Monthly Archives: April 2014

Reading Scripture In the Life of the Trinity, In Theosis

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I must admit, ever since encountering Patristic theology and their hermeneutics in seminary (back in 2002) for the first time, my compass for hermeneutical theory began to take a tailspin. And then a little later, as I continued to dig, and engage with Thomas Torrance, Karl Barth, John Webster, Matthew Levering, and even some Puritans, my compass became even more erratic. I was trained, informally, as an evangelical (growing up as the son bible-compassof a Baptist pastor), to study the Bible inductively, and really through the rationalist history of religions school and German higher criticism that sliced and diced Scripture into manageable, and even unrelated pieces. When I entered Bible College (the first time in 1992, and then 1996-97 at Calvary Chapel Bible College, and then finally my alma mater 1998-2001 at Multnomah Bible College) I began to be taught, formally, how to interpret Scripture, again, in a fragmented way, which could only at the end of my Bible study attempt to integrate Jesus into my biblical interpretation somehow. This culminated for me (which at this point looks like it will be my terminal degree), in 2002-03, when I entered seminary at Multnomah Biblical Seminary; I began work on an MA in Biblical Studies, which included course work, crowned with a Masterā€™s thesis paper, which I had to defend in order to earn my MA. I chose to do my thesis paper on I Corinthians 1:17-25, which was an exegetical analysis of that pericope. I successfully defended that in 2003, and earned my MA in Biblical Studies. But what this paper did (100 pages as it was), was demonstrate and illustrate how I used to study the Bible back then; very analytically, inductively, expositionally, verse by verse, and through hermeneutical premises that were and have been largely absent from the bulk of the Christian church. In other words, even though my passage of consideration was about Jesus and the cross, my method of interpretation was not premised, hermeneutically, upon the reality of Jesus and the cross; instead it was premised upon premises provided for evangelical Bible study that were provided for it by people who are not evangelical (historically and even culturally understood), and who might even be antagonistic to the Christian faith. In the end I actually liked what I was able to produce for my Masterā€™s thesis paper (my examiners did too), but I wonder what it would have looked like if it had been given shape under hermenutical pressure that was more intentionally Christ centered?

Is it even possible to exegete under a ā€˜Christ-centeredā€™ and Trinitarian pressure? The early church believed it was possible, and proceeded without apology to exegete the Old Testament as if it was all about Christ; and under the Apostolic mantle provided for that method by the authors of the New Testament themselves. Donald Fairbairn (a Patristics expert par excellence) has just helped me, immensely, to think about this issue once again, in a very helpful and definitive way. My compass has been wandering here and there, hermeneutically, I have been deeply influenced, as I mentioned, by T. F. Torrance, and in particular to this issue, by his book Divine Meaning: Studies in Patristic Hermeneutics; but I have had problems, quite frankly, trying to practically conceive of a way to interpret and apply Scripture in a way that is genuinely Christ centered, hermeneutically, and at the same time, critically available to the tools provided by what might be called ā€˜modernā€™ exegesis (literary, canonical, historical, etc.). This is where what Fairbairn, in a straightforward and succinct way has helped me with today; he has placed hermeneutics, at least in the way I am appropriating it, within the realm of the Greek Christian understanding of theosis, so in the domain of Christian salvation (soteriology)ā€“this would fit well, in some respects, with Matthew Leveringā€™s idea of participatory history. Let me share the two paragraphs from Fairbairn that have helped and edified me today; I hope they will be edifying for you too:

Roots Of Patristic And Modern Old Testament Interpretation

At this point, we as evangelicals should notice a significant incongruity latent in our situation. We accept (albeit with reservation) a method of biblical interpretation that historically arose among scholars who rejected most of our core convictions about the Bibleā€“that it is from God, that it is a book telling a single story, that its various writings are fundamentally unified, that its central subject is Christ. Furthermore, without giving the matter a lot of thought, we reject allegory as a way of interpreting the Hebrew Bible, a way that is found in the New Testament and that was widely used in the early church, even though that kind of interpretation grows out of the same convictions that we share. It is indeed ironic that when a church father who shares all of our basic convictions argues for a connection between this Old Testament passage and that New Testament reality, we reject his argument out of hand because our masters in the school of modern interpretation (masters who do not share our convictions) have branded such exegesis as allegory. And it is even more ironic that our adherence to a plain-sense, nonallegorical method is so intense that the New Testament itself disturbs us when it connects the Testaments in a way that sounds like allegory to us. We wind up thinking that Paul and Matthew were allowed to handle the Old Testament this way because they were divinely inspired, but surely we must not handle the Old Testament this way.

If we recognize the incongruity I have been discussing, then we should also see that there is more than ā€œmere allegoryā€ going on when the church fathers interpret the Old Testament. In contrast to modern liberals (who might see no unifying theme in Scripture) and in partial contrast to modern conservatives (who tend to organize Scripture around concepts such as the covenant or the dispensations which have governed Godā€™s dealings with humanity), the church fathers tended to see the scarlet thread, the unifying theme of Scripture, as Christ. Again, this unifying theme places the emphasis in a rather different place than we do. We today start with ourselves and ask how God relates to us. The church fathers started with God, and especially with Christ, and asked how we participate in Christ. This is why virtually all of patristic thought saw theōsisā€“humanityā€™s becoming somehow a participant in the divine lifeā€“as the link between God and humanity. Furthermore, this is why one strand of patristic thought, the one I think is most fruitful for us today, understood theōsis in terms of the Fatherā€™s relationship to the Son and saw our participation in this relationship as the scarlet thread of the Christian faith. If one does theology in the way the church fathers did, with the life of the three trinitarian persons at the heart, then one will seek to find those trinitarian personsā€“especially the preincarnate Sonā€“throughout the Old Testament.[1]

This is the way that T.F. Torrance sought to interpret Scripture (just read his two volumes: Incarnation & Atonement), and it is the way that I personally believe is the most fruitful and edifying way for Christians to engage in as exegetes.

So instead of using dispensations (as I was trained to do), or ā€˜the covenantā€™ (as people who attend places like Westminster Theological Seminary are trained to do) as hermeneutically regulative for the biblical interpretive process; along with Fairbairn, Torrance, the Patristics, Barth, Webster, Levering and others, it is better, in my estimation, to allow our hermeneutical theory and practice to be established by the One who has given revelation of Himself to begin with; and it is better to practice exegesis from within this relationship, within the realm of ā€˜salvationā€™ or ā€˜reconciliationā€™ and ā€˜participationā€™ in Godā€™s triune life mediated through Christ. Does this mean that we cannot employ modern critical tools while doing exegesis? I donā€™t think so. But what it means is that we wonā€™t let those tools (whatever they are) be the basis for our hermeneutical theory. In other words we wonā€™t just read Scripture ā€˜as literatureā€™ (because it is more not less than literature, it has a different location from other literature, Ā what might be called ā€˜profane literatureā€™); we wonā€™t just read Scipture ā€˜as historyā€™ (because it is more not less than history, it is where God providentially has interpreted through His Son for us, His life for us, and our life for Him through the vicarious humanity of Christ through Apostolic Deposit); and we wonā€™t, then, read Scripture but within the domain of grace, and in particular faith, which is established by its rule in Jesus Christ.

Ā 

 

[1] Donald Fairbairn, Life in the Trinity: An Introduction To Theology With The Help Of The Church Fathers (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2009), 114-15.

What Hath Einstein to Do With Calvinism and Arminianism?

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I think what often gets lost in the Calvinist/Arminian discussion among many non-specialist thinkers (but specialist thinkers too!) is the idea of ‘causation’. As Western people, especially in North America (but albert_einstein_256515elsewhere in the so called ‘developed’ world as well) we have simply inherited a very analytical and Newtonian mechanical understanding of how things work. We have lost all sense of dynamism in the way things relate, and we have overlaid our personal relationships, whether those take place at home, work, the church, etc., with philosophical baggage. And we attempt to squeeze our relationships into patterns that think of people and relationships more in terms of mathematical equations or logical syllogisms (just think of on-line dating for example; i.e. e-Harmony.com, Match.com, etc; or personality tests that corporations often require their potential or new employees to take; etc.) than in actual personal terms (which cannot be quantified). And so we take this kind of Newtonian or even Euclidian (geometric) understanding of human relationships, and apply that to the way we think about God. But this would be wrong. God, nor humans, created in the image of Christ (imago Christi), are susceptible to being reduced to a mathematical equation or logical syllogism; instead the way God relates, and thus people relate to others is dynamic and truly personal (meaning truly Trinitarian). We can’t measure God’s interaction with His creation/creatures by reducing that to a kind of mechanical matrix of a rigidly conception of cause and effect relationships. And the interesting thing about this, is that nature itself, created by a Triune relational God, bears witness to this dynamic reality; a reality that moves us beyond what we as Western Protestant Christians have inherited through the informing philosophy that guides the classical offerings of Calvinism and Arminianism. Thomas F. Torrance in his bookĀ Divine And Contingent OrderĀ develops this further, by describing the sea-change that occurred through Einstein’s work on the theory of relativity (don’t let this scare you away), and what this illustrates about the way the universe itself was created, and how this disrupts, or should, our conception of thinking about relationships with other humans, and God in particular, away from a rigid logical understanding of causation. Here is what Thomas Torrance has written:

… Thus Faraday and Maxwell opened the way for a new understanding of nature in terms of field theory which could be set against the Newtonian outlook and which, in spite of Maxwell’s acceptance of Newtonian dualism and mechanism, pointed to a non-mechanical view of the universe in which matter and field are unified.

The decisive step in this direction was taken by Einstein in his rejection of Newtonian dualism and mechanism. Following on clarification particularly by H. Hertz and H.A. Lorentz of difficult problems resulting from contradictions between Maxwellian and Newtonian mechanics, Einstein introduced a fundamental change into field theory, coordinating it with a startlingly new view of the universe and its unitary dynamic order, very different from the Newtonian world-view. He dethroned time and space from their absolute, unvarying, prescriptive role in the Newtonian system and brought them down to empirical reality, where he found them indissolubly integrated with its on-going processes. At the same time he set aside the idea of instantaneous action at a distance, but also set aside the existence of ether (still maintained by Lorentz) and all idea of the substantiality of the field (in Faraday’s sense). There now emerged the concept of the continuous field of space-time which interacts with the constituent matter/energy of the universe, integrating everything within it in accordance with its unitary yet variable objective rational order of non-causal connections. Thus instead of explaining the behaviour of the field and all events within it in terms of the motion of separated material substances characterize by unique unchanging patterns and defined by reference to the conditioning of an inertial system, and therefore in terms of quantifiable motion and strict mechanical causes, Einstein explained it in terms of the objective configuration of the indivisible field and the dynamic invariant relatedness inherent in itā€“that is to say, in terms of the principle of relativity. It was the radical break with Newtonian mechanics and the Newtonian world-view that made relativity so difficult to grasp, but it was in coherence with this new understanding of the universe and its intrinsic order that Einstein also sought to develop quantum theory, without a duality of particle and field, which, as he believed, calls for the determination of relativistic field-structures in a proper scientific description of empirical reality, rather than a merely statistical account of quantum-experimental events and conditions. If a statistical approach is required in quantum mechanics it cannot rest content with offering an account of how experiments operate, but must offer an account of reality itself. All this implied the unification of matter and field in a dynamic, unbroken continuumā€“i.e. without theĀ contiguousĀ yetĀ discontinuousĀ connection of particles as in the Cartesian ‘field’ā€“which prompted Einstein to devote so much attention to developing a unified theory and thereby determining the general laws of the whole indivisible filed. Although Einstein himself was not able to achieve this specific aim, nevertheless he succeeded, particularly through general relativity, as the staggering unfolding of its implications and the verification of its predictions have since shown, in opening the way toward a unified view of the universe with a very different conception of order. ā€“Thomas F. Torrance,Ā Divine And Contingent OrderĀ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 77-8.

Okay, much of that may have sounded like gibberish to you (but I assure you, it is not!), but either way, what it should illustrate for you is that the way we think about reality and the way it works should not be something that we superimpose artificially upon it, thus forcing it into the mold we would have it operate in; but instead, we ought to come and accept that the universe itself (contingent as it is directly upon the Word of God, Gen. 1:1; Heb. 1:1-3) has its own given intelligibility, given to it by God, and allow the way it operates to inform the way we think about how God works, and relates to His creation, even in its very composition. In short, if the universe, at a fundamental level, does Ā not operate in a mechanical logically syllogistic way, then it would be wrong for us to tell the universe that it needs to operate under the conditions that we want it to operate within (Newton, Euclid, et al.).

Bringing this home now: How does this relate to classical Calvinism and Arminianism (among other classical theisms)? Calvinism and Arminianism largely operate from a system of thought about reality (metaphysics), that holds that God relates to creation “mechanically” (like a Newtonian view of the universe); and that God then relates to creation throughĀ decreesĀ and built into the creation there are secondary causes that determine how creation itself will operate based upon God’s arbitrary choice. In effect this de-personalizes the relation of creation to Creator, and undercuts the idea that God at His core is Triune and personal. But, as Torrance, through Einstein and others has highlighted, is that the universe at a sub-atomic level is not put together this way; as corollary then, it would be better to recognize that the metaphysics and theory of causation that informs Calvinist and Arminian theology is not adequate, and that we should look for a theological approach that aligns with what is actually revealed and given to us by God; instead of imposing our theories about how God acts toward his creation based upon worn out and out-dated conceptions of metaphysics.

Assurance of Salvation between Theodore Beza and John Calvin

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If you need assurance who would you rather listen to; Theodore Beza or John Calvin? Or neither?

In order to resist this second [temptation], it is necessary to know if we have this faith or not. The means is to ascend (monter) from the effects (effets)Ā to a knowledge of the cause (cause) which produces them. Now, the effects (effets) that Jesus Christ produces in us, when we have apprehended him by faith, are two. In the first place, there is the testimony that the Holy Spirit gives to our spirit, that we are children of God . . . . Secondly, . . . when by faith Jesus Christ has given himself to us eternally in order to dwell in us, his virtue produces and reveals there his powers, which are known in Scripture by the word “regeneration” . . . . This regeneration has three parts . . . . The power of Jesus Christ coming to take possession of us produces three effects (effets) in us: the mortification of this corruption which Scripture calls the old man, his burial, and finally, the resurrection of the new man . . . . To know this regeneration it is necessary to come to its fruits. Thus, . . . the man, being set free from sin . . . begins to do what we call good works (4.13).

Need more:

[Good works] make us more and more certain of our salvation, not as causes of it, but as testimonies and effects (effets) of the cause (cause), that is, our faith . . . . Since good works are for us sure testimonies of our faith, it follows that they also make us certain of our eternal election . . . . So then, when Satan puts us in doubt about our election, it is not necessary to first go and search for the decision of the eternal plan (conseil) of God; his majesty would dazzle us. But, on the contrary, it is necessary to begin with the sanctification which one experiences in oneself, and to climb higher (monter plus haut). Since our sanctification, from which proceeds good works, is a sure effect (effet) of faith, or rather of Jesus Christ is necessarily called and elected by God to salvation, . . . it follows that sanctification with its fruits is the first step (le premeier degre)Ā  by which we begin to ascend (monter) all the way to the first and true cause (la premier . . . vraye cause) of our salvation, that is, our eternal and gratuitous election (4.19).

— Theodore Beza quoted from his, “Confession de la Foy (1558),” in “Adaptations of Calvinism in Reformation Europe,” 64-5 ed. Matt P. Holt

Rest now my weary souls! Look to the decree and find rest. šŸ™‚

How can anyone read this, and say, “yep, this is pure ‘Gospel’ truth?” Let me just say, with all of my attitude in-tact, that I realize folks like Beza & co. were just working with the theological tools they had (they didn’t know any better). What’s your excuse? Have you paid attention to the kind of spirituality that this kind of stuff produced in the ensuing years following?

Contrast Beza with Calvin (and by the way, Beza was Calvin’s successor at Geneva):

Now we shall possess a right definition of faith if we call it a firmĀ and certain knowledge of Godā€™s benevolence toward us, foundedĀ upon the truth of the freely given promise in Christ, both revealedĀ to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through theĀ Holy Spirit.

— John Calvin,Ā Inst., 3.2.7.

The contrast between these two is rather striking, especially since Beza and Calvin were compatriots.

TULIP, Evangelical Calvinist Style

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The TULIP Evangelical Calvinist style:

  • Total Depravity = ‘He who knew no sin became sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God in him.’ II Corinthians 5.21.
  • Unconditional Election = God in Christ elected humanity for himself that ‘by his poverty we might be made rich.’ II Corinthians 8.9.
  • Limited Atonement = The atonement was ‘limited’ to Christ’s humanity for us, for all of humanity. I John 2.2.
  • Irresistible Grace = God chose to not be God without us prior to our choice to be for him; indeed it his choice for us in Christ that grounds and funds humanity’s choice to be for him, in and through the Spirit. Galatians 2.20.
  • Perseverance of the Saints = God’s life is indestructible, and so it will always persevere for us. Hebrews 7.25.

Something like that.

Thomas Torrance on Incarnational Cosmology and the Intellegibility of the Contingent Universe in Relation

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“We come now to the other aspect of the Christian doctrine of God that is of significance for our theme, the faithfulness of God. This is the idea that in all its creaturely fragility and temporality the universe is harnassed to the invariance and constancy of God’s wisdom and love. Here once again the early Christian Church took its view of the whole economy of the space-time universe from its understanding of Jesus Christ as theĀ bodying forth within space and time of the eternal purpose of God’s love. That is to say, it was the incarnation of God himself in Jesus Christ which constituted the dynamic centre from which the whole pattern and history of created reality is to be discerned, for all lines converge meaningfully at that point where are are transfixed, as it were, by a transcendent axis, much as the spokes of a cartwheel are made to bear upon a centre through which is thrust the axle that gives the wheel its significance. The discovery of the ultimate meaning and design of the universe in the incarnation had the effect of transforming the Hebrew idea of the covenanted mercies of God, and the Hellenic idea of the predetermination of all things in accordance with changeless necessities, and of bringing them together in such a way as to give rise to a thoroughly dynamic view of the cosmos in which orderliness and temporality, regularity and novelty, constancy and change were married together. The doctrine of creation out of nothing had shocked the Greek mind, as we have seen, for it appeared to throw the universe into unstable, irrational flux, but that was to fail to see the anchoring of the time-continuum of created reality in the unswerving faithfulness and love of the Creator such as he had revealed himself to be in Jesus Christ. However, the concept of a temporal origin to the universe from such a God had the effect of both establishing the concept of the history of the physical universe as an open-ended movement which constantly takes mankind by surprise, and yet of showing that history falls within the overarching constraints of God’s grace as its operation in our spatio-temporal existence is revealed in Jesus. That is to say, here we have advanced a concept of the divine providence without the closed predetermination of Aristotelian final causes or the changeless natural law of the Stoics, and the concept of the creative interaction of God with the temporal order of the universe which gives rise to a new understanding of order as both real and contingent. Far from being understood in the Platonic as a transient image of eternity, and far from being confounded with the measurement of velocity as with the Newtonians in a later age, time is filled with real content, for it is the created counterpart to the ever-new creative purposes of God himself, so that it continues to manifest from moment to moment in a dynamic present new patterns of events which could not have been anticipated from what has already happened in the past or have been predicted through any logico-deductive reasoning from abstract ideas. It is this astonishing combination of unpredictability and lawfulness, not only in the history of man but in the history of all created reality in its relation to the constancy and freedom of the grace of the Creator, that lies behind the Christian conception of the cosmos as an open-ordered universe. In its correlation with the unlimited freedom and inexhaustibility of the Creator the universe is characterized neither by uncertainty nor by necessity. Far from being closed or predetermined, the universe constitutes an open-textured system in which novel forms of order constantly emerge and yet blend with what has already taken place in invariant consistency and rationality.”

ā€“ Thomas F. Torrance, Divine And Contingent OrderĀ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 68-9.

A Christological Collage: Reflecting on the Two-Natures, One Person of Jesus for Easter

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As we remember the great reality that God in Christ has accomplished for the world during this Easter moment, I thought it would be appropriate for us to stop and consider a rather technical but important Christological jesuscollagereality. Namely, how ought we think of the relationship between the divine and human natures present in the one person of Jesus Christ? How we attempt to answer this question will have important implications in regard to what we think happened at the cross of Jesus Christ. For example Todd Norquist in a recent comment on the blog pondered: ā€œIā€™m also sketchy on wt [sic] Christ, in his divine nature, was experiencing in the tombā€“and at death.ā€ And over at another blog that I was recently interacting act, one of its authors, Tom Belt articulated a related point in regard to considering the implications of a two-natured Christology (albeit in a different kind of context); Tom wrote,

The homoousion posits the consubstantiality of the Son/Logos with the Father. Chalcedon specifies two natures. One person, yes, but two natures (inseparable and unconfused). Itā€™s via his divine nature that the Son is consubstantial with the Father and via his human nature that the Son is consubstantial with us…. That is, when I say the Son is not ā€œreduced without remainderā€ to the constraints of his embodied/human context, I mean what Athanasius meant when he affirmed that while the Son was a babe in the cradle the SAME SON was sustaining the universe. One Person, yes, but two natures. And the natures are not collapsed into the constraints of Jesus human consciousness and embodied state.It seems to me that Kim F in his reply to Fr Aidan conflates the natures. He thinks that since there is one and only one subject (the Son) of the human sufferings that this must mean those sufferings define the divine nature. But thatā€™s not at all an obvious ā€˜Christologicalā€™ truth picked up off the surface of reading the gospels, and it specifically denies Chalcedon. (see here)

Without getting into a problem with Tomā€™s kind of Nestorian-like explication of Chalcedonian christology (potentially, Nestorian, I would need further articulation from Tom on what he means in regard to ‘consubstantial with us’, he seems to elide the ground of both natures in the Son while wanting to affirm it; I would need to know how Tom deploys the concept of an/enhypostasis), what his quote identifies is the import, and maybe the continued confusion (or more charitably, difficulty) of how a two-nature one person Christology ought to function. Beyond Belt though, let me provide one more example, this time from my friend Steven Nemes, and a recent Good Friday blog post he just offered while reflecting upon this Easter season. Steven used JĆ¼rgen Moltmannā€™s theology of the cross to reflect on God and suffering, and of course Moltmann is Lutheran, so we will get a kind of distinct rendering of the communicatio idiomatum and how the two natures repose in the one person of Jesus Christ, which for Moltmann brings suffering into Godā€™s life:

When God becomes man in Jesus of Nazareth, he not only enters into the finite of man, but in his death on the cross also enters into the situation of man’s godforsakenness. In Jesus he does not die the natural death of a finite being, but the violent death of the criminal on the cross, the death of complete abandonment by God. The suffering in the passion of Jesus is abandonment, rejection by God, his Father. God does not become a religion, so that man participates in him by corresponding religious thoughts and feelings. God does not become a law, so that man participates in him through obedience to a law. God does not become an ideal, so that man achieves community with him through constant striving. He humbles himself and takes upon himself the eternal death of the godless and the godforsaken, so that all the godless and the godforsaken can experience communion with himĀ (p. 276). (see here)

Given the above examples we can see how understanding the hypostatic union (the two natures of Jesus Christ, the divine and human) can affect the way we parse things, in particular, within a soteriological frame.

In response to this I am going to offer a quick reply by offering some quotes from my friend Darren Sumner, and an essay he has written (which represents a compressed version of his PhD work at Aberdeen). Darren will identify how this kind of discussion has occurred historically and in particular between the Lutherans and Calvinists. Darren as a Barth scholar, will offer an alternative kind of via media to what is somewhat represented by the Reformed view of this given by Tom Belt above, and the Lutheran application of this observed in the Moltmann quote.

We will start with Darrenā€™s definition of the extra Calvinisticum which is the name given to the Reformed approach to thinking the two-natures of Christ juxtaposed with the Lutheran understanding of perichoresis or interpenetration between the two-natures of Christ (the communicatio idiomatum); and then I will close with Darrenā€™s Barthian constructive proposal between these two extreme and historic approaches that has inhered in the Calvinists and Lutherans respectively. (And as I am writing this post I am running out of motivation and steam, so I might leave this post rather fragmented, and leave you to sort it out in the comment meta, if you so desire).

Here is Darren on definitions:

[T]he purpose of this article is to examine the dogmatic place of the ā€˜so-calledā€™ extra Calvinisticum in an effort to determine whether it is an indispensable tenet of Christology ā€“ particularly in the Reformed tradition. This doctrine states that the Word of God is not entirely circumscribed by his assumed humanity, but continues to fill and sustain the universe even while he is incarnate in Jesus Christ. In other words he exists in two ways, both ensarkos and asarkos, because ā€“ as the Reformed dogmatics typically put it ā€“ finitum non capax infiniti. The term has its origins in Reformation debates over the Eucharist: the Reformed rejected both the bodily presence of Christ in the sacrament and the Lutheransā€™ innovative expansion of the communication idiomatum that undergirded it, since, they argued, there is no sharing of attributes between the natures. In its origins as a piece of negative theology ā€“ as the denial of Lutheran ubiquity and the genus maiestaticum ā€“ the extra Calvinisticum aimed at nothing more than this. It was an attempt by the Reformed to maintain: (1) the proper, Chalcedonian distinction between the natures, and (2) that the natures remain unaltered and undiminished. Therefore the Word is fully incarnate in the human Jesus, but is etiam extra carnem ā€“ also outside the flesh.[1]

Darren on a Constructive Barthian Proposal Between the Calvinsts and Lutherans:

[T]he lives of the Word as asarkos and ensarkos both mutually participate in the one Christ, just as his two natures (or essences) mutually participate. This, for Barth, is simply another way of speaking of the hypostatic union ā€“ but speaking of it as a dynamic event between God and humanity and not as a static condition. The states of humiliation and exaltation ā€˜operate together and mutually interpret one anotherā€™, and this simultaneity allows us to affirm both that the Son is never limited to human form, never abandons the throne or ceases to sustain the universe, and also that he is one, undivided Subject who cannot be sought other than in Jesus Christ. It has the advantage of affirming what the Reformed took of value from the extra carnem without succumbing to its failings. It also binds the doctrine of the two natures to soteriology, not allowing it to float autonomously from the narrative of the New Testament. Where Lutheran Christology suggested that the Word crosses the gap between the Creator and the creature, and Reformed Christology that the Word bridges the gap (remaining on both sides), Barthā€™s actualist Christology suggests intead that in his person Jesus Christ closes the gap. God and humanity remain distinct, but are unequivocally reconciled in the event of the Sonā€™s incarnate life.

It is evident, then, that Barthā€™s reconfiguration of the status duplex placed the difficult matter of the extra Calvinisticum in new light. It enabled him finally to articulate just where the Reformed deployment of this doctrine into the thorny field of Christology was coming up short, and how the life of the Logos asarkos may yet be affirmed (against Lutheran kenosis, in all its forms) in such a way as to reach the goal for which Calvin had set out, yet without succumbing to the dangers of a double Logos or an evacuation of the doctrine of the incarnation of any meaningful content. But where the humiliation of the Son of God and the exaltation of the Son of Man are understood to be a single event, his life beyond the incarnation no longer speaks the definitive word about his eternal identity.[2]

If I had more energy, this is where I would attempt to draw out some implications of what Darren has offered in an attempt to engage with all of the examples I have noted previously. But I will leave that for another time.

 

 

[1] Darren O. Sumner, ā€œThe Twofold Life of the Word: Karl Barthā€™s Critical Reception of the Extra Calvinisticum,ā€ International Journal of Systematic Theology Volume 15/1 (January 2013): 42-57.

[2] Ibid. Obviously (if it isn’t obvious see the following), these two paragraphs have been preceded by much detailed explication and argumentation by Darren; this is his summary of all of that.

Holy Saturday, The Chasm Between Now and Not-Yet

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Wrote this about seven years ago.

holysaturdayHoly Saturday is the time that the “Western Church,” Protestants included (well some), contemplate the moment between the death and resurrection of Jesus. It is the contemplation of the burial in 1 Corinthians 15:3, 4:

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4. that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, . . .

What a time to contemplate the time between the now and the not yet. This time between Christ’s cross and humiliation of unspeakable depths, and the glories’ of His coming resurrection and ascension; analogically represent the time we inhabit now. We currently wait to fully realize the glory that Jesus has shared with the Father before the world began. And like the Apostles, Disciples, and hopefuls who followed Jesus to the cross, during this time of Jesus’ silence we can despair, be full of fear, angst, anxiousness, etc. We often wonder is this it? We face circumstances that seem overwhelming, that seem to eclipse and overcome the life of Christ . . . that make it seem as if Christ stayed in the grave. As Christians in this big world, some-times like the disciples of Christ (during this time in history), we can cower behind locked doors, scratch our heads, and wonder, “what now?”

If only the disciples would have remembered, and put 2 + 2 together, what Jesus had said to them in the past (easy for me to say):

As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus instructed them, ‘Don’t tell anyone what you have seen, until the Son of Man has been raised from the dead.’ ~ Matthew 17:9

maybe their despair, their bewilderment, would be turned to joy. Maybe their burden would have been light. Maybe they would have been grieving as ones with real hope. But they forgot, at that moment of time they became so gripped with fear they could not really function (at least some of them, His closest). Even though we know the story, because we can read about it at one sitting, don’t we live like Jesus’ end was the grave? We fall into caverns of unbelief that seem to eclipse and overshadow what we know to be true . . . if only we would remember the hope, the hope that Jesus spoke of in Matthew 17, and the hope that was realized in Matthew 28:1-10.

As we look forward to Sunday, lets not grow weary by the unanswered questions and grief of Saturday. Instead of forgetting what Jesus has said about the resurrection (i.e. His second advent), lets glory in advance, in anticipation of the glory that will be revealed in us, as we are hidden in Christ. While we live in Saturday, in anticipation, lets rest with Jesus, lets, with Jesus say: ” . . . Father, into your hands I commit my spirit (Lk 23:46).”

I think the best thing about this analogy, of “Holy Saturday,” is that it breaks down at a point. We don’t despair as if there is no resurrection, in fact as Christians we have been brought into the heavenly places with Christ (cf. Eph. 1), now; we have intimate union with Him now (cf. I Cor. 6:17); we have been given the Holy Spirit now (cf. Jn 14–16); and a whole array of distinguishing factors from those disciples of the first century. So take heart, don’t forget, this Holy Saturday, Jesus’ words of glory in humility:

. . . I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world. ~ John 16:33

Ā 

Easter Before Good Friday: A Reflection on the Apostles’ Creed

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Was Crucified, Dead, And Buried, He Descended Into Hell

How do you think of God revealed in Jesus? Do you primarily think of him through the lens of the cross? Then you might be a Western Christian (which most of us are). Or maybe you think of him primarily in and through the lens of the resurrection, yeah? It is probably best, instead, to think of him in both his humiliation (cross) and exaltation (resurrection, ascension, heavenly session, and consummation), and to think ourselves from within this nexus of being of God and [hu]man[ity] in Christ and his hypostatic union. This represents a genuine dialectic, right? And it also illustrates how we ought to think reality from Godā€™s Self revelation in Christ. But I digress.

Karl Barth speaks of this kind of theologia crucis and theologia gloriae more pointedly than I can, and he hearkens us back to Martin Lutherā€™s ā€˜theology of the crossā€™ (which I think dialectically has a proper understanding of ā€˜theology of gloryā€™ embedded in it) as he reflects upon this article of The Apostlesā€™ Creed: Was Crucified, Dead, And Buried, He Descended Into Hell.

The mystery of the Incarnation unfolds into the mystery of Good Friday and of Easter. And once more it is as it has been so often in this whole mystery of faith, that we must always see two things together, we must always understand one by the other. In the history of the Christian faith it has, indeed, always been the case that the knowledge of Christians has gravitated more to the one side or to the other. We may take it that the Western Church, the Church of the Occident, has a decided inclination towards the theologia crucisā€”that is, towards bringing out and emphasising the fact that He was surrendered for our transgressions. Whereas the Eastern Church brings more into the foreground the fact that He was raised for our justification, and so inclines towards the theologia gloriae. In this matter there is no sense in wanting to play off one against the other. You know that from the beginning Luther strongly worked out the Western tendencyā€”not theologia gloriae but theologia crucis. What Luther meant by that is right. But we ought not to erect and fix any opposition; for there is no theologia crucis which does not have its complement in the theologia gloriae. Of course, there is no Easter without Good Friday, but equally certainly there is no Good Friday without Easter! Too much tribulation and sullenness are too easily wrought into Christianity. But if the Cross is the Cross of Jesus Christ and not a speculation on the Cross, which fundamentally any heathen might also have, then it cannot for one second be forgotten or overlooked that the Crucified rose again from the dead the third day. We shall in that case celebrate Good Friday quite differently, and perhaps it would be well not to sing on Good Friday the doleful, sad Passion hymns, but to begin to sing Easter hymns. It is not a sad and miserable business that took place on Good Friday; for He rose again. I wanted to say this first, that you are not to take abstractly what we have to say about the death and the Passion of Christ, but already to look beyond it to the place where His glory is revealed.[1]

This challenges me. Admittedly I have thought from the ā€˜Westernā€™ proclivity much more than the ā€˜Eastern,ā€™ if we can even speak from this divide any longer. We might like to skip over Good Friday though altogether, but I donā€™t think Barth is calling for that. We might like to live our ā€˜best life nowā€™ (pace Joel Osteen), and live a Christian spirituality that has no cruciform or cross-shaped anything; we might like to pretend that there are no people locked up in insane asylums, or who live in the squalor of their birthed existence into Sudanese poverty and affliction (for example); but this isnā€™t what Barth is suggesting by inverting Good Friday with Easter. I think it is more profound, what Barth is suggesting, it is in line with what the author of the epistle of Hebrews has written (I think):

Therefore we also, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily ensnaresĀ us,Ā and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us,Ā 2Ā looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher ofĀ ourĀ faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.[2]

Christianity represents a glorious way to think, but glorious in cruciform shape. This Easter season, let Easter hope condition the whole season. Walk through the ā€˜stations,ā€™ but do so from the hope that He is Risen, Indeed!

10Ā always carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body.[3]

Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā 

[1] Karl Barth, Dogmatics In Outline (London: SCM Press, 1949), 114.

[2] Hebrews 12.1,2 NKJV.

[3] II Corinthians 4.10 NKJV.Ā 

Was Thomas F. Torrance an Advocate of Open Theism? Nein!

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The following will not be an attempt to argue against the merits of what has been called Open Theism, whether it has any (merits), or not. Instead, the sole purpose of this mini-essay will be to clarify whether or not Scottish theologian, Thomas F. Torrance, affirmed the Open Theist position in his material writings, and theological offerings.

Since I am attempting to provide clarification about Torranceā€™s relationship (or non-relationship) with open theism, there must be, you might infer, folks who are claiming that in some way (even if only suggestively), Torrance was an advocate or friend of open theism. But before we get ahead of ourselves, for the un-initiated, let me provide a definition of what open theism entails from one of its most popular and foremost proponents today, Greg Boyd. Boyd states, in regard to his definition of open theism, this:

If I had to define ā€œOpen Theismā€ in one sentence, I would say that it as the view that the future is partly comprised of possibilities and is therefore known by God as partly comprised of possibilities.Ā Ā (By the way, I prefer to refer to this view as ā€œthe open view of the future,ā€ since the most distinctive aspect of Open Theism is not its understanding of the nature of God, but its understanding of the nature of the future).

To expound a bit on this definition, the open view of the future holds that God chose to create a cosmos that is populated with free agents ā€“ at least humans and angels (though some hold that there is a degree of freedom, however small, in all sentient beings). Ā To have free will means that one has the ability to transition several possible courses of action into one actual course of action. This is precisely why Open Theists hold that the future is partly comprised of possibilities. Ā While God can decide to pre-settle whatever aspects of the future he wishes, to the degree that he has given agents freedom, God has chosen to leave the future open, as a domain of possibilities, for agents to resolve with their free choices. Ā This view obviously conflicts with the understanding of the future that has been espoused by classical theologians, for the traditional view is that God foreknows from all eternity the future exclusively as a domain of exhaustively definite facts.[1]

Whether or not (and he does not) Boyd wants to associate his ā€˜openā€™ view with his doctrine of God or not, does not change the reality that this (his) view does implicate his doctrine of God, and his conception of a God-world relation; in particular, as the quote illustrates, how Boyd conceives of Godā€™s posture and activity towards the future of this earth, and the human decisions that shape it. For Boyd, then, Godā€™s life becomes contingent upon the way we as human beings ā€˜decideā€™ to go one way or the other; and God then responds in kind to our decisions, even if he does so from a more privileged and knowledgeable place than we ourselves do. The implication being that God is ā€˜openā€™ to our future, thus filling in the gaps or contingencies embedded in creation as he ā€˜respondsā€™ to our ā€˜freeā€™ and unconditioned choices (which ends up collapsing God into creation [making Godā€™s decisions about his relation to creation contingent upon creationā€™s decisions about the future, both generally, and particularly], which would be akin to the kind of pantheistic theology of someone like JĆ¼rgen Moltmann).

To be ā€˜openā€™ then, for God, in this system, is to be genuinely open to the choices that we make as human beings.[2] This would be opposed to the conception, the classical conception, that God knows the beginning from the end; and that there is nothing external to Godā€™s life (like creation) that could cause him to change his mind, like our decisions.

Thomas F. Torrance is not an advocate, whatsoever! of Open Theism as some would like to suggest.[3] And for the rest of this little essay, I would like to briefly explain why; and further, how Torrance is using the language of ā€˜openā€™ in contrast to the way that open theism uses it. By engaging in this quick exercise, I hope to demonstrate that any attempt to correlate Torrance and open theism, simply because they use similar language at points (i.e. open), is in the end an equivocal endeavor.

Thomas Torranceā€™s primary concern, in his theology, is not to explain how human beingā€™s choices might implicate Godā€™s inner Triune life (in se). Torrance is not anxious about defending free-will theism, and libertarian free agency (as is open theism) against the over-deterministic world of classical Calvinist thought imbued with a universe that is regulated by fate-driven decrees and cog like mechanisms that turn the hands of Godā€™s time and our’s. Instead, Torranceā€™s primary concern, in regard to a doctrine of God, is to demonstrate that Godā€™s life has always already been free in itself to be what is exhaustibly within itself based upon the intra-relations of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In other words, for Torrance, he would like people to understand that God does not need anything or anyone else to be exhaustively complete and full within himself (so simple). It is precisely because of whom God is in and for himself, Torrance would postulate, that he has the kind of freedom it took for him to decide to create. And for Torrance, God decided to create not by a necessary compulsion, but because he is grace and love; and because he is love and grace he freely chose, in concert with this defining reality, to create counterpoints, by creating a creation (humanity) that could participate and reciprocate his self given life of love back to himself (cf. I Jn. 4.19) in fellowship one with the other. For Torrance then, and in line with an Athanasian theme, God has always been Father of the Son by the Holy Spirit, but he has not always been Creator; becoming Creator for God, just as becoming Incarnate in Christ, was something new for God and it was grounded back in this antecedent reality of who God is as love and in his free act grace.

Given this background on Torranceā€™s doctrine of God we are free to consider, better, how openness for Torrance functions in contrast to how ā€˜opennessā€™ functions for the Open Theist. When God freely chose to create, in Torranceā€™s view, built into this was the notion of contingency. In other words, when God created (and the classical Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo is foundational and presumed for Torrance), since he did not need the world in order to be God, by definition (since he is the one creating it), the world depended upon his divine Word for its reality; and so the world was initially and continuously contingent upon this reality (i.e. the world needs Godā€™s sustenance in order to exist, so contingence). In describing this we are getting closer to understanding how ā€˜openā€™ language will do work within Torranceā€™s system of theology and doctrine of God, in a God-world relation. What you should be starting to realize by now, is that for Torrance, there is an interesting and pregnant relation between the contingency of the world, and how he uses the concept of openness in regard to the worldā€™s relationship with its giver, with God. It is apropos then for us to see how Torrance himself articulates his understanding of God, and how the world is open to him (not vice versa in contrast to open theismā€™s conception and employment of ā€˜opennessā€™). Here is Torrance (at length):

There is no intrinsic reason in the universe why it should exist at all, or why it should be what it actually is: hence we deceive ourselves if in our natural science we think that we can establish that the universe could only be what it is. The universe is not some sort of perpetuum mobile, a self-existing, self-supporting, self-explaining magnitude, wholly consistent and complete in itself and thus imprisoned within a pointless circularity of inescapable necessities. On the contrary, the universe constitutes an essentially open system with an ontological and intelligible reference beyond its own limits which cuts the circuit of any possible closure of its internal processes re-entrantly upon themselves, and thereby gives them their distinctive intelligibility. Thus it belongs to the very nature of the universe that the consistency of its own independent status and condition is incomplete and requires to completed beyond itself. That is another way of saying that the independence of the universe is both grounded in and limited by its radical dependence. Given that dependence, openness, or reference of the universe beyond itself which is part of what contingence means, contingence also representsā€”that the universe is endowed with an autonomous character both as a whole and throughout its immanent relations, with features and patterns and operational principles which belong to it as by intrinsic natural right, and which require an autonomous mode of investigation appropriate to their distinctive nature and integrity. That is why contingence must be assiduously respected, and must not be rationalized away as some unfortunate element of deficiency or inexplicability in nature from which science must abstract in order to give a consistent, rational account of the universe. Rather is contingence to be regarded as a basic and essential feature of the universe, a constituting condition of its reality and actuality.[4]

Torranceā€™s whole discussion of ā€˜opennessā€™ takes place under the dogmatic category of a doctrine of Creation (which is distinct from where the discussion of openness occurs for the Open Theist, for the OT this discussion takes place in a doctrine of humanity or in the realm of an theological-anthropology). The world is necessarily ā€˜openā€™ precisely because it is contingent upon its reality given and sustained by God. The world, for Torrance, as just noticed, has its own internal order and independence, and thus has realities attendant to that that are coherent with its own immanent integrity; but the point, Torranceā€™s point remains, this independent character of the created order, the world, is a contingent independence, contingent upon God. When scientists, when people endeavor to seek out the mysteries of the universe, there is a naturalist component to this, but ultimately this seeking out, according to Torrance, will finally terminate beyond creation itself, and require the inquirer to move beyond nature and recognize that nature itself is contingent upon God’s word of grace. In this sense the world remains ā€˜openā€™, the world is ā€˜openā€™ and there is an openness of God in a God-world relation, wherein the world must look beyond itself to its giver if there is going to be an ultimate intelligibility about its order and resplendent glory.

This is different than the way the open theist thinks of openness. I will leave this open for you to consider further. But what should no longer be open, if ever it was for you, is the idea that Thomas F. Torrance is anywhere close to being an advocate, chum, friend, mate of what has become known as Open Theology. He is not for the reasons delineated Ā above.

 

[1] Greg Boyd, http://rachelheldevans.com/blog/ask-open-theist-greg-boyd-response, accessed 04-16-2014.

[2] In other words, God could change his mind based upon future contingencies that become actual through the decision making process of human beings, for example. So Godā€™s life vis-Ć -vis his relation to the future is not exhausted by his own internal life, but remains genuinely open and informed by the choices that human history makes; thus implying that Godā€™s own being could be lacking and deficient insofar as he, along with us, is waiting to see how the future is going to unfold.

[3] See this blog article Muslin Open Theists, Politics, T. F. Torrance, and Why the God-Man Matters, written by open theist proponent, T.C. Moore. Moore would like to suggestively posit that Thomas F. Torranceā€™s theology somehow is in alignment with the concerns and categories offered by Open Theism. Moore quotes Torrance in a piece where Torrance uses the language of ā€˜openness of Godā€™ to draw this kind of purported or suggestive correlation between Torranceā€™s theological articulation and that of open theism. This quote:

The world, then, is made open to God through its intersection in the axis of Creation-Incarnation. Its space-time structures are so organized in relation to God that we who are set within them may think in and through them to their transcendent ground in God Himself. Jesus Christ constitutes the actual centre in space and time where that may be done. But what of the same relationship the other way round, in the openness of God for the world that He has made? Does the intersection of His reality with our this-worldly reality in Jesus Christ mean anything for God? We have noted already that it means that space and time are affirmed as real for God in the actuality of His relations with us, which binds us to space and time, so that neither we nor God can contract out of them. Does this not mean that God has so opened Himself to our world that our this-worldly experiences have import for Him in such as way, for example, that we must think of Him as taking our hurt and pain into Himself? This is what we cannot do from the approach of deistic dualismā€”why, for example, Schleiermacher could not hold that God is merciful and why Bultmann cannot allow that the love of God is a fact within the cosmos. Thus it would appear that the question as to impassibility of God is the question as to the actuality of the intersection of God’s reality with worldly reality, and as to the depth of its penetration into our creaturely being. If God is merely impassible He has not made room for Himself in our agonied existence, and if He is merely immutable He has neither place nor time for frail evanescent creatures in His unchanging existence. But the God who has revealed Himself in Jesus Christ as sharing our lot is the God who is really free to make Himself poor, that we through His poverty might be made rich, the God invariant in love but not impassible, constant in faithfulness but not immutable. T. F. Torrance, Space, Time, and Incarnation (Oxford University Press, 1969), 74-75, emphasis added.

[4] Thomas F. Torrance, Divine And Contingent Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 36.

A Mechanical-Universe: Against Classical Theologies that Subvert the Freedom of God and the Freedom of Humanity

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I have kind of been on a bit of a sabbatical from reading Thomas Torrance, but I am tired of that sabbatical; it is time to jump back on the wagon, and resume where I left off with TFT, wherever that was.

maryjesusI just re-picked up (I never actually read it the first time I picked it up) Torranceā€™s book Divine and Contingent Order, and I am excited I did. The fact that Torrance dedicates this book to his long time Greek Orthodox compatriot Georges Florovsky should say something; that is, that this book, per classic Torrance, is going to take us back to the patristic past, and constructively through retrieval bring us into some modern and contemporary discussionā€“in the case of this book it will have mostly to do with issues surrounding science, with obvious overlap with theology.

The following quote from this book brings me back to what I have probably become known for best (at least in my past iteration as a blogger) in the theo-blogosphere, that is my rather contentious relationship with what I have called classical Calvinist (and Arminian) theology (but I wouldnā€™t want to limit my contentiousness to just the Calvinists and Arminians, I believe in offering equal opportunity of contention for other expressions and certain kinds of classical, mostly Aristotelian inspired, medieval theologies). And so this quote is intended to once againā€“for I fear that people have become lax in regard to the current takeover of North American evangelical theology by tributaries of resource that are flowing directly from the Aristotelian stream of deterministic logico-causality present and funding evangelical movements like The Gospel Coalition, Together 4 the Gospel, et. al. etc.ā€“re-register that Bobby Grow is still watching šŸ˜‰ , and I havenā€™t grown lax in my disdain for the mechanical God of classical Calvinism, in particular, even if I understand that many Calvinists have a deep piety and love for God. So consider my vigor, in this regard, to be motivated, in part, by a desire to align said Calvinist piety and love of God, with a ground and grammar for articulating God and dogma in a way that is correlative and consistent with who the Calvinists and Arminians want to love as God.

In step with the above then, let me get to this quote from Thomas Torrance. In this quote Torrance is sketching the impact that Aristotelian and then Newtonian categories have had upon God and the subsequent development of theology that followed, in particular, and for our purposes, in the post Reformed orthodox era of Calvinist and Arminian theology. And given the fact that much of this theology is being repristinated and resurrected by the neo-Calvinists/Puritans et. al., again, it will only be apropos to visit its informing background through the lens that Torrance provides for that. Torrance writes (at length),

It was in terms of these basic ideas that classical Christian theology of the fourth and fifth centuries set out to reconstruct the foundations of ancient philosophy and science upon which the pagan picture of God and the cosmos rested.Ā  Today we can see that they were masterful ideas which lay deep in the development of Western science, and with which we are more than ever concerned in the new science of our own day and its underlying concept of a unifying order. But what became of these ideas in thought subsequent to the Nicene and immediately post-Nicene era? For a short period they bore remarkable fruit in the physics of space and time, and of light and motion, that arose in Alexandria in the fifth and sixth centuries and which, like the theology out of which it grew, was thoroughly anti-dualist in its basic orientation. Before long, however, these ideas became swamped in the massive upsurge of dualist cosmologies and epistemologies which took somewhat different forms in the Augustinian West and Byzantine East. The idea that the created universe is rational because its Creator and Preserver is rational remained, and was to see considerable development, especially in Western medieval theology and philosophy, which thus has contributed immensely to our scientific understanding of the universe. Unfortunately, however, the doctrine of God behind it all suffered not a little modification in terms of his inertial motion which was to have considerable effect upon classical Newtonian physics. Here the conception of the impassibility and immutability of God (i.e. that God is not subject to suffering or change), which has patristic sources, became allied to the Aristotelian notion of the Unmoved Mover. Although the idea of the creation of the universe out of nothing remained, that became difficult to maintain when the universe itself came to be construed more and more in terms of Aristotleā€™s four causes in which the effect was understood as following inexorably from its antecedent and defining cause, for to regard the Creator as the First Cause from which the universe took its rise appears to imply ā€˜the eternity of the worldā€™ if only the mind of God who knows himself as its First Cause. Mediaeval theology on evangelical grounds had to reject the notion of ā€˜the eternity of the worldā€™ but it remained trapped, for the most part at least, in notions of impassibility and immutability of God which had as their counterpart a notion of the world which, given its original momentum by the First Cause, constituted a system of necessary and causal relations in which it was very difficult to find room for any genuine contingence. Contingence could only be thought of in so far as there was an element of necessity in it, so that contingence could be thought of only by being thought away. The inertial relation of an immutable God to the world he has made thus gave rise to a rather static conception of the world and its immanent structures. Looked at in this way it seems that the groundwork for the Newtonian system of the world was already to found in mediaeval thought.[1]

Does this, at all, sound familiar to you? Have you been exposed to this kind of over-determined world in what you have been taught at church or elsewhere? What do we lose if we affirm the kind of mechanical world that Torrance just described? We lose intimate relationship with God in Christ for one thing. We also have potential for losing compassion for others; we might conclude that the plight of some people, or a whole group or nation of people are ā€˜justā€™ determined to be where they are in their own lived lives, no matter how miserable. We might not overtly or consciously think all of this, but it surely would be informing the way we view ourselves and other selves in relation to God in the world.

Let me just leave off by suggesting that what Torrance describes above, about a mechanical-world is the world you get when you embrace classical Calvinism, Arminianism, etc. (philosophically, theologically, ethically, etc.). And let me suggest that there is a better way forward that is more consistent with the idea that God is love, and that he serves (or should) as the ground and grammar of everything.

 

 

 

[1] Thomas F. Torrance, Divine And Contingent Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 5-6.