Monthly Archives: July 2019

The Hermeneutical Problem for All Christian Traditions: ‘Theology as Translation’

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When Protestants say they affirm the ā€˜authority of Holy Scripture,ā€™ they are doing nothing more, or less, than being good stalwart Protestants. The Protestant Reformation at the end of the day was an authority protest; and the Reformers believed that all authority reposes not in the Catholic church (or any church), but in Holy Scripture instead. They took the paper of Scripture to be the instrumental medium between God and humanity rather than the Church simpliciter. Some have claimed, including Heiko Oberman, that Protestants ended up having a ā€˜paper popeā€™ rather than a pope with an address (my paraphrase). Be that as it may, the Protestant ā€˜Scripture Principleā€™ is at the center of what it means to be a Protestant Christian; the Christian in this frame looks to Scripture Alone (Sola Scriptura) as their authority coram Deo (before God), rather than a magisteria of cardinals under papal regency. But this begs a certain and significant question; one not lost on Catholic critics of Protestants, viz.: whose interpretation of Scripture is the Protestant going to follow; or: if there is a multiplicity of interpretations of Protestants then given such diversity how is the Protestant to know whose interpretation is most proximate to the reality versus the others? Yet, I donā€™t really think this gets the Catholic off the hook so much; they suffer from the same sort of ā€˜pervasive interpretive pluralismā€™ that they claim the Protestants do. It is just that the Catholics have identified their papal oversight to be Roman, whereas Protestant oversight has the potential to simply posit multiple ā€˜popesā€™ based upon the interpretation of Scripture they deem most faithful to the Gospel reality. So, maybe the papalists have a certain sort of rightful critique of Protestantism, but it is a double-edged sword; and all it really does is help identify a ā€˜problemā€™ that all Christian people (and people in general) have. All Christian people, in particular, have a hermeneutical problem; viz. we all our subjects spatially located under conceptual pressures framed by whatever period of history we find ourselves embedded within. In other words, we are sinful creatures who live in and from sinful epistemic realities that serve as a real challenge for ever arriving at an ultimate capacity to know with absolute certainty what is the reality and what instead might just be our own self-projections onto reality.

If the above is the case: Paper and Papal both suffer under the same hermeneutical and epistemic problems that all creatures do. True, Christians have the Spirit of God, and of course this is the point of departure, ecclesiologically between Catholics and Protestants. Catholics have institutionalized and collapsed the measure of the Spirit into the Catholic Church and magisteria itself; whereas, Protestants have institutionalized and collapsed the shedding abroad of the Spirit into the collective of elect peoples wherever they might show up. Either way, in on a positive note, what becomes manifest is that Christians, no matter what tradition, are reliant upon the Spirit of God if they have any hope of actually being able to claim that they have a concrete knowledge of God and self. Without an extra nos (outside of us) experience of the Holy the Christian remains a hopeless beggar without the possibility of receiving Apostolic ā€˜silver and gold.ā€™ But, and note the adversative force of this ā€˜but,ā€™ we do have the Spirit; and by Godā€™s Grace in Christ, we do have the capacity to know God and ourselves. We are not limited by our locatedness, because God is not so limited. God in Christ has broken into the spatial realities of our world, culturally situated as they are, and continue to be, and Deus dixit (ā€˜God has spokenā€™); and He continues to speak!

With the aforementioned considered, what I think this bespeaks is a need for humility while engaging in the theological task. There needs to be a recognition that we are at the sole mercy of the living God to speak to us where we are. We can, at a very basic level, come to the realization that the incarnation of God in Christ shows us that God is not limited by the heavens; instead the soil of this earth has become resplendent with Godā€™s glory in the shed blood of the Lamb slain before the earthā€™s very foundations. God is able to speak under variant pressures, and transpose us from the kingdom of darkness to the Kingdom of the Son of Love afresh and anew. God is stable, we are not; and so we look to His perduring voice, and understand that in His wisdom He has made His voice available to us even under the pressures set forth by our 21st century context and conceptuality. In other words, God is able to speak in the 1st century just as clearly as he is able to in the 21st. What becomes of issue then is a matter of ā€˜translation.ā€™ God doesnā€™t change; His reality is everlasting and eternal; and yet even with that as the case, He is happy to speak to us in a language we understand. This was an insight that Luther understood well; with his emphasis on the vernacular for the common people, in regard to the translation of Scripture, this, in principle remains an important reality for the doing of theology today. We have a 21st century Anglophone vernacular in North America that the Gospel is able to penetrate from above (outside of us), and ā€˜commandeerā€™ its language for purposes of communicating the transcendent tongue of the heavenly Gospel in the glossilia of the peoples of the nations all throughout the global world.

Because I reject the ā€˜genetic fallacy,ā€™ I am not afraid to share things from people I largely disagree with; that is, when they provide important insight that can stand independent, in certain pretextual ways, from their larger theological or what have you projects. In this instance I am thinking of Bultmann and Kasemann. They both offer some important insight on the reality of translation as the premise of Christian theology.

The translation of the New Testament demands scientific work. Not only because every translation produced is imperfect and needs to be revised critically in accordance with the original text, but above all because even the most accurate translation needs to be translated again in the next generation. For language is alive and has its own history. Conceptualities change, and scientific research on the New Testament has the task of communicating the text in the language and conceptuality of each particular present.[1]

And Ernst KƤsemann:

Bultmann was entirely right to pose this catchword that so terrified and infuriated his opponents. There must be demythologizing. . . . Without question God does not intend that we wander around as living mummies of the ancient world, everywhere presupposing and utilizing for ourselves the technology of our time, but spiritually and religiously setting ourselves back 1,900 years. Faith must be lived today, and this means it must think today and given an account of itself. The dry bones of the past remain ghosts if there are no living witnesses facing the present to take up their message.[2]

Without committing myself fully to either Bultmann or KƤsemann, and recognizing that they have proverbially swung the pendulum to another extreme, what they uppoint for us is helpful. It recognizes, at the least, that we are time conditioned creatures that need to hear the Gospel afresh and anew. It recognizes how translation is indeed present in the theological task, precisely because of our locatedness on the historical spectrum. What they fail to recognize, and this is deleterious to their broader projects, respectively, is that itā€™s possible to excavate from the past in order to help in the translation and inculturating project of the present. They are too committed to evolutionary advance, in linear fashion, ironically, thus failing to grasp that Godā€™s voice can and has been deposited for the fulgent present. In other words, they place so much emphasis on the existential moment as decisive, that they seem to get lost in Lessing historical ditch, consequently disallowing for the possibility to realize that our present is part of a continuum that keeps on giving. They seem to forget that the linguistic dialects that we traffic in presently have a historical prius that furnishes the present with its own linguistic living room; indeed manufactured from the conceptual matter of the past.

All of the above noted to simply state: theology is not a static thing. We have extremes on all sides; whether that be a desire to slave ourselves to the schoolmen of the scholastic past, or to cohabitate with the ā€˜modernā€™ Teutonics of the present. No matter, theology is the task of translating the Gospel into language and conceptual apparatuses that most proximate the Gospelā€™s transcendent and immanent reality in the incarnation of God. Theology that fails at this task isnā€™t a theology worth its name.

Catholics and Protestants, not to mention the Orthodox all have to deal with this same hermeneutical problem and eventual task. We cannot simply fall back into the safety of our confessional towers; we are called to go outside the city walls with Christ, and give our lives daily as living sacrifices well pleasing to the living God whom we serve. Soli Deo Gloria

[1] Rudolf Bultmann, ā€œTheologie als Wissenschaft,ā€ ZTK 81, no. 4 (1984): 447-69, at 459-60 cited by David W. Congdon,Ā The Mission Of Demythologizing: Rudolf Bultmannā€™s Dialectical TheologyĀ (Minneapolis: Fortess Press, 2015), 566.

[2] Ernst KƤsemann, In der Nachfolge des gekreuzigten Nazareners: AufsƤtze and VortrƤge aus dem Nachlass, ed. Rudolf Landau and Wolfgang Kraus (TĆ¼bingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), 97-98 cited by David W. Congdon,Ā The Mission Of Demythologizing: Rudolf Bultmannā€™s Dialectical TheologyĀ (Minneapolis: Fortess Press, 2015), 569.

A Short Defense of Modern Theology: A Challenge for the Evangelical Churches and Theologians

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A small point towards a defense of so called modern and other theological developments: It continues to be a seemingly popular belief among evangelical theologians to maintain the idea that the modern (i.e. post-Enlightenment) theological turn needs to be corrected to the point of abandonment. That modern theology took a turn for the worse when the Divine was collapsed into the creature; when the absolute power of God in eternity was disjoined from the ordained power of God in history; when the subject became Lord rather than the Lord being Lord. These are some of the major premises many believe thrust Christian theology into a ruinous trajectory of doing anthropology as theology, and that our only hope is to turn back to the pure being theology of the scholastic schoolmen (i.e. via antiqua). Note John Webster as he speaks to this issue in the context of theology of retrieval:

ā€˜Retrievalā€™, then, is aĀ modeĀ of theology, an attitude of mind and a way of approaching theological tasks which is present with greater or lesser prominence in a range of different thinkers, not all of them self-consciously ā€˜conservativeā€™ or ā€˜orthodoxā€™. Although here we concentrate upon strong versions of this approach, it can be found in less stringent forms and in combination with other styles of theological work. A rough set of resemblances between different examples of this kind of theology would include the following: these theologies are ā€˜objectivistā€™ or ā€˜realistā€™ insofar as they consider Christian faith and theology to be a response to a self-bestowing divine reality which precedes and overcomes the limited reach of rational intention; their material accounts of this divine reality are heavily indebted to the trinitarian, incarnational, and soteriological teaching of the classical Christianity of the ecumenical councils; they consider that the governing norms of theological inquiry are established by the object by which theology is brought into being (the source of theology is thus its norm); accordingly, they do not accord final weight to external criteria or to the methods and procedures which enjoy prestige outside theology; their accounts of the location, audience, and ends of Christian doctrine are generally governed by the relation of theology to the community of faith as its primary sphere; and in their judgements about the historical setting of systematic theology they tend to deploy a theological (rather than socio-cultural) understanding of tradition which outbids the view that modernity has imposed a new and inescapable set of conditions on theological work. For such theologies, immersion in the texts and habits of thought of earlier (especially pre-modern) theology opens up a wide view of the object of Christian theological reflection, setting before its contemporary practitioners descriptions of the faith unharnessed by current anxieties, and enabling a certain liberty in relation to the present. With this in mind, we begin by considering the study of history as a diagnostic to identify what are taken to be misdirections in modern theology, and then the deployment of history as a resource to overcome them.[1]

As much as I like Webster, I donā€™t agree with him here; particularly the emboldened aspect. Do I think there are serious problems with the premises that fund ā€œmuchā€ of modern theology? Yes. But I also donā€™t think they are any more sinister than premises that have percolated throughout the history of ideas and theological development for centuries. In other words, every period of theological ideational development will have pros and cons. To suggest that the whole of a period is simply a dung-heap that needs to be abandoned and corrected to the point that we simply start-over is really only a bad case of chronological snobbery. Unfortunately, Websterā€™s sentiment has been internalized by a whole generation of up and coming and have come theologians.

I seek to work from different grounds as a theologian; grounds that constructively look for God in Christ in whatever sector and period of the Church that can be fruitfully gleaned. David Steinmetz, as he segues into a sketch of Nikolaus von Amsdorfā€™s person and theology writes this:

The role of a religious conservative is rarely a popular one, especially when this conservatism is combined with an intolerance of all theological innovation. There is something pinched and one-sided about the mentality that holds that a decisive theological breakthrough has taken place in the past but denies (or is at least distrustful of) the possibility of new and original insights in the present. That the church has been led into truth in the past does not exclude the possibility of the discovery of new truth in the present, even if the new insight is only a deepened participation in the meaning of the old.[2]

Steinmetzā€™s point is well taken, or it should be! And yet so many ā€˜conservativesā€™ of our day, which is where Webster ended up going in his latter theological ministry, take the notion that he finally did to heart. Some, like Webster, spend so much time in the modern ambit that they grow weary of it. But maybe this weariness, rather than resulting in an abandonment project, ought to simply be the source for a time of reprieve and perspective building. Instead of throwing the baby out with the bath water and essentially saying that the modern needs to be fully abandoned or, at best, corrected; maybe the theologian, as Steinmetz notes, ought to be open to the idea that new and even innovative insights can be gained by modern thinkers in and for the Church just as much as the premodern thinkers were able to gain.

Travel in the theological circles that I do, and all of modern theology is essentially junked; except for careful and incidental quotes here and there of Barth or some other like figure. This is to the Churchā€™s and theologianā€™s loss. When we cut ourselves off from the modern we cut the ground right out from under us and fail to recognize that this is an impossible task to begin with. Surely we can constructively retrieve and listen to the past for the present, but this need not entail a full on abandonment of what we canā€™t abandon to begin with: i.e. our own modern locatedness and epistemic formation. Why not admit that all theology the 21st century thinker engages in is by necessity, Modern? Why not, if this is the case, attempt to critically engage with the categories we have been given and understand that those can be cross-pollinated by the past; thus allowing new vistas and innovations to open up for the Christian imagination and doctrinal development, that outwith will and cannot happen? Why not abandon the ā€œfearā€ of the present, and recognize that we are part of an ideational lineage that does not ultimately allow for it to be cast off? When we admit this, we are more free to hear the voice of the living God whether that be spoken anew and afresh for us in the 21st century, or from the 16th century. But this pervasive bias, by evangelicals, against anything ā€˜modernā€™ is a fools-errand of thought that needs to be repented of and abandoned itself.

 

[1] John Webster, ā€œTheologies of Retrieval,ā€ inĀ The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology,edited by John Webster, Kathryn Tanner, and Iain Torrance (Oxford/NY: Oxford University Press, 2007), 584-85.

[2] David C. Steinmetz, Reformers In The Wings: From Geiler von Kayserberg to Theodore Beza, Second Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 70.

The Question of ‘Free-Will’ and Human Agency in Salvation: Thomas Torrance’s Reference to the Analogy of the Virgin Birth

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This is The Evangelical Calvinist blog, as such youā€™re probably expecting posts on Calvinism. I used to post much more in this area, and still do at pointsā€”this will be one of those points. In this post we will engage with a doctrine of human agency in salvation. Since this is the Evangelical Calvinist we will work through a lengthy passage from TF Torrance, and deal with the way he treats this topic. I am happy to own what he communicates in this area as my own. Fair warning: it will leave the classical Calvinist and Arminian rather frustrated. TFT rebuffs the mechanical theory of causation we get from Aristotle as that is imbued into Westminster Calvinism. In Torrance we get a filial approach to these issues, one that is grounded in relational and Triune Grace that thinks in terms of personal relationships rather than in the logico-causal and necessitarian ways that other classical theisms typically work in and from.

Torrance, and Evangelical Calvinists following, receive critique over the very issue this post will seek to redress. We are accused of being either, Universalists or incoherent in our soteriological understanding. The critique is solely based in the fact that we donā€™t answer the question about human agency in salvation in the ways that our opponents would like us to. They, in petitio principii terms, simply presume that their causal framework for understanding how God works in the world just is and must be the way that God indeed, works in the world. Torrance had a way of undercutting their Aristotelian universe, and theory of causation therein; he did that by appealing to a ā€˜modernā€™ development by referring to the work of Albert Einstein, John Clerk Maxwell, and others. He uses, for example, Einsteinā€™s theory of relativity to undermine the sort of stable and static and mechanical universe that Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Newton gave us in their respective theories of the cosmos. But I digress, yet I do so to make the point that Torrance, and us Evangelical Calvinists, work from different premises in regard to a God/world relation; which for us, presents us with a way to articulate the inner-grammar of the Gospel in differing ways from our counterparts in the other iterations of classical theism.

The aforementioned noted, all to get us into this lengthy, but important passage from the very Scottish, TF Torrance. After we read through this pericope from Torrance, I will follow up by further contrasting our respective view on this issue with what we get in classical Calvinism and Arminianism. Torrance writes:

(v) The virgin birth the pattern of grace, the model of faith

That brings us to the point that in the virgin birth we are given at the very beginning Christā€™s life a revelatory sign, a semeion, which tells us what the divine act of grace is. Grace takes a form in the birth of Jesus which we may take as a pattern or norm for all our understanding of grace. Here God takes the initiative and approaches Mary through the word of his angelic messenger ā€“ the word proclaimed to Mary is the word of election or grace: she is chosen and told Godā€™s choice. She has nothing to do in this matter except what is done in her under the operation of the Spirit. What Mary does is simply to receive the word, to believe, which she does not in her own strength but in the strength given her by the Lord, and she is blessed because of that, not because of her virginity. John of Damascus remarked that Mary conceived through the ear: she heard the Word and the Word spoken by the Spirit in her ear begot himself in her and through her, and so the Word which Mary heard and received and obeyed became flesh of her flesh. That is the normative pattern for the believer in his or her attitude toward the Word announced in the gospel, which tells men and women of the divine act of grace and decision taken already on their behalf in Christ. Maryā€™s attitude is beautifully expressed in the words: ā€˜Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.ā€™ It is an act of glad and thankful and humble submission and surrender to the will of God. And within her there takes place the incomprehensible act of God, the birth of the Son of God in human form.

By that we are guided to think and given to understand something of our own salvation and recreation. As in the annunciation of the word to Mary, Christ the Word himself became flesh, so in the enunciation of the gospel, we surrender in like manner to Christ the Word now made flesh, and there takes place in us the birth of Jesus, or rather, we are in a remarkable way given to share through grace in his birth and to share in the new creation in him. That is the Christian message ā€“ the Christmas message. It is not of our self-will or free-will that we are saved and born anew from above. ā€˜But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God.ā€™ Here there is a ā€˜becomeā€™ dependent on the ā€˜becomeā€™ of ā€˜the Word become fleshā€™, grounded in it and derivative from it. What happened once and for all, in utter uniqueness in Jesus Christ, happens in every instance of rebirth into Christ, when Christ enters into our hearts and recreates us. Just as he was born from above of the Holy Spirit, so we are born from above of the Holy Spirit through sharing in his birth. Just as in the birth of Jesus there was no preceding action on our part, or human co-operation, such as the co-operation between a human father and a human mother, just as there was no prior human activity there, so in our salvation and in our knowledge of God there is no a priori, no human presupposition, no Pelagian, semi-Pelagian or synergistic activity.

It is from first to last salvation by grace alone ā€“ even our faith is not of ourselves for it is a gift of God ā€“ salvation for humanity, among men and women and within them, but a salvation grounded on an immediate act of God himself, and not on both God and man. We are saved by faith, but faith is the empty vessel (as Calvin called it) that receives Christ, faith so to speak is the empty womb through which Christ comes to dwell in our hearts. Faith as our reception of Christ, our capacity for Christ is itself a gift of grace. It is not a creation out of nothing, however, but a creation out of man, out of the human sphere of our choices and decisions, capacities and possibilities, a creation out of our fallen humanity but a creation of God ā€“ and therefore faith is something that is far beyond all human possibilities and capacities. It is grounded beyond itself in the act of God. In faith we are opened from above and given to receive what we ourselves are incapable of receiving in and by ourselves. Faith is not therefore the product of our human capacities or insights or abilities. The relation between faith and the Christ received by faith is the Holy Spirit: conceptus de Spiritu Sancto. Just as Jesus was conceived by the Spirit so we cannot say that Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit. It is by the operation of the Spirit that we receive the Word of God which is ingrafted into our souls, and, as it were, conceive the truth in our hearts and minds. We do not bring Christ in by our own power, by our own decision or choice, nor do we make Christ real to ourselves or in ourselves. How could we do that? That is entirely the work of the Holy Spirit ā€“ our part in being addressed by the Word is to hear the gracious decision that God has already taken, hear the word of the gospel that God has set his love and favour upon us, although we do not in the least deserve it. Although we have done nothing and can do nothing to bring it about, yet when he works in us what he has been pleased to do, it is ours to work it out in obedient living faith.[1]

Plenty there to sufficiently understand Torranceā€™s offering as ā€˜Calvinist,ā€™ but in such a way that the ground is fertilized from a variant foment as that is sourced from a doctrine of the vicarious humanity of Christ and a corollary doctrine of Christ condition election. We see how Torrance uses the analogy of the Virgin Birth to do work that we might not normally think it to do. It presents us with a picture of Godā€™s unilateral work of salvation as that is graciously imparted into the life of Mary from above. It is Godā€™s choice, in Christ, according to Torrance that serves as the ground that we ought to think about how human agency is operative in the salvific process. In other words, for Torrance, the choice for salvation has already been made, whether we believe it or not, in Godā€™s election to be for us and with us in the Grace of Christ. For Torrance, if God works this way, over our heads as it were, then we have no place to presume that we have any ground in ourselves to make a choice for Him that He hasnā€™t ā€˜already takenā€™ for us in the Yes of Jesus Christ for us.

This analogy bothers the classical Calvinist, and even the Arminian in significant ways. It doesnā€™t address the issue of particularity and the individual in salvation under the terms that they would prefer. They do not think about election through the prism of the cosmic Christ; instead they think of individually elect people whom God arbitrarily chose in abstraction from Christ, and under the absolute decree of election. In this scenario, they believe they have found a key for unlocking the ā€˜problemā€™ that Torrance seemingly slips right past. They believe they have a way of positing how someone might come to Christ, while also maintaining the effectual means by which that is accomplished. They believe that God has not only ordained the ends of election, but also the means. The means, they posit, is a created grace given to the elect through which the elect will say yes to God and confirm His choice for them. Torrance, clearly, does not think from these terms; he thinks from the mystery of the Incarnation and its inherence in the Virgin Birth of Mary. This troubles classical Calvinists greatly!

Interestingly, I havenā€™t ever lost any sleep from this apparent conundrum. I donā€™t see it as a dilemma whatsoever. We know why and even how people come to faith in Christ; it is through the faith of Christ, and Godā€™s choice to present that to all of humanity through the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. Evangelical Calvinists, following TFT, arenā€™t much different than Calvin here. Calvin held to an asymmetry between the doctrines of reprobation and election. He believed election was a revealed reality come in the mirror of Christ, but he also believed that reprobation remained a secret in the hidden will of God. This presented some problems for Calvinā€™s overall theological presentation (which Iā€™ve written about here), but on analogy, Torrance can follow the same distinction. He can say: ā€˜sure, I can tell you, like any good Calvinist, that people say yes to God because God first chose to say yes to them.ā€™ But Torrance can also say: ā€˜under these conditions we are at a loss for understanding why people continue to say no to God in Christ; all we can do is recognize the inscrutable mystery of sin and evil operative in the world. We know itā€™s a reality, but we donā€™t understand how or even why it is.ā€™ This is not a satisfactory response for the classical Calvinist, or the classical Arminian following (you realize Arminianism is not much different than Calvinism, right?).

But I will only respond with the realization that when we read the Apostle Paul or the dominical teaching itself, ā€˜freedom for Godā€™ is always already associated with the ā€˜in Christā€™ or union with Christ loci; such that to have this discussion at all leads us into the positive affirmation that to be human, and thus free, in Godā€™s economy is to be in Christ. Torrance believes that this freedom, or to be human before God, is fully available for all of humanity as that is grounded in the archetypal humanity of Jesus Christ. He believes, as we just read, that Christ is the new creation of God, and that in order to spiritually experience this reality we must be in active union with Christ. All of humanity, by virtue of Christā€™s humanity for them, has the capacity to say yes from His Yes for them. This is, I would contend, the Pauline teaching; one that focuses on the positive of what God has accomplished for the world through His gracious choice to be for humanity rather than against it; to take our no as His No, and give us His Yes, and allow it to be ours by the grace of the Spirit.

[1] Thomas F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, edited by Robert T. Walker (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2008), 100-02.

The Antihermeneutical Turn of the Evangelicals: Deferring to the Authority of the Church As Regulative of Biblical Interpretation

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You donā€™t have to love, you donā€™t even have to like him; but I think David Congdon offers some valuable insights, particularly with reference to issues surrounding theological prolegomena and hermeneutics. His insights are penetrating, for my money, because he isnā€™t working from within but without the evangelical theological mainstream; and yet he is aware of the subculture that world is characterized by. I have my own and serious qualms with Congdonā€™s theological conclusions, but to constructively engage with him in spotty fashion does not commit the thinker to arrive at the place he has, respectively. With these ground clearing caveats in place, letā€™s engage with Congdonā€™s poignant critique of what he calls ā€˜the antihermeneutical turn.ā€™

Hermeneutics or prolegomena (theological method) represent a very significant part of what I am about; if you hadnā€™t noticed. For many years as an evangelical I never realized that people werenā€™t just reading the Bible, as it is, straight off the page. In other words, it wasnā€™t until about seminary (a little prior in my later years of Bible College) that I realized the power that ā€˜interpretive traditionā€™ has for everyone! Once this sort of ā€˜Kantianā€™ lightning bolt hit me, I came to be a big believer in discerning how oneā€™s prior theological system contributes to their biblical exegetical conclusions. In fact, one day in Reformation Theology class, when this realization hit me with passion, I raised my hand and pressed my professor on this very problem; viz. the hermeneutical problem. He simply, and at that point, wisely said: ā€˜thatā€™s a good question.ā€™ If we all have informing theologies shaping the way we read Holy Scripture, then whoā€™s to say that my reading is more biblically faithful than that personā€™s? This represents the nub of the hermeneutical problem. There are differing ways to engage with it. Typically, at least among many Protestants, it is either to disengage with the problem; or if one is more disposed toward the more academic bent, it has become popular in those circles to simply refer to the rule of faith (regula fide) of the ā€˜Great Traditionā€™ of the Church to serve as regulative for how one reads Scripture. In fact, I have a Protestant friend who is just going to publication with an essay that, as I recall, premises in this very vein.

Congdon identifies the genealogy of the antihermeneutical problem in a lengthy footnote taken from his big tome on Bultmann. I want to share what he communicates therein, and then engage further with what I take some of the implications of his genealogy (and critique) to be. He writes:

The history of this ā€œturnā€ is closely connected with the legacy of Bultmann. In the 1970s the academic fascination with Bultmannā€™s theology came crashing to a halt. There are two equally valid explanations for this. On the theological ā€œleftā€ Bultmann was superseded by theologies (represented especially by those of JĆ¼rgen Moltmann and Dorothee Sƶlle) that relocated the hermeneutical problem within sociopolitical praxis. On the theological ā€œrightā€ Bultmann was superseded by two interconnected movements, what we might call ecumenical ecclesiocentrism and antihermeneutical postliberalism. The ecclesiocentric revolution was initiated by the Second Vatican Council (1962ā€“1965) and gave rise to what has become known as communio ecclesiology. Even many of those who rejected this specific ecclesiology nevertheless embraced the ecumenical insight that there is a common ecclesial-doctrinal substance beneath its contemporary permutations, namely, the shared Nicene orthodox faith. For our purposes the key aspects of this movement have been (a) the identification of the church qua corporate body as the primary and authoritative reader of scripture and (b) the identification of the churchā€™s orthodox tradition as the criterion for the reading of Scripture.

Ecumenical ecclesiocentrism, in all its various forms, is closely related to the second movement that contributed even more significantly to the overthrow of the Marburg schoolā€™s dominance in the theological academy. What I have called antihermeneutical postliberalism names the turn away from the hermeneutical problem to the plain text of the Bible. Many of the leaders in postliberalism, such as Robert Jenson and George Lindbeck, were also leaders in the ecumenical movement. As with the ecclesiocentric turn, the antihermeneutical turn is notable for the way it came to be embraced by North American evangelicals. While evangelicals had their own concerns, they were nevertheless involved in the surge of interest in biblical interpretation and authority that was taking place more generally; in response to postliberalism many evangelicals (e.g., Roger Olson and Kevin Vanhoozer) developed their own postconservative alternative. The following are some key dates: in 1970, Brevard Childs published Biblical Theology in Crisis; in 1974, Hans Freiā€™s Eclipse of Biblical Narrative appeared; in 1975, David Kelseyā€™s The Use of Scripture in Recent Theology; in 1976, Carl F. Henryā€™s six-volume God, Revelation and Authority; also in 1976, Harold Lindsellā€™s The Battle for the Bible; in 1978, the ā€œChicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancyā€; and in 1980, David Steinmetzā€™s seminal article, ā€œThe Superiority of Pre-Critical Exegesis.ā€ These early developments continue today in the form of so-called ā€œtheological interpretation of scripture,ā€ which has become a joint movement of both mainline postliberals and evangelical postconservatives. The cumulative effect of this intense interest in scripture has been, at least in many circles, the overthrow of critical hermeneutical inquiryā€”the Sachkritik approach advocated by Bultmannā€”in the theological academy. This is what I mean by ā€œantihermeneutical.ā€ To be sure, many postliberals and evangelicals show a profound grasp of the hermeneutical problem, but they respond to this problem by neutralizing it via recourse to the church and its tradition. Today many of those who were once enthralled with historical-critical methods are advocating the use of the regula fidei as the norm for exegesis. Whether these developments are to be welcomed is another matter entirely.[1]

What resonates greatly with me are the folks David lists as being formative for the evangelical surging into the antihermeneutical problem. In other words, in my evangelical training, almost every single person he lists, whether postliberal or conservative, figured greatly in my education. Towards the end of that in my undergrad days, I began to discern and sense some of the problems associated with the way these teachers were seemingly attempting to gloss over the hermeneutical problem; mostly by deferring it.

I want to suggest, along with Congdon, that this antihermeneutical mode has only become that much more acute over the last two decades. There has been a doubling-down by evangelicals, in particular, to abandon the historical-critical method of biblical engagement, for the rule of faith and precritical biblical exegetical method. There typically is very little argument given for this move, except for demonizing the whole modern period of thought; and it is now just assumed that return back to the past is the way forward for the development of evangelical theology and bible reading practices. So, the evangelical response, is to throw themselves in with the high Church, and defer to its authority for arriving at the most faithful exegetical and theological conclusions the Christian can ostensibly arrive at.

This doesnā€™t sit well with me; indeed, my whole project, my whole blogging career might be my attempt to engage with this problem at some level. With many evangelicals, and others, I have issues with the modern historical-critical reading of Scripture; but I equally have problems with the retrieval movement currently underway in the evangelical sector. The former, in my view, is simply a deferment to the authority of the individual (even collectively), and the latter a deferment to the authority of the ā€œChurch.ā€ Neither of these options honestly engage with the ā€˜problem,ā€™ they simply kick the can back to what they deem as established authorities as those have taken form in the history, one way or the other. But you see how this only reinforces the problem, right? We are deciding who has the authority to tell us what the text means; yet all this then becomes is a self-projecting project of ā€˜myā€™ or ā€˜ourā€™ authority to defer to someone elseā€™s. The loop never has any other beginning but the human agent; even as that is constituted by the institutional Enlightenment or the institutional Church. Indeed, this is what Feuerbach was so critical of: the issue of self-projection and the circular nature that entails.

Congdonā€™s denouement is a turn into missiological theory, and Bultmannā€™s contribution to and development of that in his own method. My denouement is to turn to dialogical and dialectical theology, primarily that of Barthā€™s and Torranceā€™s. I am not totally sure how to highlight the distinction between my alternative and Davidā€™s, other than to say that ecclesial grammar has greater play for me than it does, I think, for Congdon. Congdon is arguing for a greater convergence between Barth and Bultmann than many of the Bultmannians have wanted there to be; and following Congdonā€™s line, I think there probably is. But in my view, Bultmann still gives too much place to the human agent, and an existentialism devoid of real groundedness in history, than does Barth. Barth still has an ā€˜existentialā€™ component, particularly as that is grounded in his analogy of faith/relation (see JĆ¼ngel), but he still moves and breathes within the contours set out by the Nicene grammar that Bultmann seemingly moves beyond; and Congdon certainly moves beyond.

What is the real conclusion here?: I need to write more on dialogical and dialectical theology in such a way that the distinction I am noting between myself and Congdon gains greater traction with understanding. My approach to biblical studies is grounded in ā€˜encounterā€™ that is continuous and ongoing with the living Christ. In this sense, there is an aspect of existentialism present. But I would argue that the ā€œauthorityā€ is not from ā€˜my sideā€™ but in the One who is encountering me as Lord. How this gets turned into a normative hermeneutic that has some sort of salience between me and others, without reducing to an absolute subjectivism, is fodder for another post. But I think there is a way forward that takes Congdonā€™s points seriously, without committing oneself to a Bultmannian roadmap. More to come.

[1] David W. Congdon, The Mission Of Demythologizing: Rudolf Bultmannā€™s Dialectical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortess Press, 2015), 545-46 n. 95.

The ‘Double Salvation’ of the French Calvin: Participation with Christ as the Locus Classicus of Calvinian Soteriology

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John Calvin is an important figure for Protestant theology. If we can move past all the polemics that are associated (usually, wrongly) with his name, and actually engage with his theological offering; what the reader will find is a rich storehouse of theological reflection that is highly Christ concentrated. Thatā€™s what I intend to do with this post; I want the reader to be turned onto an aspect of Calvinā€™s soteriology that has enriched me greatly since the first time I was exposed to it. I am referring to what Calvin calls Double Grace (DUPLEX GRATIA). It is this soteriological frame, that for Calvin, is deeply grounded in a Christological focus; to the point that when reading his development of it, at points, you might mistake him for Karl Barth or Thomas Torrance. In this teaching Calvin thinks both justification and sanctification from nowhere else but the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. For Calvin, in order for salvation to inhere for the person, he/she must be in participation with Christā€™s humanity by the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit. In order for eternal life to obtain for the individual, that person must be in union with Christ (unio cum Christo); since Christ alone has won the salvation of God in the work He accomplished through incarnation and atonement. This conceptuality, by the way, is a locus classicus for what we are attempting to offer with our notion of Evangelical Calvinism.

Here Calvin in his 1541 French edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion explains what he means when referring to ā€˜double grace.ā€™

It seems to me that I have previously explained carefully enough how it is that there remains to people only one refuge for salvation, which is faith, because by the law they are all cursed. I believe that I have also sufficiently discussed what faith is and what graces of God it communicates to people and what fruit it produces in them. Now the summary was that by faith we receive and possess Jesus Christ as He is presented to us by Godā€™s goodness, and that in participating in Him we have a double grace. The first grace is that when we are reconciled to God by His innocence, instead of having a Judge in heaven to condemn us we have a very merciful Father there. The second grace is that we are sanctified by His Spirit to meditate on and practice holiness and innocence of life. Now as for regeneration, which is the second grace, I have said what seemed to me necessary. Justification was more lightly touched upon, because we had to understand what the good works of the saints are, which is a part of the question we must treat next.[1]

Of significance, per my impression, is the way Calvin thinks of these ā€˜two gracesā€™ as embodied in Jesus Christ first. So, if we were to think this in terms of an ordo salutis (ā€˜order of salvationā€™), we might think of it in this way: 1) Justification and Sanctification first obtain in Christā€™s life for us, and 2) Justification and Sanctification second obtain for all those, who by faith, are in participation with Christ and His humanity for us. To frame salvation from this accent gives it a decidedly filial feeling, such that other sorts of theories of salvation, the ones that have juridical or forensic frames, are put into relief; or out to pasture where they should be. Not wanting to overread Calvin here, I wouldnā€™t want to make it sound like Calvin was a crypto-Barthian, but I do think the personalist and even existential conceptions present in Barthā€™s soteriology can be found in Calvinā€”to a degree. In order to illustrate this ā€˜feeling,ā€™ in regard to the filial sort of salvation Calvin is offering, let me share from him further. Here you will notice the sharp emphasis Calvin lays on being in Christ; I take this to be a further development of his duplex gratia as that is given form in Christological repose.

Now in speaking of the righteousness of faith scripture leads us to quite another place; that is, it teaches us to turn our attention away from our works to regard only Godā€™s mercy and the perfect holiness of Christ. For it shows us this order of justification: that from the beginning God receives the sinner by His pure and free goodness, not considering anything in him by which He is moved to mercy except the sinnerā€™s misery, since He sees him completely stripped and empty of good works; and that is why He finds in Himself the reason for doing him good. Then He touches the sinner with a feeling of His goodness so that, distrusting everything he has, he may put the whole sum of his salvation in the mercy which God gives him. That is the feeling of faith, by which a person enters into possession of his salvation: when he recognizes by the teaching of the gospel that he is reconciled to God because, having obtained the remission of his sins, he is justified by means of Christā€™s righteousness. Although he is regenerated by Godā€™s Spirit, he does not rest on the good works which he does, but is reassured that his perpetual righteousness consists in Christā€™s righteousness alone. When all these things have been examined in detail, what we believe about this matter will be easily explained. They are better digested if we put them in a different order than we have proposed them; but one can scarcely fail to grasp these matters provided that they are recounted in order in such a way that everything is well understood.[2]

What we have in Calvin is a robust, and Iā€™d argue, Pauline development of what an ā€˜in Christā€™ theory of salvation entails. The focus, for Calvin, unlike so much later ā€˜Calvinistā€™ and ā€˜Puritanā€™ theology, is not primarily on the recipient of salvation, but on the ā€˜cosmicā€™ Christ. Let me qualify this: when reading Calvin we can certainly find conceptual matter that sounds like what developed later in ā€˜Calvinismā€™ and the sort of ā€˜practical syllogismā€™ soteriology that the Puritans (like William Perkins) developed. But, Iā€™d contend, and have here, that Calvin tends to contradict his Christ conditioned superstructural foundation when he presents us with a hidden decree of reprobation and ā€˜temporary faith.ā€™

In the main Calvin is a richly and profoundly Christ funded theologian who seeks to find Christ in just about every nook and cranny conceivable; particularly when that comes to a doctrine of salvation. He isnā€™t a Barth or Torrance, come on, he lived in the 16th century; but in an antecedent form, under the theological conceptual pressures he inhabited, he (along with Luther) is as close as we might get to what latterly developed under the Barthian regimen of theological endeavor. I commend Calvinā€™s double grace soteriology to you; one that is decidedly grounded in the singular person of Jesus Christ.

[1] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion: 1541 French Edition, trans. by Elsie Anne McKee (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009), 318 [emboldening mine].

[2] Ibid., 320-21 [emboldening mine].