Why Do Non-Christian Novelists Know the Human Condition So Well?
00:00:00.000 | We're back one last time with Dr. John Frame on the podcast.
00:00:09.240 | He's the author of A History of Western Philosophy and Theology, an outstanding new book that
00:00:14.480 | releases in mid-November from PNR.
00:00:17.800 | Of course, Christians are not the only people who know things.
00:00:21.520 | Non-Christians know a lot of truth about this world and about how it works and operates.
00:00:25.920 | All knowledge is in some way a revelation of God, of course.
00:00:29.200 | As we talked about yesterday.
00:00:31.040 | But it seems that non-Christians can even perceive at some level what is true and good
00:00:37.120 | and beautiful.
00:00:38.120 | Yet, the Bible also makes it clear that unbelievers suppress the truth in unrighteousness.
00:00:42.480 | That's Romans 1, of course.
00:00:44.520 | So Dr. Frame, how would you describe the truth that unbelievers grasp?
00:00:49.480 | And what do you mean when you say that non-Christian thought vacillates between rationalism and
00:00:55.840 | irrationalism?
00:00:56.840 | Well, that's very difficult to describe, Tony.
00:01:01.720 | People much wiser than me have tried to do that and found it really beyond their ability
00:01:07.800 | to state clearly.
00:01:10.640 | Romans 1 is the clearest passage in Scripture that tells us about the unbelievers' knowledge.
00:01:18.800 | It tells us that God's glory is clearly revealed so that non-believers, pagans, as he's writing
00:01:27.200 | about in Romans 1, pagans have a clear knowledge of God.
00:01:32.440 | In fact, in verse 21 it even says that these pagans know God.
00:01:37.200 | They don't just know about God, but they know God.
00:01:40.320 | So they're not ignorant.
00:01:43.360 | What they need is not additional information, in a way.
00:01:48.920 | Now, in a conversation between a believer and a non-believer, sometimes there's an exchange
00:01:54.440 | of information.
00:01:55.440 | If the non-believer claims not to know something, we have to remedy that claim, at least.
00:02:03.880 | But in the most profound sense, the non-believer knows God, even though he rejects God.
00:02:13.320 | Now, Paul goes on to say in Romans 1 that as the non-believer suppresses the truth in
00:02:20.400 | unrighteousness, he exchanges—this is unbelievable if you know the glory of God—but he exchanges
00:02:29.360 | the glory of God for the glory of things in the created world, and makes statues and images
00:02:36.520 | and worships these idols instead of worshiping the true God.
00:02:41.640 | And then Paul goes on to show how that naturally leads to very gross sins in the area of sexuality,
00:02:49.560 | and then toward the end of the passage he gives a very long list of different kinds
00:02:56.200 | of sins that all arise out of the suppression of the truth, exchanging the truth for a lie,
00:03:03.880 | as he puts it.
00:03:05.600 | What does that mean?
00:03:06.600 | What is it like to know God that clearly and yet to be suppressing that knowledge of God?
00:03:15.400 | Well, you know, psychologists have ideas about the subconscious and how people sometimes
00:03:22.480 | repress the truth into a part of their conscience that they're not entirely aware of themselves.
00:03:31.480 | We're often mysteries to our own selves; we can't understand ourselves in many ways.
00:03:39.040 | Practically, I don't know if that's a good description, because the Bible doesn't give
00:03:45.280 | me a precise description of what takes place.
00:03:49.000 | But practically, I think what happens is that when you're talking with a non-believer, you
00:03:56.240 | can agree on things like the sky is blue, and this is an evergreen tree, and it's not
00:04:03.440 | a pumpkin, so you can agree on ordinary things, but the closer you get to talking about God,
00:04:12.480 | the closer you get to talking about Jesus Christ, the more disagreements come in, and
00:04:19.200 | the more fervent the disagreements are.
00:04:22.720 | And so you really have to—it's a paradoxical situation, and the unbeliever is always pushed
00:04:30.480 | back and forth.
00:04:31.480 | He lives in God's world, so he has to acknowledge certain things about God's world.
00:04:37.880 | When you jump up in the air, you fall back down again, and if you ignore that knowledge,
00:04:45.560 | then you won't live very long.
00:04:48.440 | He has to acknowledge certain things, and yet he tries so very hard to squeeze God out
00:04:54.560 | of his knowledge.
00:04:55.560 | I think of Satan, for example, as the worst possible example along this line.
00:05:01.600 | Satan, in one way, knows more about God than I do or than any of us do, but Satan tries
00:05:08.000 | the terrible project of trying to replace God on the throne, and it's just laughable
00:05:15.360 | that anybody would try that.
00:05:17.440 | But essentially, that's what Satan tried to do, and that's what unbelievers try to do.
00:05:23.040 | Now I say that's a pretty good description of irrationalism from a philosophical standpoint.
00:05:31.160 | When they do that, that's really a repudiation of reason, because a reasonable person doesn't
00:05:39.400 | turn away from what is clearly evident in his eyes.
00:05:44.720 | But the nonbeliever, therefore, is an irrationalist.
00:05:48.800 | But why is he an irrationalist?
00:05:52.880 | He's an irrationalist because he wants to be the lord of his mind.
00:05:57.920 | He wants to be the final authority for what is true and what is false.
00:06:03.400 | He wants to rule his own thoughts rather than thinking God's thoughts after him.
00:06:09.360 | Well, that's a pretty good philosophical description of rationalism.
00:06:13.920 | A rationalist is somebody who trusts his own reason as the final and ultimate standard
00:06:20.440 | of truth.
00:06:21.440 | Well, here I am, I've said that the unbeliever is an irrationalist, and I've also said that
00:06:28.120 | he's a rationalist.
00:06:29.120 | Well, which one is he?
00:06:30.880 | Well, the fact is that he bounces back and forth.
00:06:35.400 | The desire of his heart is to be irrational, but when he gets into trouble that way, when
00:06:42.800 | he finds out that he's living in God's world and he can't behave that way, then he tries
00:06:48.440 | to set up some kind of an orderly type of thought based on his own reason, and that
00:06:54.400 | doesn't work either.
00:06:55.960 | But when that gets him into trouble, then he jumps over into irrationalism.
00:07:01.040 | And Tony, I think that's a pretty good guide to the way the history of philosophy progresses.
00:07:07.320 | You know, you have one generation of philosophers like skeptics in ancient Greece, and they
00:07:16.200 | take an irrationalist, relativist kind of view.
00:07:22.480 | And then another group of philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, for example, come along
00:07:29.080 | and try to show that reason is reliable and reason is dependable.
00:07:35.520 | And then you have another generation that questions Plato's assurances.
00:07:41.760 | And so the history of philosophy tends to move from rationalism to irrationalism, and
00:07:49.920 | some philosophers, of course, try to come up with combinations of the two, which are
00:07:57.200 | always unstable.
00:07:59.680 | So I think that's the most helpful way I know to describe the unbeliever's mentality, but
00:08:09.800 | it's paradoxical, it's difficult to understand.
00:08:12.840 | In fact, it's impossible to understand consistently because it isn't consistent.
00:08:19.600 | That's fascinating and true.
00:08:20.920 | So let's make this concrete and put this distinction into a context of non-Christian novelists.
00:08:28.600 | It seems like in the best non-Christian fiction, authors grasp some sense of what is true and
00:08:33.960 | good and beautiful, like the beauty of self-sacrificing love.
00:08:38.440 | It's beautiful to give your life for others.
00:08:41.840 | And they also understand the human condition in some really authentic and profound ways
00:08:46.080 | too.
00:08:47.440 | Years ago, I remember reading an article of yours and you said something to the effect
00:08:50.920 | that no one can suppress all the truth all the time.
00:08:55.960 | And for me, that was illuminating.
00:08:56.960 | That was really helpful.
00:08:58.400 | And the image that I have in my mind is that truth is everywhere in creation and being
00:09:03.880 | in this world is like being in a pool and truth is like being surrounded by a hundred
00:09:08.800 | ping pong balls.
00:09:09.800 | And the suppression of truth is like trying to hold down a hundred ping pong balls underwater
00:09:15.220 | at all times.
00:09:16.220 | It's just impossible.
00:09:17.280 | Does that illustration work for understanding non-Christian novelists and their perceptions?
00:09:21.760 | Oh, that's a great illustration, yeah.
00:09:24.400 | Well, I appreciate the novelist tradition because often what they come up with and it's
00:09:33.760 | not surprising, but what they often come up with are stories and images that are analogous
00:09:41.720 | to the story of redemption in the Bible.
00:09:46.160 | That's because I think everybody knows in his heart that what we need as human beings
00:09:52.560 | is redemption from sin.
00:09:55.320 | What we need above all is not more food, more entertainment, more goodies, but what we need
00:10:01.920 | is forgiveness.
00:10:04.160 | And so they write stories that allow for that and which picture that in various ways, but
00:10:12.160 | most of the time they don't tell anywhere near the whole story.
00:10:16.680 | Yes, exactly.
00:10:18.640 | Tragically true.
00:10:19.640 | And in some sense novelists can speak to what they know is true, but they don't have to
00:10:23.400 | embrace it as true personally maybe.
00:10:26.540 | Is that going on?
00:10:27.540 | So perhaps in a novel more ping pong balls get to the surface.
00:10:30.840 | Yeah, that's true.
00:10:32.560 | And of course when you're writing a novel, you maintain some distance from the characters
00:10:41.160 | and from the things that you're writing about so that you're writing something that you
00:10:47.640 | don't need to urge on anybody else.
00:10:50.720 | You don't need to preach.
00:10:52.040 | You don't need to make a claim that it's true.
00:10:55.200 | You just sort of pretend that you can look at it objectively from the outside.
00:11:00.560 | Bingo.
00:11:01.560 | That's gold.
00:11:02.560 | Thank you, Dr. Frame.
00:11:03.560 | I appreciate your time in these past two days.
00:11:06.440 | Thank you, Tony.
00:11:07.440 | I've enjoyed being with you.
00:11:09.280 | That has been Dr. John M. Frame, the J.D. Trimble Professor of Systematic Theology and
00:11:13.040 | Philosophy at Reform Theological Seminary in Orlando, filling in for John Piper, who
00:11:18.440 | returns tomorrow.
00:11:19.440 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.
00:11:20.440 | We'll see you then.
00:11:20.680 | Thank you, John.
00:11:21.680 | Thank you, Tony.
00:11:22.680 | Thank you.
00:11:22.680 | [END]
00:11:24.680 | Dr. John Piper, the J.D. Trimble Professor of Systematic Theology and Philosophy at