Vern Poythress


Vern Sheridan Poythress is an American Calvinist philosopher, theologian, and New Testament scholar.

Biography

Poythress lived on his family farm in Madera, California until he was five years old and later moved with his family to Fresno, California. Poythress earned a B.S. from California Institute of Technology, in Mathematics in 1966, which was done in 3 years, and where he was valedictorian of his class. There, he was a William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition in 1964, while a student there. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard University, finishing in 1970. He studied linguistics and Bible translation at the Summer Institute of Linguistics at the University of Oklahoma in 1971 and 1972, and he enrolled at Westminster Theological Seminary, earning an M.Div. and a Th.M. in apologetics. He then received an M.Litt. in New Testament from Clare College, Cambridge in 1977, and received a Th.D. in New Testament from the University of Stellenbosch, Stellenbosch, South Africa, in 1981.
Poythress taught mathematics at Fresno State College for a year after earning his Ph.D. in the subject, and taught linguistics at the Summer Institute of Linguistics in the summers of 1974, 1975, and 1977. As of 2016, he was teaching New Testament and occasional courses on the philosophies of science and language at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, work he began in 1976.. As of this date, Poythress edits the Westminster Theological Journal, a role he has played since taking over for Peter Enns in 2005, and his blog with John M. Frame was listed in early 2018 as one of the top 50 Christian popular culture sites.
He was a member of the Translation Oversight Committee for the English Standard Version.
In 1981, Poythress was ordained as a teaching elder in the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod, which merged into the Presbyterian Church in America.

Thought

As an Christian evangelical, Poythress advocates the complete, divine authority of the Bible. As a Calvinist, he places great emphasis on the sovereignty of God and adopts the Neo-Calvinist theme that Jesus is Lord over every sphere of human existence, not just private or religious life. He makes use of Biblical theology in the tradition of Geerhardus Vos, and builds on Meredith G. Kline's work in Images of the Spirit to argue that "imaging" is a pattern in the Bible beyond man and woman being made in the image of God. He has a decidedly positive view of the Old Testament Law, though he rejects theonomy and Christian Reconstructionism, and he also rejects the hermeneutics of dispensationalism in favor of traditionally Reformed covenant theology. In Christian eschatology, he advocates an Augustinian amillennial perspective.
He is an advocate of Cornelius Van Til's presuppositional apologetics, particularly the ideas that epistemology and ontology must find their ultimate grounding in the Trinity. He has also sought to work out presuppositionalism's central claim that there is no neutrality in the area of science and mathematics. In a manner akin to Augustine's view that truth is divine, Poythress views scientific law as a form of the word of God. In 1976, Poythress wrote a chapter on "A Biblical View of Mathematics," in which he argued that number is eternal because the Trinity is eternal. In a 1983 article, he suggested that mathematics is the rhyme of the universe. His philosophy of science draws on the work of Thomas Kuhn.
A central idea in Poythress' thought has concerned the validity of multiple perspectives, or multiperspectivalism, a project that he shares with his teacher and collaborator John Frame. In Poythress's work Philosophy, Science, and the Sovereignty of God, he explored how the scientific concepts of wave, particle and field can be used analogically to demonstrate different ways of looking at things. He argued that such a triadic structure is "a means of avoiding unhealthy dualism", and he continued on this line of thought in Symphonic Theology, where he applied multiperspectivalism to theology.

Publications

Poythress has published a number of books in different fields — Christian philosophy of science, linguistics, theological method, dispensationalism, biblical law, copyright law, hermeneutics, Bible translation, and eschatology and the Book of Revelation including:
He has contributed to a number of other volumes such as The Foundations of Christian Scholarship, Hermeneutics, Inerrancy, and the Bible, The New Testament Student and His Field, Inerrancy and Hermeneutic: A Tradition, A Challenge, A Debate, Theonomy: A Reformed Critique, Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, New Geneva Study Bible, and The Spirit of the Reformation Study Bible.
Additionally, he has published a number of scholarly articles, including:
Poythress married his wife Diane in 1983, and they have two sons.