Faustus Socinus

As I drive home from work I continue to listen to this guy, Leighton Flowers; I’m not sure why—I must be something of a theological rubberneck. He continues to push his soteriological framework which he calls: Provisionism. I’d simply call it Calminianism; the lowchurch, baptistic attempt to draw strands from what they take to be fulgent from both Five Point Calvinism and Arminianism. What he is communicating is not something evangelicals like me haven’t grown up with their whole lives; we have! The problem I have with Leighton, ultimately, is that he is teaching young minds how to be rationalist in their approach to Scripture and theology. He appeals to a solo Scriptura mode, denouncing theological exegesis every chance he gets. He thinks, through a series of anecdotes, based in pure rationalism, rather than theological theology, that he has put classical Calvinism to death. I’m all for placing classical Calvinism in its proper place; I think classical Calvinism represents a mode of theological development that ought to be ultimately repudiated; but at the same time it did, in its time, under the material available, forward a theological grammar that can be helpful for the rest of Christendom to glean from and deploy in its attempt to come to the unity of the Faith once for all delivered to the saints.

Unfortunately, Flowers, as I noted, does his thinking from a Lockean-like universe wherein rationality, his, is of a premium; and he fails to recognize that Christian theology, that is genuinely Christian, does it thinking from confessional norms grounded and conditioned in and by the triune life of the living God. In other words, Flowers would be well-advised, and anyone who attempts to do ‘theology’ like him, to do their thinking from the homoousial reality of God’s consubstantial life with us in the Theanthropos, Godman, Jesus Christ. Thomas Torrance offers a better way for Flowers to think, it is what TFT identifies as a ‘stratified knowledge of God.’ Ben Myers offers a helpful and precise sketch of what this entails for Torrance:

Thomas F. Torrance’s model of the stratification of knowledge is one of his most striking and original contributions to theological method. Torrance’s model offers an account of the way formal theological knowledge emerges from our intutive and pre-conceptual grasp of God’s reality as it is manifest in Jesus Christ. It presents a vision of theological progression, in which our knowledge moves towards an ever more refined and more unified conceptualisation of the reality of God, while remaining closely coordinated with the concrete level of personal and experiential knowledge of Jesus Christ. According to this model, our thought rises to higher levels of theological conceptualisation only as we penetrate more deeply into the reality of Jesus Christ. From the ground level of personal experience to the highest level of theological reflection, Jesus Christ thus remains central. Through a sustained concentration on him and on his homoousial union with God, we are able to achieve a formal account of the underlying trinitarian relations immanent in God’s own eternal being, which constitute the ultimate grammar of all theological discourse.[1]

If Flowers were to follow this method of theological reflection he could avoid his rationalist approach to all things ‘theological.’ I keep putting theological in quotes, when referring to Flowers, because I don’t take what he is doing to be actual Christian theology. In order for Christian theology to be genuinely Christian it must be principially and intensively grounded in and from Jesus Christ who is the evangel of God for us. As Torrance rightly understood the Gospel isn’t a concept, but a person; and the Christian can only think God’s thoughts, from a center in God, as they do so in participation with God in the mediatorial and vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ.

Folks like Flowers fail at doing Christian theology precisely at the point that they don’t start in God’s confession that He is for us in Jesus Christ. Flowers fails at doing Christian theology because he fails to recognize that there is such a thing as a theological ontology—God’s triune life—that comes prior to a genuinely Christian theological epistemology; i.e. there is an order of being that is antecedent to a prior of knowing. To realize this allows the Christian to start their thinking in what Anselm famously identified as fides quarens intellectum (faith seeking understanding). Note the emphasis on faith. A proper conception of Christian faith cannot start its thinking, but from the ‘faith of Christ’ (pistis Christou). As Calvin realized, biblically speaking, faith is knowledge of God. And according to Scripture Jesus is God’s knowledge, God’s wisdom, God’s Self-exgesis for us (cf. Jn 1.18; I Cor 1.30). It is as we are in union with Christ (unio cum Christo), that real knowledge of the triune God can obtain; outwith this union, and the realization that this is the only place wherein genuine knowledge of the living God is realized, all one can do is what Flowers does—i.e. turn-to-the-subject, and rationalize an ostensible theological framework that has its grounding in an abstract conception of humanity that is mondic-like in its day to day existence (in other words, it starts with itself and thinks its way towards God from its own inherent intellectual and spiritual resources—God-given as Flowers is wont to emphasize).

Flowers can signify a multitude of various theological traditions out there; ones that equally claim to engage in Christian theology, when in fact all they are doing are self-projecting themselves onto what they perceive to be the God of the Bible. <rant over>

[1] Benjamin Myers, “The Stratification of knowledge in the thought of T. F. Torrance,” SJT 61 (1): 1-15 (2008).