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John Frame | |
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Born | [ citation needed ] Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S. | April 8, 1939
Occupation(s) | Theologian, author |
Notable work | Theology of Lordship series, Van Til: The Theologian, Introduction to Presuppositional Apologetics |
Spouse | Mary Grace |
Children | 2 |
Era | Late 20th and early 21st centuries |
Region | US |
Language | English |
Main interests | Calvinism, Cornelius Van Til, epistemology, presuppositional apologetics, ethics, systematic theology |
Notable ideas | Multiperspectivalism |
John McElphatrick Frame (born April 8, 1939) is a retired American Christian philosopher and Calvinist theologian especially noted for his work in epistemology and presuppositional apologetics, systematic theology, and ethics. He is one of the foremost interpreters and critics of the thought of Cornelius Van Til. [1]
Frame was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania [2] and became a Christian at the age of 13 through the ministry of Beverly Heights Presbyterian Church, a congregation of the United Presbyterian Church of North America in Pittsburgh. [3] He graduated from Princeton University, where he was involved in the Princeton Evangelical Fellowship (PEF) and Westerly Road Church. [3] The PEF and Westerly Road had a profound impact on forming Frame's faith and theology. He says of their impact:
I owe much to PEF ... Fullerton and PEF cared deeply about people, spending hours in mutual prayer, exhortation, counseling, gospel witness. I never experienced that depth of fellowship in any Reformed church or institution ... So I am not much impressed by people who want to set up an adversary relation between "Reformed" and "evangelical." Today, Reformed writers often disparage evangelical ministries as circuses, as clubs that will do anything at all to gain members, who pander to the basest lusts of modern culture. That was not true of PEF, or of Westerly Road Church ... PEF would never have imagined the effect their ministry had on me: they turned me into a Reformed ecumenist! [4]
Frame received degrees from Princeton University (A.B.), [5] Westminster Theological Seminary (BD), [5] Yale University (AM, [5] and M.Phil. [5] and began work on a doctoral dissertation). [5] He received an honorary doctorate of divinity in 2003 from Belhaven College. [6] He has served on the faculty of Westminster Theological Seminary, [5] and was a founding faculty member of their California campus; [3] as of 2019 [update] , Frame is an emeritus faculty member at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, Florida. [7] He is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church in America.[ citation needed ]
Frame is known for his critical view of historical modes of theology, including his criticism of such scholars as David F. Wells, Donald Bloesch, Mark Noll, George Marsden, D.G. Hart, Richard Muller, and Michael Horton. Particularly notable amongst Frame's critical analyses is "Machen's Warrior Children", originally published in Alister E. McGrath and Evangelical Theology: a Dynamic Engagement (Paternoster Press, 2003). [8] More recently, Frame reviewed Horton's book Christless Christianity with a similar analysis. [9] In 1998, he debated then librarian D.G. Hart in a student-organized discussion of the regulative principle of worship. [10]
This article appears to contradict the article Multiperspectivalism .(May 2007) |
Frame has elaborated a Christian epistemology in his 1987 work The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God. In this work, he develops what he calls triperspectivalism or multiperspectivalism which says that in every act of knowing, the knower is in constant contact with three things (or "perspectives") – the knowing subject himself, the object of knowledge, and the standard or criteria by which knowledge is attained. He argues that each perspective is interrelated to the others in such a fashion that, in knowing one of these, one actually knows the other two, also. His student and collaborator Vern Poythress has further developed this idea with respect to science and theology. Reformed theologian Meredith Kline wrote a critique of this view, explaining that Poythress and Frame had used multiperspectivalism in ways that had led to what he considered incorrect conclusions in regards to the relation of Kline's position and Greg L. Bahnsen's on covenant theology (more specifically theonomy). [11] [ verification needed ]
As a former student of Van Til, Frame is supporter of the presuppositionalist school of Christian apologetics. He defines a presupposition as follows:
A presupposition is a belief that takes precedence over another and therefore serves as a criterion for another. An ultimate presupposition is a belief over which no other takes precedence. For a Christian, the content of Scripture must serve as his ultimate presupposition. ... This doctrine is merely the outworking of the lordship of God in the area of human thought. It merely applies the doctrine of scriptural infallibility to the realm of knowing. [12] [ full citation needed ]
Frame, developing the thought of his mentor Cornelius Van Til, has asserted in both his Apologetics to the Glory of God and his Cornelius Van Til: An Analysis of His Thought,[ full citation needed ] that all non-Christian thought can be categorized as the ebb and flow of rationalism and irrationalism.
In this context Frame defines rationalism as any attempt to establish the finite human mind as the ultimate standard of truth and falsity. This establishing of the autonomous intellect occurs within the context of rejecting God's revelation of himself in both nature and the Bible; a rationalist, in this sense, states that the human mind is able to fully and exhaustively explain reality.[ citation needed ]
Yet, when Frame speaks of "exhaustive explanations" he does not mean these systems seek omniscience; rather, he means[ according to whom? ] that the history of non-Christian thought (though, admittedly, his focus is Western philosophy) is the history of various attempts to construct systems that account for everything (a distinctive metaphysic, epistemology and value theory).
According to Frame, examples of attempts to explain reality are found in Plato and Aristotle's form/matter dualism; the debate between the nominalists and the realists over the status of universals and particulars, and the "all is ... [fire, water, atoms,etc]" of the pre-Socratics.[ citation needed ] More examples would include Descartes' mind/body dualism, Spinoza's God or nature, and Leibniz's monadology, Plotinus' "The One" and his teaching on emanation, the British empiricists' attempts to limit knowledge and possibility to that which can be empirically verified, Kant's worlds of the noumena and the phenomena, and Hegel's dialectic.
This section needs expansionwith: independent, third-party-sourced coverage of the full scope of Frame's awards, etc.. You can help by adding to it. (July 2019) |
Belhaven College awarded Frame an honorary Doctor of Divinity in 2003. [6]
Frame married Mary Grace Cummings in 1984, and has two sons and three stepchildren. [2] As of 2024, he lives in Orlando, Florida.[ needs update ] [2]
The Transcendental Argument for the existence of God (TAG) is an argument that attempts to prove the existence of God by appealing to the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience and knowledge.
Francis August Schaeffer was an American evangelical theologian, philosopher, and Presbyterian pastor. He co-founded the L'Abri community in Switzerland with his wife Edith Schaeffer, née Seville, a prolific author in her own right. Opposed to theological modernism, Schaeffer promoted what he claimed was a more historic Protestant faith and a presuppositional approach to Christian apologetics, which he believed would answer the questions of the age.
Fideism is a term used to name a standpoint or an epistemological theory which maintains that faith is independent of reason, or that reason and faith are hostile to each other and faith is superior at arriving at particular truths. The word fideism comes from fides, the Latin word for faith, and literally means "faith-ism". Philosophers have identified a number of different forms of fideism. Strict fideists hold that reason has no place in discovering theological truths, while moderate fideists hold that though some truth can be known by reason, faith stands above reason.
Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield was an American professor of Reformed theology at Princeton Seminary from 1887 to 1921. He served as the last principal of the Princeton Theological Seminary from 1886 to 1902. After the death of Warfield in office, Francis Landey Patton took over the functions of the office as the first president of seminary. Some conservative Presbyterians consider him to be the last of the great Princeton theologians before the split in 1929 that formed Westminster Theological Seminary and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.
Systematic theology, or systematics, is a discipline of Christian theology that formulates an orderly, rational, and coherent account of the doctrines of the Christian faith. It addresses issues such as what the Bible teaches about certain topics or what is true about God and his universe. It also builds on biblical disciplines, church history, as well as biblical and historical theology. Systematic theology shares its systematic tasks with other disciplines such as constructive theology, dogmatics, ethics, apologetics, and philosophy of religion.
Presuppositionalism is an epistemological school of Christian apologetics that examines the presuppositions on which worldviews are based, and invites comparison and contrast between the results of those presuppositions.
Gordon Haddon Clark was an American philosopher and Calvinist theologian. He was a leading figure associated with presuppositional apologetics and was chairman of the Philosophy Department at Butler University for 28 years. He was an expert in pre-Socratic and ancient philosophy and was noted for defending the idea of propositional revelation against empiricism and rationalism, in arguing that all truth is propositional. His theory of knowledge is sometimes called scripturalism.
Gregory Lyle Bahnsen, credited in most of his books as Greg Bahnsen, was an American Calvinist philosopher and Christian apologist. He was a minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and a full-time Scholar in Residence for the Southern California Center for Christian Studies (SCCCS). He is also considered a contributor to the field of Christian apologetics, as he popularized the presuppositional method of Cornelius Van Til. He is the father of David L. Bahnsen, an American portfolio manager, author, and television commentator.
Christian apologetics is a branch of Christian theology that defends Christianity.
Edward John Carnell was a prominent Christian theologian and apologist, was an ordained Baptist pastor, and served as President of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. He was the author of nine major books, several of which attempted to develop a fresh outlook in Christian apologetics. He also wrote essays that were published in several other books, and was a contributor of articles to periodicals such as The Christian Century and Christianity Today.
John Henry Gerstner was an American Reformed and Presbyterian theologian and professor of Church History at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and Knox Theological Seminary. He was an expert on the life and theology of Jonathan Edwards.
Kenneth L. Gentry Jr. is a Reformed theologian, and an ordained minister in the Reformed Presbyterian Church General Assembly. He is particularly known for his support for and publication on the topics of orthodox preterism and postmillennialism in Christian eschatology, as well as for theonomy and Young Earth creationism. He holds that each of these theological distinctives are logical and theological extensions of his foundational theology.
Neo-Calvinism, a form of Dutch Calvinism, is a theological movement initiated by the theologian and former Dutch prime minister Abraham Kuyper in the first years of the twentieth century. James Bratt has identified a number of different types of Dutch Calvinism: The Seceders, split into the Reformed Church "West" and the Confessionalists; the neo-Calvinists; and the Positives and the Antithetical Calvinists. The Seceders were largely infralapsarian and the neo-Calvinists usually supralapsarian.
Louis Berkhof was a Dutch-American Reformed theologian whose works on systematic theology have been influential in seminaries and Bible colleges in the United States, Canada, Korea and with individual Christians in general throughout the 20th century.
Vern Sheridan Poythress is an American philosopher, theologian, New Testament scholar and mathematician, who is currently the New Testament chair of the ESV Oversight Committee. He is also the Distinguished Professor of New Testament, Biblical Interpretation, and Systematic Theology at Westminster Theological Seminary and editor of Westminster Theological Journal.
Multiperspectivalism is an approach to knowledge advocated by Calvinist philosophers John Frame and Vern Poythress.
David M. VanDrunen is the Robert B. Strimple Professor of Systematic Theology and Christian Ethics at Westminster Seminary California. VanDrunen was the 2004 recipient of the Acton Institute's Novak Award, a visiting fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University in 2009, and a Henry Luce III Fellow in Theology for the 2016–2017 academic year.
Northwest Theological Seminary was a theological seminary in the Reformed Christian tradition located in Lynnwood, Washington. It closed in 2018.
Richard Linwood Pratt Jr. is an American theologian, author, and founder and President of Third Millennium Ministries. Third Millennium was launched in response to the lack of training of Christian leaders around the world. Third Millennium recognizes where the church is growing the fastest, those Christian leaders have the least amount of training. Pratt personally witnessed this in the 1980s as he traveled for missions. Helping the church worldwide has become his passion. He believes that any person that has the desire to learn more about the Bible should be given that opportunity in their own land, in their own language, and at no cost.
Cornelius Van Til was a Dutch-American Reformed theologian, who is credited as being the originator of modern presuppositional apologetics.