I have been having an ongoing discussion with two brothers; Nathan (a guy I went to Bible College with, and we both went to the same Seminary too), and then Kc, a dear brother who I have gotten to know over the years through blogging (like so many of you!). We have been discussing what free will, so called, entails (if there is even such a thing, or if this is the best lingo to describe it); and then this has also, now led us to a discussion of God’s grace and what in fact that might involve. I spent some time today, while at work, on my breaks in our little computer lab punching out a few responses to Kc and Nathan. I thought, since I am exceedingly tired, that I would reproduce those as a post here; to see if they might garner further feedback, or maybe they might serve helpful to someone out there in the great wide world of the blogosphere. The first response has to do with ‘human freedom’, and how that relates to our ‘choice’. The second is in direct response to Kc, and how he views God’s grace versus what he perceives of my view of grace (also, the last paragraph is in response to how I think Kc perceives Torrance’s concept of sin and salvation and sins continued (or not) effects in the believer’s life).

Response to Nathan on my view of what human freedom means and where it comes from.

God alone is the only free non-contingent self-determined being simpliciter; thus, if creation can be said to be ‘free’ (or have ‘free desires’) it can only be in a contingent way as it participates from the only kind of freedom available (from and thus for God). So creation’s freedom (while having an independent integrity of its own as creation) is a contingent freedom, and it is only ever truly freedom when it finds its terminus in God’s life of freedom for the other (which is is how I would describe God’s self given being, as subject-in-being or onto-relational). So whom the Son sets free is free indeed; free for God. There is only freedom of desires when our hearts of stone have been replaced (recreated) through Christ’s heart of flesh which we participate from as we are joined to his humanity by the Spirit. There is no other alternative way to speak about human freedom, theologically. (surely we can speculate and make inferences from our human intuition, but this is foundationalist methodology that imposes an abstracted aparatus upon God’s Self-revelation as it reasons from its own being to God’s or the analogia entis or analogy of being; which my personal chapter in our book is on, and which I reject, methodologically … I follow something like Barth’s analogy of faith and/or TFT’s).

Unless, we want to set up a competitive relation between the God-world Creator-creature relation; we will not posit an ontological category of desire or freedom that is not first grounded in God’s desire or freedom for us; as mediated through the homoousios life of the Son, our high priest, our mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus. This is how I view freedom, and anthropology, Nathan; as participationist.  To me, all other discussion of human freedom and desire is non-sensical as it arises from a position that is non-being or nothing.

Response to Kc on my view of God’s grace as personal (I am going to quote Kc’s distinction that he makes between mine and his view of grace as the jumping off point for my response back to him).

Kc writes: “Where Bobby would say that grace is a person, Jesus Christ, I would say the grace of God that brings salvation is the revelation of Jesus Christ.”

But ultimately, at least theo-logically there is a problem here that I think you would rather avoid, Kc. When you say that the ‘grace of God that brings salvation’ you make Jesus Christ the predicate of a quality or ‘attribute’ known as grace, of which grace is now the subject. To think through these terms is no different than how a classic Calvinist or Arminian thinks of the decrees as the intermediary created realities through which God interacts with creation. This is to place creation prior to God, in an order of being; and thus in the incarnation of Christ, he is meeting the conditions of ‘grace’ (whatever those are) and thus becomes only the instrument of “God’s grace,” instead of grace himself, in his act toward/for us. So this places a rupture in God’s life, and subordinates the Son to the Father (which in Church history is consider a heresy).

I want to think of grace as God’s personal act for us in himself (antecedently), and temporally made manifest in the incarnation of the Son. So I see God’s covenant life of grace preceding creation instead of following it. This emphasizes the primacy of Christ over all creation as its purpose (Col. 1.15ff). So we can then think of God’s purpose in creation as always already mediated through the Son who in Colossians 1 is called the icon or image of God. So to think from protology (first things) to eschatology (last things), if the eternal Son is the image of God, humanity was originally created in the Son’s image; and yet, this was not all that God had in store for creation (i.e. protology), since his life is eschatological. So given the ‘Fall’ humanity was ripped asunder from God’s image in his Son and from his being, into non-being. Yet humanity was kept/covered (Rom. 3:25) and suspended by God’s grace in his ongoing being for us in his Son. It was this being, the image of God, that incarnated for us, died, buried, and rose again through which we have been re-created; so now we have become mirrors of the mirror of God’s image (and exact representation Heb 1.3) in the (imago Christi) ‘image of Christ’. This is God’s grace, it is his person, in Christ for us reconciling us back to union with God through Christ; but back to something much greater, back through the mediator and point and purpose of all creation; through Jesus Christ, and it is in his eschatological life that our lives have purpose as we participate in him by the grace of his humiliating act of in-humaning.

Further, I do not hold to a form of perfectionism; that misunderstands TFT’s point. Instead, while the life of Christ is stable and perfect, and it is this kind of life that we participate in; we are still in the now aspect of the not yet coming consummate form of the kingdom. And it is this coming kingdom in Christ that breaks in on us anew and afresh every morning through which we have the power to reckon ourselves dead to sin and alive to and through Christ. This is the point of TFT’s ontological theory of the atonement; Christ penetrates into the depth of our sinful lives and hearts, and redeems us from the inside out. Starting in his crib, penultimately at the cross, burial, resurrection and ascension; and ultimately at the consummation of all things at his second advent when he makes all things new in fully realized form. This is when the protology of God’s life will be ‘fully’ known in eschatological form; the form that has always shaped even the ‘first things of God’s life’ in his gracious act of original creation (gracious because he, according to his outward othered focused life he choose to create a counterpoint that he might love us in the Son, the point of the creation).

**All of the above comes from my reading, of course, of many theologians and Scripture; primarily: Athanasius, Barth, TF Torrance, John Webster, and mostly, Myk Habets. It must be obvious that I just jotted these little replies rather quickly and off the top, but I hope they give you some further insight into my thinking on such things. I think it is probably quite obvious to some—and no surprise—that my thinking on such things is very much so what can be called Torrancean, and clearly Habetsian … but I like to think that these things have an impress of my own upon them as well. Now let me have it …