Lux Lucet

During a recent Sunday school discussion on the Westminster Longer Catechism, I heard an objection raised to the wording of question 7.  This question asks, “What is God?”  Now while the wording of this question may seem strange to our ears, there is a very good theological reason why the writers of the Catechism asked this question the way they did.  But to understand why they did so requires a some understanding of the history of apologetics.

Having rejected the biblical principle of Scripture alone, medieval theologians attempted to do God’s work apart from God’s word.  One area where this tendency reared its head was apologetics.  Instead of defending Christianity by the Bible alone, medieval apologists undertook to defend the faith by attempting to prove the existence of God, and this apart from any reference to the Scriptures.  Only after establishing by means independent of the Bible that God existed, would they then proceed to discuss what the Bible had to say about him. 

There were two major problems with this method.  The first of  these was that by starting their defense of Christianity outside the Bible, the medievalists made the foundation of the Christian faith not the Bible, but instead their proofs for God’s existence.  Should these proofs prove invalid, which in fact they are, those who rely on these arguments for the defense of the faith have the philosophical rug pulled out from under them.   

The reformers wisely rejected this method, for they that saw that the starting point for apologetics, as with every other pursuit, must be the Scriptures.  Luther called this the Schriftprinzep, the Scripture principle.  The proper biblical method of apologetics is to defend the Bible using the Bible.   And this was the method of the Reformation. 

A second problem with the medieval strategy of proving the existence of God is that even if it had been successful, it would still have been futile, for all things exist: men, dogs, cats, dreams and Sasquatch.  And if all things can be said to exist, to assert that something exists tells us nothing about it.  The important question is not, “Does such and such a thing exist,” but rather, “What is it?”

By making the 66 books of the Bible the sole basis for the Christian faith, the framers of the Westminster Standards rejected the foolish wisdom of this world in favor of the true wisdom of God.  And having done this, they were able to ask and correctly answer the right questions.