Hengstmengel, Joost

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VU Research Portal[Book review of:] Absolute Person and Moral Experience: A Study in Neo-Calvinism,written by Nathan D. ShannonHengstmengel, Joostpublished inPhilosophia Reformata2023DOI (link to publisher)10.1163/23528230-bja10070document versionPublisher's PDF, also known as Version of recorddocument licenseArticle 25fa Dutch Copyright ActLink to publication in VU Research Portalcitation for published version (APA)Hengstmengel, J. (2023). [Book review of:] Absolute Person and Moral Experience: A Study in Neo-Calvinism,written by Nathan D. Shannon. Philosophia Reformata, 88(2), 135-139. https://doi.org/10.1163/23528230-bja10070General rightsCopyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright ownersand it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.            • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research.            • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain            • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portalTake down policyIf you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediatelyand investigate your claim.E-mail address:vuresearchportal.ub@vu.nlDownload date: 13. Sep. 2024135Published with license by Koninklijke Brill nv | doi: 10.1163/23528230-bja10070© Joost Hengstmengel, 2023 | ISSN: 0031-8035 (print) 2352-8230 (online)Nathan D. Shannon, Absolute Person and Moral Experience: A Study in Neo-Calvinism. T&T Clark, London, 2022. xiii + 204 pages. isbn 978-0-5677-0735-2.The neo-Calvinist tradition, which also gave birth to this journal, has long since ceased to be exclusively a Dutch affair (if it ever was). Neo-Calvinism has become truly international, and the center of gravity of its research has moved abroad. Nowadays, most studies on Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck—the two authors who continue to enjoy the greatest popularity—are published in English by Anglo-American publishers. Apart from numerous translations, the most recent publications include an edited volume on Kuyper’s Stone Lectures (Joustra and Joustra 2022), an anthology of Klaas Schilder’s writings (Harinck, de Jong, and Mouw 2022), a study of Bavinck’s scientific theology (Xu 2022), a theological introduction to neo-Calvinism (Brock and Sutanto 2022), and an edited volume on neo-Calvinism and Roman Catholicism (Eglinton and Harinck 2023). In addition, a neo-Calvinism handbook (Sutanto and Brock, forthcoming) and a journal titled Neocalviniana are forthcoming.Absolute Person and Moral Experience fits this trend of globalizing neo-Calvinism. Its author, Nathan Shannon, obtained his PhD from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands, taught for some years in Seoul in South Korea, and is currently adjunct professor of apologetics and systematic theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in the United States. His newest book studies and combines the neo-Calvinist theologies of one Dutchman bound to his native soil, “eclectic systematician” Herman Bavinck (1854–1921); his nephew Johan Herman Bavinck (1895–1964), a missiologist who studied in Germany and worked for many years in Indonesia; and two Dutch-born Americans: biblical theologian Geerhardus Vos (1862–1949) and apologist Cornelius Van Til (1895–1987).What Shannon’s book seeks to offer based on these authors is a—rather than the—neo-Calvinist account of moral experience. This justifies the absence of Kuyper, the founding father of the neo-Calvinist tradition. Why he is not included in the discussion—apart, that is, from a few mentions mostly in the footnotes—remains unexplained. The same is true for the choice of the four dramatis personae. That the two Bavincks, Vos, and Van Til are innovative thinkers is beyond doubt. But Shannon does not justify why their works are particularly suitable for the (re)construction of a neo-Calvinist theory of the human moral condition. This does not alter the fact that the author proves their oeuvre to be very fruitful for this purpose. Combining insights mainly, but certainly not exclusively, from such primary sources as Herman Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics, Vos’s Biblical Theology, and Van Til’s Introduction to book reviewsDownloaded from Brill.com 07/05/2024 11:19:44AMvia Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam136Systematic Theology and Common Grace and the Gospel, he outlines the contours of a theocentric account of moral experience that is presented as an advance upon the tradition of Augustinian moral theology (see the preface).Surprisingly, the book circles around just two Bible texts: the divine prohibition in Genesis 2:17 (“But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” [New King James Version]) and the human transgression in Genesis 3:6 (“So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate. She also gave to her husband with her, and he ate” [nkjv]). These two loci from the “Urzeit of Christian revelation” (x), which to the four theologians in question is historical, are subjected to theological commentary in chapters 1 and 2, respectively. This sets the stage for human moral experience. Chapter 3 focuses on the other part of the book’s title: the idea and significance of absolute personality. The next two chapters discuss two individual writers. While chapter 4 zooms in on Van Til’s theology of accommodation, chapter 5 is concerned with the role of the incarnation in Herman Bavinck’s theology. The final chapter provides a helpful summary and draws this new study in neo-Calvinism to a close, surprisingly concluding that God the Son was first forsaken, despised, and rejected in the event recorded in Genesis 3:6.The term moral experience, which remains undefined in the book, denotes the human experience of moral meaning. It refers to the subjective engagement with moral phenomena and encompasses the individual’s perception of moral values, of right and wrong, good and evil. Now according to the neo-Calvinists, Shannon reasons, human moral experience is self-conscious engagement with the moral structure of image-bearing life, that is, of humans created in the image of God. Within this structure or fabric, Genesis 2:17 is the legal expression of God’s own moral character. The injunction “you shall not” can be seen as the self-expression of God as a moral norm for humans. It affirms their moral consciousness of creaturely freedom relative to the will of God and formalizes the possibility of disobedience and sin. As such, “God is man’s ultimate environment,” as Van Til expressed it (Van Til, cited at 2, 45, 80, and 158). From a neo-Calvinist perspective, moral experience presupposes the self-expression of the divine moral character: it is profoundly relational. It is eschatological as well, for the glory of God and human happiness. Rather than challenging them, the prohibition of Genesis 2:17 invites all humans, in Adam, to exert themselves morally in order to increase in godliness.How, then, is it possible that a good-willed creature self-consciously chose to transgress God’s moral norm? Whence this relational breach? This notorious book reviewsPhilosophia Reformata 88 (2023) 127–171Downloaded from Brill.com 07/05/2024 11:19:44AMvia Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam137problem of evil permeates the entire book. Typical for the neo-Calvinist—and Augustinian—approach is that it offers no theodicy but a “theology of evil.” Rather than vindicating God in the face of evil, it tries to make sense of evil in a world created by God. Regarding evil as a theological problem, the neo-Calvinists start from divine revelation, out of the belief that “God must be his own theodicy” (Van Til, cited at xiii). According to Herman Bavinck, Vos, and Van Til, the so-called covenant of works of Genesis 2:16–17 is a formalization of a natural moral situation preceding it. As a creature created in the image of God, Adam has always been under obligation of obedience. Human moral experience is not a function of the formal covenant but a function of an earlier divine relational initiative. This makes evil all the more mysterious. For while the transgression of Genesis 3:6 explains the beginning of sin and evil, it does not provide an explanation of their origin and objective possibility. Why did God design things that way in the first place?The neo-Calvinist reflex when facing such theological mysteries, Shannon repeatedly states, is to “look more steadfastly into the face of God” (Van Til, cited at xiii, 33, 76, 115, and 193). When the neo-Calvinist theologians (including, in chapter 3, Johan Herman Bavinck) do so by turning to the doctrine of God, they come up with “triune absolute personalism.” Creation, history, and human moral experience actually presuppose theism: a God who is both absolute and personal. Only an unconditioned God who is both ontologically independent and relational—in himself and toward his creatures—can demand obedience and engage in a historical covenant. The Creator-creature relationality is, moreover, conditioned by the Trinitarian relational economy, the co-eternity of the three persons who are unity-in-diversity. God revealed his nature and will in Eden and in Scripture, and to that end had to condescend or accommodate himself to humankind, Shannon argues with Van Til. Finally, as the reader learns from Herman Bavinck, the incarnational condescension in the Son is the fullest expression of the absolute personal God moving toward, and reducing the distance to, that which is not God.This neo-Calvinist account of human moral experience, which in all its richness I can only summarize very briefly here, does not solve the problem of evil as a philosophical problem. But it helps to understand the human moral situation as well as the mystery of moral experience from a theological point of view. It was the relational context of an absolute and personal God seeking historical communion with humankind that gave meaning to evil. As the author summarizes it: “Sin and evil are meaningless notions if they are not descriptive of a willful transgression of a law issuing from the self-objectification of the book reviewsPhilosophia Reformata 88 (2023) 127–171 Downloaded from Brill.com 07/05/2024 11:19:44AMvia Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam138God who is there, who is the very personal fabric of human self-understanding in the first place” (115).A contribution to the T&T Clark Enquiries in Theological Ethics series, Absolute Person and Moral Experience is theological rather than philosophical in nature. This makes it a challenging read for a philosopher uninitiated in complicated theological discussions regarding, for instance, the angelic fall, covenant, and original sin. That said, it does contain a few philosophical digressions and, generally speaking, has philosophical relevance, if only because Van Til was also a philosopher credited as forerunner of presuppositionalism. There is some discussion in the book of whether, philosophically speaking, knowledge of the absolute (God) is possible at all, and how the personal God of Christianity relates to the abstract God of the philosophers—an especially appropriate topic in 2023, which marks the four-hundredth birthday of Blaise Pascal.One shortcoming of Shannon’s book is that it basically treats Herman Bavinck and the other theologians in a vacuum. While relating their theologies to those of Augustine and Calvin and suggesting that Bavinck could be placed alongside other modern theologians, it does not actually show how the neo-Calvinist exegesis of the first three chapters from Genesis differs from that of other interpreters.Whether the Lord is pleased with this book, as the author wishes in the acknowledgments, I do not know. Speaking for myself, I am impressed by the richness of the material it presents, and I learned much from it. A development of the insights from this book in a Christian-philosophical direction would be most welcome. As can be learned from Shannon’s study, if such an attempt is informed by neo-Calvinist theology, it cannot but be theocentric, Trinitarian, and Christological. A particular challenge will be to do justice to the absolute personalism proposed by it. “The moment we step outside the domain of this special revelation in Scripture,” observed Herman Bavinck, “we find that in all religious and philosophical systems the unity of the personality and absoluteness of God is broken” (Bavinck, cited at 171).Joost Hengstmengel | orcid: 0000-0003-4637-0878Faculty of Religion and Theology, Texts and Traditions, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlandsj.w.hengstmengel@vu.nlbook reviewsPhilosophia Reformata 88 (2023) 127–171Downloaded from Brill.com 07/05/2024 11:19:44AMvia Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam139ReferencesBrock, C.C., and Sutanto, N.G. (2022). Neo-Calvinism: A Theological Introduction. Bellingham: Lexham Academic.Eglinton, J., and Harinck, G., eds. (2023). Neo-Calvinism and Roman Catholicism. Leiden: Brill.Harinck, G., de Jong, M., and Mouw, R., eds. (2022). The Klaas Schilder Reader: The Essential Theological Writings. Bellingham: Lexham.Joustra, J.R., and Joustra, R.J., eds. (2022). Calvinism for a Secular Age: A Twenty-First- Century Reading of Abraham Kuyper’s Stone Lectures. Westmont: InterVarsity.Sutanto, N.G., and Brock, C., eds. (forthcoming). T&T Clark Handbook of Neo-Calvinism. London: T&T Clark.Xu, X. (2022). Theology as the Science of God: Herman Bavinck’s Wetenschappelijke Theology for the Modern World. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.book reviewsPhilosophia Reformata 88 (2023) 127–171 Downloaded from Brill.com 07/05/2024 11:19:44AMvia Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

[Book review of:] Absolute Person and Moral Experience: A Study in Neo-Calvinism, written by Nathan D. Shannon

Joost Hengstmengel

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Absolute Person and Moral Experience: A Study in Neo-Calvinism, written by Nathan D. Shannon

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[Book review of:] Absolute Person and Moral Experience: A Study in Neo-Calvinism, written by Nathan D. Shannon

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