Thomas Reid has suffered under Reformed apologetics. Few people
actually have read what he said, and the caricatures of him are easy to
ridicule. That he was to old Princeton Calvinism what Locke was to
Jonathan Edwards, few can deny. But many in the Van Tillian camp,
seeing “autonomous reason” everywhere, have savaged Reid. Given my
background and my long debates with Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman
Catholicism, Reid’s works were like a fresh walk on the Scottish moors
(maybe somewhat literally, since Reid is Scottish).
For the past three years I’ve been somewhat a Hegelian. Hegel has some interesting things, but that takes one down a different path. Last Christmas I finished reading Living in the End Times by the neo-Hegelian atheist Slavoj Zizek. While the book had many fine criticisms of liberal democracy, towards the end–if I may sound like an Evangelical at summer bible camp–I felt a darkness that I had not felt before: extreme melancholy and a “mental shadow.” There might be something to that description. In Joseph Farrell’s God, History, and Dialectic he described Hegel as a “Gnostic Magus.”
Make of that what you will, back to Reid. Reading Reid was an intellectual liberation. When I was dialoguing with those Anchoretic traditions, and I would come to a verse that seemed problematic (like where Isaiah 53 explicitly teaches penal substitution, as does 1 Peter 3), I would get several responses, all along the same lines: 1) “Remember, that’s just your interpretation. You can’t posit that against the entire Patrum Consensus” or 2) “Given what we believe about anthropology, etc., the verse can’t mean that.”
You know what? Maybe they are right, but something kept saying in the back of my head, “That’s not how you use words. That is the most raw form of special pleading imaginable.” Eventually mental systems break under such cracks. Reid’s answer came like a summer rain: God created my brain in such a way, assuming I don’t have a concussion or something, that he will not deceive me. If I can use the laws of logic and grammar to understand what the Anchorite says about something difficult like “All of God, essence, energy and operation, are hyperousia,” then I can understand something simple as when the prophet Isaiah tells me that the Servant suffered for the sins of my people.
But someone can respond, “Well, how do you know your mental faculties are working accordingly?” There are several responses:
Thomas Reid was responding to the idealism of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. In a nutshell, and woefully oversimplifying what they believed, they said that in every act of memory there are two objects, one mental object in my head and the external, mediate object in real life. One of the dangers of this thought is that the external object, when the process is pushed to the limit, is dropped, leaving only as real the internal objects. A later post will review Reid’s response to this line of thought.
For the past three years I’ve been somewhat a Hegelian. Hegel has some interesting things, but that takes one down a different path. Last Christmas I finished reading Living in the End Times by the neo-Hegelian atheist Slavoj Zizek. While the book had many fine criticisms of liberal democracy, towards the end–if I may sound like an Evangelical at summer bible camp–I felt a darkness that I had not felt before: extreme melancholy and a “mental shadow.” There might be something to that description. In Joseph Farrell’s God, History, and Dialectic he described Hegel as a “Gnostic Magus.”
Make of that what you will, back to Reid. Reading Reid was an intellectual liberation. When I was dialoguing with those Anchoretic traditions, and I would come to a verse that seemed problematic (like where Isaiah 53 explicitly teaches penal substitution, as does 1 Peter 3), I would get several responses, all along the same lines: 1) “Remember, that’s just your interpretation. You can’t posit that against the entire Patrum Consensus” or 2) “Given what we believe about anthropology, etc., the verse can’t mean that.”
You know what? Maybe they are right, but something kept saying in the back of my head, “That’s not how you use words. That is the most raw form of special pleading imaginable.” Eventually mental systems break under such cracks. Reid’s answer came like a summer rain: God created my brain in such a way, assuming I don’t have a concussion or something, that he will not deceive me. If I can use the laws of logic and grammar to understand what the Anchorite says about something difficult like “All of God, essence, energy and operation, are hyperousia,” then I can understand something simple as when the prophet Isaiah tells me that the Servant suffered for the sins of my people.
But someone can respond, “Well, how do you know your mental faculties are working accordingly?” There are several responses:
- I can return the question, “They must be working well enough for me to understand your question.” This is also the most practically devastating response to criticisms of sola scriptura. If I can’t understand the Bible outside the teaching authority of the church, then I can’t understand the Bible when the teaching authority of the church quotes Scripture to me. Even if we deny the principle of sola Scriptura, yet when explicit appeal is made to Scripture to ground a given dogma, then such an appeal must be exegetically sustainable.
- This was Reid’s answer: Forgo the question right away. Simply suppose he is merry. If you find out he is serious, then suppose him mad.
Thomas Reid was responding to the idealism of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. In a nutshell, and woefully oversimplifying what they believed, they said that in every act of memory there are two objects, one mental object in my head and the external, mediate object in real life. One of the dangers of this thought is that the external object, when the process is pushed to the limit, is dropped, leaving only as real the internal objects. A later post will review Reid’s response to this line of thought.
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