3.1 Johan Bavinck on Romans 1

Johan Bavinck’s reading of Romans 1 begins with the observation that Scripture appears to be paradoxical on the issue of general revelation: how is it that many passages of Scripture indicate clearly that many do not know God, and fall into idolatry, and yet that Paul speaks in Rom. 1:19–20 that everyone, in fact, knows God (J. Bavinck, Reference Bavinck, Jong, Bolt, Bratt and Visser2013, 284)? This leads Johan to reflect on the tension between “knowing” and “suppressing.” For Johan, a successful reading of the passage must do justice to both sides of that dynamic.

For Johan, general revelation is about making “evident” that God confronts every individual by way of a “voiceless speech,” and this “manifestio constitutes the only point of contact in mission work” (J. Bavinck, Reference Bavinck, Jong, Bolt, Bratt and Visser2013, 277). As a self-revelation of God, this is about an encounter rather than a “philosophical instinct”: general revelation “must be understood more existentially” (J. Bavinck, Reference Bavinck, Jong, Bolt, Bratt and Visser2013, 278). Johan thus argues that one must resist the temptation to resolve the tension between knowing and repressing by arguing that God’s revelation is available in nature, and human beings are rendered “without excuse” because they fail to reason unto him. Such a move, Johan thinks, misses the force of Rom. 1:18–23: the knowledge of God is not a bare possibility conditioned upon whether one actively reasons properly from creation to God, but an actual fact that obtains in human beings because of God’s action. He argues that one must “disentangle” general revelation from the “abstract philosophical accretions” that attended its articulations, and set it “in terms of biblical reality” (J. Bavinck, Reference Bavinck, Jong, Bolt, Bratt and Visser2013, 238). Thinking, reasoning, observing, and conscious reflection are not “where God meets” humankind. Rather, “the meeting point of general revelation,” Johan writes, is “first of all in the problems inherent in being human, that is, in being a fallen human being” (J. Bavinck, Reference Bavinck, Jong, Bolt, Bratt and Visser2013, 279). The sense of the divine here is not incrementally gained by way of a process of reasoning, nor is it calmly contemplated as implanted propositions, but rather stirs up the heart of humanity as it resides in the primordial “given” of God’s revelation. It does not mean that this sense cannot be reflected on or propositionalized (indeed, Paul has delivered precisely that in his description of the sense of the divine as involving the knowledge of God as creator and our guilt before God), but this is a secondary moment. For Johan, there is no circumstance in which human beings do not know God or do not enjoy his gracious, ever-present illumination. Failure to honor God or give thanks to him (v 21b) is in the context of knowing God (v. 21a). As I will elaborate, for Johan, human beings know God affectively, yet fail to express that phenomenological knowing conceptually.

Hence, the word “suppress” (vs. 18) here deserves close attention, for it cannot be a suppression that results in a lack of knowledge. Indeed, suppression presupposes the presence of that which is suppressed, and it occurs because humans feel their guilt and seek to hide (Rom. 1:18, 32). Suppression “need not be understood as a conscious action. It can develop in total silence in the human heart. I am inclined to understand this in the sense of repression, as the concept of repression has been developed in recent psychology. As a rule, repression occurs ‘unconsciously, but that makes it no less real’” (J. Bavinck, Reference Bavinck, Jong, Bolt, Bratt and Visser2013, 242). Humans are ethically responsible for what they do to this sense of the divine, and that unconscious act of suppression is always against the presence of the sense of the divine in the human heart:

At every point, one is exposed to general revelation, and at every point, one is reacting to it in unconscious ways: “God definitely reveals himself, but people immediately push it away, repress it, suppress it” (J. Bavinck, Reference Bavinck, Jong, Bolt, Bratt and Visser2013, 285). It would be a mistake to infer here that J.H. Bavinck therefore diminishes the noetic effects of sin, as if his focus of repressing here renders sin’s effects to be only primarily on the will, or that affirming the noetic effects of sin strongly means that one becomes unaware of God. Sin’s effects on the mind and the will are so pervasive that the mind and will fail to apprehend and respond appropriately to what is internally known and acting upon them. To make sense of this paradoxical claim, J. H. Bavinck again turns to the reality of the unconscious:

Johan Bavinck’s reading discerns the possibility of a discrepancy between one’s explicit professions and behavior and the internal conditions that might drive them. The sense of the divine, repressed in one’s psyche, cannot be fully eradicated due to the persistence of general revelation. This dynamic of knowing yet repressing manifests itself in the existential feeling of unsettledness, and in the presence of idolatry – humans are religious creatures, made for worship of the divine, and when the sense of God as creator is repressed, the result is not a lack of worship but a misdirection of worship. As Johan says elsewhere, repression of the sense of divinity results in a “parasitic substitution” where one explicitly worships something else despite knowing the true creator in their unconscious existence:

For Johan, this unconscious presence of the sense of the divine is that which forms the “point of contact” for Christian witness. The evangelist does not bring the word of special revelation to a blank canvas, so to speak, but to one who is already wrestling with God, its creator. This is a point of contact because only by being “illumined by the light of the gospel, they sometimes suddenly become aware of the horror of this suppressing process and realize that they have always known but have never wanted to know” (J. Bavinck, Reference Bavinck, Jong, Bolt, Bratt and Visser2013, 285). Special revelation addresses directly the existential guilt and disposition to worship that the sense of the divine stirs up and brings to it the salve of forgiveness and atonement. The “sensus numinis” in humanity pits him against the “phanoresis” (manifestation) of God: “his creatures do not stand as one who no longer hears his voice” (J. Bavinck, Reference Bavinck1940, 110). As I will describe in Section 4.2, this sensus numinis explains why it is that Johan argues humans are drawn to certain “magnetic points”: the existential ways in which humans continue to elevate creaturely realities, feel angst and guilt for their sins even while they deny God’s existence, desire solidarity with a greater whole, and so on.Footnote ¹⁰

An analogy might help to capture the sense of Johan’s emphases here. One might consider a family in which an estranged child, now an adult, receives daily texts from a sibling that their mother has been diagnosed with a fatal disease.  Their mother has only about a few more years to live. These texts beckon the child to come home, but the child has so become accustomed to living on his own and ignoring the family that he refuses to respond or read the daily text messages. After a few months, the text messages are treated no longer as minor nuisances that require conscious deleting, but become ignored altogether, grouped with all of the other unread messages he receives, receding into the back of his subconscious. The child can go about his daily business without consciously thinking about the messages or his mother despite it being there in his subconscious – that is, of course, until that distant sibling shows up on his doorstep, forcing him to recall all the messages he had so successfully (in self-deception) coped with through suppression.

Similarly, for Johan general revelation is that visceral feeling or unconscious knowledge of God that all creatures experience by virtue of God’s revealing act. One might no longer be attentive to it, but it can never be forgotten or eradicated and manifests itself in the ongoing idolatries and existential angst one feels. Certain prompts that occur within one’s life, such as, perhaps, exposure to great beauty, a conversation about the meaning of mortality, or, attending a church service where the Word is preached, might cause the sinner to be confronted again with this sense of the divine that he or she has long submerged. For Johan, an emphasis on propositions and arguments for God’s existence as a reading of Romans 1 domesticates the force of this Pauline passage and misses the concreteness of its teachings.

Johan Bavinck’s reading of Romans 1 arms us with considerable benefits. Firstly, we can affirm that the knowledge of God is ever-present without denigrating the effects of sin that cause us to fail to apprehend God properly. Secondly, following from the first, we can maintain the paradox of knowing-yet-not-knowing that we articulated is the condition of sinners living in God’s good world: we are, indeed proceeding as “unknowing knowers.” Thirdly, we capture a deeper sense of sin’s pervasiveness that goes beyond mere analyses of propositions and are thus enabled to describe it with empirical granularity.

Johan appeals directly to Herman Bavinck’s Dogmatics as that which inspired his own view of the sense of divinity. From Herman, Johan was prompted to consider more clearly the locus of general revelation’s impact (J. Bavinck, Reference Bavinck, Jong, Bolt, Bratt and Visser2013, 274–5). It is to Herman’s work that we now turn.

3.2 Herman Bavinck on Gevoel

Herman Bavinck’s mature reflection of the effects of general revelation, as we saw, is found in his 1909 work Magnalia Dei, where he describes those effects as a “gevoel” of the divine. To understand the significance of that passage in context, one should situate it within his overall oeuvre. I will begin by observing his comments in Dogmatics, before turning to his 1908 Philosophy of Revelation, and then finally to the seminal passage in Magnalia Dei.

In Dogmatics, Bavinck argued that the terms general and special revelation do better justice to the teachings of Scripture over natural and supernatural theology (H. Bavinck, Reference Bavinck and Bolt2003, 311–12; Eglinton, Reference Eglinton2012, 89). Though he recognized that the older Reformed theologians situated natural theology as a subset of revealed theology, he argued that the way in which natural and supernatural theology had been distinguished, especially in medieval scholasticism, tended toward an “absolute contrast,” where God’s revelation in nature and Scripture were related together mechanically, merely side by side, rather than organically. (H. Bavinck, Reference Bavinck and Bolt2003, 303–4). Furthermore, deploying the terms of general and special revelation emphasizes that all revelation is supernatural: “Scripture, though it knows of an established natural order, in the case of revelation makes no distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ revelation … Actually, according to Scripture, all revelation, also that in nature, is supernatural” (H. Bavinck, Reference Bavinck and Bolt2003, 307). If it is God “who reveals himself in his handiwork,” it “presupposes that it is not humans who, by the natural light of reason, understand and know this revelation of God” (H. Bavinck, Reference Bavinck, Vriend. and Bolt2004, 74). Bavinck was concerned with maintaining the objectivity of revelation as a divine act and resisted its conflation with the activity of human reason or rational argumentation (H. Bavinck, Reference Bavinck, Vriend. and Bolt2004, 78).

To be clear, Bavinck affirmed with Reformed orthodoxy that human beings clearly perceive God’s existence precisely because God’s objective revelation is clear, and that, subjectively, human beings possess both the “capacity” and “inclination (habitus, disposition)” to conclude that God exists (H. Bavinck, Reference Bavinck, Vriend. and Bolt2004, 71). However, alongside these classical comments, Bavinck also emphasizes that God reveals himself internally, arguing that there is an “interior impact of revelation upon [humanity’s] consciousness” that “precedes” both the implanted and acquired knowledge of God; there is, internal to the psyche, a “revelatory pressure” (H. Bavinck, Reference Bavinck, Vriend. and Bolt2004, 72–73). Hence, the distinction between innate and acquired knowledge of God needs to be clarified by the further emphasis that even the innate knowledge of God is, in a sense, acquired, for “God’s revelation precedes both”:

This is an important passage for the affective model, for, here, Bavinck distinguishes the knowledge of God from “cognitive ability” and “cognitive action” (cf. Brock, Reference Brock2020, 252). As Bavinck writes in this passage, the impressions of revelation might “become” cognition by an act of the intellect. The activity of the intellect always presupposes that divine revelation “from within and without.” Divine revelation is always from the outside, impinging itself in our consciousness, and the effect of that revelation is not reducible to explicit cognition, preceding it altogether.

When Bavinck finally turns to treat the proofs for God’s existence, then, he argues that one should not treat these proofs in isolation from the Christian faith, nor as definitive demonstrations that serve as faith’s preambles, but rather as a witness to one’s religious consciousness. In other words, these arguments are mere witnesses to the reception of general revelation and the “feelings” that stem from them: “The situation is this: Faith attempts to give an account of the religious impressions and feelings [produced by general revelation] that we humans receive and carry with us in our soul” (H. Bavinck, Reference Bavinck, Vriend. and Bolt2004, 90, emphasis mine). God produces these religious “impressions and feelings,” and these feelings, in turn, are worked upon by the intellect in order to produce a conceptualized articulation. Christians, armed with the spectacles of Scripture, are equipped to reflect on this revelation precisely because the articulated proofs witness “their own religious and ethical consciousness” (H. Bavinck, Reference Bavinck, Vriend. and Bolt2004, 91). Scripture articulates and connects with that which is already felt.

In the Philosophy of Revelation, Bavinck argues that “in self-consciousness, therefore, we have to deal not with a mere phenomenon but with a noumenon, with a reality that is immediately given us, antecedently to all reasoning and inference” (Reference Bavinck, Brock and Sutanto2018b, 53). He then draws from Schleiermacher to clarify the affective effects of this general revelation: prior to reasoning and active cognizing, human beings immediately feel an absolute dependence on God (cf. Schleiermacher, Reference Schleiermacher, Kelsey, Lawler, Tice, Kelsey and Tice2016, §4. 2, §32–33). This is an implication of being a creature situated within God’s handiwork:

Thinking, reasoning, and action are all embedded within a definite mode of existence as exposed to divine revelation. In Bavinck’s reading, Schleiermacher is drawing from Augustine’s turn to the self to show that the soul is pre-categorically aware of God’s presence prior to active reasoning (H. Bavinck, Reference Bavinck, Brock and Sutanto2018b, 55; see also Brock, Reference Brock2020). Human reasoning, therefore, is always a second moment that itself presupposes an implanted phenomenological awareness, indeed, an affect – that God exists, and that we are absolutely dependent on him: “in self-consciousness both the existence and the specific mode of existence of the self and ego, are revealed” (H. Bavinck, Reference Bavinck, Brock and Sutanto2018b, 58). It is precisely through interpreting the result of revelation as a preconscious affection that one should read Bavinck’s provocative claim that revelation is the “secret of all that exists”: “Revelation underlies all created being … the finite is supported by the infinite” (H. Bavinck, Reference Bavinck, Brock and Sutanto2018b, 24). To identify the deliverances of human reflection with general revelation is thus to commit a fundamental category mistake for Bavinck, not to mention that it would hardly make sense of this passage, for it is impossible that human beliefs or activity underlie all created being. Revelation is the primordial environment, and that which affords or prompts human activity, and is strictly prior to it.

His comments in the 1909 text, the Magnalia Dei, which is an updated, more accessible synopsis of his Dogmatics, naturally follow from these broader and earlier developments in Bavinck’s thought. Before describing the effect of general revelation as a “feeling of the divine,” Bavinck appeals to the older doctrine of illumination that there is an “impression of the divine in us,” which helps us recognize the divine impressions “outside of us,” “just as the eyes allow us to see light and colors, and the ear which enables the hearing of sounds” (H. Bavinck, Reference Bavinck1909a, 35). It was Calvin, Bavinck argued, who recognized this “feeling of divinity” (gevoel der Godheid), as it was taught by Paul in Rom. 1:20 (Bavinck, Reference Bavinck1909a, 36). Bavinck went on to describe this feeling of divinity as a “feeling of dependence”:

While Schleiermacher posits the feeling of absolute dependence as the essence of religion and that on which dogmatics reflects, for Bavinck, the feeling of absolute dependence is an effect of general revelation, and that to which special revelation addresses, as given in the Scriptures. This feeling is concomitant with creaturely existence and is located in one’s consciousness but apart from and “underneath our reasoning and action.” In connection with Rom. 1:19–20, we feel ourselves dependent on God’s eternal power, for we have the intuition that God is the creator. In conjunction with Rom. 1:32, we feel that we are guilty before God, for God is also the moral judge.Footnote ¹²

In sum, the affective model of general revelation, which draws from the two Bavincks, renders the sense of divinity as feelings of the divine that are prior to and independent from human reasoning. Whether one describes this affective sense of the divine as a sensus numinis that is repressed (Johan), or a feeling of absolute dependence (Herman), both authors are clear that propositional or conceptual awareness is a secondary and derivative moment, not having to do with the reception of general revelation at its most basic level. The sense of the divine, then, just is the implanted affect itself; it presupposes that humans have the capacity to receive these affects, but it is not identified with those capacities for the affect is the result of a divine work. One might wonder how something can be meaningful or known prior to propositions, and I shall address this later by drawing some concepts from Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology. Before that, however, it is helpful to further clarify this affective model by comparing it to the influential account of the sense of the divine by the philosopher, Alvin Plantinga, in order to show that the affective model does better justice to the biblical witness.

3.3 Alvin Plantinga’s Sensus Divinitatis: A Faculty-Model

Plantinga’s Warranted Christian Belief provides a seminal account of the sense of divinity that he draws from the works of both John Calvin and Thomas Aquinas. While Plantinga’s epistemology of proper function is many-sided and his arguments touch on a variety of issues, from the nature of warrant, epistemic justification, and the noetic effects of sin, what’s most relevant here is his description of the sense of the divine as a kind of cognitive faculty that is prompted, under the right circumstances, to produce theistic beliefs. The sense of the divine is an “input-output device,” “the operation” of which is initiated by particular circumstances, such as the “perception of my guilt,” exposure to the beauty of the Grand Canyon or a tiny flower, and so on (Plantinga, Reference Plantinga2000, 174–175). The sense of the divine thus produces beliefs that resemble “perception, memory, and a priori belief”; it produces beliefs that are apprehended immediately, not inferred from other beliefs, and serves as “starting points for thought” – beliefs that are properly basic (Plantinga, Reference Plantinga2000, 175–176). As Plantinga writes:

It is not that one needs to be aware that one is created with this belief-producing mechanism in order to produce warranted theistic beliefs.Footnote ¹⁴ Rather, it is simply that because one is created with this faculty, one finds oneself believing in a divine being, under certain conditions, just as one might produce a belief about the whiteness of the wall when the wall is perceived in front of one’s self, or that our spouse is angry at us when we perceive his or her body language.Footnote ¹⁵

When Plantinga turns to the noetic and cognitive consequences of sin to account for the presence of nontheism, then, Plantinga speaks about the malfunctioning of the sense of divinity. It no longer works as it should, and thus fails to produce beliefs in God as frequently or as strongly: “failing to believe in God is a result of some kind of dysfunction of the sensus divinitatis” (Plantinga, Reference Plantinga2000, 184). Again, “failure to believe can be due to a sort of blindness or deafness, to improper function of the sensus divinitatis” (Plantinga, Reference Plantinga2000, 186). This explains why it is that some believe in God and others do not: “The condition of sin involves damage to the sensus divinitatis, but not obliteration; it remains partially functional in most of us” (Plantinga, Reference Plantinga2000, 210). It is the renewing work of the Spirit that repairs that sense of divinity, such that it can produce theistic beliefs again appropriately, under the right conditions.

Before we recognize the differences between Plantinga’s and the affective model, it is worth noting that Plantinga’s faculty-model of the sense of divinity is not altogether incompatible with the affective model I’ve described in Sections 3.1 and 3.2. The affective model does not deny the possibility of immediately formed apprehensive beliefs about God, or even that, as image bearers, humans may have the disposition, even propensity, to form theistic beliefs.Footnote ¹⁶ The affective model emphasizes, however, that the effects of general revelation lie prior to the formation of such beliefs. These affects of the divine might lead to an explicit articulation in the form of an immediately held belief, but need not rise to that level. As we saw, it is a knowledge without concepts, an intuitive, propulsive pull, sedimented in the embodied soul, which may manifest itself in a variety of ways: the instinct to worship, to prioritize some higher destiny, a sense of angst or guilt when having done something wrong, and so on.

The basic difference between the faculty-model and the affective one, however, is in the identification of the sense of the divine. The sense of the divine, for the affective model, is not a faculty, akin to one’s perceptual faculties, though, as we saw, it presupposes that there are tacit dimensions in the knowing faculty, as in Herman Bavinck. The sense of divinity corresponds to the faculties of knowing (indeed, the tacit, nonconceptual, and unconscious aspects of knowing), but it is not identified with those faculties. The sense of the divine just is the sensus numinis (Johan), and just is the feeling of divinity, which concretely manifests itself as a feeling of absolute dependence (Herman). Because the sense of divinity is affective and instilled by divine agency alone (through creation), it would make no sense to describe this sense as malfunctioning or damaged due to sinfulness (for how can God or his activity malfunction?). Rather, sinfulness has caused one to misapprehend, repress, and suppress what one knows deep within; instead of acknowledging the God we feel, our explicit thoughts and directions manifest the heart as a “factory of idols” (Calvin, Reference Calvin, Battles and McNeill1961, I. 11. 8). This repression is not reducible to inferring false beliefs about God, nor is it merely failing to produce immediate beliefs about God when prompted by the right conditions. It is a heart-wrestling, a sense of inner strife, akin to seeking to forget a long-repressed experience that may or may not be explicitly remembered, and which can only be relieved by the illumination of the Spirit, working with the redemptive word.

Plantinga’s interpretation is, on one level, understandable, because “sense” is ambiguous. It can refer to the “sense of taste,” for instance, and such a sense might be dulled if we had damaged our taste buds. He seems to be taking the sense of the divine in this way, and hence he argues that the sensus divinitatis can be damaged, thus failing to properly yield beliefs about God. But “sense” can also be taken as the content itself, as it were, and hence it is of the divine. It is in this latter sense that the Bavincks suggest that God himself has implanted a pre-theoretical awareness of the divine.

I suggest that the affective model is a better reading of Calvin’s language and, correspondingly, of Paul’s words in Romans 1 over Plantinga’s.

Plantinga initiates his presentation of his model by referring to Calvin’s words on the sense of the divine, which we saw as well at the beginning of this Element. The salient part of the passage is that Calvin describes the sense of divinity as “engraved upon man’s minds,” it can never be “effaced,” though we struggle “furiously” to “extricate” ourselves “from the fear of God,” and that it is “not a doctrine that must first be learned in school, but one of which each of us is master from his mother’s womb and which nature itself permits no one to forget” (Calvin, Reference Calvin, Battles and McNeill1961, I. 3. 3; see also Adams, Reference Adams2001, 281–282). Plantinga suggests that this passage is “extravagant,” and argues, tentatively, that what Calvin really means is that the sense of divinity is “a kind of faculty or a cognitive mechanism … which in a wide variety of circumstances produces in us beliefs about God” (Plantinga, Reference Plantinga2000, 172). Plantinga then argues that Calvin cannot mean that the knowledge of God really is universal, and again wants to identify the sense of the divine with a mere capacity:

Plantinga thinks that Calvin cannot mean that everyone has the knowledge of God, because, clearly, infants do not really know God, at least, not just yet. Just as the capacity for arithmetical knowledge is innate but the knowledge itself comes later, so it is with the capacity to form theistic beliefs. The capacity to form theistic beliefs itself is innate, but it takes a little maturity, through the right conditions, for that capacity to be actualized in the right way.

Though Plantinga admits that he is not ultimately interested in advancing Calvin’s meaning, I suggest that Plantinga’s reading here softens and domesticates Calvin’s passage in a way that the affective model does not, precisely because it resists the identification of the sense with explicit thinking or reasoning.Footnote ¹⁷ Indeed, as Dowey has shown, for Calvin, the sense of divinity was not

For the affective model, the sense of the divine is not a faculty but is instilled by God himself; it is the feeling itself of the divine. It offers an alternative and more accurate reading of Calvin’s passage. For the affective model, it is not impossible that infants know God, perhaps akin to the way in which infants recognize the voices of their parents, or facial expressions, even prior to the development of their cognitive faculties. If the sense of divinity is not a “doctrine learned in school,” then no amount of “maturing” will have any effects on the presence of the sense of divinity, just as no amount of human repression will efface it either. Plantinga, it seems, presupposes an exclusively propositional model of knowledge (as warranted true belief) and imposes it on Calvin’s text.Footnote ¹⁸

Indeed, to identify the sense of divinity with human growth, human ability, or, indeed, a faculty of the human person is to confuse revelation (which is from God), and the human response to that revelation. Revelation presupposes that humans (as image bearers) can receive that revelation and later reflect on that revelation, to be sure, but revelation is a strictly divine work. The affective model emphasizes, therefore, that the feeling of divinity is indeed universal, but it is not, technically, “innate,” but instilled or implanted, preceding even the formation of immediate beliefs. Everyone knows God, “because God has shown it to them” (Rom. 1:19). It has the benefit, over Plantinga’s, to affirm the universality and efficacy that Calvin and Paul ascribe to the work of general revelation, refusing to exclude infants (and, one might suggest, the neurodivergent) from the feeling of divinity.

4.1 The Cognitive Science of Religion and “Cognitively Natural Theism”

The affective model does not merely do justice to the biblical witness over the faculty-model – it may also theologically reorient how one might consider the empirical findings associated with the sense of the divine from the cognitive science of religion. The affective model is a dogmatic account, to be sure, and its priority is to advance a model consistent with the biblical witness and Christian tradition and is as such not dependent on empirical results. Nonetheless, its strength is that it offers a more satisfying theological explanation of those findings, and in so doing we shall see that it addresses the vexed issue on whether the sense of the divine is to be identified with the reports concerning the most common theistic beliefs.

This first subsection surveys the empirical findings from the cognitive science of religion, along with two theological lines of responses to those findings: that the yields show that sin has often caused the loss of the natural knowledge of God, or that the findings depict for us a “cognitively natural theism” to be identified with the divine being disclosed in general revelation. The next subsection draws from Katherine Sonderegger and Johan Bavinck to show how the affective model rejects those two lines of responses and provides a more theologically satisfying reorientation to the empirical yields of the cognitive science of religion, while identifying and preserving general revelation’s affective salience.

The cognitive science of religion is a subfield of cognitive science that studies the “mental processes that concern religious phenomena, such as religious experiences, beliefs, practices, and dispositions” (Van den Brink, Reference Van den Brink2020, 243; cf. Barrett, Reference Barrett, Mezei, Murphy and Oakes2021, 519). One of the yields of this research is the demonstration that religious and theistic beliefs are formed with significant regularity, suggesting that the human brain has evolved in such a way that it is hardwired to produce such beliefs.Footnote ¹⁹

More specifically, practitioners refer to a Theory of Mind (ToM), which describes a cognitive bias that produces beliefs in supernatural agents and teleology. For instance, humans naturally believe that other agents act because of internal states of intentionality: Peter sees Susan hastily taking a bite of her sandwich, and immediately believes that Susan does so because she is hungry, or because she is rushing to a meeting, and so on. The ToM is also linked with an agency-detecting device. Humans seem hardwired to believe that certain occasions are linked with agency: that, say, the rain is here because something – or someone – out there is punishing me, or, that dinner on the table means that my spouse, who loves me, has prepared this for me. Aku Visala (Reference Visala, Crisp and Sanders2018, 105) observes that humans have also developed a ToM of higher orders, for we are able not just to detect what other agents seem to be intending in their actions, but also how those agents might perceive the way we intend certain acts, or how we might be perceiving their intentions, and so on. The ToM and the agency-detecting device thus also predispose humans to believe that supernatural agents are involved in everyday occasions: the traffic is smooth because God (or some deity) is blessing me, that I failed to get a promotion because I am receiving punishment due to my past wrongdoings, and so on.

As it turns out, therefore, religious and theistic beliefs are produced naturally by human cognition. Without argument or coercion, humans “appear to be naturally inclined to see the world as purposefully designed, and easily see an intelligent, intentional agent as behind this natural design” (Barrett, Reference Barrett, Mezei, Murphy and Oakes2021, 524, emphasis original). This research has produced a bit of a double-edged sword with respect to the rational status of those religious beliefs. On the one hand, some might suggest that because humans are hardwired to produce beliefs in supernatural agents, this might well just be an evolutionary quirk, and a by-product that undermines their rational status (e.g., Dennett, Reference Dennett2006). On the other hand, however, these empirical findings seem to confirm the traditioned Christian claim that God has, indeed, revealed himself in creation. Many have thus linked these findings with Plantinga’s faculty-model of the sense of divinity. Kelly Clark (Reference Clark2019, 72–73), for instance, suggests that these findings disclose that humans have a “God-faculty”: “the cognitive science of religion suggests that we have a cognitive faculty that produces God-beliefs without recourse to argument.”

Yet, things are not all that simple – as Clark himself is aware, the ToM and agency-detecting device seem to be producing a diversity of religious beliefs, all of which are context-dependent (cf. Barrett, Reference Barrett, Mezei, Murphy and Oakes2021, 525, 528). They produce beliefs that not only confirm, but are also at odds with the traditioned claims from Romans 1. These involve beliefs that are not merely about a creator God who is holding creatures accountable for sin, but also about all sorts of anthropomorphic supernatural agents that are less metaphysically or ethically demanding than that of the almighty Creator depicted by Paul, beliefs that lead to other religions, and beliefs that fail to anticipate other Christian beliefs (Clark, Reference Clark2019, 76).

Faced with these challenges, theologians have tended to produce one of two responses. The first response goes this way: given the diversity of religious beliefs, we should admit that the faculty that produces true God-beliefs is in fact malfunctioning due to sin – such that we often fail to produce beliefs in God, and perhaps that the noetic effects of sin mean that humans often fail to know God at all (e.g., Plantinga himself, as we saw in Section 3.3). A second response, however, is to identify the most common beliefs that have been reported from the cognitive science of religion with the output of general revelation. Launonen and Mullins (Reference Launonen and Mullins2021), for instance, have argued that the God of so-called classical theism, with its beliefs concerning divine atemporality, simplicity, and immutability, is a far cry from the empirical yields of the cognitive science of religion. They argue that proponents of classical theism risk denying the doctrine of general revelation given that these empirical findings show that the most common theistic beliefs have to do with divine beings that are larger extensions of human persons. For, if the doctrine of general revelation is true, it follows that humanity will produce theistic-tracking beliefs, and if the empirical yields show us that the typical theistic beliefs picture the divine being as “parts of the spatio-temporal universe; agents among other agents” (Jong, Kavanagh, and Visala, Reference Jong, Kavanaugh and Visala2015, 251), then this must be the sort of God that general revelation discloses, so the argument goes. Launonen and Mullins, therefore, suggest that open theism seems to be the model of divinity most in line with the most common yields of the cognitive science of religion, and, therefore, with the divine being disclosed in general revelation: “Most believers fashion God in the image of man, the Creator in the image of a creature” (Launonen and Mullins, Reference Launonen and Mullins2021, 8).

4.2 Locating the Affective and Phenomenological Salience of General Revelation

How does the affective model of general revelation address these findings of the cognitive science of religion, and the two lines of responses surveyed in Section 4.1?

First, the affective model resists the conflation of the professions of theistic beliefs reported by these empirical findings with the sense of the divine itself. The affective model argues that the sense of divinity produces a feeling of dependence on God that may or may not be articulated propositionally. Conscious, deliberate reasoning or propositional formation are thus second moments that may or may not reflect those affects or unconscious knowledge. Both Plantinga’s and Launonen and Mullins’s responses presuppose the identification of propositional beliefs and the output of the sense of divinity, and thus suggest that either some humans may no longer have any knowledge of God (Plantinga), or that general revelation produces a picture of the divine being bound in space and time (Launonen and Mullins). However, the affective model suggests that the sense of divinity is not identical with the profession of propositions, and effectually persists even if no one professes belief in God, indeed, even if the majority denies God.Footnote ²⁰ Thus, it would be a mistake to identify the results of the polls with the results of general revelation.

Katherine Sonderegger’s observation concerning the distinction between Calvin’s more phenomenological account of the sense of divinity and the products of explicit reasoning dovetails well with the affective model advanced here:

There is thus a fundamental distinction between the “seed planted deep in the heart” that may “spring up,” and the articulations of the “rational intellect.” The result of the sense of divinity, as Calvin argued, was not an appropriate belief in God, for sinners “do not therefore apprehend God as he offers himself, but imagine him as they have fashioned him in their own presumption” (Calvin, Reference Calvin, Battles and McNeill1961, 1. 4. 1.). Dowey thus summarizes that the sense produces in fallen sinners “the universality of religion, which because of sin means the universality of idolatry, accompanied by (2) the servile fear of God and (3) the troubled conscience” (Dowey, Reference Dowey1994, 53).

Sonderegger continues to observe that, for God to be properly acknowledged, there must be a convicting of one’s sins by way of the work of the Spirit that allows us no longer to suppress the sense but to recognize God: “God must be known, rather, through an awakening of one’s conscience, a conviction of sin – to use nineteenth century parlance … or the ‘inner testimony of the Holy Spirit’ as the mere words of the Bible or the preacher becomes the Word of Life itself. This is the joining of reverence and gratitude, the knowledge of divine benefit extolled by Calvin in the Institutes” (2021, 394). The empirical yields of the cognitive science of religion, therefore, testify not so much to the content of the sense of the divine but to its suppression, as humans resist confessing that deep-seated affect that renders them accountable before God. Those who endorse both classical theism and the affective model could thus respond to Launonen and Mullins that the most common beliefs recorded in the cognitive science of religion disclose not so much the output of the sense of the divine but the idolatrous responses of sinners to that sense.

Hence, in distinction from Plantinga, proponents of the affective model would argue that it would be impossible for any human being to lose the sense of the divine, for, per Romans 1:18–23, God is the one who has instilled it himself. To Launonen and Mullins, proponents of the model would argue that these empirical findings have no bearing on the veracity of general revelation or whether classical theism is “natural.” As Jong, Kavanagh, and Visala have argued, therefore, the yields of the cognitive science of religion may well witness instead to the human mind as a natural idolater (Reference Jong, Kavanaugh and Visala2015).

Second, nonetheless, the model I advance here continues to emphasize the affective, and even experiential (or existential and phenomenological) salience of the doctrine of general revelation. Given that the sense of divinity is submerged and then suppressed by sinners, Johan Bavinck argues, it manifests itself not in straightforward professions of belief in God. Rather, because humans are fallen religious creatures always in contact with God, there is an existential “unsettledness” as a result of their suppression of the sense of the divine. Furthermore, because the sense of divinity is implanted by an active work of God himself, they cannot ultimately eradicate it, and so “[the sense of divinity] cannot become openly conscious; it appears in disguise, and it is exchanged for something different” (J. Bavinck, 2023, 117–118). Indeed, as Sonderegger observes, the sense of the divine might “spring up,” despite our attempts to eradicate it.

The sense of divinity pops up “in disguise” due to the heart’s desire (and failure) to repress the truth. Johan Bavinck argues that the sense shows up in our intuitions and talk of norms, in our tendency to feel that there is an ultimate problem concerning the world and that there is a corresponding solution, our care for belonging, our longing for a destiny, and a connection with a higher power. However, sinners are always “exchanging” these points of reference from God to something creaturely. All of these “magnetic points” as Johan calls them, manifest the human heart’s wrestling with the sense of the divine – though all humans know God, in an attempt to erase the sense of divinity, humans substitute God with another creaturely reality (J. Bavinck, Reference Bavinck and Bolt2003, 226). “General revelation is depicted for us in the bible as a much more personal involvement of God with each person than we in our theology once understood it to be. We will have to … disentangle them from all their abstract philosophical accretions and to understand them in terms of biblical reality” (J. Bavinck, Reference Bavinck and Bolt2003, 238). The empirical salience of the doctrine of general revelation is thus not primarily about the professions of belief that might be observed, but in the existential dimensions of human life – in its misdirected worship, fears and longings, and so on. Though sinners deny God, in other words, sinners continue to wrestle with the desires and cares that reflect their wrestling with the creator, and often fail to move this affective awareness toward accurate propositions.

To flesh this out even further, a few conceptual tools from phenomenology prove to be helpful, as we will see in the next section.

5.1 A Theological Interpretation of Heidegger: Affect and Practice

Heidegger provides us with the conceptual resources to describe the meaningfulness of nonconceptual knowing and practice, such that conceptual reasoning, and even the formation of immediately formed beliefs that are “present-at-hand,” do not get at the deepest level of human knowing. Reasoning presupposes the preconditions of Dasein’s contact with the world and its affordances, and takes place within the context of humanity’s “cares.”

Heidegger illumines this everyday phenomenology by drawing many distinctions. For our purposes, we will observe just two: between the “ontical” and the “ontological,” and between that which is “ready-to-hand” and that which is “present-at-hand.”

Firstly, then, for Heidegger, the being of Dasein, or rather, its “ontology,” is something that is “pre-ontological,” in the sense that one’s existence as being precedes the study of being (Heidegger, Reference Heidegger, Macquarrie and Robinson1962, 32). If “ontology” is the “theoretical inquiry” that studies being, Heidegger reasons, then one must reckon with the reality that Dasein’s being precedes that study. Dasein’s being, then, is “ontical,” which is that which is closest, most immediate, and concrete, and hence prior to developing an ontology. The ontical refers to the concrete being of humanity. We already are human, and fully functional and inhabiting the world as human, prior to developing a theory of human being. This distinction between onticity and ontology produces a paradox: “Dasein is not only closest to us – even that which is closest: we are it, each of us, we ourselves. In spite of this, or rather for just this reason, it is ontologically that which is farthest” (Heidegger, Reference Heidegger, Macquarrie and Robinson1962, 36; cf. Dreyfus, Reference Dreyfus1991, 21). To explicitly study human existence (ontologically) is to move ourselves away from everyday human existence (onticity), and because Dasein is nontheoretical, concerned, and fluid, it can only be studied indirectly: “We must rather choose such a way of access and such a kind of interpretation that this entity can show itself in itself and from itself. And this means that it is to be shown as it is proximally and for the most part – in its average everydayness” (Heidegger, Reference Heidegger, Macquarrie and Robinson1962, 38; emphases original). Being precedes theoretical knowing, and thus the study of ontology removes one from concrete being, despite seeking to describe concrete being. This is not to say that the study of human ontology is unimportant (for Heidegger himself is attempting such a project), but that it is derivative, and detached from the actual concrete existence of the very being that it is supposed to study.

Secondly, that concrete existence treats the affordances of the environment in which Dasein finds itself as ready-to-hand, rather than present-at-hand. Dasein functions, in its everydayness, by rendering its environment as equipment which is ready-to-hand. Readiness-to-hand is eluded the moment we examine “the ‘outward appearance’ of Things in whatever form this takes,” by making it present-at-hand. (Heidegger, Reference Heidegger, Macquarrie and Robinson1962, 98). Again, “if we look at Things just ‘theoretically’, we can get along without understanding readiness-to-hand” (Heidegger, Reference Heidegger, Macquarrie and Robinson1962, 98–99). However, when we deploy things in the environment, “this activity is not a blind one,” and instead it has “its own kind of sight by which our manipulation is guided and from which it acquires its specific Thingly character” (Heidegger, Reference Heidegger, Macquarrie and Robinson1962, 99). This is the context in which Heidegger introduces the example of using a hammer – the skilled carpenter uses the hammer in itself in fluid practicality, perhaps even while his mind is thinking about something else — his being, that is, his body is moving the hammer, “appropriated” it, so to speak, as that which is in-order-to (Heidegger, Reference Heidegger, Macquarrie and Robinson1962, 98).

Only when something goes awry, say, the nail being lost, or the hammer becoming broken, does “obtrusiveness” occur; the object becomes present-at-hand, thus removing one’s self from the very concreteness of the meaningful yet nonconceptual activity: “It reveals itself as something just-present-at-hand and no more, which cannot be budged without the thing that is missing. The helpless way in which we stand before it is a deficient mode of concern, and as such it uncovers the Being-just-present-at-hand-and-no-more of something ready-to-hand” (Heidegger, Reference Heidegger, Macquarrie and Robinson1962, 103). The mental and present-at-hand are perhaps necessary at particular points, but the locus of meaning precedes this explicitly “thematic” way of cognition.

The insight here, for Heidegger, is that the ready-to-hand is not “founded upon” that which is “present-at-hand” (Heidegger, Reference Heidegger, Macquarrie and Robinson1962, 101). It is not the case that meaningful being is predicated on the linguistic, propositional, or explicit, but the other way around. Predication takes place within a prior embodied sort of knowing and practicality, what Hubert Dreyfus calls “skillful coping” (Dreyfus, Reference Dreyfus and Wrathall2014, 116). Skillful coping contains at least these three related features: (1) conceptual reasoning and conscious acts of the will are not the primary ways in which human beings exhibit expertise. (2) Human skillfulness, instead, manifests itself in the intuitive, non- or pre-theoretical, and non-volitionally responsive ways in which one copes with environmental affordances. (3) Skillful coping does not only mark the master’s expertise, but also everyday existence. Cognitive action and conceptual reflection, then, always take place in the context of “everyday practice” that lies beneath “our theoretical presuppositions and assumptions” (Dreyfus, Reference Dreyfus and Wrathall2014, 134).

If the structure of Heidegger’s phenomenology sounds familiar to theological readers, this is because, as Judith Wolfe indicates, Heidegger was drawn to situating human reason within a prior, meaningful contact with Being-as-such because of the influence of Bonaventure’s Augustinian theory of illumination: “For Bonaventure as for Heidegger, a transcendental viewpoint, which seeks the conditions of the possibility of all knowledge, does not discover a new entity, but asks after that which is no entity and yet makes possible all intentionality, and this is Being itself” (Wolfe, Reference Wolfe2013, 117). For Bonaventure, God attends to the mind as an “unchangeable light” (Bonaventure, Reference Hayes., Boehner and Hayes2002, 3. 3.), and “it is His light that supplements or concurs with the human cognitive light so that it can truly illumine reality” (Schumacher, Reference Schumacher2011, 142). This divine illumination is implicit or tacit, to be sure, and thus not always in the forefront of human consciousness, but the attentive human mind can discover the “divine realities that shine forth” as a result of that illumining work, disclosed in Romans 1:19–20 (Bonaventure, Reference Hayes., Boehner and Hayes2002, 2. 13). As John Webster comments: “Bonaventure is a positive divine, one for whom the mind’s powers are encompassed and accompanied by a gift and light which are not of the mind’s invention” (Webster, Reference Webster2012, 174). Bonaventure regards divine illumination, and thus accommodated contact with the Being itself to be that which conditions and enables the possibility of reason’s proper function.

If, for Bonaventure, the operation of human reason is situated within the condition of divine illumination, Heidegger demythologizes Bonaventure by asserting that this primordial contact is not with divine being, but “Being” in the sense of the imminent, affordances of the world as Dasein’s environment.

The affective model of the sense of divinity can remythologize Heidegger, so to speak, while accommodating his insights. God’s general revelation results in the provision of intuitions that lie underneath explicit cognition or propositional awareness. The intuitions and “phenomena” of Heidegger’s phenomenology are the result of everyday exposure to creation, and because God himself is the agent of revelation, and creation is a divine handiwork, one’s environment is always and everywhere eliciting the “sensus divinitatis.” Or, as Fritz has argued, reading Heidegger theologically would show us that “revelation, which so often is equated with the glory of transfiguration and the shining of heaven, can be found just as much in the mundane and everyday” (Reference Fritz, Mezei, Murphy and Oakes2021, 318).

This brings us full circle to the affective and phenomenological salience of general revelation. The sense of the divine may prompt particular instincts, propositions, or actions, which leads to a variety of religious acts or interpretations, but it remains beneath and submerged underneath them. Human beings are already always in touch with truth, and indeed, are always in the truth, in the sense that they are involved within “the broader phenomenon of openness to and contact with the world, and as encompassing subpropositional, propositional, and suprapropositional levels” (Inkpin, Reference Inkpin2016, 62). Hence, as Bavinck argues, the primordial context in which humanity lives is precisely God’s self-revelation – revelation is that which underlies all created existence. That is, in a manner more pervasive than any social or physical environment we are in, the human self is always living in the context of divine action.Footnote ²² In God, we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28). Since that is the case, the human self is always already skillfully coping with this primordial environment, and due to sinfulness, that skillful coping takes the form of suppression and need not be learned. God’s self-revelation is the primary affordance that elicits our fluid coping, and it is the context out of which we reflect and make conscious decisions. Thus, read in light of Romans 1, the intuition of that environment is concurrent with the sense of divinity. This sense of divinity can prompt explicit reflection, and, as it were attended to as that which is “present-at-hand,” but as Heidegger recognizes, that which becomes present-at-hand has long been known beforehand. Sin forges a disconnect between that which is present-at-hand and that which was ready-to-hand.

5.2 Three More Benefits of the Affective Model

Three further implications follow from this appropriation of Heidegger’s phenomenology and the affective model of the sense of divinity, and these implications, I suggest, further highlight the model’s strengths.

Firstly, as I argued in the section on the cognitive science of religion, the model highlights the affective salience of the doctrine of general revelation. The affective model accounts for why it is that humans often display a vivid tendency to ask about the meaning of their own existence as a finite creature, to seek forgiveness and atonement in the face of guilt, to contemplate a higher power or destiny when confronted with mortality or the grandeur and horrors of creation, and so on. In Heidegger’s language, the affective model explains why it is that “Dasein … is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it … and this implies that Dasein, in its Being, has a relationship toward that Being – a relation which itself is one of Being” (Heidegger, Reference Heidegger, Macquarrie and Robinson1962, 32; emphasis original). Humans are in touch with their existence, and relate to their existence, with profound care, and the affective model suggests that this is because, as image bearers, and due to the divine initiative, God has not left them without a witness.

Secondly, the affective model directs one’s attention away from the purely epistemic or philosophical when one brings up the issue of general revelation or the noetic effects of sin, and orients it within a more concrete and affective theological anthropology. There is a tendency to conflate general revelation with the natural theological proofs of God’s existence or with cognitively natural theism, or to conflate the noetic effects of sin with the inferring of wrong propositions about God, or of forming no beliefs about God at all. Those issues may be philosophically interesting, but they do not get at the heart of the doctrine of general revelation, which highlights the affective dimensions of human existence. The way one experiences God in creation is not primarily, even exclusively, by way of explicit thinking, but also by way of our inhabitation, and indeed practiced immersivity in God’s world (cf. Ward, Reference Ward2016, 259; Hector, Reference Hector2023, 2–3). The noetic effects of sin should thus be discussed alongside the affective or psychical effects of sin, according to which sinfulness is displayed in one’s fluid coping and repression of the affordances of general revelation in everyday, concrete existence (See Sutanto, Reference Sutanto2024). Unbelief and nontheism are indeed the results of the noetic and affective effects of sin: repression causes the emergence of a discrepancy between one’s professions and one’s affects or feelings. The space of reasons takes place within the backdrop of the phenomenological wrestling with the knowledge of God, per Sonderegger and Johan Bavinck.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the affective model of general revelation resists the domestication of Paul’s and Calvin’s emphases on the universality and efficacy of God’s revealing work, despite the presence of unbelief and the professions of nontheists. A propositionalized or faculty-model of the sense of divinity would render the efficacy of general revelation something dependent on the presence or profession of explicit propositions in each and every person. As such, due to the noetic effects of sin and the presence of atheism, these alternative models would perhaps suggest that this propositional knowledge is either something all creatures have, or something they used to have – the noetic effects of sin thus might include a total loss of the knowledge of God.

I suggest, however, that understanding the creational knowledge of God as primarily or exclusively propositional in character risks diluting the sense of Paul’s text, which denotes that human beings always suppress the knowledge of God within the context of possessing that knowledge, of having “clearly perceived” him because God himself has “shown it to them” (Rom. 1:19–20). An exclusively propositionalized model of the natural knowledge of God seems to render the efficacy of God’s general revelation dependent on whether human beings do profess to believe particular propositions about God. Here, I suggest that unless one has a grasp of the possibility of an affective and phenomenological account of knowing, one would be hard-pressed to do justice to the sense of Paul’s meaning. In other words, in line with Paul’s witness, human beings continue to know God, even while they hold false beliefs about him, and, indeed, human beings continue to know God, even while they hold no propositional beliefs about God, and even when they deny God. Indeed, one of the potential weaknesses of an exclusively propositional rendering of the knowledge of God disclosed in Romans 1 is that, upon encountering nontheists, one would have to say that God’s revelation is somehow not plain, or that some simply lack a knowledge of God. No amount of surveying the increase or decrease of professed atheism, however, in principle, can put to question the efficacy of general revelation, because general revelation does not have to do with propositional beliefs in the first place. Heidegger’s phenomenology has shown that cognition arises out of and alongside preconscious embodied affects. If one has a phenomenological account of knowing in view, then one can hold on to the prima facie paradox that one can know God without believing any explicit propositions about God.

6.1 Karl Barth

Barth’s rejection of natural theology, natural revelation, or the natural knowledge of God is nuanced, far-reaching, and contextually complicated, and space does not permit us to go into every detail. Here, I describe the kind of natural theology that Barth rejects, and then indicate how the affective model addresses Barth’s rejection.

Though Barth declares that “even if we only lend our little finger to natural theology, there necessarily follows the denial of God in Jesus Christ,” he is quite specific about what he means by natural theology (Barth, Reference Barth, Parker, Johnston, Harold Knight, Haire, Bromiley and Torrance1957, 173). After all, a “natural theology which does not strive to be the only master is not a natural theology” (Barth, Reference Barth, Parker, Johnston, Harold Knight, Haire, Bromiley and Torrance1957, 173). Barth, for instance, does not deny that nature and culture could become “instruments” of revelation, nor is the issue of natural theology so much about the indispensable role of reasoning for theological reflection. As Bruce McCormack specifies, Barth is committed to a distinction between the locus and the source or power “by means of which revelation (in the Bible or in nature and history)” becomes actualized (McCormack, Reference McCormack1995, 306 n. 51). The issue for Barth, as Kevin Diller specifies, is about the “latent presumption that human reason could provide neutral and independent access to the knowledge of God apart from encounter with and transformation by God” (Diller, Reference Diller2015, 180). Clearly, Barth’s rejection of natural theology is specific, and is targeted at a particular definition of the same. I specify three features of the natural theology he rejects.

First, Barth argues that talk of natural theology or the natural knowledge of God presumes that human reason, or some human capacity, is on its own able to arrive at some true knowledge of God, such that the knowledge of God becomes obtainable by some natural means or is rendered a property of creation itself, rather than dependent on an act of God. Natural theology assumes that God is manifested “in our creatureliness, the creation of man which is also the revelation of God” (Barth, Reference Barth, Bromiley, Bromiley and Torrance1936, 130). But it would be a mistake, as Barth famously argued against Emil Brunner, to suggest that some capacity in humanity could serve as a point of contact for the Word of God (Barth, Reference Barth, Bromiley, Bromiley and Torrance1936, 65–138). To emphasize the intrinsic ability of humanity to arrive at some natural knowledge of God would be to invite the hubris of German Nazism and the identification of its own culture as the source of knowledge of the divine will (cf. Holder, Reference Holder, Brooke, Manning and Watts2013, 121; Diller, Reference Diller2015, 181). Revelation is thus never a property of creation in itself, nor a possession or capacity for humanity to actualize.

Furthermore, to claim that humans have an intrinsic capacity to know God risks projecting human ideas unto the divine, which presumes that God and creation are on the same plane of existence, leading to Barth’s probing criticisms of the analogia entis as the invention of the anti-Christ (Barth, Reference Barth, Bromiley, Bromiley and Torrance1936, xiii; see also Johnson, Reference Johnson2010). Barth does not, to be clear, reject the notion of “analogy” in itself, but argues that if there is indeed some sort of correspondence between “what we say of God and what God is,” it is on the basis of “the fact that God’s true revelation comes from out of itself to meet what we can say with our human words and makes a selection from among them to which we have then to attach ourselves in obedience” (Barth, Reference Barth, Parker, Johnston, Harold Knight, Haire, Bromiley and Torrance1957, 227). It follows, therefore, that any “knowledge” of God is not due to the intrinsic, indeed, natural capacity of human predication or reason but is due to God’s initiation and revelation, an analogia fidei.

Second, Barth argues that talk of natural theology involves the assumption that Christian theology must be validated by some neutral, general human standard, or involves the combination of theology from general philosophical principles and from supernatural revelation (Barth, Reference Barth, Parker, Johnston, Harold Knight, Haire, Bromiley and Torrance1957, 181). The question of the knowledge of God, however, cannot be established in the abstract but only in the concrete, for the word of God must be considered on its own terms. As Barth reasons:

As Diller comments, Barth was rejecting a “general starting-point assumption” typified by Enlightenment modernism, which searches for ‘a shared foundation between natural and spiritual knowing’ (Diller, Reference Diller2015, 78; see also Green, Reference Green, Brooke, Manning and Watts2013, 1–35). It is not the case that some knowledge of God is gained from general, or neutral, philosophical principles, which anticipate, verify, or are supplemented by, the material of revelation.

Third, Barth argues that revelation, properly speaking, is a revelation of the saving work of Jesus Christ. This is apparent in his exposition of Romans 1:18ff, which takes a different route than the older Reformed or Catholic readings surveyed at the beginning of this Element. Barth acknowledges that Paul is indeed talking about “man in the cosmos,” and that it “is unquestionable that knowledge of God is here ascribed to man in the cosmos, and knowability is ascribed to God” (Barth, Reference Barth, Parker, Johnston, Harold Knight, Haire, Bromiley and Torrance1957, 119). However, Barth argues that we cannot read Paul here as if he was some “unknown secular author,” and thus his words must be seen in light of the gospel in Rom. 1:17 (Barth, Reference Barth, Parker, Johnston, Harold Knight, Haire, Bromiley and Torrance1957, 119). Paul is not “speaking of the heathen in themselves and in general,” but rather about “the revelation of the grace of God in Jesus Christ” (Barth, Reference Barth, Parker, Johnston, Harold Knight, Haire, Bromiley and Torrance1957, 119). This revelation of the gospel always has a “shadow side,” namely, “the wrath of God,” and “it is of this shadow side that he speaks in the first part of the epistle” (Barth, Reference Barth, Parker, Johnston, Harold Knight, Haire, Bromiley and Torrance1957, 119). Barth is therefore rejecting any clear distinction between general and special revelation, and that revelation, if it is truly a revelation, must be redemptive and thus be about and from the grace of Jesus Christ (cf. Diller, Reference Diller2015, 192; Duby, Reference Duby2019, 123).Footnote ²³

How does the affective model address Barth’s objections? To the first objection, it is worth noting that the affective model does not locate the revelation of God as a property of creation itself, to be mined or domesticated by some intrinsic human capacity. Nor does the affective model suggest that the “point of contact” just is the structure of human nature, which manifests the being of God in some way. Rather, the “point of contact” is due solely to the divine initiative, by means of creation, which implants a feeling of the divine in each human heart. It is not the case, then, that human reason is baptized or mandated to produce some true knowledge of God, on its own, which then anticipates supernatural theology, for the sense of divinity is not, technically speaking, about human reason at all. This is why, as we have seen, Bavinck was uncomfortable with the terminology of “natural theology” and insisted that “according to Scripture, all revelation, also that in nature, is supernatural” (H. Bavinck, Reference Bavinck and Bolt2003, 307). The affective model evades Barth’s objection here because it insists that the bestowal of the feeling of the divine is a divine act, due to a sovereign initiative of divine freedom.

The response to the second objection follows from the first. Because the sense of the divine is a repressed feeling in the subconscious, it cannot serve as a starting point for a positive, Christian, theological construction. It serves as a “point of contact” only in the sense that the redemptive word in Christ addresses the existential striving of the human heart that has been stirred by that feeling of divinity. Bavinck himself, as early as 1904, was critical of the emerging German nationalism that began to identify German culture with the locus of divine revelation (see Sutanto, Reference Sutanto2024, chs. 6–7). The affective model could well accommodate and even agree with Barth’s insistence that Christian theology is grounded in revelation alone, and does not consist in a combination of a generic, philosophical theology of “pure nature” alongside the illumination of the faith. Indeed, Bavinck saw himself as standing on the Reformational recovery of the intrinsic “bond between special and general revelation” (Bavinck, Reference Bavinck and Bolt2003, 305). He suggested that the Reformed were responding to what he perceived to be a dualistic structure in Roman Catholic prolegomena, according to which “knowing and believing, reason and authority, natural and supernatural revelation, occur dualistically side by side” (Bavinck, Reference Bavinck and Bolt2003, 304). As such, the “Reformation took over this distinction between natural and supernatural revelation while nevertheless in principle assigning a very different meaning to it,” for they insisted that Scripture and illumination are necessary for humans to interpret general revelation properly (Bavinck, Reference Bavinck and Bolt2003, 304). In the language of the affective model, special revelation and the illumination of the Spirit are required for us to see clearly that we have been wrestling with the feelings of guilt and dependence instilled by the sense of the divine.

The response to the third objection is admittedly a bit less straightforward. While the affective model of Johan and Herman Bavinck would agree against sharpening a distinction between general and special revelation, the model would continue to preserve that there is, indeed, a distinction between them – God discloses himself by two means: general revelation is affective while special revelation includes verbal and propositional means. General revelation, again, is repressed by the sinful human condition, and is not to be taken on its own as a prompt for a generic, pre-dogmatic natural theological program. This, it seems, is more in keeping with the sense of Romans 1:18–32, and the traditioned interpretation of the same. Steven Duby registers a similar response towards Barth, drawing from Thomas Aquinas:

General revelation, as Paul indicates and as Duby discerns, organically anticipates the message of redemption only as guilt corresponds to grace. The affective model would further emphasize that the sinner knows these things by the created order precisely because the created order is an instrument in God’s hands, and it is God who discloses himself through them, rather than us who discover God through creation.

When the sinner is captivated by the redeeming and sanctifying work of the Spirit, the renewed intellect can indeed see in creation the glimmers of the glory of God, with special revelation providing the criteria and principles for such work, and this is what distinguishes the theologia vera from theologia falsa (Turretin, Reference Turretin, Giger and Dennison1992, 1. 2. 5). The affective model’s insistence that the sense of divinity is not reducible to a set of propositions, nor of philosophical reasoning, has the double benefit of evading Barth’s first two concerns, emphasizing that revelation is a divine work that does not affirm the positive deployment of unregenerate reason for constructing dogmatics, while simultaneously maintaining a continuity with the older traditioned readings of Romans 1 on the distinction between general and special revelation.

The response to Barth here provides the groundwork for my responses to Schilder and McFarland.

6.2 Klaas Schilder

Klaas Schilder was a Dutch Reformed theologian who worked in the neo-Calvinist tradition of Kuyper and Bavinck, and, like Barth, registered a firm “no” to “general revelation and natural theology” (Schilder, Reference Schilder, Harinck, Mouw and Jong2022, 178). Schilder does not make a strong distinction between general revelation and natural theology, and he focuses his critique in his 1939 commentary on the Heidelberg Catechism. Like Barth, however, he is focusing his critique on a rather specific definition of general revelation and its effects. He does not deny, for instance, that there is a “natural knowledge of God” that can be gained by Christians “at the hand of Scripture” (Schilder, Reference Schilder, Harinck, Mouw and Jong2022, 183). Rather, he has in view the conflation of revelation with some feature of the human condition, and, more specifically, with the work of the human conscience through a misuse or misinterpretation of Romans 2:14–15.

Schilder’s objections can be boiled down to two interconnected reasons: he suggests that the doctrine of general revelation leads to a speculative identification of human-made principles with revelation, and subsequently, therefore, to an unduly positive and elevated view of the unbelieving mind and heart. Because these two reasons are so intertwined, I shall treat them together.

Schilder observes the history of Reformed interpretations of Romans 2:14–15 and argues that they wrongly affirmed that “an extensive knowledge was available to the conscience of natural man, even apart from Scripture” (Schilder, Reference Schilder, Harinck, Mouw and Jong2022, 184). This might take the form of identifying the Stoic idea of “common notions” with general revelation, which provided principles “in the field of ethics,” or in the identification of axioms with “natural law,” such that these principles and axioms became normative alongside the word of God (Schilder, Reference Schilder, Harinck, Mouw and Jong2022, 189–190). To exacerbate matters, Schilder observes that this leads to the identification of the institutions and cultures built on the basis of these purportedly revealed axioms with the results of revelation itself, and this leads to a dangerous, chauvinistic sort of hubris. In Schilder’s mind, just as it would be foolish to identify “the time and morals in a certain age” of the Christian church in, say, “the Middle ages” with the work of special revelation, so would it be foolish “if you were to depict the life of the heathens just by saying ‘Behold, the work of general revelation!’” (Schilder, Reference Schilder, Harinck, Mouw and Jong2022, 201; emphases original). At every point, Schilder argues, one should be mindful of the distinction between revelation itself, and how “people react and respond to it” (Schilder, Reference Schilder, Harinck, Mouw and Jong2022, 200; emphases original).

This identification of revelation with human principles and axioms is, in Schilder’s judgment, what led past theologians to misuse Rom. 2:14–5 in order to pronounce a “Magnificat” to humanity in general, and to how “things are ‘not all that bad’ in my case” (Schilder, Reference Schilder, Harinck, Mouw and Jong2022, 199). His concern is the move of excusing or rendering positive judgments on the unbeliever due to their possession of general revelation, as if the “situation in which they find themselves is therefore not all that bad” (Schilder, Reference Schilder, Harinck, Mouw and Jong2022, 197). By contrast, Schilder argues that Romans 1–2 does not affirm a light in unregenerate humanity, as some kind of intrinsically praiseworthy human capacity. Rather, the point in these passages is that the sinful nature is culpable and corrupt, leaving them without excuse. The conscience and the “light” are not an affirmation of humanity but a witness to culpability. As such, Schilder argues that the conscience should not be considered as itself revealing God. Referring to Psalm 19, Schilder writes that “you cannot just consider conscience a part of general revelation, and simply apply to it what Scripture reports – in a poem, no less! – about the heavens, which declare the glory of God, and about the sky, which proclaims his handiwork” (Schilder, Reference Schilder, Harinck, Mouw and Jong2022, 207; emphasis original). Schilder hardens the distinction already found in earlier neo-Calvinists between revelation from creation and human reasoning – excluding as well the work of the fallen conscience as revelatory of God. Though Schilder affirms that “remnants” of the image of God remain in fallen humanity, he warns against using this language as an affirmation of the human being: “Will someone now turn to sing the praises of that natural light? Or the praises of the remnants? Or the praises of the conscience? Let them rather sing the praises of God, who preserves the ‘nature’ of his creatures, regardless of how fiercely they struggle against it” (Schilder, Reference Schilder, Harinck, Mouw and Jong2022, 209). Schilder concludes that the point of Romans 2:14–15, along with 1:18–23, is not the elevation of sinful human knowing as still trustworthy or praiseworthy, but as disclosing guilt and culpability.

By way of response, it is important to note that despite the polemical tone of Schilder’s objections, he never denies that there is a proper recognition of “some light of nature” in fallen humanity, but that light is “corrupted, suppressed, and resisted because of the flesh” (Schilder, Reference Schilder, Harinck, Mouw and Jong2022, 209). I suggest that the affective model preserves Schilder’s affirmation of this light of nature, and can also alleviate his worries about whether this affirmation would lead to the identification of the principles of human reason with revelation, or to a positive affirmation of the fallen mind. Indeed, to repeat the point towards Barth, the affective model can do this because the result of general revelation is not propositional and is not about the product of human reason at all.

By identifying the effect of general revelation with the sensus numinis, one can distinguish between revelation’s effects and the conceptual reception of that revelation by the human intellect. It is thus inappropriate simply to identify the notions of the Stoics with general revelation or the principles of some culture with the dictates of natural law, especially apart from the illumination of the word and Spirit. The senus numinis may stir the human mind to produce such principles, but those principles may be diverse, are not themselves revelation, and must be evaluated by special revelation. Thus, no single culture or institution can be identified intrinsically with possessing a deposit of revelation that naturally anticipates or is seamlessly compossible with special revelation. In these ways, the model can accommodate Schilder’s worries and avoid the pitfalls that he identifies.

The model, however, also preserves the classical teaching that the created mind, when illumined by the Spirit, may indeed positively and explicitly reflect on those affects. Schilder himself does this as he considers the implications of the suppression of the light of nature, and Paul, too, identifies in propositional language what those affects signify in Rom. 1:18–23, 32. However, because those affects precede conceptual reasoning, any form of human conceptual reasoning is never identical with revelation but is either consistent with, obedient to, or inconsistent with that revelation. The affective model, therefore relativizes human reasoning, and resists the identification of one particular human culture with revelation, precisely because it emphasizes that revelation is solely a divine activity, with a locus of reception that precedes propositional knowing. Scripture, illumination, and the Spirit norm the human interpretation and reception of general revelation and renders possible the conformity of reason to revelation. For emphasis, the affective model, in other words, eludes Schilder’s worries while preserving his insight that one should always mind the gap between revelation and human reception and interpretation. I also suggest that, far from affirming the consciousness or conscience of fallen humanity, the model highlights the patience and mercy of God, who continues to disclose himself to all people, despite their repression and misuse of that sense.

6.3 Ian McFarland

Finally, then, I suggest that the affective model and its phenomenological emphases prove fruitful as it addresses the more recent dogmatic work of Ian McFarland against the natural knowledge of God (McFarland, Reference McFarland2014; Reference McFarland2016). McFarland focuses on the epistemological implications of his understanding of divine transcendence and God’s exhaustive involvement within the world. In so doing, he articulates a potent and theologically motivated rejection of the natural knowledge of God, not because, as some might predict, of the positing of God’s hiddenness or inactivity within the world but precisely because of God’s immanence. Put positively, “a maximally comprehensive vision of divine involvement in the world,” he writes, actually makes “untenable any direct line of inference from creature to Creator, in the form of claims that the beauty or order of the world reveal God” (McFarland, Reference McFarland2016, 260). Precisely because God is comprehensively involved in the world, there is no direct epistemic access to God in one place or another. McFarland’s line of argumentation climaxes in this arresting passage:

McFarland’s claims here concerning the implications of the opaqueness of creation and the inability of human reasoning to infer theological claims in a bottom-up fashion are complemented in the following passage from his From Nothing:

The creator-creature distinction means that from one creaturely phenomenon only another creaturely phenomenon can be inferred, and the doctrine of God’s omnipresence and his exhaustive involvement with the world means that no particular aspect of creation provides a privileged entryway toward knowledge of God. Just as characters within a novel could never infer the existence or character of the author from the features internal to the causal nexus of the novel, so creatures cannot reason unto God from creational phenomena for “in so doing we are tracing a connection between one phenomenon and another – here to there, now to then, this to that. But if God is not one object among others, then there can be no reasoning from phenomenal entities to God” (McFarland, Reference McFarland2022, 69). The invisibility of God is the entailment of the relation between creator and creature.

Theological reasoning with respect to creation and the being of God, therefore, belongs within the standpoint of a confessing faith rather than a set of deduced claims from empirical observation or by virtue of sheer logical acumen. McFarland’s suspicions concerning the epistemic success of natural theological reasoning are thus similar to Bavinck’s (and neo-Calvinism’s) dispositions: both emphasize the necessity of starting with the Christian faith for proper dogmatic reflection, and hence both would render suspect a pre-dogmatic model of natural theology. Neo-Calvinist dogmaticians would similarly emphasize the transcendence of God and God’s exhaustive preservation and governance of the world by way of concursus.

McFarland’s exegetical emphasis on Romans 1, too, would be shared by the neo-Calvinist: whatever knowledge or talk of God that arises in the creature’s experience of the world renders that creature’s thinking “futile” because “they invariably confuse God with some lesser reality … with more abstract forms of first cause, unmoved mover, or most perfect being in what remains a worldly matrix of cause and effect” (McFarland, Reference McFarland2016, 272). As we saw, Abraham Kuyper had argued very similarly that from “the finite no conclusion can be drawn to the infinite, neither can a Divine reality be known from external or internal phenomena, unless that real God reveals Himself in my consciousness to my ego” (Kuyper, Reference Kuyper1898, 343). The emphasis in Romans 1 is thus not the possibility of a “perception of the invisible with a movement from phenomenal effect to transcendent cause,” which would be to commit a “category error,” but about the “One who comes to be known in questioning us” (McFarland, Reference McFarland2016, 273). The direction must come from the top-down as the God of Jesus Christ, who is recognized by those who are “in faith” (McFarland, Reference McFarland2016, 273).

Yet, as we’ve seen, the affective model affirms the ubiquity of general revelation whereas McFarland deemed it fitting to deny it as a useful category altogether (McFarland, Reference McFarland2016, 261, n. 3). At least one reason this is the case, given the affective model (and phenomenological account) of general revelation, is that the natural knowledge of God is not primarily a rational category but an affective one. Creation reveals and bestows a knowledge of God that is not the product of reasoning from created effects toward a transcendent cause, but a pressure exerted by a ubiquitous divine revelation that incurs a phenomenological, relational awareness of the creature’s failure to honor its creator. Much like how the awareness that a spouse is angry arises when one enters into a room merely by recognizing the spouse’s body language – without the attendance of words – God’s pervasive presence means, in dogmatic terms, that no creature exists without their awareness of their failures and dependence before their creator. Further, the unillumined reflection on divine realities that may be prompted by the sensus divinitatis, proponents of this model would insist, do remain futile, as they invariably confuse God with a lesser reality, refusing to acknowledge the God who is, due to sinful repression. Talk of God is to be distinguished from general revelation as a verbalized second moment, thereby preserving on the one hand the pervasiveness and efficacy of general revelation alongside the futility of reasoning unto God apart from faith. Those in Christ can, and do, behold the presence of God in creation, but this is only due to the illumination of the word and Spirit, and in a manner that preserves the analogical mode of theological predication. In these ways, it seems to me that the affective model of general revelation addresses McFarland in a similar way as it addresses the worries of Barth and Schilder. The model can assuage McFarland’s worries without paying the price of denying the traditioned category altogether.