
PJ (16:26.32)
And can you talk a little bit so we talked a little bit about the general and special, you know natural supernatural What about this idea of coming forward from hiddenness?
Gray (16:39.466)
Coming forward from hiddenness. Yeah, so it's making explicit the implicit, I suppose. And, you know, the primary colors and the lines are always implicit and they're presupposed. They're the preconditions for visual representation in a way. And I think that's what Boving is trying to say here with respect to the philosophy of revelation is trying to investigate that which was implicit in everyone's imaginations. You know, we talk about Charles Taylor's social imagination or plausibility structures, whatever else.
Revelation provides the conditions for that. It's what makes sense of that. It's why we can't eradicate the sense of divinity, the sense of the good and treat the beautiful. So what he's going to try to argue is that if you tether this implicit contact with general revelation with special revelation, you're going to end up seeing and inhabiting a more capacious imagination.
where all things are seen in all their diversity, all things are seen in all their richness and complexity. And actually when you are trying to not connect the sense of the good and the true and the beautiful with God, with special revelation and so on, you're always going to end up with a kind of reductionist sort of worldview or reductionist sort of imagination. So whether this is, you know, he has two poles throughout the book are always between what he calls mechanical thinking.
which is really a scientific naturalism, the reduction of all things to matter in their physical components. And then what he calls dynamic vitalism, which is a kind of panentheistic, pantheistic, idealist sort of movement, which reduces all things to the absolute or the divine in some way, in a kind of, you know, univocal way, not that the divine is something beyond us, but rather the divine is something imminent. And he's trying to say that if you go with...
connecting the good and true and the beautiful with the Christian God, you're actually going to be able to do justice to the physicality of all things, and also the way in which all things are really traces of the Creator. So there's a kind of unity and diversity because all things come from the Triune God. Anyway, so that's making implicit the explicit in a proper way, because we can make the implicit and tether the implicit to something that is only physical or something that's only spiritual.
PJ (18:35.596)
Excuse me.
Gray (19:01.93)
but he wants to tether it to something both physical and spiritual, something creational in other words.
PJ (19:06.992)
Yeah, as I was going through that, I haven't read Bobink, but I got my Master's in Philosophy of Religion and all of a sudden, Van Til and Plantinga, I was like, I'm very familiar with these ideas. Can you talk a little bit about Bobing's legacy and where we see him kind of his stuff pop up? I think you give like three or four like clear paths or trails.
Gray (19:21.802)
Yeah.
Gray (19:32.138)
That's right. Yeah. So, so these are all contested waters, you know, all the Plantingians are contesting all these things. And, you know, we had Nick Woltersdorf on, on, on our Grayson Common podcast. And we talked about a little bit of that as well. And, you know, Van, the Van Til legacy with respect to urban bobbin is also very much contested and all that. But, but you can see trajectories that come from the Neo -Calvinist tradition of bobbin and Kuiper. And what we see, for instance, in Plantinga.
PJ (19:36.016)
I'm out.
Gray (20:01.514)
and and Woltersdorf is the instincts that you cannot separate your Christian identity from your philosophical thinking. So Plantinga's famous address is, you know, advice to Christian philosophers. And he argues that you don't have to be on the defensive all the time. You don't need to justify starting from Christian foundations and Christian starting points to your philosophy. You can just start as a Christian. You can draw from all that information that you know, as a Christian, from the Bible, about the Holy Spirit, about Jesus and creation and so on.
without feeling like you need to demonstrate it beforehand. And I think that's a very neo -Calvinist instinct, right? And Boving goes on and just doesn't really need to feel that he needs to prove by reason alone first that there is a God before we can talk about God. But rather, he's showing inductively that Christian revelation is inescapable. And he's writing from an explicitly Christian point of view. And you know, Nick Woltersdorf and all of his work on justice, on aesthetics, on liturgy, on...
imagination and so on. All of these works come from his understanding that Christianity is holistic. And so, you know, whether you're talking about Walter Swerve, Planning or Van Til, all of them have this idea that Christianity provides us with holistic foundations. You can address any topic from a Christian perspective. I will say that Van Til is probably a lot more deductive than inductive in the way that he argued for it.
PJ (21:25.68)
Yes.
Gray (21:27.594)
You know what I say to my students is that that sometimes you got to read Van Till like the book of Leviticus. They're going to be lines are going to be like I have no idea what he means by this or that and it seems that he's jumping the gun and you know, but but get the kernel get the good you know and once you get the kernel it does open up for you. I had to revisit Van Till because I had to to teach. The history of apologetics here for instance. And and.
He would make some judgments. He also writes in conclusions rather than argues for those conclusions. So you got to be charitable to him. You got to be really patient with the guy. Yeah. So, so those are just a couple of trajectories. We can also talk about, you know, Richard Mao. We can also talk about, Herman Doeveerd and all of these are contested waters. And what we try to do with Boving and the recovery of Boving in Texas that you got to go back to the primary sources and not just read these second, third generation permutations.
PJ (22:24.208)
Yeah, I'm just glad that you said doya veered before I had to so then I knew how to pronounce it That's a name and a half
Gray (22:29.286)
Yeah.
That is definitely.
PJ (22:40.368)
as we work through and this is something that kind of comes up.
Part of this rejection of just straight reasoning comes from this historical process.
What is the value and how does that change the method by viewing Revelation as this historical process rather than kind of this enlightenment, like reason first?
Gray (23:05.702)
Right. Yeah.
PJ (23:09.328)
No pressure, easy question, simple question, right?
Gray (23:12.074)
Yeah, that's right. So, you know, one of the things that I think we're starting to see now is, well, if you've been to a Reformed seminary, at least in North America, you would have been acquainted with a theologian by the name of Gerhardes Voss. So Gerhardes Voss is the so -called father of modern biblical theology. And what he tries to argue is that when we're talking about the Bible, you're not just looking at, you know, propositions in the abstract.
that leads you to other propositions, but rather you're looking at what he calls the organic unfolding of the history of redemption. And so what you see is that the Old Testament, he would argue, is a kind of like a seed that slowly flowers and matures into the full -blown oak tree in the New Testament. And so there's a broad historical continuity between the Old Testament and the New Testament with the same gospel message of redemption.
tethered throughout that ultimately climaxes in the coming and revelation of Jesus Christ. And Voss got that from a lot of different instincts. And I would argue, you know, well, there's JP Gabler and then of course the neo -Calvinist tradition before Voss, which is in Bobby and Kiper, which really took up this idea of the organic from the Bible itself, I would argue, but also inspired by the romantic movements around them as we talked about.
that saw organic language as really helpful in showing us the connectivity of all human nature throughout time.
So I think, you know, when you read the previous reform, go ahead. Yeah.
PJ (24:47.952)
I apologize. Do you mind explaining more on that what you just said about the organic land? Like, yeah.
Gray (24:56.074)
Yeah, so the organic language, this is again a huge swath of literature behind this. Right. Yeah, so when you take a look at the 19th century, organic language is really quite ubiquitous. So whether you're reading Friedrich Schallermacher, Schelling, even a little bit of Hegel, you're going to see organic language pop up.
PJ (25:02.64)
It's academics, like, of course people are gonna contest it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Gray (25:22.922)
And organic language refers to basically by these authors, something about the unity of human nature, the unity of human beings across time, the unity of history, the developmental aspect of history, even in some authors, you know, the unity between God and the world. So God and the world are in kind of organic relation. And to contextualize for their readers and listeners, Boving and Abraham Kuyper, the two Dutch neo -Calvinists we're talking about here.
would use organic language as well. But they strictly redefined it in light of the Bible. And they would argue God is being. God does not change. God is simple. God is absolute. God is absolutely distinct from creation. But creation is revelational of God or is a kind of analog of God's being. And because God is absolute unity and diversity in his triune self.
Creation will also mirror God by disclosing aspects of unities and diversities. So history is an organism. It does develop in some way, but it doesn't mean that God's life develops. Human nature is an organism. There's a unity and diversity, but that unity is not found in some German culture, which is the aspect, the teleological aspect of history, but rather that unity is found in Adam or in Jesus, our covenantal representatives.
So if Jesus Christ represents you, you belong to him as your head. And so you are his body and he is your head. So they're really redefining the organic in light of the organic language of the Bible. So when people say to me, well, that organic worldview stuff, that's all just German idealism. Well, no, the Bible is where we get the definitions first. And there's a formal similarity with German idealism. We're going to redefine it in light of the Bible. So in the Bible, you see organic language.
You see, for instance, that the Old and New Testaments have the same substance, but different forms across time. Or in classical language, it's one single covenant of grace in different administrations. The Abrahamic administration is different than the new covenant, but it's a single covenant of grace, right? And so organic language has that idea of there's that, that, that, you know, that essence of history moving along.
Gray (27:45.034)
but history moves in its different forms. And you can interpret that in light of covenant theology. You can also interpret that in light of the organic language, interpret that in light of the union that we have with Christ and so on. So because they were more attuned to the 19th century historical turn, this turn to history as a source of knowing and as a way of contextualizing and conditioning your knowing. Because you're a romantics, you understood that.
the way you know it's not by abstract reason, but by a condition, space and time. You understood that we have to understand the Bible in light of its redemptive historical character. And you also understood that revelation has been received by the church across time and space. So you're more aware of the development of doctrine and you're more aware of the development of the reception of revelation.
I don't know if that's answering your question. I forgot it already. Something about historical methods.
PJ (28:45.488)
No, no, it's very, it's a, I think, yes, as we talk about organic language, you mentioned quite a bit, I think, like, kind of Pauline language, the systematic language, would it be also fair to point to things, and this shows up in Paul as well, kind of the consistent use of plant language to describe the way that revelation shows up or the way that the church develops, right? It's like,
You have a vine or you have an olive tree and then you get grafted in. And that's obviously a process, right?
Gray (29:20.01)
Right, that's exactly right. So, you know, the church, and this is one of the things that attracted me at Herman Boving initially as well, is that the church is going to take, it's going to look really different across time and space. And that no one expression of the church, he would argue, is the golden age, or is the golden manifestation of what the church is. Well, you know, behind this is also his ideas, he's an odd millennial, which means that there is no progressive advancement of the kingdom of God until the return of Jesus Christ.
And so he's going to argue that, you know, whether the church looks like the church in Geneva in the 16th century or the church in the Netherlands in the 19th century, we're not going to isolate that one era or one form of the church with the true church. Rather, the church can look very different in different spaces and times. And that's OK, because culture in a way is not absolute. Not that it's all completely just relativistic, but rather, you know,
When you take a look at two Christian families, one Christian family looks like this and the other Christian family looks like that, they're all imitating Christ. Or what Bobing would say is that, you know, Peter looks like Peter and John looks like John. And Peter is brash and action -minded. John is contemplative. That's the stereotype, right? The apostles, I mean. And Christ never tells Peter, Peter followed me the way John follows me, nor vice versa. There's room for individuality and personality.
And if you extend that there's room for cultures, different cultures to manifest themselves within the one Christian church. So, you know, coming as a third culture kid who grew up in Singapore, Jakarta, and then now I'm in the States. I really appreciated that. And I think if you can just recover that sense of that distinction between, you know, Christianity in a, in a, in its different cultural forms and the essence of Christianity.
which is imitation of Christ, the kingdom of God, forgiveness, redemption, the gospel, and so on. I think we could do a lot of good because I think a lot of our debates these days, a lot of our heated debates that I see, are really about cultural differences, not so much about theological differences. And I think we gotta be able to distinguish those two things and say, that church looks different from mine, but we're all actually theologically the same.
Gray (31:40.97)
And so maybe my discomfort with that church is not really theological, but cultural.
PJ (31:47.472)
I want to come back to that.
PJ (31:52.752)
first I wanted to ask, am I right in reading a little bit when we talk about this emphasis on development? Part of that is a very strong Protestant sensibility of like, we can't talk about the age of Augustine and Constantine as this golden age of the church, right? Which is a very like, so there's a little bit of a Protestant like, no no no.
Gray (32:11.306)
Right.
PJ (32:18.064)
It's been developing and it's always like, it's always been good. And there's not one like golden age, which can sometimes happen with certain Roman Catholic manifestations. Is that a, is that a fair reading of Bobink?
Gray (32:30.314)
I mean, I would like to say it's a fair reading of Bobing. I would like to say it's a fair reading of Protestantism as well. And you know, he's got this essay called The Future of Calvinism where he argues exactly that, where he says, you know, Protestantism has always made room for cultural plural formity, cultural individuality and expression. So when you take a look at the, you know, the three forms of unity of the Netherlands, they're not exactly the same in its emphasis.
But the same in substance, sure, but not the same in emphases and context with the Westminster standards. And the Lutheran catechisms don't look exactly the same as the Geneva. And we can talk about all of the different ways in which the Reformation, therefore, permeated the different countries. And yet we don't look for uniformity. We look for a kind of, again, unity and diversity. And so that's what the Christian worldview gives you so that when you take Christianity as a
develops in America versus the Netherlands, Bovenk would also say, it's quite different in America. But why should we expect the Americans to look like Dutch Christianity? Neither is better, he would argue. And that's really refreshing to hear. And I think that's the sort of, again, sensitivity to historical context and historical development of the reception of revelation. I think what happened in the 19th, 20th century that we can indeed learn from, and I don't believe in a
purely decline narrative. Of course, some things were worse theologically, blah, blah, blah. But, you know, one of the things that Bob and Kuyper learned, and Bobing notes this all the time, and it's addressed, for instance, orthodoxy and modernism that he wrote in 1911. He argued, what we learn now is that that cultures are really very diverse. And the world is way bigger than we understood it to be. And what we took to be purely, you know, common sense were actually outdated.
by, you know, after 30 years or so of scientific advancements. What we thought was just intuition and intuitive is really just Dutch intuition. And when we took the world history, people really generally are different from us. We got to wrestle with globalization and pluralization. And how can Christianity still make sense in this world? And I think they were trying to address that particular problem. So I don't think it's sufficient or persuasive to just say, well, Christianity is just uniform.
Gray (34:53.034)
But I think this impulse of organic unity and diversity is really quite healthy for the church to inculcate. Not that there is a singular point of human history where we're all developing towards, but rather all of us are organically united, but there is a diversity of cultures and forms.
PJ (35:12.176)
Do you mind sharing a little bit about your own personal journey through that? Because I think if anyone, it sounds like, I mean, you had quite the journey yourself, and that's part of the reason this appeals to you. What are some specific contemporary issues that you saw where you felt the need to distinguish between cultural issues and theological issues?
Gray (35:34.378)
Yeah, well, you know, right. Well, after, after I did my PhD, I was a pastor for about five years in Jakarta. And, you know, that's where I grew up. I grew up in Singapore as well. And, you know, ministering in that context was just really, really quite different. You know, one of the things that I saw, for instance, that was really needed in Indonesia was a lot of teaching and discipline and catechizing with respect to the family.
PJ (35:36.88)
without trying to get you into trouble, yeah.
Gray (36:04.202)
And you would think, okay, that's interesting. Why the family? I thought that's what's needed in America. But the family in the sense of overreaching authority of the oldest patriarch in the broader family was a real issue in Indonesia. So very common, you have the oldest member of the family, let's say, is a great grandfather who's still alive, maybe perhaps already cognitively in decline, but he's still calling the shots.
before his granddaughters went to school and who you married and so on. And oftentimes a lot of that is also very racially tinged. You're not allowed to marry a foreigner. You're not allowed to marry somebody outside of your own race. And, you know, one of the things that Christianity did in the early church was actually diversify that sort of understanding in the sense of, you know, it doesn't matter where you're Greek or Jew. What matters is that you are a Christian first. Your Greek and Jewish identity are secondary. But in a context like, you know,
Jakarta, where Chinese and Indonesians and Indonesians were really very much segregated from one another in a lot of ways. That's the sort of teaching that we need to recover. And it's actually something that we take for granted in the context of the West, this sort of individualism, which is kind of parasitic on the Christian understanding. But that's something that we had to wrestle with. So again, it's just very different cultural emphases. And so I remember hearing about this one American preacher who came.
who talked to a group of fathers in the context of a conference for fathers or fathers retreat or a father's talk, I can't remember exactly. And his emphasis was discipline your children. And I'm like, well, you don't really need that. That's not exactly the sort of teaching that you should probably, you shouldn't encourage more discipline of your children. So the things that Western Christians are oftentimes scared of, individuality,
PJ (37:45.04)
Hahaha!
Gray (38:00.234)
freedom of conscience, freedom, liberty, and things like that, you know, I actually found to be liberating precisely because I think all of these things are permutations of the Christian faith. Can they be taken away and ripped apart from the Christian faith? Yes. And of course we see that in secularization in the West. But these are good things that I wanted to emphasize in my own ministry in the context of Indonesia, not because they're Western things, but because they are Christian ideals first.
And another thing that I found was, for instance, you know, in the context of Jakarta, when you're ministering there, the temptation is actually to be more harsh than you need to be when you're addressing issues like sexual ethics. Because in the context of Jakarta, where Islam is a huge influence, for instance, and Chinese Confucianism is a huge influence as well, you know, when you are, let's say, having sex before marriage, that's not just a sin, that's taboo.
It's not just an individual mark of error, but it's also something that's going to bring shame to your whole family. So the church would look incredibly quote unquote liberal there because we were going to say, you were engaged in that sort of relationship. Forgiveness is here in Jesus Christ and you can be immediately forgiven. Of course, your discipleship process repents and so on. But the Christian sexual ethic is not seen to be outrageous in the East. It's natural law.
But it's not just natural law, it's also so incredibly legalistic there that you gotta emphasize the forgiveness and liberation that comes after you become a Christian. So that's really useful apologetically in the West because you can tell people people are quibbling with, not just quibbling, rejecting the Christian sexual ethic as if everybody's gonna reject them. No, it's actually a point of contact in the East. So anyway, the preaching therefore looks very different, right? You gotta contextualize. The preaching in the East,
PJ (39:49.744)
Hmm.
Gray (39:55.466)
You don't have to give an apologetic for the Christian sexual ethic. Everybody assumes it. But in the West, you got to give an apologetic for that. And so I think if you're an Indonesian coming to a church in New York City or Los Angeles, you might be thinking like, why are they spending all this time on Christian sexual ethics? Like, let's just get to like what really, really is important. Family issues, you know what I mean? Or whatever. And you can start.
PJ (40:18.384)
Right. Right, right.
Gray (40:23.05)
And if you don't have this idea of the Catholicity or the universality, the organic character of the church, you're going to be like, this church is really unorthodox because you're always preaching on this issue that really is not that important, you know, but that's not, that's not a theological difference. That's a cultural difference in the sense of contextualizing, you know. so I think that that sort of sensitivity and I tell people it's a real privilege to be able to travel, but do travel.
you're starting to realize that things that you take for granted are not to be taken for granted. And okay, here's probably another thing, and you know, Tim Keller emphasizes this a lot, but the two -party system in America is really quite complicated in terms of the Christian faith, right? Where some Christians would say you have to be a Democrat or else you can't really be a Christian because we care about justice, or you have to be a Republican or else you're not really Christian because we care about, you know, abortion or sexual ethics and so on. And there's grains of truth.
But you can't think of a one package system because all you have to do is just move to a place like Indonesia. And the options are just completely different. And which one is the Christian option, quote unquote, Christian option? I think that's really difficult.
PJ (41:29.584)
Yeah, I've actually, I've felt that considerably. When you talked about the failure of that American pastor, I was a youth sponsor for kind of classic, you know, it was upper Wisconsin. So I very, very white church at like, there was the whole population up there is white. And so I did this lesson that was very well received and very helpful on.
how collective guilt works with Adam. Why are we responsible for Adam's sin? And the kids really liked it. And then when I went to go get my master's in philosophy of religion in Deerfield, Illinois, I was a youth pastor at a Korean church. And I did the whole lesson again on collective guilt. And they were listening. And I got to the end, I was like, so what do you think? I mean, isn't that helpful? And they're like,
No, that's really obvious. Like, of course, of course we're responsible for our families. Like, I was like,
Gray (42:27.306)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
That's right. And that context of collective guilt definitely is a huge assumption in Indonesia as well. I want more individuality. I want more personality. I don't want uniformity because uniformity is all we have there. And it is very common there if you went to a Batak wedding. I use this example in class. A Batak wedding is a, they're Indonesians, but they're a particular tribe within Indonesia. And you know,
You go to a Batak wedding, it's very different culturally from a normal Jakarta wedding. But they really believe in collective guilt and they know your last name. They know what your family did four generations ago. And they're not even going to befriend you because they know that there's this infighting between the X family versus the Y family like four centuries ago. And I'm like, the gospel can bring so much redemption to that. But I don't have to justify our federal unity with Adam there.
PJ (43:26.288)
Mm.
PJ (43:31.28)
All right.
Gray (43:32.842)
So when I read these modern theologians who say things like, it's so unjust for us to be held accountable for Adam, I'm like, no, man, you're just westernized. You gotta just zoom out a little bit. This is not just common sensely unjust. Yeah, so great point.
PJ (43:40.948)
Yeah.
PJ (43:49.22)
So I want to be respectful of your time. Is there, so if I can ask you two more questions. One is you talked about this inductive study. He goes, Boving goes to these different subjects. Is there one in particular that you found helpful or is there one that's like your favorite to talk about?
Gray (44:15.594)
Yeah, I think it would probably be the last chapter, Revelation of the Future. I'm editing this essential bovink reader. It's really, really hard to narrow down, you know, what a quote, quote, unquote, is essential bovink. But I selected a few pieces from the philosophy of Revelation and this section of Revelation of the Future is really quite potent because he's dealing with eugenicism. And we now think obviously eugenicism is wrong, but this was all the rage in, you know, the 1900s. So.
PJ (44:42.896)
yeah.
Gray (44:45.354)
And he traces it again to the sense of the good and the true and the beautiful that we have in every single person and because we've gotten rid of the transcendent the hope for the future has to be this worldly he argues the very beginning of the chapter and If there's no God then humans must liberate themselves. Well, how will we liberate ourselves? Well through scientific progress technological progress now if we know that humanity has evolved
PJ (44:58.512)
Mm.
Gray (45:11.882)
through biological evolution, why can't we also artificially evolve by way of, you know, let's just advance it even further by manipulating humanity self -consciously through our will rather than just by nature? And eugenicism seemed like a very logical option. And what he actually argued is that this is the result of not locating the sense of the good in God. And when God is not your transcendent good, you're always going to identify something within creation.
itself as the transcendent good. And again, it's going to be your humanity. And because you're going to prefer your own culture, you're going to identify your culture as the greatest good. And that would lead to racism, eugenicism and nationalism, he argued. I think that's the best, the best argument there. And, and you know what he sees really is very predictive. And in fact, I think very potent because it's really quite true.
PJ (46:03.632)
Because it was predictive, like you said earlier.
Gray (46:10.41)
that humanity has a longing for a better future, a better society. And eugenicism was a way of solving our sense that we've deviated from the good. And it's a way of trying to reground the talos and something outside of God. So, you know, I put it kind of controversially in a lecture essay. If you depart from Christianity, racism and eugenicism is happening.
And that's that's that's Bobbitt's arguments, but but he doesn't just say that like I did, you know He he shows it from all these different German philosophers and sometimes British philosophers arguing for that
PJ (46:50.704)
Yeah, and that's I'm frustrated because I wanted to off there it is there there's the number I was trying to find the number for it because I remember the first time Where the school that I went to kind of like rah rah American history, right? North America this stuff happens and I remember the first time I found out in the 20s that you had 70 ,000 forced sterilizations
in North America, in the North, and we always want to say it, talk about like the racist Nazis, but eugenics was such, eugenics was the way to go. Like, like that was the educated opinion of the time.
Gray (47:32.17)
Right. Right. And, you know, everybody was saying this is the way of the future and so on. And if you just zoom out a little bit, how silly that claim is. And I think we can also probably think about, OK, what are the so -called scientific consensus or this that issue? You're probably going to see in 50, 60 years things that we're going to recognize now as something good. But in the future, we're going to be like, what are we doing? What are we thinking? If it was not just stupid, it was also quite evil.
and I think we can probably predict some of those even today.
PJ (48:02.16)
Hmm.
So, final question. This is the typical question I ask my guests. Besides reading Bob Inch's Philosophy of Revelation,
What would you have our audience walk away with today to kind of chew on to meditate throughout the week after listening to this episode?
Gray (48:25.834)
Yeah, great. Thank you. If you're a Christian,
try hard to really make that distinction between theological orthodoxy and cultural differences. And I'm probably just speaking from the reform world, but I think so much of what we are fighting over oftentimes are cultural differences and not so much theological differences or what Tim Keller calls, you know, theological vision. So Tim Keller and his book center church would distinguish between your doctrinal foundation.
PJ (48:40.688)
Hmm.
Gray (49:01.002)
your theological vision, and then your ministry expression. And he says, you know, why is it that in the context of, let's say the reform churches, we all have the same confession Westminster standards, but our ministry expressions look really different from one reformed church to another, even one Presbyterian church to another. Well, he argues the differences are really not about oftentimes, sometimes it is, and you got to really deal with that. Not about doctrinal foundation, but really about theological vision, which is your
articulation or maybe not articulated, articulated or not articulated viewpoint of how your doctrine should be translated to your ministry expression. What should we emphasize? How do we contextualize? And theological vision is really about contextualization. I think if you're not a Christian here, everybody is a sinner and nobody is any better. Nobody is better than anyone else.
PJ (49:54.224)
Ha!
Gray (50:00.682)
And everybody, because they're a sinner, needs forgiveness and redemption. And that redemption can only be found in the person of Jesus Christ who lived the righteous life that you should have lived and died the death that you should have died. And only because he resurrected from the dead, can you have assurance that you would be accepted by God because his righteousness is offered to you in the gospel. So because you sin, you cannot be made right with God, but because he was righteous, you could be made right with God because God will now consider you in him.
and his righteousness is now yours, given to you freely. It's good news, not good advice. And if you're not a Christian, let me say one more thing.
You are always going to, because I also know this, and when I lived as an atheist until I became a Christian when I was 17, you too have a vision of the good and the true and the beautiful. You might say, I don't really care about the good or good as our relative, but you believe that there's something good. And if that good is not grounded in God, not identified with God, you're going to end up locating that good in something else. And I want to challenge you to think about what that good is for you and why that good is absolute for you.
And if you're saying, well, nothing is absolute, everything is relative, even that becomes sort of an absolute statement. Maybe that's pretty rudimentary, but you know, I want to challenge you to identify what it is that you're identifying your goodness in. What is the longing that you're rooting yourself into? What's your identity? And if that's not found in God, then you're going to end up projecting it to other people and it's going to look really tyrannical. And if it's not grounded in God, it's going to be really, really fleeting and insecure because...
Everybody feels like there's something wrong with them and you've got to find something good outside of them. And I want to challenge you to find that in God.
PJ (51:46.288)
Dr. Sutanto, one, thank you for that final charge and thank you so much for coming on today. Really appreciated it.
Gray (51:54.474)
Thank you. I'm glad to be here.