Monthly Archives: August 2025

On Deacademizing the Christian Existence: Wake Up Christian, Rise from the Dead!

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The examples given to us in Holy Scripture for living the Christian existence, particularly in the New Testament, are people like the Godman, Jesus Christ, the Apostles, like, Peter, John, Paul et al. Their lives, respectively, embodied the message, the Kerygma, the Gospel itself; indeed, as Christ in Himself is the Gospel by the Holy Spirit. So, when I look out at the Christian existences in the 21st century I scratch my head. The Christian existence is in fact a deeply theological existence. Theological existence is simply living participatio Christi (participant with Christ), it is thus, inhabitatio Dei (inhabiting God’s triune life). Hence, to live in this world as a Christian has no compartments. There is, or shouldn’t be, a discipline known as “academic theology,” “biblical studies,” “practical theology,” “pastoral theology,” so on and so forth. The Christian existence ought to be one that is drenched in the Holy Lifeblood of Jesus Christ. Our veins ought to be running through and through with Immanuel’s blood, as we are partakers of the triunely divine nature, in and through union with Christ. For sure, “the life is in the blood.” And if the blood that drives the Christian’s life is in fact the Godman’s blood, then our lives will reflect a theological existence full of witness and worship wherever we go as emissaries for the Kingdom come and coming.

On a more pointed note: I will never let other Christians, Christians who believe that attending church once a week, or reading a Bible verse every now and then, push the Christian existence into the ghetto of the academic’s ivory tower, or even into the pastor’s study. The Christian existence is a theological existence all the way down. Reading so-called “academic theology” books is a false category of segregation in the Christian existence. That is to say, the work of doing that type of activity is not reserved for so-called “eggheads” and “nerds,” who get off on being considered smart, and a cut above the rest of the plebes in the pews. It is a trick of the Enemy that leads Christians to believe that the work of the faith is left only for the clergy and clerics; and this is the case, even more so, for those of us who are Protestant Christians with “our” Priesthood of All Believers. This type of work is incumbent upon so-called everyday and lay Christian. All Christians have been given the resources to grow in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ. All Christians have been given the charge to be ready to give an answer for the faith, which then entails rigorous and devoted study, reflection, within a prayerful and doxological frame; indeed, as faithful stewards of the gift of Life we have been given and are now participant within in Jesus Christ.

If someone attempts to push me into this corner just because I seemingly have a passion for reading “deep” theology books, reading the Bible over and over again, so on and so forth, I will repudiate such pushing with vehemence. Christians have settled for much too little in the Christian existence. They have allowed their respective “leaders” to lull them into remaining “dumb,” in the name of just being “regular.” The Christian existence doesn’t even have such categories available to it. To whom much is given much is required.

Humanity Held in the Suspended Imago

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The carnal human being is held suspended by the Grace of God’s 𝑖𝑚𝑎𝑔𝑜 𝐷𝑒𝑖 for us, Jesus Christ (Col 1.15). The 𝑖𝑚𝑎𝑔𝑜 𝐷𝑒𝑖 isn’t an inalienable human given. The universality of the coming of the Son of Man, indeed, the 𝑇ℎ𝑒𝑎𝑛𝑡ℎ𝑟𝑜𝑝𝑜𝑠, ensures that all of humanity is mercifully held in God’s image; indeed, as God’s humanity is for us rather than against us. Will the singular person held in this suspended freedom, choose to take the deep plunge into the union of God and humanity, into the reconciliation that the Godman is for us, Who is the mediator between the living and triune God, and those of us born into the first and lesser Adam? Woe! Today is the Day of Salvation!

Reading the Bible Through and Through

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Just finished again, by God’s grace and mercy. The way I do it is to just start at the beginning and read straight through. While I’m in the OT I am concurrently reading whatever NT books I feel led to read at any given time. Once I make it into the NT I just read the NT through until the read through is complete. At points, on this viatorum, I have read the OT in the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) order. I read various translations (and I have read through the NT in the original Koine Greek), but my go to has been the NASB (now the NASB95). Without this commitment to reading and meditating on Holy Scripture I wouldn’t be here with you today. Soli Deo Gloria

The Inadequacy of Our Knowledge of God as Real Knowledge Now

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If not for God’s revealedness (Deus revelatus) in Christ, the glory of His hiddenness (Deus absconditus) would smite us where we stand. Even as adopted children of God now, even as we are co-heirs with Christ now, it is such by the faith of Christ that we are able to stand within the presence (parousia) of the triune God now. It is only as we are robed with the righteousness of Christ’s vicarious humanity now, that we are able to commune with the triune God and not be killed by the weight of His glory. Christ is the Rock of Israel, indeed, as in Moses’ case, the cleft of the Rock wherein he was hidden from the direct Light of God’s presence, by which he could endure the intensity of the holiness of God; even if only God’s backside. Whilst we remain in these bodies of death, it is God’s mercy, wrapped in the Son’s Gracious humanity, whereby we can approach God, even in His throne room boldly; but of course, by the faith of Christ as the vision of inexpressible things—without which, if we were to see God “physically,” in our current status, we would surely die.

Karl Barth opines on such things, in regard to an ‘adequacy of a knowledge of God.’

Here and now, i.e., on this side of the coming final revelation of the kingdom, we cannot take any other path in the knowledge of God, but theology can only be a theologia viatorum [theology on the way]. God knows Himself and all things adequately: not after and alongside one another, but in and with one another at a single stroke. And in the lumen gloriae [light of glory] of eternal life we, too, shall certainly know Him in this sense adequately, “face to face.” Here and now, however, our knowledge has to be inadequate—a knowledge of things after and alongside one another—if it is to be real knowledge. There is no sense in regretting its inadequacy. For adequate knowledge of God here and now would not be real knowledge any more than a direct look into the sun would be real seeing. In both cases we could only be dazzled and therefore blinded. If we were to see God here and now as He is, and as He sees Himself, we should die. To His Word that becomes flesh, to the shining of the lumen gratiae given us here and now, there corresponds the humility of the inadequate knowledge of things after and alongside one another, which precisely as such, as theologia viatorum, is true knowledge, the fully satisfactory form, here and now, of the true knowledge which corresponds to its object and is thus the saving power.[1]

In the theological history this combine of knowledge of God was signified by the language: archetypal (God’s Self-knowledge) and ectypal (our ‘inadequate’ knowledge of God). God is more merciful than we will ever know; at least this side of the inadequacy of our knowledge of God. Graciously, though, we have a true and adequate knowledge of God mediated for us, as we are in union with Christ by the Holy Spirit. This is the ‘correspondence’ and ‘saving power’ Barth is referring to. For the ‘Gospel is the power of God.’

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/4 §52 [034] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 30–1.

God’s Light of Light as the Light of Holy Scripture

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Most Christians, or non-Christians, don’t realize that Scripture has an ontology; that it has an orderliness within the taxis of God’s economy for the world; that is, in subservience to the Logos ensarkos, the Word made flesh. Further, since they fail the prior, this then impacts their biblical hermeneutic, to the point that the Bible itself becomes a wax nose of their own making (a self-projection); instead of being allowed to genuinely be God’s Word to us. The Word that pierces to the heart and marrow; the Logos that contradicts us, as we attempt to read Scripture through our self-adulating categories, rather than through God’s Light of Light; indeed, as the Psalmist says “we see light in His Light,” and never vice-versa.

Reading Romans 1 Against Natural Theology

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18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, 19 because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. 20 For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. 21 For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. 22 Professing to be wise, they became fools, 23 and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures. –Romans 1.18–22

The above pericope has been used as the locus classicus for those who want to argue for a ‘natural theology,’ in regard to a theological methodology. That is, for anyone interested in promoting the idea that the triune Christian God can be liminally known simply by reflecting on the effects of nature; indeed, as those are reasoned back to their first cause (in a chain-of-being knowledge and casual schemata), in the cause of all causes, who just is God. But New Testament exegete, Jason Staples, argues something much more biblical,

In contrast to the standard Jewish polemical argument that Israel has been set apart from the theologically ignorant pagans by the reception of the Torah, the account of Rom I: I8–32 “offers a completely distinct explanation.” In Paul’s account, Kathy Gaca explains, the idolaters are “not theologically blind outsiders but something far more reprehensible in biblical terms. They are knowledgeable about God . . . yet have become rebels.” This is not a minor change. Right from the start, the alert reader familiar with traditional Jewish polemics will be startled by the assertion that “what is knowable about God is revealed among them, for God has revealed it to them” (I:19). Since when has the knowledge of God been revealed among the pagans? Is not the knowledge of God granted through the Torah the very thing that has set Israel apart?

Unlike Wisdom’s ignorant idolaters who failed to realize the knowledge of God through extrapolating from creation to creator, Paul tells a narrative in which the explicit revelation from creator to creation is realized but rejected. As such, like Adam, the subjects of Romans are “without excuse” or “indefensible” . . . precisely because they knew better and rebelled against the revelation of God. Not only did they have access to divine revelation, the “understood” . . . the “unseen things.” . . . Rom I:18–32 does not speak “of people who should have known God’s attributes through the creation around them” but rather of people who did know God’s attributes through the revelation God gave them. By implication, the knowledge of God and divine revelation is not in fact a safeguard against impiety and sin as Wisdom suggests (I5:2) but rather is the very reason the revels of Rom I stand without excuse for impiety and injustice. In Johnathan Linbaugh’s words, “Wisdom’s polemics targets idiots; Paul aims at apostates.”[1]

Staples’ argument is much more involved than the passage I just shared from him. But it serves our purposes precisely at the point that it signals an alternative, and more biblical way, to exegete Romans 1. It isn’t and thus shouldn’t be used as THE prooftext for giving natural theology the biblical ground it so desires; that it so needs, to be hip to the “catholic” groove. On this occasion Paul is making a particular argument vis-à-vis the relationship between the Jews and the Church (as given further development and climax in chptrs. 9—11). The underlying point of Romans 1, in Staples exegesis, is that it isn’t a naked creation that holds the vestiges by which the Christian God can be known; even if only discursively. Instead, as Staples shows latterly, Romans 1, as apiece with the following context in chapters 2—3, is written in order to reinforce the judgement that the Jew (which in itself is a complicated designation in the Pauline theology), and that the world, mediated by the ones who should have known through God’s Self-revelation as attested to in Holy Scripture, in the Torah, in particular, should have come to know and submitted to.

Staples’ argument resonates deeply with my own sense on this passage, relative to the notion that God has only ever really been known personally, and even generally (because how else would a personal God be known?), through God’s intentional and personal revelation first presented to the Jews in the Torah. To the Jew first, then the Greek.

[1] Jason A. Staples, Paul and the Resurrection of Israel: Jews, Former Gentiles, Israelites (United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2024), 118–19.

The 24 Elders, 4 Living Creatures, and Real θεολογία Theology

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After a long small print section of commentary on Revelation 4—5 on angels and heaven vis-à-vis a Heaven-world relation, Karl Barth ends the whole thing with the following passage:

A final observation may be made. At one time θεολογία was thought of as knowledge of the kind of matters which have occupied us here. Rev. 4—5 was thus regarded as a typical specimen, and it was for this reason that the author was called John ὁ Θεολόγος. He would have been most surprised, and the 4 living creatures, the 24 elders and the many angels in heaven, must surely have been surprised, at most of the things which have since been given the name of theology.[1]

Barth wrote this in the mid-20th century; how much more so is his indictment even truer in the 21st century church and churches? Kyrie eleison

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3 §50–51 [476] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 190.

The Blog Font-Type

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An administrative question: is the new base font I’m trying out readable for all of you? I kind of like it because it reminds me of old typewriter font. But I always want to be mindful of my readers in regard to their reading experience here. Just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean I’ll change it back LOL. But I would seriously like to know what you think of it. I was going to use it in the past, but then thought it might be too small to read for some. Anyway, your feedback is most appreciated.

Just Be a Philosopher Already: On Being a Thomistic Theologian

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For me I only have the capacity to follow a Dogmatic or Systematic theology insofar that I believe it is sticking to the theo-logic inherent to the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. This is what keeps it Biblical. This is what keeps it from adulterating and going beyond the 𝑡𝑒𝑥𝑡; that is, by going to its inner and upward reality in the Godman (Theanthropos), Jesus Christ. In other words, speculative theologies, ones that reason from the being of humanity to the being of God; ones that reason discursively about nature vis-à-vis God, as if nature holds vestiges of God; are balderdash to me! If that is all I had to go with theologically I would fully walk away from the theological endeavor. The Biblical witness, the Biblical attestation to its triune reality in the God revealed (Deus revelatus), can be the only line of theological reasoning the Christian can really take. Not in assertion, as if just claiming loudly, over and over again, “that we follow the Scripture Principle,” but in concrete fact; i.e., that Scripture indeed is the only source and ground of the theological engagement.

These theologians constantly touting Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle as the bee’s-knees of theological performance might as well do it right. They might as well become professional philosophers of religion, and at least learn how to think philosophically in nuanced and correct ways if they are going to elevate a philosopher-king as their theologian, rather than the actual Biblical witness. Instead, they lazily lay claim to the whole of church history, as if the Patristics, for example, were simply doing what Thomas Aquinas was doing with Aristotle in mediaeval times. Indeed, they sublate their bad philosophical takes as theology takes, as if they are ultimately takes provided for by Biblical exegesis.