You may get tired of me referring to Barth so much, but bear with me again. I just watched an excellent presentation by my co-Evangelical Calvinist and friend, Myk Habets. It was his inaugural address at Laidlaw College in New Zealand where he just became the head of their school of theology. In Myk’s talk he refers to David Bentley Hart’s language of ‘Strange Beauty,’ with reference to the triune God. I find that I am driven, mostly, by aesthetic and doxological modes when thinking theologically; I don’t think I am alone in this. As Myk underscored in his presentation, the ultimate beauty for the Christian is the reality of God’s inner-triune life. And the ultimate way for entering into this life is through the broken body of Jesus Christ; as Scripture says ‘he is the mediator between God and man.’

Often Barth is critiqued and found wanting because he is wrongly, in my view, framed as a “modern theologian.” In another book I just started reading, written by Jamie Smith, which is an introduction to Radical Orthodoxy, Smith picks up on the common critique that modern theology is defunct, offering a flat muddled conception of the triune God. As such, from this narrative, anything modern needs to be abandoned in favor of a return to the old paths and heights offered by pre-modern/pre-critical theologies that emphasize God’s transcendence and beauty therefrom. Smith places Barth into this sort of modern and flat sort of immanentized theological form; a form where the metaphysical/transcendent conception of God is traded in for a user friendly flat flabby postmetaphysical/domesticated God that can only be known through the optics of existentialism and self-absorbed navel-gazing.

But I protest. Barth, in my view, and this is the attraction for me, represents a theologian who indeed fully accepted and recognized his modern location, but put his foot in the ground forcing people back to God’s window of Himself for the world in Jesus Christ. Not to instrumentalize Jesus, but to understand with the evangelist ‘to see Me is to see the Father.’ It is this that makes Barth’s theology in line with the Fathers of the past; particularly of the Patristic past. Barth, along with Irenaeus, Athanasius, Cyril, the Cappadocians, even Augustine emphasizes the centrality of Christ to the whole theological reality. It is a reality that is not shrouded in an immanentized theological conclave, but the reality of focusing on Christ who transposes us from below to above in exactly the way God has chosen for that to happen. TF Torrance articulates this in his book Christian Doctrine of God: One Being Three Persons, he refers to this transposition as a ‘stratified knowledge of God’; a movement from the evangelical to the theological knowledge of God. This is what Barth, Torrance, and all the best theologians of the Church catholic have been about. They haven’t been driven by specifically tradition-oriented concerns, but instead to find the beauty of God as that is regulated and revealed in the face of Jesus Christ.

Barth is a constructive theologian, so is Torrance; a constructive theologian is driven by a desire to worship God. They are willing to draw off of a variety of streams provided for in the history of the Church’s theological ideas. This can be observed as the Christian reads Barth’s Church Dogmatics. He draws from reformed scholastic thinkers; medieval thinkers; patristic thinkers; modern thinkers; and whomever helps to bear the weight of attempting to magnify the beauty of the living God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. To be a constructive theologian is to be driven by a desire to magnify God; this is the work of the Holy Spirit (Jn 14—16), to build up the Church of Christ by pointing people to the witnesses of Christ, no matter what period these witnesses are found within. The aim of the constructive theologian isn’t to concern themselves with anything else than magnifying Christ. They aren’t stumbled by the artificial barriers created by sectarian hedges and traditions that want to silo off people’s ability to draw from the plenitude of rich resource offered in the whole of Christian reality. Instead, the constructive theologian only cares about opening up avenues wherein the beauty and majesty of the triune God is made known in the power of all that that is for us as revealed in the resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ.

This really is my mode. I see myself as a constructive theologian, or an always aspiring one. This does not mean I haven’t fallen prey to the seduction of sectarian shifts and turns, here and there. But it does mean that my ultimate aim is to draw from a variety of theologians and genuinely Christian traditions in such a way that the triune life of God is opened up for the Church to feast on and from as their life. This means that I can place themes in Calvin in conversation with Barth; or themes in Athanasius in discussion with Luther, so on and so forth. And after all of this, I say that I am ‘Barthianish’ because I think Barth offers the best example I’ve witnessed of what it looks like to be a Christian Protestant constructive theologian; he also fits best with my ‘baptistic’ sensibilities on certain doctrines (such as baptism, free church, free bible etc.). My aim, as a constructive theologian, is to work, along with the consensus patrum, from a revelational model, or kataphatic model of doing theology. This is not to say that there is nothing apophatic about the theological endeavor, it is just to recognize that the Deus absconditus (the hidden God) is the Deus revelatus (the revealed God). And within this hiddenness, as that comes in the ordinary flesh of a man from Nazareth, the transcendent wonder and beauty of God is opened up in exactly the way, with the certain character that He wants us to see of Himself. Here the immanentized-horizontal world we are seemingly trapped within breaks open as God penetrates the husk of the physical world, and shines His bright ray of triune light into the midst of it all. In this rupturing of things, He illumines the genuine beauty of God, and in so doing places creation into its proper orientation vis-à-vis God. Herein the beauty all around us in the created order truly takes on the beauty of God as we understand that He alone upholds it by the Word of His power in Jesus Christ. Within this frame we can begin developing theologies of nature, like St Ephrem the Syrian did, and understand that, as Calvin did, the created order is truly the theater of God’s Glory in the prosopon (face) of Jesus Christ.

This is the sort of theologian I seek to be. One that is consumed with the worship (doxology) and the beauty of God’s three in one/one in three life. Driven by this trajectory the theologian can engage in a specialized “haphazardness,” and draw off of whatever Christian streams, from whatever periods that help to magnify Jesus as Lord; and as the one who brings us into the pleroma of God’s inner Holy, Holy, Holy Life.