Let me try and nuance a delicate issue. I say ‘delicate’ because if I’m not careful this could come off sounding arrogant. I mean I’m nobody special, I’m just little Bobby Grow (well I’m actually 6’ 3’’), shooting off blog posts from my little corner of the world in the Pacific Northwest; but I still like to stop and think about where I’m at on the continuum of Christian theological identity. So that’s what this post will be about. I will talk, briefly, about where I see myself lining up relative to other Christian thinkers out there, and fortify that a bit with a quote from John Webster on how holiness and theology work together.

Many people, I’m sure, think I’m a liberal simply because I like some of Karl Barth’s theological motifs and themes. Of course, once some of these same people find out that I am even more enamored with Thomas Torrance their perspective on me softens a bit, I think. I grew up as a Conservative Baptist evangelical; attended evangelical institutions of lower and higher learning; and continue to largely inhabit the evangelical sub-culture in North America. So I see myself as a strange brew in some ways. When it comes right down to it though my traditional ways are still very much present. I mean politically my alignment has definitely moved; not towards Democrat from Republican. More like from conservative Republican to agnostic in regard to any political party or agenda; and actually I’m pretty antagonistic towards most political agendas these days, whether that be the “right” or “left.” But this again works against me in some ways; since so much of my sub-culture, i.e. evangelicalism, has conflated itself with the agenda of conservative Republicanism, many of these folks will probably still see me as a liberal. But of course my stance on what “conservatives” think makes them conservative and evangelical are probably right there with them; i.e. I’m against abortion, same-sex marriage (or homosexuality in general—and when I say against, I mean in the way the church and the traditional reading of Scripture has been against this—I’m not against these people, I see them as sinners just like the rest of us); but then I’m more pro-life and at this point, meaning anti-war, and interested in non-violence (as an ethos at least) than many of them.

But the above is just the political stuff. When it comes to theology I’m still quite trad, but conditioned from a more Torrancean and John Websterian direction. When it comes to Scripture I hold to the infallibility of Holy Scripture (meaning I don’t think inerrancy is a good way to frame a doctrine of Scripture — so I believe more about Scripture, and its aims, not less than what inerrancy will allow for). I believe the tradition of the church is something that is very important in regard to developing a biblical hermeneutic (meaning I think we should be all about retrieving the voices of the past in the history of the church in order to resource them for the present to help us approach Scripture in sober and humble ways). I believe in all the basic doctrines covered in the Apostle’s Creed (and other important ecumenical creeds such as Nicaea, Constantinople, Chalcedon, et al.). I’m no theological liberal; I just want to clear that up right now. I read Karl Barth as an evangelical Christian (thinking of evangelical in its historic understanding), and not as a social or theological liberal. And I think Thomas Torrance and John Webster offer some of the best ways into the theology of Karl Barth in order to engage with his theology constructively. I’m a reader of and learner from John Calvin, Martin Luther, the Patristic theologians, and a host of other important and orthodox teachers from the past.

Most importantly I believe that the task of theology is one where it should be done from a posture of doxology (worship) and the realization that theology is really a matter of sanctification; i.e. of pressing further and further into the holiness of God’s Triune life. To help me explicate this point, let me refer us to John Webster:

Once again, therefore, we find ourselves running up against the contradictory character of theology as an exercise of holy reason. One of the grand myths of modernity has been that the operations of reason are a sphere from which God’s presence can be banished, where the mind is, as it were, safe from divine intrusion. To that myth, Christian theology is a standing rebuke. As holy reason at work, Christian theology can never escape from the sober realization that we talk in the terrifying presence of God from whom we cannot flee (Ps. 139.7). In Christian theology, the matter of our discourse is not someone absent, someone whom we have managed to exclude from our own intellectual self-presence. When we begin to talk theologically about the holiness of God, we soon enough discover that the tables have been reversed; it is no longer we who summon God before our minds to make him a matter for clever discourse, but the opposite: the holy God shows himself and summons us before him to give account of our thinking. That summons – and not any constellation of cultural, intellectual or political conditions – is the determinative context of holy reason. There are other contexts, of course, other determinations and constraints in the intellectual work of theology: theology is human work in human history. But those determinations and constraints are all subordinate to, and relativized by, the governing claim of the holy God, a claim which is of all things most fearful but also of all things most full of promise.[1]

As usual, Webster articulates what I’m really after here in the cogent and prescient way that he is known for. The reason I still see myself as a traditional, even conservative Christian thinker (and dare I say, theologian) is because I, along with Webster, think that what it means to do theology properly is from the realization that that only happens as the holy God, and his life works on me, as I participate in and from his life through Jesus Christ. At the end of the day I think this is what makes a Christian theologian conservative and even traditional; I think the best of the theologians in the history of the church had this reverent posture before God. It doesn’t mean they were always right, but it does mean that they always deferred to God; that they approached his written Word in ministerial rather than magisterial ways; and they always saw their life under God rather than over God. This is the approach I still strive for, and I think it’s the approach that many liberals and non-traditionalists mock. So be it.

Well, in this rather off the cuff post hopefully I have communicated something that is intelligible. I rambled quite a bit (what else are blog posts good for?), but hopefully you’re catching the drift of my heart. And if you’re not what I would consider a “conservative” or traditional thinker, at least in the ways I think of that, why not give it a try? I think the trad way, when properly understood, meaning Christologically radicalized (there’s the Torrance influence!), is the richest of ways to do and think theology; it’s theology not just for self-edification, but for the edification of the church of Jesus Christ. These are the theologians the church needs; it doesn’t need theologians who point people away from Jesus, but radically to him—and to the Father and Holy Spirit.

[1] John Webster, Holiness (Grand Rapids, Michigan/Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2003), Loc. 157, 162, 167 Kindle.