Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 83:2 (Fall 2021)
Article: Franciscus Junius, Old Princeton, And The Question Of Natural Theology: A Response To Shannon’s “Junius And Van Til On Natural Knowledge Of God”
Author: Kevin DeYoung

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Franciscus Junius, Old Princeton, And The Question Of Natural Theology: A Response To Shannon’s “Junius And Van Til On Natural Knowledge Of God”

Kevin DeYoung

Kevin DeYoung is senior pastor of Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, NC.

Franciscus Junius (1545–1602) was one of the most influential theologians in the post-Reformation period. His Treatise on True Theology (1594) established many of the categories, and set in place the basic outline, that later systematicians would use in defining and delineating the nature of theology. Junius did not just shape later Reformed prolegomena; in many ways he established Reformed prolegomena in the first place. Not surprisingly, Junius is considered by some to be the quintessential Reformed theologian in the period of early orthodoxy.1

Given Junius’s influence and stature, Nathan Shannon’s recent article “Junius and Van Til on Natural Knowledge of God” makes an important and provocative claim.2 Shannon argues that “Junius and Van Til … agree that post-fall natural theology, unaided by special revelation, is not theology in any meaningful sense” (p. 279). The singular thesis—and the most important claim of the article—is that for Junius, as well as for Van Til, “relational reconciliation is a necessary condition of true theology” (p. 279). Or to put it even more bluntly: “Since true theology is determined by redemptive relation, natural theology, lacking this redemptive relation, is not true theology, not in fact theology at all. Natural theology is in the end anti-theology” (pp. 279–80).

This is a bold thesis, as Shannon recognizes. The entire tradition of scholasticism affirmed the existence and importance of natural theology. And yet, according to Shannon, “Junius’s view of natural (as in unregenerate) theology marks a conspicuous point of departure from pre-Reformation scholasticism” (p. 281). More than that, if Shannon’s argument is correct, Junius sounds a

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different note than virtually every orthodox Reformed theologian to follow in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the tradition of Old Princeton theology that developed in the nineteenth century. Considering the debate in Reformed circles about the legitimacy (or not) of natural theology, to have Junius on the side of nein would be significant—not only for one’s view of the post-Reformation period but for the pedigree of more recent Reformed theology. “This thesis,” Shannon writes, “so far as it is true, enhances the historical credentials of Van Til’s characteristically neo-Calvin...