I just listened to a podcast where both presenters are former Calvinists (one Baptist the other Presbyterian). Now one of them has converted to Eastern Orthodoxy, while the other is a ‘Christian Mystic’ (whatever that entails). One is now a Christian universalist, who sounds like he approves of a Rahnerian anonymous Christian mode and transcendental Christ-consciousness, while the other seemingly is a Hickian pluralist. They both are against creedal (credo) belief (relatively speaking), and instead affirm what they identify as religious (religio) belief; the latter being some form of mystical meta material that holds all of reality together (some might think of the Logoi theology of some of the patristics at this point). There is a deep commitment to an apophatic theology among these two. They find the apparent antinomies of Calvinism and Arminianism to be intolerable, but they are okay with deep mystery when it comes to their respective worldpictures. One of them has read some Barth and Torrance, and appreciates them, it’s just that he thinks they are irrational when it comes to their inner-theo-logic vis a vis universalism. This guy is a priori committed to Christian universalism, he believes if Barth and TFT were consistent with their logic that they would also have to be absolute universalists. Since they aren’t, according to this guy, they run afoul of being consistent, and thus present an incoherent theology. Both he and his buddy maintain that Barth and TFT are simply too contradictory to follow on this point, and thus ought to be placed into the same camp as the classical Calvinists and Arminians when it comes to the false superstructure they are offering. Interestingly, these guys fail to appreciate the dialogical/dialectical nature of Barth’s/TFT’s approaches, respectively, when it comes to thinking things theological in nature; even if one of them acknowledges that they have this mode of theological existence informing their respective ways. In the end, they sound more New Age (or Gnostic) than Christian.

When a principled theology of the Word is abandoned for an amalgam and idiosyncratic appropriation of the consensus fidelium you never know where the person will end up. People, in the main, are clearly fed up with the phoniness of evangelical Christianity; I am too. But the alternative, for my lights, isn’t to simply cobble together some sort of mystical religion wherein cohabitation with an ostensible religious psychology becomes the mainstay. To be genuinely Christian, in my view, means that the person must think God from God in a principial way. In other words, to be genuinely Christian in mode means to think God from God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ; and to do so from a robust theology of the Word. When Scripture becomes the wax-nose of a purported mystical approach, it no longer has ultimate meaning as a Christian text. When the scandal of particularity is swallowed by the mystery of the universe, as has been by the two I’m referring to in this post, Scripture loses its ordained place as the place where God has freely chosen to speak as if in the burning bush. God is not a pervasive energy, or stream of consciousness pervading through the cosmos. He is a particular and scandalous God who has freely chosen to reveal Himself in the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ. Once that scandal is no longer the centraldogma of someone’s mode as a purported Christian, all one has left is some form of [Christian] Gnosticism of the sort that I think the guys I have been referring to have imbibed.

Systems of theology aren’t bad, just bad systems are bad. Systems of theology are as inevitable as tradition-making is. These two guys want to reject systems that they see as totalizing machinery. Of course, in their rejection they simply posit a new system of their own. It is true that scholasticism may have anticipated the totalizing systems of rationalism. Even so, to reject systems in toto, as I just noted, cannot follow. It’s simply a matter of whether or not a system is held with the right amount of humility or not. For the Christian, the best system will understand its relative place next to eschatological reality. All good systematic theology recognizes its proximate value insofar that ‘final’ judgment on things is always already left open to its eschatological and coming reality in Jesus Christ. This is the basis of the Reformed semper Reformanda, a basis that classical Calvinists can only pay lip service to these days. Nevertheless, to replace bad systems with a mystical system doesn’t solve anything, it only, by definition darkens things by thinking and speaking in the negation.

I recognize this is a rather cryptic post, but I wanted to offload after I spent two hours watching this podcast unfold last night.