Knowledge Sought In Obedience

Our chapter from Keller this week is “The Knowledge of God.” The following quote from The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God highlights how the Christian is to seek knowledge under God’s authority.  In addition, John Frame gives an insightful definition of presupposition, a term that has been mentioned in our class over the past few weeks.

When we seek to know God obediently, we assume the fundamental point that Christian knowledge is a knowledge under authority, that our quest for knowledge is not autonomous but subject to Scripture.  And if that is true, it follows that the truth (and to some extent the content) of Scripture must be regarded as the most certain knowledge we have.  If this knowledge is to be the criterion for all other knowledge, if it is to govern our acceptance or rejection of other propositions, then there is no proposition that can call it into question. Thus when we know God, we know Him more certainly, more surely than we know anything else.  When He speaks to us, our understanding of His Word must govern our understanding of everything else.  This is a difficult point because, after all, our understanding of Scripture is fallible and may sometimes need to be corrected.  But those corrections may be made only on the basis of a deeper understanding of Scripture, not on the basis of some other kind of knowledge.

It is at this point that we introduce ourselves to the term for which Van Til’s apologetic is best known, the term presupposition. A presupposition is a belief that takes precedence over another and therefore serves as a criterion for another.  An ultimate presupposition is a belief over which no other takes precedence.  For a Christian, the content of Scripture must serve as his ultimate presupposition.  Our beliefs about Scripture may be corrected by other beliefs about Scripture, but relative to to the body of extra-scriptural  information that we possess, those beliefs are presuppositional in character.  This doctrine is merely the outworking of the lordship of God in the area of human thought.  It merely applies the doctrine of scriptural infallability to the realm of knowing.  Seen in this way, I cannot understand why any evangelical Christian should have a problem in accepting it.  We are merely affirming that human knowledge is servant-knowledge, that in seeking to know anything our first concern is to discover what our Lord thinks about it and to agree with His judgement, to think His thoughts after Him.  What alternative could there possibly be?  Would anyone dare to suggest that though we commit ourselves unreservedly to Christ, there is no place for such commitments in our intellectual work?  Thus this doctrine of presuppositions purely and simply asserts the lordship of Christ over human thought.  Anything less than this is unacceptable to Him. (pp 44-45)

randy