Westminster Confession of Faith and the 'light of nature'

The Westminster Confession of Faith begins this way:


"Although the light of nature, and the works of creation and providence, do so far manifest the goodness, wisdom, and power of God, as to leave men inexcusable; yet are they not sufficient to give that knowledge of God, and of his will, which is necessary unto salvation..."


Why does the Westminster Confession of Faith begin with 'the light of nature?'  Thomas Torrance wonders why, pointing to older catechisms from the 1500s which focused upon the person and work of Jesus Christ from the start.  Instead of focusing upon Christ from the start, Westminster is focused upon the way man appropriates this salvation.  The light of nature, creation, and providence would have sufficed, but because of sin we can't see this.


Torrance wants Westminster to proceed more from God than from man: "Ultimately the main content of these Catechisms is concerned with man's action, man's obedience, man's duty toward God, man's duty to his neighbor, and man's religion, although undoubtedly all that is directed upward in a most astonishing way to the glory of God." (xviii).  Furthermore, where and how do we discuss obedience?  More Torrance: "In the older Catechisms man's obedience was regarded as part of his thanksgiving, but in the later it is schematized to the moral law as something that is partly revealed by "the law of nature." (xix)  Is it a grateful act in response to Christ's work, or something we are all dimly aware of through the law of nature?  Or both?  These are Torrance's queries.  And according to Torrance, it all depends on how you 'schematize'.


A scheme is an outline, a way of organizing beliefs.  To use Kevin Vanhoozer's term, doctrine are never just abstract beliefs, but drama.  They tell a story.  Stories convey drama, and they have the power by their format to present order to day-to-day events.  To borrow a phrase from Alisdair McIntyre, we don't know how to act meaningfully or morally until we know what kind of story we are living.  This makes doctrine paramount in importance, because it means we always live doctrinally, according to some story.  It is just a question of which story, which scheme we will live by.  A scheme is a way to organize these beliefs so that the story is coherent.  Torrance thinks the scheme of Westminster establishes itself in an objective belief in a stable and fixed 'law of nature' and reason, where there was an opportunity and perhaps, to his way of thinking, a missed opportunity to establish the scheme objectively in the person and work of Christ as the way we know God. 


How does the Christian begin the doctrinal story?  Per Torrance, is there really any other way into this story than through the knowledge of Jesus Christ in all that he is?



For to see all the drama of doctrine begin and end with Christ is to keep doctrine rooted in Christ in a way that continues to speak freshly through the centuries.  Various Scottish theologians love the catechisms of the 1500s more than those of the Westminster era of the 1700s.  Horatius Bonar, the great hymn-writer, wrote: "Our Scottish catechisms though grey with the antiquity of three centuries, are not yet out of date.  They still read well, both as to style and substance; it would be hard to amend them, or to substitute something better in their place.  Like some of our old church bells, they have retained for centuries their sweetness and amplitude of tone unimpaired." (Torrance, xvii)


Perhaps, as Bonar and Torrance would say, it is because of the lawyer-ly, relentlessly logical quality of Westminster which makes it difficult to get at the sweetness.  Perhaps.  Yet, we will undertake this pursuit of sweetness in a series of posts here.