Monday, November 8, 2021

John Frame (Reformed) on "The Heart" vs. Absolutization of Jeremiah 17:9

  

THE HEART

 

The knowledge of God is a heart-knowledge (see Exod. 35:5; 1 Sam. 2:1; 2 Sam. 7:3; Pss. 4:4; 7:10; 15:2; Isa. 6:10; Matt. 5:8; 12:34; 22:37; Eph. 1:18; etc.). The heart is the “center” of the personality, the person himself in his most basic character. Scripture represents it as the source of through, of volition, of attitude, of speech. It is also the seat of moral knowledge. In the Old Testament, heart is used in contexts where conscience would be an acceptable translation (see 1 Sam. 24:5).

 

The fact that the heart is depraved, then, means that apart from grace we are in radical ignorance of the things of God (Part One). Only the grace of God, which restores us from the heart outward, can restore to us the knowledge of God that belongs to God’s covenant servants—the knowledge that is correlative with obedience.

 

One implication of this fact is that the believer’s knowledge of God is inseparable from godly character. The same Spirit who gives the first in regeneration also gives the second. And the qualifications for the ministry of teaching (theology) in Scripture are predominately moral qualifications (1 Tim. 3:1ff.; 1 Peter 5:1ff.) Thus the quality of theological work is dependent not only on propositional knowledge or on skills in logic, history, linguistics, and so forth (which, of course, believers and unbelievers share to a large extent); it is also dependent on the theologian’s character. (We saw in Part One how knowledge and obedience are linked in Scripture.)

 

A second implication is that the knowledge of God is gained not only through one “faculty” or another, such as the intellect or the emotions, but through the heart, the whole person. The theologian knows by means of everything he is and all the abilities and capacities that have been given him by God. Intellect, emotions, will, imagination, sensation, natural and spiritual gifts of skills—all contribute toward the knowledge of God. All knowledge of God enlists all our faculties, because it engages everything that we are. (John M. Frame, The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God [A Theology of Lordship; Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1987], 322-23)