An Author Interview from Books At a Glance
Reformed theologians have had much to say about human nature, and I think it may be a bit surprising to learn that there is, in fact, a gap that needs to be filled. And that’s what Dr. Paul Helm has done for us in his new book, Human Nature from Calvin to Edwards.
Greetings, and welcome to another Author Interview here on Books At a Glance. I’m Fred Zaspel, and we’re talking today to Dr. Paul Helm. It’s a noteworthy event when a scholar makes a genuine contribution to some area of study, and that is what Dr. Helm does for us in his new book. Dr. Helm is a widely recognized authority in Reformed historical theology, and we are very pleased to have him with us today.
Paul, welcome, and congratulations on your new book!
Helm:
Hello, thank you very much, indeed. Shall I try to answer that question in the following way: I was looking for a book, for teaching, that taught me about how the theologians I was interested in thought about human nature, not in connection with soteriology, but just in terms of human nature – what is it to be a human being? And that’s the question I certainly don’t answer in the book, but I give a wide variety of samples of writers in the 16th and 17th centuries and going into the 18th who wouldn’t be put off by the question and would have something to say, by means of an answer to it, and they wouldn’t always agree with each other about it. So, it’s like a natural basis on which soteriology leans. The drama of personal salvation is dependent upon the human nature, body and soul. And that’s what I’m interested in. I’m interested in the intellect and the affections and the conscience and the moral life. I’m interested in the nature of the soul and its life after death and its relationship to the body. These have been controversial matters of debate in the Reformed tradition and I want to draw to people’s attention to some of this literature. There is a vast amount and I simply do nothing in the book other than try to introduce people to some, not all, of its teachings. But I certainly don’t go into questions like the imago Dei, certainly not purposely, except incidentally now and again, or the human nature of Christ, and so on. That’s what I call theological anthropology. I’m interested, in the book, in anthropology per se. It’s fallen anthropology, of course, so you can’t avoid that and I say something a bit about that in the course of the book.
Zaspel:
That is an uncommon focus. Most often in Reformed theologians, the focus is on the condition of human nature, your focus is on what is human nature, so why don’t you expand on that. Just what is human nature?
Helm:
Well, human nature is a set of powers. These powers, the people who I’m dealing with in the book called faculties. They didn’t always call them faculties in the history of Christian thought, but they called them faculties by the 16th and 17th centuries. Which is hard to comprehend, even if it’s sympathetic Reformed people, without having some idea of what went before then. And what went before then was Scholasticism, Roman Catholic Scholasticism, and that stood on the shoulders of Plato and the Stoics. So, we are involved in some philosophical work as a background. It was a philosophical tradition, that of scholasticism and Platonism, that the Reformed were educated in. Most of them in scholasticism feature Vermigli or any first-generation Reformed theologian (Calvin was an exception), Zanchius – they all spent a good deal of their lives as teachers in scholasticism one way or another in the Roman setting. And when Zanchius and Vermigli fled Italy, being pursued by the Inquisition, they didn’t leave everything behind them. They took their education with them. And some of the things they confessed they didn’t repudiate on becoming Protestants and on becoming Reformed. All that has to be remembered. Reformed theology is a Catholic theology. This is going off the subject a little bit. It embraces the patristic conclusions regarding the nature of the Trinity, the three in one, the threeness and the oneness of the eternal God and of course with the person of Jesus Christ. They didn’t give up those beliefs as you can see from Richard Muller’s Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics. He gives some space to what went before the Reformation, and in a way, I’m echoing that. Not with the professionalism that he has, but with the same kind of interest and appeal to understanding.
Zaspel:
You mention that this is an area of study in which theology and philosophy intersect in a more obvious way than many others. Maybe you could give us more specifics on that, and talk to us in particular about “faculty psychology.”
Helm:
Faculty psychology is reflection on how these powers, the powers of the soul, the intellect, the conscience, the will, the emotions, and so one, interact. Which has primacy? Which has a leading role in the intellectual lives of men and women? What is the role of the affections or emotions? Are they a good thing or a bad thing? Are they to be expunged from the Christian life or are they to be, themselves, the subjects of the regenerating grace of God in Christ? That’s faculty psychology. Some of these people stressed the apartness of each of these faculties; they play a distinct role. Others of them stressed the unity and the cooperation and the intertwining, as I call it in the book, of this faculty and that. And it comes out, of course, most obviously in what they have to say, in the 17th century, about the nature of regeneration. Regeneration is something that affects the whole soul. Or perhaps I should go back to the Fall. For these people, the Fall is an accident in the sense that the integrity of human nature remained intact. Regeneration is not a remaking of the human soul, it’s a reforming of the human soul, or the regenerating of the human soul. So that here, as elsewhere in their theology, grace builds upon nature. It does not spurn nature, because nature is the Creation and is God’s gift. It is God’s gift that we have the nature that we have as human beings. And this isn’t rejected when we become Christian people. When the Holy Spirit works upon us in regenerating power we don’t cease to be what we were in the sense of possessing a human nature, a soul. Rather, our souls become, in regeneration, less disorderly than they were as a result of the fallen nature of human beings prior to regeneration.
Zaspel:
Describe for us your historical focus. Why this time period? And why these representative theologians?
Helm:
Oh, because I’m interested in how Reformed Scholastic theology collapsed like a pack of cards in the 18th century. It collapsed, in a word or two, because the philosophical underpinnings of all that I’ve been talking about were supplanted by different philosophies which were alien to the propagation of Christian theology in its classical mode. You get the beginnings of the Enlightenment in the sixteenth century with Descartes arrival in Utrecht and his interaction with Reformed theologians in Utrecht and elsewhere and in the universities of Holland, in some of them, if not all of them. And then it takes a further step, though a rather surprising step, in the case of Jonathan Edwards, who was extremely, deeply influenced by John Locke and whose fingerprints, as it were, are all over his work. In the case of Edwards this tended to an intensification of the distinctives of the Reformer’s faith though it is in a rather different way than repudiation and dilution of it. But the main gist of the Enlightenment or when Locke was given to different hands than Edwards’ was to repudiate and to weaken that theology as we know.
Zaspel:
What are the areas of general consensus among these theologians?
Helm:
The theology is, of course, a matter of consensus. If you’re thinking, now, about the Reformers’ scholastics, the Reformed Orthodox, they are linked by the confessions of their various churches. So, in a sense, they speak with one voice, but there are variations between them, as I’ve been saying to you. Some stress the unity of the powers of the souls, others stress their apartness in the way in which different models lead to different theologies.
Zaspel:
And so, the diversity among them is not that wide?
Helm:
Well, what I would say in answer to that point is that the literature is very great. And you get all sorts of idiosyncrasies. You get, for example, John Owen, who was scholastically inclined and was not averse to scholastic theology; nonetheless, there are some limits to it as far as he is concerned. Or you get Voetius, this person who disputed with Descartes when he arrived in the city, for whom Thomas Aquinas, apart from one or two of the Puritans stressed elements in his theology, was supposed to be accepted lock, stock and barrel. So, there were some that were more scholastic than others, and others who were less scholastic but who borrowed some of their terminology. But theologically there may not be a great deal between them.
Zaspel:
Give us a brief overview of your book so our listeners can know what to expect.
Helm:
Yes, I mentioned already the background to this in Augustine and in Plato and in Aristotle and in Thomas Aquinas. The first chapter has to do with that background. The second chapter has to do with the leading thinkers or the leading tradition makers in Reformed theology and I picked out Peter Martin, Vermigli, and John Calvin because John Calvin was not a Scholastic, he’s more eclectic. That is to say, he picks and chooses from this philosopher and that philosopher according to the use of what that philosophy is saying for theological and religious purposes. Vermigli, as I’ve mentioned, was more of an out and out Scholastic thinker. Then, from them there’s a great explosion of writing at the end of the sixteenth century and onwards.
So, chapter 1, the background; chapter 2, Calvin and Vermigli. Then I go into a series of chapters which are constructed rather differently. They consist largely of word by word extracts from writers. First of all, about the body and soul, then about the faculties and powers of the soul. I take this man and that man and select some passages from them for the reader. So, this is simply first-level exposition on my part. I’m letting these people speak for themselves and trying as best I can to elucidate for the reader what it is they are saying and some of its implications. The third chapter has to do with what I call independent thinking. That is to say where the faculties are less clearly distinguished from each other than they are in classical faculty theology.
Other chapters have to do with Reformed Polemics and the Intertwining Self. Then there’s Faculty Psychology in polemical situations where there are debates within the Reformed camp and how that works out in terms of the faculties that they presuppose. There’s one chapter called Beyond Faculty Theology where we get to Edwards, and I try to show that the influence of Locke was very great in a large number of topic areas. And though he repudiates Scholasticism, he hasn’t been able, wholly, to shake himself free of it all. For instance, take note from Locke the saying, “it is not the will that is free, it is the man that is free.” In other words, approaching these things with the unity of human nature in mind, Edwards, almost beside himself, against his intuition at this point, goes on in The Freedom of the Will to talk about the faculties. Though he can hardly keep the language of the faculties separate from what he is doing even though he tells the reader that he’s repudiating the whole business.
Then there is an Appendix where I talk about Bavinck at some length because Bavinck wrote a little book on psychology, apart from his Reformed Dogmatics. And this is why, perhaps, there’s not much of this stuff about human nature within the Dogmatics, themselves. He favors, though, of course, now, into the 19th century, he follows more or less the order of things of the faculty theologians, even though he doesn’t cross any t’s or dot any i’s as far as faculty psychology is concerned. So, I tried to bring up with the Appendix on Bavinck into the era that people are more perhaps familiar with, or certain people are more familiar with to show that these things didn’t simply have a fleeting importance. They are of abiding interest for anyone with an interest in the history of Reformed theology, including not simply the Doctrine of God, which is what, of course, Richard Muller has emphasized in his writings, but here the Doctrine of Man.
Zaspel:
We’re talking to Dr. Paul Helm about his new book, Human Nature from Calvin to Edwards. It’s an area of study that has not received extensive attention, and his book helps to fill a significant gap in historical theology. If you plan to study theological anthropology at all, this is a book you will want to get.
Paul, thanks so much for another excellent book, and thanks for your faithful ministry, and thanks for talking to us today.
Helm:
My pleasure. Thank you very much, everybody.
