40 Bicycles

…Ockham and Locke believed that God Himself is not the object of our theological inquiry. The object of our analyses is our concept of God. The unbeliever can theologize just as well as the believer. The difference, however, is that the believer knows the propositions are true (that is, they correspond to reality) because he or she accepts them on authority by faith as God’s revelation.

American advocates of Scottish Common Sense were, for the most part, no better. Nineteenth-century Presbyterian theologians often identified the object of faith with the propositions of Scripture rather than with Christ Himself. Charles Hodge and others equated the objective side of Christianity with biblical propositions. Like Locke, Common Sense theology viewed revelation as essentially cognitive. Faith consists in believing that something is true, rather than being the means by which we participate in the realities to which such doctrines point. Such biblical rationalism reasons from abstractions to reality rather than from reality to ideas. Thus a doctrine is said to be true because the Bible teaches it, rather than saying that the Bible teaches it because it is true.

This is not to say, of course, that either Locke or Princeton regarded the words of Scripture as empty abstractions or creatures of the mind. They represented an objective reality, be it historical or spiritual. By virtue of divine authority, the propositions of Scripture were viewed as constitutive knowledge, not simply as heuristic devices. Nevertheless, by shifting the object of faith and the foundation of theology from the historical and spiritual realities of Christianity to the Scriptures (that is, the noumenon to the nomen), they unwittingly lapsed into a form of nominalism which, if not actual, was at least functional in its effects. For them, as for Ockham and Locke, language became an end in itself instead of a bridge to the spiritual world.