Monthly Archives: January 2015

The Evangelical Calvinist Podcast. Season 1, Episode 2. History and Evangelical Calvinism

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Addendum: Hyperlink is now fixed below. You can click on the title and it will take you to The Evangelical Calvinist Podcast Season 1, Episode 2. Let me know if there are any remaining issues.

In this podcast I talk about the relationship between History and the development of Evangelical Calvinism for me personally. I talk about my own personal antecedents related to my formal historical theological training and how that opened me up to what we have now called Evangelical Calvinism. And I talk about how the critiques that I make of so called Federal Theology or contemporary Reformed theology (what counts as such) has historically rigorous pedigree within the history of Reformed theology itself, and how my critiques are not contingent upon the theologies of Thomas Torrance nor Karl Barth. Enjoy.

Click Here: The Evangelical Calvinist Podcast. Season 1, Episode 2. History and Evangelical Calvinism

The Evangelical Calvinist Podcast. Season 1, Episode 1: An Introduction

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Addendum: The hyperlink below is now fixed. Click on the link below and you will be taken to: Season 1, Episode 1. Introduction to the Evangelical Calvinist Podcast. Let me know if there are any remaining issues.

I am going to start podcasting. The name of my podcast will be, what else?, but The Evangelical Calvinist (very original, I know). Anyway I hope to do podcasts at the very minimum on a weekly basis, if not on a bi-weekly basis. I hope I don’t bore you too much; hopefully the topics we cover and the way we develop them will overshadow the drone of my voice and make them interesting enough for you to continue listening. Here’s the link to my introductory podcast:

Click Here: Season 1, Episode 1. Introduction to The Evangelical Calvinist Podcast

 

 

Holy ‘Pactum Salutis’ Batman and Vanhoozer! Why Love is better than Law in the frame of Salvation

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There are many images, metaphors in the Bible to depict God’s relationship to his creation, humanity. There is the law-court pactumsalutisbatmanimagery, the Shepherd-sheep picture, and so on and so forth. But what undergirds all of it is who God in Jesus Christ is, and that reality–who he is–has been most clearly revealed in Jesus Christ; we know then that he is love, and thus it is God as love that comes before everything else, every other image and relationship depicted of him and us in the Bible. If this is the case it behooves us then to drive deep into this reality (God as triune love) as the interpretive grid through which we construct our primary understandings of how he acts and who he is; it beckons us to live under this pressure as the mode through which we develop our theological frameworks. These frameworks then need to bear up under the given reality of who God has revealed himself to be; we must take our cues from there, and not elevate subsidiary imagery in the Bible over this prime reality of who God is for us in Jesus Christ. And yet this, I would suggest, is the very thing that has dogged, in particular, the Protestant Reformed tradition. A tradition that has taken the imagery of the law-court, and legal metaphors in the Bible and used that as the primary interpretive grid through which God is understood and articulated. Of note, in this vein, is what has been called Covenantal (or Federal Foedus) theology; this framework developed in the 16th century, primarily under the oversight of Heinrich Bullinger and Caspar Olevianus. The basic premise of this framework is described well by Dewey Wallace:

A second development in English Calvinist thought, also international in its scope, was the rising importance of federal theology. Federal theology built upon the covenant theology of the Reformers, especially that of Heinrich Bullinger, Zwingli’s successor of at Zurich, and also of Calvin. For Bullinger, God had made one covenant with humanity, the covenant of grace, known by anticipation in the times of the Old Testament and by remembrance after the coming of Christ. For Calvin too there was but one covenant, that of Grace, but he stressed its testamentary character whereas Bullinger spoke of it as more conditional, although for both the covenant was the means in a history of salvation by which God unfolded his purposes. At the end of the sixteenth century, the Heidelberg Reformed theologians Zacharias Ursinus, Caspar Olevianus, and Franciscus Junius shaped the idea of a covenant of works distinct from and preceding the covenant of grace. Important English Calvinists, beginning with Dudley Fenner and including many later Puritans, adopted this double covenant federal theology with its covenant of works made with Adam, the federal head of humanity, to be followed, after the fall of Adam, with the covenant of grace, which was anticipated in Moses and fulfilled in Christ, the federal head of redeemed humanity. This federal theology was not only a pedagogically useful and biblically warranted scheme for organizing theology but also “a useful vehicle of the gospel message,” closely related to the flowering of Calvinist piety.[1]

So we get this kind of bilateral covenantal understanding of the Bible and salvation history; we get this legal understanding of God as the prominent interpretive grid through which we understand God’s dealings and relationship with humanity. The covenant of works essentially (as the story goes) was a covenant God originally made with Adam and Eve wherein they were to obey his Word, his Torah, his Law, by not eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Of course they disobeyed God, they ate of the tree, broke God’s holy law, and thus incurred God’s penalty which was death. Fortunately, in this accounting of things, God had already ratified another covenant, the so called covenant of grace, wherein Jesus Christ, the second Adam, would come along, pay the penalty of Adam’s sin, and legally purchase back (i.e. redeem) an elect group of individual humans who the Son and the Father had bargained for in eternity past; the only payment required then was the Son’s active obedience for this elect people, climaxing in his passive obedience of death on the cross for these elect people. At this point, God’s holy law and the penalties incurred by humanity (through Adam’s disobedience) have been remitted, and this elect group of people bargained for by the Son and the Father are finally purchased by the Son, and they have legally become his and thus legally rightly related to God who ultimately relates to people by his Holy Law (even if it is said to be motivated by his love).

With all of this background in place, I wanted to underscore all of it by quoting theologian Kevin Vanhoozer’s defense of this legal framework as the primary means through which he believes (along with the rest of the classically Reformed tradition) we should understand God’s relationship to and with humanity. Remember I just quickly (above) mentioned the ‘bargaining’ that took place for these elect group of people between the Father and the Son? This has been called the pactum salutis (or the Covenant of Redemption), and it serves as the middle term between the Covenant of Works and Grace that helps forward this epic Covenantal story between the Father and the Son; it helps to keep the logic of legal Covenantal thinking moving, and fills in the blanks even further (Robert Letham in his book The Westminster Assembly gets into how the ‘Pactum Salutis’ developed among some of the later Westminster divines). Here is what Kevin Vanhoozer has to say about the significance of this ‘pact’ for contemporary understanding of how Christians in general, from his perspective, should understand God’s relationship to humanity:

There are good biblical reasons to expand the idea of an eternal divine decree in a more dialogical direction. This, at least, was the conclusion of the post-Reformation Reformation theologians who discerned, through a careful reading of Scripture, a pactum salutis (i.e. the intra-Trinitarian “pact of salvation”) between the Father and the Son. Consider, for example, Paul’s reference to “the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, … in accordance with the eternal purpose that he has carried out in Jesus Christ our Lord” (Eph. 3:9, 11). To be sure, Scripture does not wear the notion of a pactum salutis on its sleeve, but like the doctrine of the Trinity, it appears to be a necessary implication of what is said explicitly. Minimally, it says that both the Father and the Son freely formed a partnership, agreeing on a plan from before the foundation of the world that would be executed on the stage of space-time history: “You were ransomed … with the precious blood of Christ…. He was destined before the foundation of the world, but was revealed at the end of the ages for your sake” (1 Pet. 1:18-21). The historia salutis is thus the dramatic representation in space and time of the eternal pactum salutis. This is all to say that the eternal divine decree is dialogical, the work of more than one communicative agent.[2]

Remember above as I opened this little essay up how I highlighted how we, in my estimation, should think interpretively through God’s life of triune love instead of elevating other subsidiary biblical imagery as the lens through which we interpret God’s relationship to humanity in Christ? It appears that Kevin Vanhoozer, along with the post-Reformed Reformers, has opted to take this subsidiary imagery as the primary lens through which he believes that we should understand God’s relationship with us.

A consequence of this, among many of them, is that who God is for us, for fallen humanity ends up getting distorted. A subsidiary picture of God’s dealing with humanity (the legal picture) becomes the frame, when this is not the frame that God has chosen to reveal himself through in the prime. God has chosen to reveal himself to us as personal triune love in his eternal Son Jesus Christ; any idea of Law-giver, or any other picture must be framed by this reality: that God is love, and because he is and because he loved us first we can love him through the Son as the mediator.

I submit to you that this framework that Vanhoozer claims to be a necessary implication of biblical truth, as necessary (implicitly so) as the Trinitarian conclusion, ought to be rejected. The ‘pactum salutis’ (‘pact of salvation’) is only a necessary conclusion about the Father’s relationship to humanity through the Son, if and only if we first and in an a priori way commit ourselves to this kind of classically conceived Covenantal construction of salvation. But why should we? The Apostle Paul used other imagery (and it is a canonical imagery through and through) to depict our relationship to God in Jesus Christ; the imagery of marriage. Why wouldn’t we follow this imagery instead? It better proximates the theological reality of who God genuinely is for us in Jesus Christ; the lover of our souls. And this imagery is in the garden before the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; the imagery is first appealed to in Genesis 2 (i.e. marriage), while the ‘tree’ imagery is provided for in Genesis 3. If there is a primary covenant then it is framed, even in a straightforward and linear reading of Scripture, in the imagery of marriage; and so we end up with a covenant framing our understanding and relationship with God, a singular covenant of grace, which pre-temporally fits better with God’s choice to not be God without us but with us in the election of our humanity for himself in Jesus Christ (the ultimate bridegroom).

Something to think about then …

[1] Dewey D. Wallace, Jr., Shapers of English Calvinism 1660-1714: Variety, Persistence, and Transformation,(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 16-7.

[2] Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Faith Speaking Understanding, kindle loc. 1997, 2003, 2009.

Emptiness, Nihilism. The Battles an evangelical Christian thinker might face

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I don’t know about you, but sometimes I fight feelings of emptiness and nihilism when it comes to doing theology; and yet at the same rickwarrentime it has become the love of my life, because it is where intimacy with my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ reposes most! But there are a million distractions, and things of life that would like to squeeze out any possibility of spending thoughtful, intentional, and dare I say, heart-shaped intellectual time with God in Christ.

There are many reasons why this sense of futility or emptiness might set in, and in particularly acute ways for evangelical Protestant Christian thinkers. Here are a few reasons that come to mind:

1) There is no value placed upon deep theological thought within the environs of modern day Protestant evangelicalism.

2) Theology, at points, just seems all too academic with no apparent touch points with “real” life, and “real” people.

3) If you think too deeply you almost become outcast, and are accused of focusing on things that don’t really matter; what really matters, in contrast, and ostensibly, is that we have some sort of warm hearted felt experience with God, and this somehow abstracted from any deep and rigorous thought about what that looks like.

4) Related to the above: There is often a false dilemma created by evangelicals; either, as it goes, the thinker must be involved in real life daily stuff that matters, or be relegated to the dead halls of the Christian thinkers where everything remains abstract and aloof from the apparently concrete lived experiences (which are the standard for determining genuine spirituality, apparently) of what it means to truly live a simple, heart warmed Christian experience.

5) Thinking theologically and deeply that way, apparently, takes too much time to develop; what counts towards being a real life evangelical Christian is that we make more immediate real life connections with real people; and as a result we mystically connect and grow in fellowship with God and others, albeit devoid of any intention or rigorous theological thought.

These are some reasons that might contribute to the seeming futility of doing theology as an evangelical. Underneath the resistance to this there seems to be a kind of nihilistic attitude towards Christian thinkers who are wired to think deeply; and in place of such modes, the “Christian experience” becomes the standard of what it means to be truly Christian and thriving. In other words, feeling good and happy about oneself seems to be the King. Desiring to live as a Christian thinker in such an environment contributes to this kind of battle and sense of emptiness that often can hit an evangelical thinker. There is no value placed upon such platitudes, and in fact such platitudes get relegated to the realm of “hobbyhorse” with no real meaning for what it means to be a healthy vibrant thriving Christian person. Beyond that, unless an evangelical thinker gets a PhD in theology or something, and is able to secure employment in a seminary or bible college (the only sanctioned places among evangelicals where rigorous intellectual activity is sanctioned and acceptable), there really is no value (like towards employment) for such people in the evangelical church–they are usually lauded as novelties in the church, and known for being a very smart person who traffics in things too elevated for what really counts toward being a vibrant thriving evangelical Christian person. What a shame.

________________

*The picture of Rick Warren is somewhat ad hoc; I just found it when searching google image, and it seemed fitting as typifying a kind of evangelical posture I was bemoaning in this post (especially the banner behind Warren).

The Passion of Christ, He is the Source. Not Me, But Christ

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It was 1994, I was the ripe age of 21, rolling deep in my mini truck, isuzuslammed, low-riding, my system blaring Snoop-Dog and Warren G, living the dream in my hometown of Long Beach, CA. I had grown up in the church, my dad was a Baptist pastor, and things seemed to be flowing along; I was having fun, hanging out with my friends, taking trips to Vegas, cruising Hollywood Boulevard, and visiting various clubs in the Los Angeles and Orange County areas. It was in this context that the Lord broke into my life afresh; he brought tough stuff into my life; a season (meaning years) of depression, anxiety, intellectual doubt (of God’s existence); and a host of other things that created a fork in the road for me–really it wasn’t a fork, it was choose life or die; I chose life!

As I began to press into the Lord in new and desperate ways my life began to take on the transformation of Christ; his resurrection power was pulsing through my veins; and I had to share this reality with whoever would listen, wherever they would listen. I started attending church (Calvary Chapel, Costa Mesa) almost every day of the week; I committed to reading through the Scriptures over and again, memorizing books of the Bible, and reading whatever I could that I thought would help propel me deeper and further into this fresh new reality of Jesus Christ in my life. What this new reality in my life inculcated, primarily was: Passion and Idealism. When I could move beyond the depths of my intellectual doubt I had such a sense of God’s reality in Jesus Christ that it was palpable; I felt as if I was indestructible. I felt like a superman, like I could walk up to drug dealers on the street and share Jesus, and I did! There was an immediacy to God’s life, as if he was breaking into and around every corner of life and reality. The fact that he was truly the living God, that he truly had risen again from the dead in Jesus Christ, that he was now sitting at the right hand of the Father always living to make intercession, and that he was going to come again (bodily) very soon was blowing my mind. As deep as the lows were that I was experiencing, the highs were as high as heaven itself. In this mix of things I was continuing to read the Bible over and again, it was the lifeblood of my life as I realized it was the only source that connected me to its living reality, to the eternal Word, to my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. I thought nothing could stop this; it was God’s kingdom in Christ, it was where the action and adventure was; everything else paled in comparison. Life was a battle, a spiritual battle, and I was a soldier living from The Soldier’s victory; I was more than a conqueror, and this world in all of its vainglorious glory had been dealt its final death blow in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. I was living on this tide, on this high, a heavenly high.

I thought because of all of this, because I had earned a BA degree and MA degree in biblical studies and theology, because I had been doing all types of ministry (pastoral, evangelistic, teaching, etc.), that my life was flashing before my eyes. I was full of idealism (in 2003) coming out of seminary, yes war torn from much of the spiritual battles I had faced up to that point, but then life continued to happen. I experienced years of unemployment, underemployment, and then I got a terminal cancer. I lived through that, experienced more unemployment, my daughter was almost killed from a freak accident at school, and now I work a job where I can’t even go to church on Sundays (or any days) because of the crazy schedule I have at work.

It is good that my passion, my idealism is not the source of life; indeed, it is good that the source of my passion and idealism aren’t mine at all, but Christ’s. I participate in him no matter what the circumstances of this life bring. His wisdom is that he has penetrated all of these circumstances of life, these apparently mundane and tragic ones, and he has redeemed them; he meets us (and me) in the midst of all of these. His face, the glory of God, shines ever brighter as each day passes by, as the day of his glorious return comes closer and closer to us. Indeed, he comes everyday and every night. This world does not own him, he owns this world; along with a thousand cattle on the hills. I expect to be filled with his passion and idealism for the rest of my life and all of eternity, I hope you do too!

William Perkins as a Shaper of Classical Calvinism

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The following is an example of how I used to engage with classical Calvinism much before many of you started reading me (this is an old old post).

**The following quote is a little lengthy, not too bad, but if you want to skip to the bottom, to my “List of Assertions,” and closing paragraph you might just want to interact at that level (the quote substantiates or at least provides fodder for my assertions). Some might find this beyond where you’re at in your understanding (i.e. might be a little “heady”); if so, you can always ask for clarification. I plan on writing some more posts on “defining” Evangelical Calvinism soon (this piece actually helps provide an example of what it’s not ;-). Also the tone here is a little polemical**

William Perkins (1558-1602), a Cambridge theologian, and English clergyman can be considered to be one of the founders of what today is known as Calvinism. When people say they are ‘Reformed’ (esp. in America), this is one of your forbears who you are beholden to for the theological categories you think through — to one degree of intensity or another. If you, more popularly, follow the teachings of John Piper, Michael Horton, Carl Trueman, and even John MacArthur, amongst others; then you follow in the trajectory that William Perkins set so long ago.

William Perkins followed the scholastic tradition (conceptually); that is to say, he adopted the Aristotelian framework assimilated by Thomas Aquinas to explain and articulate who God is (ontologically), and thus what salvation entails as corollary. Part of adopting this framework, for Perkins, means that he must cast God in terms of immutability (there have been reifications of this term to fit a more trinitarian understanding — I say this just so that some of you know that I am aware of this); God cannot have any kind of contingency or composition, here is how Perkins says it: “God’s immutability of nature is that by which he is void of all composition, division, and change” [Perkins, Golden Chaine, 1. 11, first cited by: Ron Frost, “Sibbes’ Theology of Grace UnPublished PhD Dissertation,” 61]. This has a drastic impact upon how God’s life is understood, and emphasied to be, viz. as singular (simplicity); furthermore it implies that the Johannine notion of “God is love” to be a figment of God’s disclosure in time, but not a reality of who God is in eternity (since love would imply ‘composition’, ‘division’, and ‘change’). The following is a quote (from Ron Frost’s dissertation) that further elucidates and substantiates my claims thus far:

2. Love and the will. In speaking of God, apart from any one of the triad of persons, Perkins identified a primary essence which is “void and free from all passion” [Perkins, “Golden Chaine,” 1. 25]. Love, if seen as essentially affective, would include an element of contingency, namely, God’s desire that his creation respond to his love as the complement to his own love. If, however, love is a component of the will, God merely requires such a response . In the Golden Chaine, then, love is striking in its absence as a motivation in God; this despite the primacy of love in biblical descriptions of God. As illustrated in the chart of the Chaine [which Frost provides on the previous page], love appears only after the mediatorial work of Christ.

Perkins also believed that if God’s love is perceived as an inherent motivation (that is, as an affection), it would imply the prospect of universal salvation. He raised an “objection” in the Golden Chaine to make the point, a point which illustrates Perkins’ position that love is defined by God’s arbitrary determinations:

Object. Election is nothing else but dilection or love; but this we know, that God loves all his creatures. Therefore he elects all his creatures.Answer. I. I deny that to elect is to love, but to ordain and appoint to love.II. God does love all his creatures, yet not all equally, but every one in their place [Perkins, “Golden Chaine,” 1. 109, Cited by Frost, 62].

This reflected Perkins’ synthetic definition of God’s love. In his Treatise of God’s Free Grace and Man’s Free Will, Perkins posed the question “whether there be such an affection of love in God, as is in man and beast.”

I answer that affections of the creature are not properly incident unto God, because they make many changes, and God is without change. And therefore all affections, and the love that is in man and beast is ascribed to God by figure [Perkins, “God’s Free Grace, 1.723, cited by Frost].

Thus, God must be understood to express his immutable will in a manner that accomplishes “the same things that love makes the creature do”. God, then, lacks any inherent affections but he still chooses to do the actions of love or hatred, and uses anthropomorphic language, while working out his eternal purposes: “Because his will is his essence or Godhead indeed.” [Perkins, “God’s Free Grace,” 1.703, cited by Frost] [brackets all mine] (Ron Frost, “Richard Sibbes’ Theology of Grace and the Division of English Reformed Theology [Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of London, King’s College, 1996],” 61-2).

List of Assertions

  • This is the origin and framing of contemporary thinking about “double-predestination” (supralapsarianism) and the import of God’s decrees.
  • According to Perkins, to sustain the above framing, and as a result of using Aristotle’s “immutability,” God cannot love within Himself — within His own life freely. Thus God is different in eternity (ad intra) than He is in time as the “mediator” (ad extra).
  • In other words, the decrees of God (absolutum decretum) create space for God, “to love,” without impinging upon His real life, which according to Perkins, cannot love (or there would be change).
  • Furthermore, Perkins’ view implies that there is another God behind the back of Jesus.
  • At bottom, Perkins’ God cannot love, He cannot (in His real life in eternity) have compassion, or greive; He is only able to do this in time because His decrees allow Him to do so (in other words, God becomes subserviant to His decrees — so in the end He really is contingent on Human history, He is determined by His decrees — He is thus, not truly free!).

I wonder if any of this causes any contemporary Calvinists of today any kind of pause. If your view of double-predestination is framed by Perkins’ view (which it is, if you follow Westminster Calvinism), then I wonder what that further says about your view of God. Are you willing to take on the same assumptions on God’s immutability that Perkins does? Or, because you know scripture won’t let you, are you going to say: “I don’t believe that nonsense,” and move on, assuming that what Perkins and Westminster articulated has no bearing on your own “biblical viewpoint?” Enquiring minds want to know!

‘Classes’ of People: A Relationship Between Gnostic and classical Calvinist/Arminian Understanding of Election? Appropriated from J. Kameron Carter

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This won’t be a popular post among some, but I think it hits upon something that needs to be addressed in regard to how the doctrine irenaeus1of election and reprobation (double predestination) has taken shape; as far as its conceptual antecedents.

Greek metaphysics are never far from the development of Christian theology; many of the most notable church Fathers (and Mothers) were Greek (not all of course, we have Latin theologians of the era too, most prominent being Augustine); the trick of course is to reify or repurpose metaphysics in a way where said metaphysics get evangelized with the Gospel, such that their meaning is given determination by God in Christ himself instead of the other way around. I would like to suggest (emphasis upon suggest – since this is merely a blog post written under time constraints) that the classical conception of double predestination, of the kind that we find in classical Calvinism (and Arminianism for that matter) has more to do with a Greek metaphysic that remains more Greek and less Christian. Why would I assert such a thing? Because, there appears to be some analogous relation between the conclusions of classical Gnostic understandings of ‘classes’ of people and classical Calvinist understandings of classes of people (i.e. ‘elect’ and ‘reprobate’)[ I have written about this before in a very reflective state]. And I don’t think this is mistake; I think it comes from a common (but nuanced differently) understanding of God that comes from a philosophical basis rather than a revelational one (of the kind that we find provided by God’s Self revelation and interpretation in Jesus Christ); common that is between Greek Gnostic understanding and classical Calvinist understanding in regard to an socio-anthropological fleshing out of humanity (which is of course also a theological reality).

Like I asserted above this is all at the level of suggestion, but I don’t think unfounded. To help illustrate this let me quote something from theologian J. Kameron Carter as he sketches out church Father, Irenaeus’ understanding of the Ptolemaic Gnosticism that he was engaged with in his day. I hope, at least, that you will get a lineament of what I am talking about in regard to a parallel between Gnostic understanding of election (back in the day), and classical Calvinist and Arminian understanding of the same theological locus (‘election’ and how that gets cashed out anthropologically/sociologically/theologically). Carter writes of Irenaeus’ understanding of Gnosticism in this way:

… As far as Achamoth (or Desire herself), who is of a pneumatic constitution, and for the pneumatic race of humans, they will enter the Pleroma. Desire will be restored to Wisdom (Sophia), and the pneumatics will also enter the pleromatic heavens. Such is their eschatological destiny. And finally, those psychics (who give in to their passions, thus remaining trapped in material existence and weighed down by the body) and the hylics (who have no hope of transcending themselves and aspiring toward supramaterial existence) will go the way of all matter: they will undergo the fires of apocalyptic destruction (AH I.7.5). The material Cosmos will perish, and they along with it. Such is Irenaeus’s account of the Gnostic myth, which when all is said and done is deeply concerned as he interprets their mythology with anthropology and the justification of the superior “race” inside the discourse of Christian theology….[1]

I wonder if this hasn’t confused you more than enlightened you? Basically, Gnostics believed in a dualism; the idea that the material world was evil, and the spiritual world was pure. In general they believed that certain people had the ‘spark’ of divine within them, albeit trapped in this physical material body, and that the only way out was to achieve a special kind of Gnosis or ‘knowledge’ that would finally allow them to escape and return to their divine source or the ‘pleroma’ (which means ‘fullness’ or ‘plenitude’ in classical and Koine Greek). As Carter describes Ireanaeus’ understanding of the Gnostic’s view, he is highlighting how there was a particular class among humanity who indeed had access to this divine spark within themselves in a special way, a ‘spiritual’ way that set them apart from two other classes of people who had no chance whatsoever to overcome their materiality or physicality; unfortunately for these latter two (reprobate) classes they had no determined end other than eternal destruction (something like a concept of ‘hell’).[2]

I wish I could get deeper into this; I have quite a bit more material that I would like to cover, especially to draw out how these kinds of correlations between Greek Gnosticism and their conception of a ‘elite’ class of people fit curiously well with how classical Calvinism (and Arminianism) understands there to be an ‘elect’ class of ‘spiritual’ people who are sensitive to the things of the true God (thus bringing salvation) versus a class of ‘reprobate’ people who are slaves of their ‘fleshy’ physical live realities. [Maybe I am simply engaging in the ‘guilt by association’ fallacy … I don’t really think so]

I would argue that the similarities between these two very different trajectories of thought are a result of a shared theory of revelation, and a commitment to a type of natural theology that implicates, at a methodological level, the way that people can ostensibly ‘know’ metaphysical things. I will have to leave this assertion pretty vague, but if you are read up on such things you’ll understand what I am intimating.

More later.

[1] J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account, Kindle loc. 548.

[2] See J.N.D. Kelly for further definition of what Gnosticism entails in his book: J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines. Revised Edition (San Francisco: HarperCollins Publishers, 1978), 26.

Doing Genuine Christian Theology: The Praise of God or the Praise of Man

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Just a quick reflection on theology as a discipline. Theology as a discipline is strange thing, in a way. It is immersed in two worlds;  1) the world of the confessing Church of Jesus Christ (a doxological world), and 2) the world of the unconfessing academy that seeks to make something that might look foolish as wise in the ‘world’s eyes’. So doing theology as a Christian, doing Christian theology becomes a very tenuous task; it almost seems as if it is a balancing act. One where on the one hand we are seeking the praise of God while on the other the praise of men. Typically the only way to discern what is really going on is to take inventory of one’s heart, but really only God can do that. This makes doing Christian theology a dangerous task. We ourselves aren’t always sure of whether or not we are doing most of our theologizing for the praise of God or the praise of men. Even so, this does not make us any less accountable, and so our only hope is to continuously throw ourselves, as theologians, at the mercy of God; to constantly live in a state of repentance, realizing how broken we are as vessels in the hands of a loving God.

It is hard to say sometimes whether or not we as Christian theologians are really doing Christian theology; because if it is not of love, or from love it means nothing (and we know that genuine Christian theology is something, at the very least!)

Miscellanies on God’s ‘Impassibility’. In response to Wesley Hill’s ‘First Things’ Article

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pantocratorr

Wesley Hill, professor of biblical studies at Trinity School for Ministry, just wrote an article for First Things entitled: The New “New Orthodoxy”: Only the Impassible God Can Help. In this article Hill provides a brief sketch, and then a kind of corrective (I think that’s what he is attempting) for what it appears he thinks has become a kind of waywardness within modern theology; that is, what could be called a ‘death of God’ type of theology, the type maybe typified by someone like Jürgen Moltmann and his post-Holocaust theologizing around the theme of God crucified. Hill writes:

By the time Goetz wrote, that theme—of God hanging there on the gallows with the innocent sufferer, in the timeless image Elie Wiesel offered in his book Night—had come to dominate many forms of Protestant theology. Dietrich Bonhoeffer had written from a Nazi prison that “only the suffering God can help.” Jürgen Moltmann, in the wake of the revelation of the full extent of the Holocaust, had authored a book called The Crucified God. And figures as diverse as the process theologian Alfred North Whitehead, who characterized God as “the fellow-sufferer who understands,” and the Japanese Lutheran Kazoh Kitamori, who spoke of “the pain of God,” had ushered in a way of thinking about divine majesty and power as God’s ability and will to share in human misery. Across the spectrum, from both pulpits and pews, the “new orthodoxy” came to reign: God suffers in God’s own nature. (source)

It seems that Hill believes that this has been a deleterious turn for Christian theology, and thus through his article he seems to be calling for people to turn back–to repent as it were–to the old paths; to the paths provided by many of the Patristic theologians, a turn that leads us back to a sense of God’s transcendence, of his otherness, his unlikeness from us, to an apophatic kind of labyrinth vis-à-vis God that has become somewhat of a rage among a sub-group of youngish (and some olderish) [so perceived] conservative minded theological types. This seems to be the category that Hill falls into,

And what do we find with that newly awakened textual sensitivity? Just this: that, far from being unconcerned about the human plight, the Church Fathers were motivated by their theology of salvation in upholding doctrines of divine immutability and impassibility (God’s transcendence of human suffering and passions). Their doctrines of salvation prompted their—allegedly aloof and insensitive—understandings of God.

“God’s Logos is by nature immortal and incorruptible and Life and Life-giver,” wrote Cyril. Only so is God able, through sharing our human flesh in the Incarnation, to impart eternal life to that flesh, rather than succumbing to our death and being extinguished by it. When it comes to rescuing us from death, and not merely enduring death along with us, only the impassible God can help. (source)

One thing that wasn’t clear in Hill’s essay though was how he actually defines impassibility in regard to God. He seemed to trade on a certain understanding of what that entails; mostly for Hill that seemed to be an idea of God’s transcendence, his otherness from humanity in his inner-being. But Hill didn’t tease out exactly what he meant; he seemed to be suggesting that the Church Fathers for example endorsed a kind of Greek metaphysic in regard to God, insofar as that metaphysic supplied a theological grammar for them to articulate and worship God through. But left unqualified, as Hill left it, it does seem as if he gives us some Patristic authors and thinkers who indeed fell back into the Greek metaphysical temptation of thinking God in terms of analytical philosophical categories rather than the lively ones that the so called ‘New Orthodox’ ones have been attempting to construct in regard to God and his passions (so Moltmann et al) – the categories that Hill is apparently attempting to undercut as viable. But as I left Hill’s article all it really felt like is that he had simply swung the pendulum back from one side to the other, without attempting to grab any fruit from the side that he opposes.

Myk Habets, my friend, has written a little on how the Church Fathers used the Greek metaphysics (in what we might say non-correlationist ways), and in particular the language of impassibility, to help unpack the mysterious ways of God made manifest in the flesh (en sarkos). But I think Habets closes the door where Hill left it open, and so I offer this brief sketch from Myk in response to Hill’s article in an attempt to foreclose on the language of ‘impassibility’ in a way that I think it ought to be. Habets writes:

… When medieval theology adopted Aristotelian philosophy the Greek notion of God as impassible and immutable was also adopted. In this way Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover became associated with the God of the Scriptures. However, in Patristic theology immutability and impassibility, as applied to God, were not associated with these philosophical ideas but were actually a challenge to it. It is true that God is not moved by, and is not changed by, anything outside himself, and that he is not affected by anything or does not suffer from anything beyond himself. But this simply affirms the biblical fact that God is transcendent and the one who created ex nihilo. What the Fathers did not mean is that God does not move himself and is incapable of imparting motion to what he has made. It does not mean that God is devoid of passion, of love, mercy and wrath, and that he is impassibly and immutably related to our world of space and time in such a way that it is thrown back upon itself as a closed continuum of cause and effect.

I grant that patristic theology was tempted constantly by the thrust of Greek thought to change the concepts of impassibility and immutability in this direction, but it remained entrenched within the orbit of the Judeo-Christian doctrine of the living God who moves himself, who through his free love created the universe, imparting to its dynamic order, and who through the outgoing of his love moves outside of himself in the incarnation. (source)

The first couple of clauses from Habets (i.e. “When medieval theology adopted Aristotelian philosophy the Greek notion of God as impassible and immutable was also adopted. In this way Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover became associated with the God of the Scriptures….”) signals a qualification that Hill glosses over, and thus then weakens (in my view) his article. Hill skips from the Patristics to the Bible in his genealogy of ‘impassibility’, but he fails to sketch how Medieval theology appropriated and thus impacted theological receptions of the language of impassibility. My guess is that Hill would affirm Myk’s sketch on how the Patristics retexted the grammar of impassibility, but I am not altogether sure he sees the distinction between the Patristics and the Medievals (and I would want to suggest that it is the Medieval reception and recasting of ‘impassibility’ that gets appropriated in Christian Dogmatic and constructive theology, more than the Patristic offering); at least not in the way he leaves things open in his article.

So my question to Hill is, if he sees this distinction between Patristic and Medieval offerings of God’s impassibility (as a doctrine)? Does Wesley Hill believe that this distinction needs to be recognized (between a Patristic and Medieval conception of ‘impassibility’), and how to not do so (make some sort of critical distinction) ends up leaving us in an equivocal jumble of things that leaves discussion about God’s impassibility (without this kind of discussion) open for critique in this way?

 

 

Participatio, James B. Torrance, Alan Torrance, Limited Atonement, and Evangelical Calvinism

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Participatio is the peer reviewed online theological journal of the Thomas F. Torrance Theological Fellowship (I had the honor of being a copy editor and assistant editor for Participatio for a couple volumes), and they just came out with their latest volume. This latest volume is actually an issue dedicated to Thomas Torrance’s brother James B. Torrance, a virtuoso theologian and churchman in his own right. I would like to encourage all of my readers to head over to their website, and give this JBT volume a read. To whet your appetite I would like to offer a quote from the Introductory essay written by James’ son, prof (Dr) Alan Torrance (he is professor of theology at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland). Not only do I want to offer this quote as something to pique your interest in the whole of the volume, but I also want to use the material in the quote as a bit of a springboard to talk about something that is core to what Myk Habets and I have called Evangelical Calvinism; as you all know by now, Thomas Torrance, and James Torrance (no less) have provided all kind of impetus and trajectory for the shaping of Evangelical Calvinism (in fact Myk and I stole that language from Thomas’ book Scottish Theology).

The following is a quote from Alan Torrance about an experience that his dad, James Torrance had (early on in his career) as he was asked to share the pulpit with two stalwart theologian-pastors of that day, Martin Lloyd Jones (who JBT served as youth pastor for), and James I. Packer; he found himself in a bit of a quagmire as he staunchly disagreed with his two elders on the issue of the extent of the atonement (both Jones and Packer, of course, affirm the classically held Reformed position that Jesus only died for the elect … more commonly understood in popular parlance as ‘limited atonement’). Here is what Alan Torrance writes of that experience:

Third, there was his “black day.” JB was profoundly involved in evangelical circles and he never ceased to regard himself as an evangelical. He was president of the IVF while studying philosophy in Edinburgh and went on to lead the largest mission ever organised by the Christian Union in Scotland. While in London, he worked alongside Martin Lloyd Jones as his youth pastor. All of this culminated in what he described as possibly the most influential (and distressing) experience of his theological development. He was invited to be a keynote speaker at a massive evangelical conference in London alongside James Packer and Martin Lloyd Jones. At this event, the subject of limited atonement came up — a topic that had been little discussed in post-war evangelical circles. My father found himself outnumbered on the platform when he offered an emphatic rejection of limited atonement, insisting that the God who became human loved and forgave his enemies just as he told us to love and forgive our enemies — seventy times seven, that is, unconditionally. God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself and those who deny Christ “reject the Lord who bought them.” What distressed him most was the fact that Martin Lloyd Jones supported limited atonement. As he once explained to me, it was this event that led him to devote most of the rest of his career to analysing the elements that had led to the emergence of a doctrine that he, like his missionary father, regarded as a heresy — one that tragically misrepresented the character of God, the integrity of the incarnation and the nature of God’s mission to the world in Jesus Christ. It meant that we could no longer tell people that God loved them or that Christ died for them. Indeed, ultimately, on this understanding, no-one could ever be sure, this side of the eschaton, that they were loved by God or that Christ died for them. [read the full volume here, this quote was taken from Alan Torrance’s Introductory essay to this volume]

What a significant insight into James Torrance’s life and theological development! This is one of the distinguishing factors between us (as Evangelical Calvinists) and classically (so called) Reformed proponents. We believe along with James Torrance (and Thomas) that Jesus Christ in his vicarious humanity and as the ontological ground of all of humanity in the Incarnation assumed the humanity of all people in a very particular way as the man from Nazareth. As such it is impossible for the Evangelical Calvinist to ever conceive of the idea that God only loves some people, some of his creation enough to die for them. Indeed, the logic of our position requires that God loves all of humanity as much as he loves himself, for he has chosen to not be God without us as he elected our humanity for himself in his dearly beloved Son, Jesus Christ. You see the dilemma then: if Jesus in the incarnation truly assumed humanity and serves as the ground the condition upon which all of humanity holds together (by the ‘word’ of his power see Hebrews 1), then it would be utterly impossible to even consider the idea that Jesus only died for just a few out of the mass of humanity; this would lead to the idea that there is some sort of rupture within the life of God (if in fact he truly did assume humanity in the incarnation, and he did so because of who he is as Triune love).

James Torrance is an Evangelical Calvinist par excellence; alongside, of course, his bother Thomas Torrance. I hope this insight from James’ son, Alan, helps to make clearer why he is such an important person and thinker for us Evangelical Calvinists.