God works in accommodating ways. Not accommodating in the sense that He concedes to our desires and wants, but accommodating in the sense that He meets us where we are and, often through a process, takes us to where He is. It is on this analogy that I want to refer us to a theological methodology. In order to provide an example for this analogy, of the ways of God, I will appeal to the kings of Israel. This might sound rather strange, but bear with me. What I want to suggest, from the kings of Israel, is that God does not always immediately change our ways into His ways; instead He comes to our ways, and through a sanctification process, breaks down and builds up / breaks down and builds up until we are all finally delivered into the glorified image of God in Christ that God currently holds for us and in us in the mediatorial humanity of Christ.

My thesis is this: God works into various periods of time in order to accomplish His purposes and make them known in Christ. When we think of the kings of Israel, and their multitudes of wives and concubines, we have to wonder why God didn’t immediately and apocalyptically reveal that this is not His way or intention for marriage (which we understand from Gen. 2). Over time, in the fullness of time (cf. Gal. 4), it becomes clear that God’s ideal for marriage, as a witness to His relationship to His ‘bride’, is that it be between one man and one woman. This finally becomes clear, once again, in the revelation of Jesus Christ; and this becomes normative for the Church of Christ. On analogy: The Christ comes to this world, at Christmas time, during the Graeco-Roman period of world history. As such, and since the early Fathers (and Mothers) of the Church were ensconced in this period, they naturally used what was most native to them. That is, as the early Church attempted to work out their salvation, meaning as they attempted to explicate and come to terms with the reality of who God is as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, they deployed Hellenic philosophical categories in order to achieve their goal to think and speak God in intelligible ways. But just as with the kings of Israel and their wives, the admixture of Greek conceptions and Christian theology were never intended to stay wedded indefinitely. As God worked, even in definitive ways among the Church Fathers, in ways that perdure in basic ways into the present language of the Church, this work has pressed on.

I want to suggest (and maybe argue later) that just as the status of the kings of Israel and their wives did not / could not remain the status in God’s Kingdom; likewise, the over-emphasis upon Greek categories for thinking God could not / should not remain the status for us. It is not as if what I am suggesting is that there is a linear progressive nature to God’s revelation in Christ; to the contrary. What I am suggesting works off the premise that God’s life is eschatological, and His way: apocalyptic. His way is given up front and immediately, but because He is patient and long-suffering with His people, He will allow us to fumble around until we grow into His eschatological way. Just as Christians today have rejected polygamy, so to, I want to suggest that we ought to reject over-reliance upon so called ‘Pure Being’ categories when thinking God. Indeed, as Jaroslav Pelikan has keenly learned us to, even in the early Church, while the propensity to fall prey to the Greeks was always intensely present, even then the aim was to reify the Greek philosophical categories in such a way that God’s Self-revelation in Christ, as attested to in Holy Scripture, was given categorical preeminence in the way they sought to think and speak God to themselves and the world.

It seems to me that the Church has grown lazy. That she is in a rush, in order to distance herself from the modern mediating theologians, in the sense that the modern theologians are known for attempting to wash Christian theology of any relic of an over-reliance upon the Hellenic form in the theological endeavor. But I think the evangelical and Reformed Churches, or any ‘conservative’ (so called) theologian, have swung the pendulum back too far. There is wisdom in the thesis that the Greek category has been allowed too much shrift in the way the Christian thinks God. This is not to say that the Christian ought to simply abandon all forms of Greek or so called catholic categorical thinking when it comes to the Church’s theologizing. But it does mean, that just as the kings of Israel and their matrimonial framework could not remain the status quo, likewise, the reliance on Hellenic categories, insofar as those overly-intrude into God’s Self-revelation, cannot and must not remain the status. Yet, in the haste to remove herself from any residue of the modern mind, the conservative 21^st century Church has devalued the insight of the modern Church that the Greek concubines ought to be abandoned insofar as they have spawned lines of thought about God that are not themselves corollary with the God revealed in Christ. Most will simply laugh my suggestion off, and continue on their merry way with their harems in tow; but they shouldn’t. The work of allowing God’s revelation to be the end all in the theological task of the Church needs to be engaged with in much more toilsome ways (cf. II Tim. 2:15). Instead of simply receiving what she takes to be the catholic and orthodox way, she needs to more critically wonder about how the Hellenic categories have been allowed to thwart the way we think God.

Of course the underwriting premise is this: Contra the ‘two-books’ theory of revelation, I am committed to the idea that just as there is one will of God, there is only one revelation of God; and that revelation is strictly limited to Jesus Christ alone. It is this theory of revelation that must be the driving commitment, or my suggestion about over-reliance on Greek forms will not be taken seriously. Yet we must ask: where does this commitment to natural and special theology come from? Where do proponents of two-books, even if they see special as greater than natural revelation, get their notion that God has revealed Himself in nature such that we have the capacity to find Him there? They often claim that Scripture itself gives them this theory. But this presumes that they would or could read Scripture itself outwith an already commitment and submission to the reality that Jesus is Lord; Lord within the revealed and relational framework that God is Father of the Son before He is the Creator.