Robert Sweetman, ed. In the Phrygian Mode: Neo-Calvinism, Antiquity and the Lamentations of Reformed Philosophy. Lanham, MD; Toronto: Institute for Christian Studies and University Press of America, 2007. Pb 311pp. $39.95.

        The title of this volume says many things about the task of neo-Calvinism. Perhaps readers of ICS literature have become somewhat used to erudite references such as the Phrygian mode—not to be confused with the French Revolutionary cap—that suggests a certain triumphant song, perhaps even warlike in its intellectual struggles. But this is juxtaposed with lamentations, evoking grief or regret, and in this case the creative tension cannot be easily resolved. The authors, representing third or fourth generation neo-Calvinist and Reformational scholars, were brought together in a conference at Knox College, Toronto, and sponsored by the Institute for Christian Studies and the Dooyeweerd Centre for Christian Scholarship. It followed a series of earlier conferences inspired by the classicist Wendy Helleman.

        The early church struggled to define itself vis-à-vis pagan philosophy. Ever since St. Paul went to Mars Hill it has not been easy to dismiss human attempts to search for truth outside the Judeo-Christian revelatory tradition, although the age old question remains, posed in Jaroslav Pelikan’s book  What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? Despite Tertullian’s skepticism, it has been more common for Christian theologians and philosophers to embrace some aspects of pagan thought, for central to the doctrine of creation is imago dei, and common grace is important in the redemptive process in Calvinism. But this raises the central issue for this book: can Christian scholars use synthesis to glean some insights from antiquity, or must they take the position of antithesis alone? Many theologians have attempted to embrace a part of pagan thought by seeing in it a “praeparatio Evangelica”; for pagani were far more ignorant than subversive of the truth. Renaissance scholars tried to reconcile ancient wisdom with Christian theology. Calvin, and many Christian humanists, had an immense appreciation for the classics, and Seneca and Cicero became important interlocutors for the Greco-Roman tradition. Richard Mouw reminds us in He Shines in All That’s Fair that “Calvin carefully avoided treating our ‘natural’ religious-cognitive capacities as if they are something that people simply ‘have’ in some static sense. While believing thinkers can offer ‘competent and apt statements about God here and there’, he writes, they always do so with ‘a certain giddy imagination’.”(67) Hence Christians are placed in a creative tension between a triumphal song found in the biblical promises and the lamentations of working out salvation in fear and trembling, perhaps demonstrating a certain giddiness at times. This collection of scholars are all working within the neo-Calvinist tradition, but that does not mean that their response to the synthesis-antithesis issue is the same. 

        The neo-Calvinist tradition was born in the late nineteenth century, especially under Abraham Kuyper, with a goal to define its worldview-oriented philosophy, renew the Reformation tradition, and answer the objections raised in a post-Enlightenment world of thought and experience. The first several chapters examine the way in which earlier generations of neo-Calvinist scholars approached antiquity. In the Prologue and Chapter 1 Robert Sweetman surveys the birth of neo-Calvinism in Abraham Kuyper and others, and their great attraction to humanism, especially to Platonism and Stoicism. Sweetman reminds us of the fact that “neo-Calvinism was born with Antiquity in its breast.”(267) It was not only a matter of avoiding the activity of synthesis but the fact that most Christian thought had already appropriated the Greco-Roman tradition, and this needed to be reformed. It played an important role in education, and became a useful ally in a struggle against Enlightenment ideas. This is certainly brought out in Harry Van Dyke’s investigation of the work of Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer in Chapter 2. While Groen appreciated the educational value of antiquity, their ideas remained problematic because they did not use their knowledge of “theologia naturalis” to discover truth; their search “torn from its roots [was] hence doomed to sterility.”(17) When neo-Calvinism came into its own with the founding of the Free University of Amsterdam serious study of antiquity was established in the work of Jan Woltjer and Alexander Sizoo. John Kok demonstrates, in Chapter 3, that Woltjer “accepts the opposition between Athens and Jerusalem, … and insists that it comes to a right knowledge of God and his service, only Jerusalem can deliver the goods.”(42) Yet if propositional truth is far easier to elicit from divine revelation, the poetry of antiquity attracted Woltjer (Logos theory) in its ability to connect with the power of an inner vision, a “God-given ability to see, beyond things and in things, the idea in all its beauty and perfection.”(60) In Chapter 4 Johan Zwaan shows that although Sizoo, an Augustine scholar, was attracted to synthesis because the classics seemed to prepare the ground for Christian thought, they only gained a “boundless superficiality” and failed to grasp the real sense of sin and guilt.(88)

        In the second half of this volume authors engage the central issues of neo-Calvinism by primarily re-examining the work of Dooyeweerd and Vollenhoven in light of recent developments. A.P. Bos and D.F.M. Strauss compare Greek ontology and Biblical cosmology in Chapter 5. The creative tension is demonstrated in one of the subheadings: The Relative Correctness of Plato and Aristotle. Here we see the important foundation of the study of law offered by the classics. In contrast to post-Enlightenment agnosticism, Plato’s greatest gift was a demonstration that ideas are beyond human thought, and therefore constitute a universal principle. Yet both Dooyeweerd and Vollenhoven point to a certain necessary antithesis, for as Anthony Tol points out in Chapter 6, Vollenhoven believes that “a deep difference remains between the Christian who stands open to the Word-revelation and the ancient Greek who lacked this.”(157) K. J. Popma has most likely been the most significant historian who has most directly immersed himself in the relationship between the classics and modern neo-Calvinism. In Chapter 7 Wendy Helleman shows that he considered the humanist method as the essence of Greco-Roman ideas. While the pedagogical role of the classics remains necessary, the central problem with humanism is that it “overestimated the value of ethical or moral laws as a source of life and salvation.”(171) Popma finds that the church fathers were laudatory in their piety, but their accommodation with pagan ideas failed to grasp the power of the Gospel to transform. In Chapter 8 David Runia examines Philo’s attempt to explain biblical revelation with Platonic and Stoic concepts, and how Vollenhoven rejects this as a “clear example of a synthesis that is regarded as both illegitimate and sterile.”(200) To qualify Dooyeweerd’s and Vollenhoven’s rejection of synthesis, William Rowe argues in Chapter 9 that they did negotiate the boundaries between Scripture and Greco-Roman philosophy. Their Reformational thought is ‘in’ in order not to be ‘of’ this tradition. Reformation is or involves a positive relation to the thing ‘to be reformed’, to the reformandum.”(217) This certainly represents Vollenhoven’s thetical-critical method. In Chapter 10 Calvin Seerveld practices a redemptive method of art historiography in contrasting the art of Nicolas Poussin and Jan Vermeer. Whereas Poussin relied on the partial truth of antiquity, Vermeer “bypasses, as it were, the Greco-Roman mythological stock of certified values… and returns to the sheer glory of good creatural life championed by the Older-Testamented Biblical psalms and wisdom literature.”(248) In conclusion Seerveld rejects all synthesis and echoes the warning of H. Evan Runner. Christians will “‘reject the desirability of synthesis when we have seen the nature of the Word of God’.”(256)

        In the Epilogue Sweetman suggests that a new emphasis is emerging among the next generation of neo-Calvinist scholars. With the continued development of philosophy and cultural movements in general comes a renovation of terms. The original rejection of synthesis is now softening with its newer vantage point. While antithesis may remain a useful tool in proclaiming the uniqueness of biblical revelation, “synthesis arises out of the intention to address that thought intelligibly with the Christian faith out of the evangelical desire for communication and conversion.”(276) This new use of terms has been championed by Klapwijk (Transformational Philosophy), and he is aware of a greater risk involved, something that remains too great for many others. It is important that any new attempts to promote a neo-Calvinist method find concrete applications, as Seerveld has done. The current challenge to neo-Calvinism raises some important questions. Is it possible to continue earlier systematic thinking given the changes brought by post-modernism? Born in the realization that philosophical thought has a strong correlation with historically determined conditions, can neo-Calvinist philosophy ever escape a limited perspective? If the Greco-Roman tradition has been an important educational primer, yet in the end no appropriation or synthesis is possible, than why did neo-Calvinism turn to philosophy, and how different is neo-Calvinist philosophy from Western philosophy? What further dialogue is possible with Catholic neo-Thomism? In the end perhaps this self criticism is a strength of the tradition, and both forms of antithesis and synthesis may find a new role in neo-Calvinist philosophy as it continues to offer a unique theological-philosophical tradition in constant dialogue with antiquity and the latest ideas.

John B. Roney is Professor of European History at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut. He obtained his PhD at the University of Toronto, 1989.

His current scholarship includes the publication of Culture and Customs of Holland due Oct 2008 by Greenwood Press and The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg: Crossroads to the European Political Economy, in progress for Sacred Heart University Press.