Month: August 2026

Man is the source of rationality, the first point of reference, and the final condition of right and wrong. This is Burlamaqui’s starting point for his investigation of man. It is helpful to see that Burlamaqui is not neutral, nor does he claim to be. He has his own pre-commitments to a worldview, commitments which cannot be challenged. They are, as he says, “fixt and uncontestable.”
“We must therefore set out with acknowledging as a fixt and uncontestable principle, that the human understanding is naturally right, and has within itself a strength sufficient to arrive at the knowledge of truth . . .” (Burlamaqui, 34).
“By natural law we understand a law that God imposes on all men, and which they are able to discover and know by the sole light of reason, and by attentively considering their state and nature” (Burlamaqui, 123).
“. . . man finds within himself, and in his own reason, the rule he ought to follow; and since the counsels which reason gives him point out the shortest and safest road to his perfection and happiness, from thence arises a principle of obligation, or a cogent motive to square his actions by this primitive rule” (Burlamaqui, 87).
“. . . this faithful guide [i.e., reason], which is to direct the steps of man, and whose directions and counsels he may follow with an entire confidence” (Burlamaqui, 70).
“. . . Right . . . is nothing else but whatever reason certainly acknowledges as a sure and concise means of attaining happiness . . . Does it not evidently follow that Right in general is whatever reason approves as a sure and concise means of acquiring happiness?” (Burlamaqui, 69).
When Burlamaqui discusses man and gives an account of his nature, he makes no distinction between regenerate and unregenerate. While he does not recognize this traditional Reformed distinction, he prefers to point to the distinction between child and adult as the primary one to be made.
When does man become the possessor of rights? Burlamaqui denies that children have rights; rather, “This state does not properly commence with respect to man till he has attained the age of knowledge and discretion” (Burlamaqui, 71). Until man can rationally express the existence of rights, there can be no such thing.
He sees the mind of man as perfectly free to choose the good. He does not see man as unregenerate, but rather as unconstrained.
“Can any one seriously deny that in the choice of good and evil our resolutions are unconstrained . . . we have it in our power . . . to weigh the arguments on both sides, and to do, in short, whatever can be expected from the freest agent?” (Burlamaqui).
“The second question we have to examine is whether we are equally free in our determinations in regard to good and evil. To decide this point, we need not stir out of ourselves; for here also, by facts, and even by our internal experience, the question may be determined” (Burlamaqui, 45).
Burlamaqui is not neutral in his view of man. Man is the perfectly balanced scale, capable of determining right from wrong. His presupposition is that man is the measure — this he calls a “fixt and uncontestable principle.” He goes on to write that man is not indifferent between right and wrong, but possesses a natural tendency toward good. If this is true, then man — at least in some sense — possesses a kind of positive righteousness by his own nature.
“We are formed in such a manner that good of necessity allures us, whereas evil, by an opposite effect, repels us, as it were, and deters us from attempting to pursue it” (Burlamaqui, 45).
Burlamaqui is a prime example of the antithesis between the natural rights position and Reformed theology. Cornelius Van Til points out that the unbeliever’s position requires that man be spoken of in abstraction — abstracted from the context of a sovereign, personal God who determines whatsoever comes to pass. It is man’s attempt to independently identify himself prior to and apart from God. Such abstraction from the context of a sovereign God comes at the cost of rationality itself. It is an attempt to build a worldview piecemeal, without being able to bring the particulars into relation. In The Defense of the Faith, Van Til writes, “According to the principle of Protestantism, man’s consciousness of self and of objects presupposes for its intelligibility the self-consciousness of God” (Van Til, 100).
Any ability to identify man for what he truly is must at the same time know God for who he is. This is Calvin’s basic position in The Institutes: he faithfully points out that knowledge of God does not precede knowledge of self. Each is involved with the other. From man’s point of view, it cannot be said which comes first.

Question 9. How many persons are there in the Godhead?
Answer. There be three persons in the Godhead, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost; and these three are one true, eternal God, the same in substance, equal in power and glory; although distinguished by their personal properties. (Westminster Larger Catechism)
Cornelius Van Til argued that the Reformed faith was the expression of consistent Christianity. This Christianity, “. . .stands for ultimate personalism” (Van Til, Defense of the Faith 85).
The foundations of reality are not built upon impersonal forces, like the kind posited by determinism. The Christian worldview is grounded in a personal God: a personal God that creates and sustains the world, a personal God that governs righteously.
As God is personal, we who are created in his image were created to be like him, to image him in every way that a creature could possibly imitate the Creator. It is only because God is a person that man’s personality has any significance at all. There is a distinction between the personality of God and the personality of man; God as sovereign is absolute personality, and man as his creature is a covenant personality. This is to say that the ultimate context of creaturely existence is relational.
“. . . the idea of analogical or covenant personality is that which alone preserves genuine significance for the thoughts and deeds of man” (Van Til 168).
John Frame’s book Cornelius Van Til: An Analysis of His Thought highlights this as a significant position: “Van Til summarizes his doctrine of God in terms of ‘self-contained fullness.’ Another Van Tillian summary of this doctrine is that God is ‘absolute personality.’ Both words in the phrase are important. Some non-Christian systems (as the polytheistic religions and modern philosophical ‘personalisms’) posit personal gods of one kind or another, but those gods are not absolute in the sense of being self-contained. Other non-Christian systems accept absolute realities of various kinds, but those absolutes are not personal. Only in Biblical teaching are absoluteness and personality combined in the Supreme Being” (Frame 58).
Frame goes on to quote from Van Til’s Survey of Christian Epistemology: “Man’s surroundings are shot through with personality because all things are related to the infinitely personal God. But when we have said that the surroundings of man are really completely personalized, we have also established the fact of the representational principle. . . Because he is a creature, man must, in his thinking, his feeling and his willing, be representative of God” (Frame 59).
Greg Bahnsen helpfully distills Van Til’s position in his wonderful book entitled Van Til’s Apologetic. Bahnsen writes, “The Christian thinks about himself and about everything in the world as being intimately related to God—created, controlled, and preinterpreted by Him. Our aim is to know Him better, to see His glory and wisdom worked out in the world, to respond in obedience and praise, etc. This is not at all the primary perspective of the unbeliever. He holds that we must begin with the ‘hard, cold, dry lifeless’ facts that are found in an impersonal environment of randomness; and ‘personal’ considerations (self-consciousness, man as a free personality, creativity, dignity, purpose, moral standards, etc.) must be secondary qualities or realities that somehow evolved by chance from the more fundamental building blocks of matter or energy” (Bahnsen 278).
Here it must be seen that any attempt to preserve the responsibility and dignity of man by removing him from the conditions of covenant reality—a reality which is governed by a sovereign, personal God—fails on account that it destroys the foundation for any meaning whatsoever. Bahnsen highlights this epistemic destruction: “But for the non-Christian, the impersonal, space-temporal universe either exists by itself or is intelligible in itself, without reference to God. Things and events are simply what they are, with no need for (or possibility of) more basic explanation. The facts are ‘brute’—that is, particulars unrelated to any plan or interpretation. The universe consists of purely random matter, moving completely by chance. The connecting links between brute facts—whether concepts or laws—exist apart from God as abstract, impersonal, and apparently self-existent universals. Facts and events cannot be known, much less interpreted, in advance, thus making any hypothesis as credible as any other hypothesis prior to investigation and/or prior historical eventuation” (Bahnsen 279).
The Westminster Confession uses the language of personality to describe God; Van Til faithfully applies this principle to the work of philosophy.

I recently came across an interesting link between the old covenant sign of circumcision and an Anglican rite called the Churching of Women. Rushdoony made this connection in the first section of The Institutes of Biblical Law; it was intriguing enough that I wanted to outline the basic connection. The two ideas are discussed in the first chapter dealing with the first of the Ten Commandments. “Those who obey the first commandment, ‘Thou shalt not have other gods before me,’ are members of the covenant. The two basic rites of the covenant in the Old Testament were circumcision and the Passover…” (Rushdoony, 41).
Rushdoony points out that circumcision was widely practiced in the pagan world. Though a pagan practice, Geerhardus Vos rightly notes that “the rite was everywhere a religious one” (Vos, Biblical Theology, 89). The pagan version of the rite is different from the Old Testament practice. Traditionally, pagan circumcision was seen as an act of the will, a sort of self-propelled motion that crossed the border between childhood and adulthood. Rushdoony sees this as a form of Pelagianism; an act of will on the part of the individual which integrates a man into the tribe.
The Old Testament rite of circumcision was rooted in the covenant of the sovereign God. Examples of circumcision pre-date Abraham and are found widely across cultures: Vos writes, “We must, therefore, admit that it was not given to Abraham as a previously unknown thing, but introduced into his family invested with a new significance” (Vos, 89).
What new significance was circumcision invested with? Rushdoony quotes Vos’s Biblical Theology in a very helpful way: “For the doctrinal understanding of circumcision two facts are significant; first, it was instituted before the birth of Isaac, secondly, in the accompanying revelation only the second promise, relating to numerous posterity is referred to. These two facts together show that circumcision has something to do with the process of propagation. Not in the sense that the act is in itself sinful, for there is no trace of this anywhere in the Old Testament. It is not the act but the product, that is human nature, which is unclean, and stands in need of purification and qualification. Hence circumcision is not, as among pagans, applied to grown-up young men, but to infants on the eighth day. Human nature is unclean and disqualified in its very source. Sin, consequently, is a matter of the race and not of the individual only” (Rushdoony, 42).
While promises were made to Abraham and his seed… “Circumcision teaches that physical descent from Abraham is not sufficient to make true Israelites. The uncleanness and disqualification of nature must be taken away. Dogmatically speaking, therefore, circumcision stands for justification and regeneration, plus sanctification (Rom 4:9-12; Col. 2:11-13)” (Rushdoony, 42).
The sin of Adam is found in the product of human propagation, leaving no room for self-authored salvation. The whole of man has been affected by sin: “Neither the flesh nor the spirit of fallen man is clean before God. There is no more hope in things spiritual than in things material. Circumcision witnesses to the fact that man’s hope is not in generation but in regeneration, and the witness of the ceremony of the purification of women is the same” (Rushdoony, 43).
Circumcision of male children shortened the time of purification, while the testimony of the ritual of purification was “…witness to covenant membership for the daughters. It was a reminder that covenant righteousness was of the grace of God, to mother and child, and that grace, not race or blood, is the fountainhead of salvation” (Rushdoony, 43).
This rite Rushdoony sees as being carried out in the modern church. He writes, “The service continues in the church, and appears, for example, in The Book of Common Prayer as ‘The Thanksgiving of Women after Childbirth’ or ‘the Churching of Women.’ It begins with the pastoral declaration, ‘forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God, of his goodness, to give you safe deliverance, and to preserve you in the great danger of childbirth: You shall give hearty thanks unto God,’ and it concludes with the presentation by the woman of a required gift. The rite has reference, not to actual sin but original sin, and it is a recognition of the fall of man and of covenant grace. By birth the old rebellion of Adam is reintroduced into the covenant household in the form of a child whose nature is inherited from Adam. This hereditary corruption is acknowledged, and the covenant of grace beseeched, in the ritual of the purification of women. There is no valid reason for the discontinuance of the rite. It has been reduced to a simple thanksgiving in The Book of Common Prayer, which is an atrophy of meaning, but this still far surpasses the practice of other churches” (Rushdoony, 44).
The 2019 ACNA Book of Common Prayer includes this prayer in the rite: “O eternal God, you have promised to be a father to a thousand generations of those who love and fear you: Bless this child and preserve his life; receive him and enable him to receive you, that through your grace and the Sacrament of Baptism he may become the child of God; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.” This rite reminds us that salvation is of the Lord; like circumcision, it is witness that man’s hope cannot be in generation, but our hope must be in regeneration.