Abstract
The works of the 16th-century Protestant Reformers generally exhibited a distinctly polemic character. John Calvin’s discussion of Christian epistemology in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, for example, emphasised the authority of the Bible, in contradistinction to the Roman Catholic view, as independent of any ecclesiastical intermediation (Calvin 1559:I.7.1). The Reformation, therefore, was exactly what its name implies: a reaction against the established ecclesiastical order’s embodiment of doctrines it perceived of as false (Hillerbrand 2007:384). In contradistinction, the Protestant Scholasticism of the 17th century is described by the American historical theologian Richard Muller (2003:34) as a development that, unlike the Reformation, did not emerge from “kerugma to dogma”, but rather was one “consisting in the adjustment of a received body of doctrine and its systematic relations to the needs of Protestantism, in terms dictated by the Reformers on Scripture, grace, justification, and the sacraments”. The term “Scholasticism” is ascribed to this development because of its indebtedness to the prevalent medieval theological methodology, in particular as it had been developed at medieval European universities (McGraw 2019:101). In this sense the medieval university provided the theoretical framework that shaped 17th-century Protestant Scholasticism (Vos 2001:118).
Like his Protestant contemporaries, the man widely regarded as the father of modern philosophy, René Descartes (1596−1650), was also schooled in the Scholastic tradition and much of his work also bears the stamp of its method (Ariew 2019:29). In seeking a firm foundation for indubitable knowledge in reason alone, Descartes epistemologically rooted the res extensa, that is the object of knowledge, entirely in the res cogitans, the thinking subject. Therefore, for Descartes, reason served as the last bastion against all doubt; that is, while all that was external of the human mind might be potentially deceptive, the internal cognitive consciousness of one’s own thinking served as the irrefutable proof of one’s own existence (Descartes 1644:30).
During his own 17th century, Descartes’ philosophy would actually receive more scholarly interest in the Netherlands than in his native France, with the University of Utrecht also becoming the world’s first to teach his philosophy (Frijhoff and Spies 2004:281). Nonetheless, Cartesianism quickly came to be viewed as a threat to Dutch Calvinism, and during the 1640s many churches and universities (including Utrecht where it was initially taught) rejected it as heretical (Cellamare 2019:2–3).
The first Dutch Protestant Scholastic that would, however, dissent from this widespread rejection and explicitly incorporate Cartesianism into his understanding of divine revelation, was Christoph Wittich (1625−1687). By virtue of a history of ideas approach, the nature of Wittich’s exegetical and hermeneutical approach to Biblical texts in terms of his attempt at harmonizing Cartesian philosophy and Protestant theology, can be amplified in an unprecedented manner.
At the heart of Wittich’s understanding of Cartesianism was his conviction that Cartesian doubt in no way threatened faith in God (Cellamare 2019:7). For Wittich (1664:12) “Descartes’ first step on the path to the acquisition of knowledge is similar to the manner in which acknowledgement of sin is the first step to repentance”. In following Descartes’ epistemic method, Wittich (1664:15) argued that although we know from Scripture that God does not deceive us, this cannot be indubitably known until it is confirmed by human reason.
Wittich rhetorically distinguished Cartesianism from the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza (1632−1677), following criticisms by Dutch Reformed theologians such as Jakobus Revius (1586−1658) who argued that the rationalist method of Descartes was essentially the same as that of Spinoza, whose philosophy effectuated a form of pantheism (Revius 1548:118). Wittich (1690:49) countered that he considered Descartes’ epistemology to be radically different from that of Spinoza, as the latter confused cause and effect in regarding human reason as the foundation of God’s existence itself, whereas with Descartes it is merely the means of acquiring indubitable knowledge of God.
The famous Reformed Scholastic strongly associated with Dordtian Orthodoxy, Gysbertius Voetius (1589−1676), condemned the rationalism of Cartesianism itself as a religious conviction at odds with Christian doctrine, arguing that “human reason does not precede faith, nor does it have access to higher knowledge, and therefore cannot be foundational to faith” (Voetius 1636:4). In contradistinction, Wittich (1653:1) proposed that reason itself “was implanted in us since the first creation”, thereby being of itself, in terms of both its origin and authority, a principium externum.
Given his historical context and audience, it was vital for Wittich to reconcile his doubt regarding knowledge acquired through the Bible with the Protestant doctrine of the infallibility of Special Revelation. He claimed to receive the Bible as “the sole rule and norm for faith and practice” (Wittich 1682:297). Unlike the historical critics of the 18th and 19th centuries, Wittich therefore did not question the infallibility of the Bible as such, but argued for semantic and conceptual reappraisal of the idea of divine accommodation. The idea of accommodatio, dating back to the early church fathers, was historically understood as the Holy Spirit’s employment of anthropomorphisms in Scripture, so as to effectively reveal God to fallible human beings (Lee 2017:34). Both Augustine and Calvin, for example, understood accommodatio as a means by which God bridged the gap between God-self and the limited understanding of fallen human beings (Lee 2017:34). As Richard Muller (2006:19) notes:
[t]he Reformers and their scholastic followers all recognized that God must in some way condescend or accommodate Himself to human ways of knowing in order to reveal Himself. This accommodation occurs specifically in the use of human words and concepts for the communication of the law and the gospel, but it in no way implies the loss of truth or the lessening of scriptural authority. The accommodation or condescension refers to the manner or mode of revelation, the gift of the wisdom of the infinite God in finite form, not to the quality of the revelation or to the matter revealed.
Muller, however, erroneously ascribes a new understanding of accommodatio in the sense of “a use of time-bound and even erroneous statements as a medium for revelation” to the 17th-century Lutheran theologian, Johann Semler (Muller 2006:19). However, an investigation into the history of the idea during the preceding century reveals that it already had undergone a conceptual and semantic metamorphosis in the theology of Wittich. According to his understanding of accommodatio, God not only revealed God-self in accordance with the cognitive limitations of fallible humans, but also in accordance with the contextually bound ignorance, misconceptions and prejudices of the Biblical text’s original audience (Wittich 1653:3, 24). In other words, the Bible contains many passages that not only accommodate the limitations of man by means of anthropomorphisms, but also by means of erroneous statements regarding natural and even moral matters (Wittich 1653:3).
Although Wittich (1553:249) appealed to both Augustine and Calvin in defence of his understanding of accommodatio, his reappraisal of the concept differed radically from theirs, providing through it a rationalist impulse to the concept of analogia fidei or standard of truth by virtue of an emphasis on the correct use of reason as decisive in terms of the interpretation of the Bible. Whereas historically the concept of accommodatio was understood as a deliberate act on the part of God for the sake of accommodating human limitations, Wittich (1682:397–8) presented it as the result of the misconceptions of both the human author as well as the first audience of any given Biblical text – misconceptions that could be overcome by the right use of reason. This stands in direct contrast to an anti-Cartesian opponent of Wittich, Petrus van Mastricht (1630−1706), who accused Wittich of disregarding the classical Reformed understanding of the analogia fidei, namely that Scripture is always its own final interpreter (Van Mastricht 1655:77).
Unlike human reason correctly applied, Wittich (1682:31) therefore did not regard Biblical texts as free from epistemic suspicion and they are therefore to be considered as inferior to reason when it comes to addressing natural and even moral matters. Reason, considered by Wittich to be a gift from God, is always decisive in terms of the acquisition of indubitable knowledge. Biblical truths therefore remain dubious until they are epistemologically ratified by reason (Wittich 1664:15).
The existing literature wrongly presents Witttich’s notion of accommodatio as a mere continuation of a pre-existing conceptualization of the idea (Muller 1987:94, Lee 2017:33). While he rhetorically appealed to the Augustinian and Calvinistic traditions in his defence of his understanding thereof, it is clear that the concept underwent a profound semantic metamorphosis in the theology of Wittich by virtue of his integration of Cartesian philosophy into his Protestant theological framework. His critical approach to Biblical texts through the lenses of his – at the time − new understanding of accommodatio, played an important historical role in laying the early theological foundations of the late 18th- and early 19th-century development of modern hermeneutics.
Keywords: Descartes, René; divine accommodation; epistemology; Protestant Scholasticism; rationalism; Wittich, Christoph
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