What happens when we think of God under the pressure provided for by Greek or ‘Hellenic’ categories; do we end up with the emphases we get of God when we think Him from His Self-revelation in Jesus Christ? David Kelsey describes how the Greeks informed early and even mediaeval grammars for thinking God thusly:

. . . The Triune God’s “oneness,’ [sic] ie, God’s unity and singularity, is explained in terms of one strand of the economy. God’s providential care of creation (which is entailed by God’s creative blessing). God’s “oneness” is the logically and ontologically necessary singularity of the cosmos’ “prime cause,” the arche, of providential care. In that singularity God is absolute and alone.

By that move, however, the “oneness” or singularity of the Triune God is not explained in terms of the further assertion of the singular God’s tri-unity. It is not explained in terms provided by affirmation of God’s three-foldness that is itself warranted by a different strand of the economy than creation-providence, viz., God’s relating in making and keeping liberative promises, specifically in all that Jesus Christ does and undergoes. A Trinitarian doctrine of God plays little or no role in the traditional explication of God’s providential care of creatures framed in terms of the cosmological arche. Instead, one element of a Trinitarian doctrine of God alone is framed in terms of the arche: the first “Person” of the Trinity, the “Father,” to whom relating to creatures in providential rule is ascribed, is characterized in terms of the concept of a cosmic arche. “Father”is used analogically to characterize God’s relation to the created cosmos, not to characterize the first “Person” of the Trinity’s eternal relation to the second “Person,” the “Son.” The “Father” relates to all else as creator in the way the cosmic arche relates to all else. The “Father’ is the cosmic mon-arche, absolute and alone.1

My oft critique of classical Calvinism, and other classical theisms, mutatis mutandis, gets to the very point that Kelsey above is highlighting for us. When the material deployed for thinking God is unduly evangelized, and thus remains in its pagan mode, what we end up with is a projected god; a god of the ‘hills and the valleys.’ When we follow this line of grammarizing God we sublate the God of Self-revelation in Christ by the god constructed through the fertile imaginations of the philosophers. God becomes a syncretization, and thus the no-God of the philosophers. God in this instance, when an attempt is made to synthesize Him with the Hellenic grammar, becomes the arche, the literal Archimedean point by which the abstract human knower might make sense of an otherwise chaotic cosmos. The “Father,” when sublimated by the arche, becomes an Odin (Thor’s father) rather than a loving lover who is in intimate relationship with His Son in the bond of the Holy Spirit.

And yet, tragically, this is exactly who most Western Christians know God to be. A brute beginning-point that explains how the world comes to have order. But this isn’t the God the Christian knows as Father; that is if the Christian is under sound dogmatic thinking. The Christian isn’t looking for an explanation with reference to the source of order in the world, per se. Indeed, the Christian, prior to becoming a Christian, or a fetus for that matter, isn’t looking for anything other than themselves, as the case may be. It took the Father’s and the Son’s loving and unilateral initiative to freely elect fallen humanity’s status, in the humanity of the Son, so that the would-be Christian might actually become a Christian. And this is to the point: the first order need of this fallen world, and the fallen humanity therein, is for a re-freshed, indeed, a re-created relationship with the God who is first Father of the Son, rather than with a God who is Creator, per se. The fact that God is creator isn’t simply a brute fact in regard to who God is. Who God is, is first Son of the Father (as Athanasius says so eloquently2) by the Holy Spirit; and it is out of this overflow, of a life defined by the Other that God graciously creates. He doesn’t create because He is simply the arche; He creates because He is the Triune God of eternal filiation.

Until classical Calvinism, and other iterations of the various classical theisms on offer, come to recognize this basic point in a doctrine of God, they will continue to offer a notion of God, and thus ‘spirituality,’ that is less than the genuine God of Christ offers. This has been a mantra of mine for a decade and a half now online. One wonders if this mantra will ever make headway with the machina. The machina I am referring to is with reference to the theologians, and thus theologies, that insist that forwarding a Christian Aristotelianism as the only orthodox way for the Protestant revolution. But this surely cannot, and has not been the case. The machina thinks from a revisionist understanding of the history of Christian ideas. There have always been theologians, who have thought God in filial rather than arche terms. The Nicene theologians, by-and-large sought to evangelize the Greeks to the point that the Greeks only became a pre-text by which the re-text of God’s life for us in the re-created humanity of Jesus Christ subverted the no-God the philosophers fabricated in their own virtuoso reflections.

1 David H. Kelsey, Human Anguish and God’s Power (UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 114-15. 

2 Athanasius, Contra Arianos 1.9.34.