Placing Creation before Creator: Scripture before Jesus

Here is a video I have only watched 30 minutes of thus far (and don’t know if I’ll get further), it is a discussion hosted by doctoral student Camden Bucey with professor at Westminster Theological Seminary, K. Scott Oliphant and I believe Oliphant’s son (who is also connected with WTS). They are discussing, mostly, the doctrine of scripture and a theory of revelation; and of course they do so from a classically Reformed, and Westminster directed, understanding of this. In particular they are getting into the presuppositional approach of Cornelius van Til, and how this relates to his theory of revelation and scripture. One thing of note, a point that I disagree with them on, is that they collapse ‘Revelation’ into scripture (and thus absolutize the propositional and written words of scripture), and do not primarily associate Revelation with God’s Self-revelation in the person of Christ. This is not to say that they don’t think Jesus is an aspect of God’s revelation, it’s that they think that scripture, epistemologically, must precede Jesus so that we might ‘know’ that Jesus is indeed is revelation. So Jesus, in this approach becomes a predicate of scripture as revelation, instead of scripture becoming predicated as God’s Word only in and through its capacity to bear witness to Jesus, its reality and purpose (as is all of creation’s purpose, Jesus that is). So they show their methodological approach, clearly; they place creation (or scripture) before covenant, or God’s life; or they disconnect ontology from epistemology, or they don’t ground Creator/creature in the person of Jesus Christ. This is where, as a functional evangelical Calvinist, I move away from the classically Reformed; I want to move and breathe from the reality that Jesus is indeed the center, and that he precedes scripture’s giving and breathing as its reality from before historic time and into it as its ground and reality. Here is that video:

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