Author Archives: Bobby Grow

Knowledge of God Through Suffering: With Reference to Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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When we suffer as Christians, we come to know God because we are no longer reliant upon ourselves, we have no resource in ourselves, and so we are pressed deep into the ground of our life in Jesus Christ. The Apostle Paul understood this well when he wrote to the Corinthian church,

8 For we do not want you to be ignorant, brethren, of our trouble which came to us in Asia: that we were burdened beyond measure, above strength, so that we despaired even of life. 9 Yes, we had the sentence of death in ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves but in God who raises the dead, 10 who delivered us from so great a death, and does deliver us; in whom we trust that He will still deliver us, 11 you also helping together in prayer for us, that thanks may be given by many persons on our behalf for the gift granted to us through many. -II Corinthians 1:8-11

When faced with the uncertainties of daily life, when pressed against the direst of consequences we really have nowhere else to go; it is really hard to deceive ourselves at that point, we are very vulnerable. This is the perfect scenario for God’s wisdom to reach us where we are truly at; we often do not realize how needy we are until we are needy. And this is why Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from his Nazi prison cell about God’s wisdom versus the religious wisdom of the world:

Here is the decisive difference between Christianity and all religions. Man’s religiosity makes him look in his distress to the power of God in the world: God is the deus ex machina. The Bible directs man to God’s powerlessness and suffering; only the suffering God can help. To that extent we may say that the development towards the world’s coming of age outlined above, which has done away with a false conception of God, opens up a way of seeing the God of the Bible, who wins power and space in the world by his weakness. This will probably be the starting-point for our secular interpretation.[1]

What suffering does for both the Apostle Paul and Dietrich Bonhoeffer is to tear back the un-reality, and un-truth of the human religions of the world; and instead, it shows us humans, especially us Christians (who may well have imbibed the wisdom of the world), how empty everything else is a part from our God who humbled himself to the point of deep suffering and agonizing death. It is in this instance in this moment when our suffering is seen to correlate with his suffering for us at the cross, and our knowledge of God increases in dependence upon his life; the life that death and suffering could not hold down.

[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, 359-61.

*Written, originally, in 2014.

The Christian Existence: Contra Systemic Dualisms

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The right and left binary represents a dualism that genuine Christian theology rejects. Dualism generally says that there are equal and opposing forces, light versus dark, in a cyclical battle of yin and yang. The Kingdom of God is grounded in the reality of God become [hu]man. There is no dualism, no competitive relationship between the fallen and unfallen; all of reality is subsumed within the singular person of Jesus Christ. Thus, Christianity, the Gospel comes with different expectations. The Christian is not in a loggerhead with the darkness, per se; the Christian moves and breathes from within the atmosphere of the heavenly Zion. This reality is not of this world, and thus not of the dualisms that often frame this world system. We are emissaries of the living God in the risen Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. In that sense we move differently than others, not being shaped by what the world optically presents to us as if it gets to determine reality by brute presence.

The aforementioned should have an impact on the Christian existence in this world. It should keep us moving towards and from the upward call in Christ Jesus. Politics, culture wars, and the like should never be defined by the whims and whams of the base person, the profane systems of thought progenerated by this world system; the evil age. Jesus is already reigning at the right hand of the Father (see 1 Cor 15), and will come once and for all riding on His white steed with the sword of God proceeding from His mouth. Maranatha

The Church as Prolongation of the Incarnation or as Witnesser: The Catholics and Protestants

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Ecclesiology for people in the churches is an underdeveloped, and even undeveloped teaching for most. Unless a Christian person is self-motivated to pursue study of this important doctrine they will most likely live their Christian existence within the darkness of absence (of teaching). I think this, in fact, has a lot to do with many so-called Protestant Christians swimming the shallow end of the Tiber River; i.e., to become members of the Roman Catholic church. In nuce, Roman Catholic ecclesiology entails the notion that the Roman church itself prolongates the incarnation of Jesus Christ. That is to say, that the Roman ecclesia, for proponents of Roman Catholic theology, believe that its church is the visible embodiment of Jesus Christ Himself; thus, their reference to the mystici corporis Christi (‘mystical body of Christ’). Here is a snippet of a longer encyclical that Pope Pius XII wrote for the Catholic church with reference to understanding just what the Roman Catholic understanding of the Church is:

But if our Savior, by His death, became, in the full and complete sense of the word, the Head of the Church, it was likewise through His blood that the Church was enriched with the fullest communication of the Holy Spirit, through which, from the time when the Son of Man was lifted up and glorified on the Cross by His sufferings, she is divinely illumined. For then, as Augustine notes, [39] with the rending of the veil of the temple it happened that the dew of the Paraclete’s gifts, which heretofore had descended only on the fleece, that is on the people of Israel, fell copiously and abundantly (while the fleece remained dry and deserted) on the whole earth, that is on the Catholic Church, which is confined by no boundaries of race or territory. Just as at the first moment of the Incarnation the Son of the Eternal Father adorned with the fullness of the Holy Spirit the human nature which was substantially united to Him, that it might be a fitting instrument of the Divinity in the sanguinary work of the Redemption, so at the hour of His precious death He willed that His Church should be enriched with the abundant gifts of the Paraclete in order that in dispensing the divine fruits of the Redemption she might be, for the Incarnate Word, a powerful instrument that would never fail. For both the juridical mission of the Church, and the power to teach, govern and administer the Sacraments, derive their supernatural efficacy and force for the building up of the Body of Christ from the fact that Jesus Christ, hanging on the Cross, opened up to His Church the fountain of those divine gifts, which prevent her from ever teaching false doctrine and enable her to rule them for the salvation of their souls through divinely enlightened pastors and to bestow on them an abundance of heavenly graces.[1]

The Roman Catholic church maintains, as indicated by Pope Pius XII, that the Holy Spirit, as the enlivener and Creator of the Church has so mystically tied Himself into the visible manifestation of the Roman See, along with all of her sacraments, hierarchy of pastors, so on and so forth, that the only ‘place’ union with God in Christ can obtain is if someone is brought into union with the mystical body of Jesus Christ; or, in the Roman view, with the Roman Catholic church herself. This union is supervened by the bishops and priests of the Catholic church, not least of which, is the Pope himself. Once inducted and confirmed into the Catholic church, through baptism and partaking in the Mass of the sacraments, it is at this time that the Catholic convert becomes a ‘feeder’ on and mystical participant within the visible body of Christ on earth; or the Roman Catholic church. In this sense, and per Pius XII’s aforementioned words, there is a real sense wherein the Roman ecclesiology, with its insistent assertion on their status as the visible body of Christ on earth, that the Church itself becomes a prolongation of the incarnation. That is, for the Roman, the Church has become and is so entwined with the notion that Roma is now the apple of God’s eye, that she alone is God’s visible body on earth; that in order for communion with God to obtain for humanity, would-be Christians must come into, again, union with the mystical body of Christ; which is none other, according to Roman doctrine, but the Latin Catholic church.

Protestants, on the other hand, rooted in a radical theology of the Word of God, maintain that the body of Christ is fully present within the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ; indeed, even as Christ has resurrected with that body, ascended with that body, intercedes in priestly session at the right hand of the Father with that body, and will come again with that body; His glorified body. For the Protestant, thusly, there is no prolongation of the incarnation of Christ as a mystical body of Christ, but rather its concrete existence in the flesh and blood of Imannuel’s veins as He has freely elected to be for us, with us, and not God without us in Jesus Christ.

Hence, Protestants are not burdened with the notion that we must present some type of mystical body of Christ to each other and the world writ large, as if that body is constituted by a physical address in Vatican City, Italy. On the contrary, Protestants understand that the esse of the Church is constituted by the literal body of Christ Himself for us. Resultantly, the Protestant doesn’t seek to point a would-be or already Christians to a particular iteration or expression of the Church in the world as the Roman does. The Protestant understands that their respective Christian existence is constituted, indeed by the Holy Spirit, by way of union with Christ immediately, directly. The Protestant bears witness to the finished work of God in Christ as the reality (res) of the Church in the triune God. Karl Barth writes on this status of the Protestant Christian similarly,

. . . Their existence in the world depends upon the fact that this alone is their particular gift and task. They have not to assist or add to the being and work of their living Saviour who is the Lord of the world, let alone to replace it by their own work. The community is not a prolongation of His incarnation, His death, and resurrection, the acts of God and their revelation. It has not to do these things. It has to witness to them. It is its consolation that it can do this. Its marching-orders are to do it.[2]

Barth rightly notes that the work of the Church is absolutely finished in the work of Jesus Christ. It is His work of salvation, of building His Church, that He has already accomplished; the Church’s task, by the Spirit, is to bear witness to this, her reality, in her Head and reality, Jesus Christ. The Roman church, alternatively, believes that it constitutes itself by re-presenting the Mass, the death of Jesus Christ, through the primary sacraments of baptism and the eucharist. There remains an unfinished work within the Catholic ecclesiology which makes the prolongation of the incarnation of Jesus Christ the most organic outcome. That is, because their remains a proving ground, so to speak, of the Christian’s worth to inherit eternal life through the treasuries of Christ’s merits, over and beyond the work of Christ’s atonement. And so, for the Catholic Christian, the Mass and its sacraments remain the portal whereby salvation might be constantly offered, affirmed, reaffirmed, over and again, as the Christian seeks to establish a level of sanctification whereby they are found worthy enough to in fact become real and ultimate participants within the mystical body of Christ. If the Church, as it is for the Roman, is a prolongation of the incarnation, then the incarnation, logically, requires further re-establishment and curation by the faithful; if in fact, the body of Christ can be shown to be the true body of Christ in the world today.

This requires further fleshing out. But hopefully there has been enough provided for the reader to start to digest.

[1] Pope Pius XII, MYSTICI CORPORIS CHRISTI: ENCYCLICAL OF POPE PIUS XII ON THE MISTICAL BODY OF CHRIST TO OUR VENERABLE BRETHREN, PATRIARCHS, PRIMATES, ARCHBISHOPS, BISHIOPS, AND OTHER LOCAL ORDINARIES ENJOYING PEACE AND COMMUNION WITH THE APOSTOLIC SEE, published by, The Holy See, accessed 05-05-2026.

[2] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 §59 [318] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London:T&T Clark, 2010), 312.

On the Orders and Disorders of the God-World Relation: With Reference to Augustine, Athanasius, Barth, and Torrance

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There are two orderings in the world structure: God’s real order, and man’s real disorder in an attempt to be contra God. God has freely and graciously elected to be for this world, as both the electing God and elected man, in Jesus Christ. Soteriologically driven theologies, like Augustinianism, sets these two worlds in a competitive relationship. Contrariwise, the Athanasian-Barthian-Torrancean combine thinks these orders from within the nexus of God and humanity in the reconciling and hypostatically uniting person, Jesus Christ. This combine allows the Christian to think the God-world relation from within the strictures God has setup, even in-spite of humanity’s inherent urge to fight against God as a condition of their fallen nature as lapsarian humans. Against the Augustinian effort to think the elect of God into God through a decree of God (decretum absolutum), the Athanasian complex is required to think the God-humanity relation from within the gift of God’s Self-givenness for the world, for humanity, from within the confines of His own second-person, the eternal Son en sarkos, Jesus Christ. This Athanasian frame offers a cosmic frame of reference when it comes to things worldly, things salvific, so on and so forth.

Barth writes of this relationship presciently:

This is obviously the underlying form of our problem—the real distance in which the God appearing in the human sphere, and acting and speaking for us in this sphere, confronts us to whom He turns and for whom He acts. Note that on the one hand it is God for man, on the other man against God. There are two orders (or, rather, order and disorder), two opposite world-structures, two worlds opposing and apparently excluding one another. Note that it is He and we—and He and we in a direct encounter, we before Him—how can we live before Him and with Him?—we with the God who by Himself reconciles us with Himself, we in His presence, in the sequence of His work and Word. On the side of man the only possible word seems to be a deep-seated No, the No of the one who when God comes and acts for Him and tells him that He is doing so is forced to see that his day is over and that he can only perish.[1]

As Barth rightly emphasizes there is no such thing as a competitive relationship between God and humanity. That is, because God has already become both the Yes and the No on behalf of humanity’s rebellion against God in His free movement towards humanity in Christ, and His equipoise movement of humanity towards God, in a Yesward movement, of Christ’s making. This is not to say, of course, that humanity no longer sees itself, consciously or subconsciously, in a Noward stance before the living and triune God; it does. It is just to say that even in that ongoing rebellious spirit, the one that has already been put to death in the archetypal humanity of the Second Adam, there remains no power behind it. Humanity’s rebellion, its no to God, has already been put down, and thus risen up in the Yes and Amen of God in Jesus Christ. Rebellious humanity, at this point, simply lives against their humanity already won for them in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ.

The work of God in Christ’s salvation for us is finished!

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 §59 [291] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London:T&T Clark, 2010), 284.

De-Archiving the Blog

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I’ve decided that I don’t really like Substack. It isn’t set up for specific categories etc., which makes it difficult with the unfolding of my ongoing Barth Reader. I think I’ll make this my primary online site again. Sorry about the confusion. Thing is, I plan on cross-posting to my Substack still. There is no need to limit myself. But as far as my comfortability level, WordPress is still where that’s at. My concern, as noted before, is that WP is not seemingly so focused on catering to bloggers anymore. Oh well, I suppose until it becomes totally non-functional that way, I will make it work.

Again, sorry about the confusion. Either way, you will see my new posts come up whether you are subscribed to me here or at Substack, or both.

Archiving the Blog, See You at Substack https://bobbygrow.substack.com/

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It has been a seventeen year run here at this url. I have been blogging since the heyday of the blogosphere starting back in 2005 (different urls). I think it is time to shudder this space. I have just returned from a week of vacation, and after some further reflection and thought (I was already trending this way in my thinking) I have decided it is best to archive this blog. That doesn’t mean I will no longer be writing online, but that my primary writing online will be limited to my Substack account (of the same name, Athanasian Reformed). I have appreciated all of you my readers over the decades, and I look forward to continuing with you over at the Substack. Substack has a better overall community and energy behind it these days. Not only that, WordPress as a hosting platform for blogs has deteriorated over time; it seems that they mostly cater to business websites these days. So, while the going is still good I thought it best to transmigrate myself over the transom to Substack. Please do follow me over there dearest readers. I know some of you already are subscribed to me over there as well; perfect! For those who are not I expect to see you there front and center!

As you have also noticed my output has waned over the last few years. I’m hoping being part of the Substack community well help energize me once again. But we’ll see. I don’t expect that I’ll be posting every day like I once did for years and years. But you never know, the Lord may well urge and motivate me to pick up the writing pace once again. Even so, I expect that I will still be publishing at least two posts a week, on average, at the Substack.

This isn’t a goodbye, au contraire, but a hello at a new habitat for me online. I’ll see you there! https://bobbygrow.substack.com/ Athanasian Reformed. 

  1. Another motivation for the move is that even with my very infrequent posting over at my Substack account I still get the same or more views there than I do here. I am imagining that with more cultivation and dedication over at Substack that my readership will pick up rather than wane as it has here. Pax Vobis

 

As a Narrative Theologian You Pray, You Worship, You Write

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I prefer doing narratival theology. Why? Because to me it is the most organic expression of a dialogical theology. What is a dialogical theology? It is a theology where you’re constantly in prayer, in dialog with the One who has made and re-made us in Jesus Christ. It is a theology where you aren’t waiting to be participant or partaker with the divine nature, but actively keeping in step with that as the reality of the Christian daily existence. Narratival theology remains an open form. One that reflects a stream of worship, meditation, and con-versation with God, who is Father of the Son by the Holy Spirit. Dialogical theology operates from within the center of God’s life in Christ; it is greater than the written word, but not lesser. As such it can be written for the Church’s edification; indeed, grounded in the experience of Christ’s lived life, His vicarious humanity for us. So, a narratival theology as the expression of a dialogical theology is a highly personalist and experiential theology. But it isn’t a rationalist or romanticist theology insofar that the experience of God isn’t grounded in each one of us abstractly, but in God the Son’s experience for us in His archetypal and greater Adamic humanity for us.

As a narratival thelogian you simply pray, you worship, you participate in the triune life and the communio sanctorum (communion of the saints), and then write and speak upon it for others; for purposes of edification of the body of Christ writ large.

On Ryan Hurd’s Babylonian Captivity

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I’ve “known” Ryan Hurd for many years now; through online engagements and personal correspondences. I’ve only known Hurd in his classical Reformed context as that has taken place during his time at New Saint Andrews College, and then as he has been an instructor for Davenant Hall. My last correspondence with him was quite a few years ago; he and I were discussing his entrance into the PhD program in theology at the University of Kampen (he was just getting started then). There was no indication that he was wrestling with the types of ecclesiological matters that have now finally bubbled up in his recent announcement. In case you don’t follow online theological matters closely, Ryan just wrote a post for his Substack that announced his (and his wife’s) movement into Roman Catholicism. If you don’t know of Ryan his primary theological interlocutor over the years has been the ‘Angelic Doctor,’ Thomas Aquinas. Indeed, it was this hook that finally captured Hurd’s total intellectual and spiritual development. I have always contended that if you’re going to be a Thomist (follower of Thomas Aquinas), then for consistency’s sake you ought to be a Tridentine Roman Catholic (a Catholic after the Council of Trent). Ryan clearly arrived at that same conclusion. Here is a piece of what he wrote for his Substack announcement:

This occurred in my case. And here is where we find the reason for me becoming Catholic. Of course, there are always many reasons for a thing like this, a whole host and all very different. Actually, it is my impression that people often cannot point to really a single reason within the mass of them; but in my particular case, I can do so easily. The reason, for me, is precisely what initially determined me to the Catholic part on these contradictions. The name of that reason is Thomas Aquinas, and particularly his auctoritas.

Auctoritas is a condition of a person comprising both his knowledge in a science, as well as his moral goodness. The former is how you know that he is not deceived; and the latter is how you know that he does not deceive when he testifies as to which part is true. When such a person does testify, you assent to that part merely on account of that person’s condition (propter auctoritatem)–and then you proceed from there.

Over time, it happened that Thomas’s auctoritas became supreme in my intellectual experience. Obviously, it is not supreme absolutely speaking–Thomas would be the first person to tell you that. But it is so in my experience–especially as I have undergone the confirming process of (1) assenting initially merely because Thomas said so; (2) eventually found rationes; and then (3) locked the proposition down in a demonstration and achieved scientia. All throughout this, my learning process, I have never found Thomas wanting, not even close. He has never steered me wrong. And over time, my intellect has become habituated to proceed about contradictions in precisely this mode (I have articulated this elsewhere as simply what it means to be a Thomist).

As I became intellectually obliged to follow Thomas wherever he leads me, so withholding my assent became intellectually unjustified–even regarding those contradictions where, initially, I had no reasons for the Catholic part, or even my remaining Protestant doubts. Remarkably, I became obliged to conclude Catholicism, merely because Thomas had told me to do so. And in the end, I listened.[1]

Why have I maintained that to be a Thomist most organically leads to being a Tridentine Catholic? Primarily because of the hierarchical chain-of-being and theory of causation present with Thomas’ appropriation of the Aristotelian categories and causation. Steven Ozment writes,

The assumption that real relations existed between God, man, and the world made possible Aquinas’s confidence in a posteriori proofs of God’s existence; finite effects led necessarily to their origin, because they were really connected with it. The same assumption underlay Aquinas’s distinctive views on the “analogical” character of human knowledge and discourse about God. According to Aquinas, one could speak meaningfully of one’s relationship to God by analogy with one’s relationship with one’s fellow man because a real relationship existed between the values of people shared and those God had prescribed.[2]

It is this theory of real hierarchical relations finding their causal and actual force from the Unmoved Mover, God, that in my view entails an ecclesiological theory wherein the Catholic church fits best. Why? Because it makes sense that if there is One God, One primary cause, that in a chain-of-being movement from highest to lowest, that within that chain there be one Church, one people of God. And on analogy even within the structural framework of the said Church, there be a hierarchy of one (like the Pope represents) that works its way down into diffuse levels of leadership out into the various priests, so on and so forth. Indeed, just as in Thomas’ theory, he sees the angels with a similar hierarchical structure within the angelic structure itself. And again, this all starts with the actus purus (pure act) or Pure Being of the singular God.

Does this mean that the hierarchical theory of God’s being in action must necessarily lead to the Roman Episcopy? No. But the most organic iteration of it, I would argue, given the Dominican’s ecclesial space for reasoning, is in fact the Roman Catholic church. And of course, this is why the Nominalists and the via moderna posed such a problem for the prelates within the Roman city. For sure, as the nominalists maintained, there were no real or necessary relations between God and the world. If the ‘moderns’ were right about this we can see how the authority of the Roman church could easily be called into question. If God merely related to the world through covenants and ad hoc words (think of the potentia theology), then the centrality and the necessity for the Roman church to mediate God to the world, could not theologically make an argument for the authority of the papacy. But then this is why I think that to be an ecclesiological Thomist is to be Roman Catholic. Aquinas constructed his theory by deployment of and synthesis with the Aristotelian categories toward buttressing the authority and reality of the Holy Communion of Roma in view. Even if early on his theology wasn’t as enthusiastically endorsed as it finally became post and contemporaneous with Trent.

To draw this back in: Hurd, as I have briefly sketched, I think, is being consistent with the aims of Thomas’ ecclesiology and its coherence with the Roman ecclesiology and theory of church government and authority therefrom. There was once another Reformed fellow, in his case, a Presbyterian, named Jason Stellman; he too, within his Presbyterian (Aristotelian) theological commitments arrived at the same conclusion as Ryan Hurd. As a result, he also swam the river Tiber. Surely, there are many former Reformed folk who have made this move. And I would argue for similar reasons to Hurd’s. Ultimately, I have greater respect for people like Hurd who see that the pressure of Thomas’ thinking, if held consistently, ought to lead all of his adherents to Vatican City, Italy. Of course, there are better ways to be genuinely Protestant. And so, I would invite Hurd et al. to abandon Thomas’ project altogether and recognize what it truly means to be a biblical Christian. There are theological, dogmatic ways for doing that; and ways that do not require a sacrificium intellectus. But alas, that was never Hurd’s way to begin with; that is, to be Protestant.

[1] Ryan M. Hurd, Why I’ve Become Roman Catholic, accessed 04-10-2026.

[2] Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform 1250–1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980), 49.