Did you know that much of the Great (Christian) Tradition is committed to a way of doing theology that is committed to speculation as its primary mode for thinking and articulating God? Did you know that this mode is currently being recovered by most conservative evangelical theologians today? Did you know that metaphysics of the classical philosophical sort is the way the Tradition has sought to do its theology? Did you know that the Protestant Scripture principle was a serious source for undercutting the so-called ancient way (via antiqua) of the Great Tradition; that the Scripture principle majored on a theology of the Word that theretofore hadn’t been fully appreciated? Did you know that present within this sort of ‘Turn to the Word’ there was a fetus waiting to be birthed such that a radical Turn to the Word might come to maturation wherein Jesus Christ, rather than the speculative wit, might become the regulative way for doing genuine Protestant theology? Unfortunately, this conception was still born in the nurseries of scholastic midwifery with the result of returning the Protestant trajectory back to the via antiqua rather than into the bright light of baby Jesus’s face. The effect is that Protestantism is currently in a stage of becoming shaped more by the Latin-Catholic ancestry, and the tradition and commentary building of that sort, rather than by a genuinely formed theology of the Word whose rule of faith is Jesus Christ. So, a radical theology of the Word is being abandoned for a regnant theology of the Church whose regulative principle isn’t ultimately Jesus Christ, but the magisters of the Great Tradition. The Tradition itself becomes authoritative even if it is asserted that it is subordinate to Scripture. It is very hard to see how that is the case in any meaningful sense; particularly when the reality of Holy Scripture is none other than Jesus Christ and the Triune God who He alone has Self-revealed.

I know this doesn’t bother most, not in the evangelical world. Indeed, one of my best brothers, my best friends is committed to this recovery effort. I fully understand the motivation and impulse that pushes brothers and sisters to engage in this sort of theological excavation project; I just think it ultimately falls short in a fundamental way when it comes to the attempt to think God according to the Evangel. The whole project is in fact representative of a basic commitment to natural theology; it is an enthymemic commitment in most cases. In other words, there is an attendant presumption to this excavation project that what ‘just is’ in the Great Tradition has been providentially supervened, in a causal sense, by God Himself. These folks presume that because of the staying-power of certain ideational and theological institutions, that this in itself guarantees a sort of Divine imprimatur upon the Trad. Further, the presumption fortified even more forcefully by the idea that the logoi or ratio of God is so interwoven into the fabric of the created order, and attendant to that, an irresistible and natural capacity to discover this ratio, that these theologians thrush full force ahead under the notion that nature itself is effulgent to declare who God is. They presume that God’s attributes, His predicates of Deity, are latent within the shadows of God’s eternal form as that is shown forth in His power to create and govern a universe of unspeakable depth and source. This is the natural theology that attends the recovery effort of the current crop of theologians; at least certain theologians, in the quadrants I’m referring to.

Yet this natural theology is not supported by Scripture and its reality in Jesus Christ. Scripture teaches that no one seeks after God; that Jesus alone Self-exegetes God for us; that Jesus alone is the point and reality of Scripture; that the Logos of God is personal not substantial, and definitely not accidental. Speculation is not the spectacles God has provided for in knowing Him. God has instead stooped into our dusty frames, taken us to the soil of earth, and recreated us anew in the resurrected humanity of Jesus Christ’s humanity. It is only by this analogy of relation, by this analogy of faith, through the adoption of Grace, that we have the capacity by the Spirit to taste and see that God is; and in this tasting to come to know Who God is (not simply that He is). Herein a genuine Quarens Fides Intellectum (Faith Seeking Understanding) comes into form, that is as we are participatio Christi (participating in Christ). There is no assurance that the Great Tradition is ultimately proximate to Who God is; that assurance of Eternal Life only comes in the dearly Son of God in whom the Father is pleased. The Great Tradition might supply an archive for imaginative ways to think God under certain periodic pressures, but they are not authoritative ways, per se. The only authoritative imprimatur of God, for knowing God, is given in the One who has become flesh in the womb of Mary, and resurrected in the arms of the Father by the recreative power of the Spirit.