Category Archives: Affective Theology

Problematizing a Development of Sacra Doctrina within the Church: With Reference to Peter of John Olivi

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Bernard McGinn writes the following with reference to the apocalyptic-theology-of-history present in the mediaeval theologian, Peter of John Olivi’s (c. 1248—1298) thought:

The invective Olivi directs against the evidences of the carnal Church is concerned not only with the ecclesiastical abuses of the day, especially with avarice and simony, but also, like Bonaventure before him, with the use of Aristotle in theology. The Provençal Franciscan also expressed belief in a double Antichrist—the Mystical Antichrist, a coming false pope who would attack the Franciscan Rule, and the Great, or Open Antichrist, whose defeat would usher in the final period of history. Characteristic of Franciscan apocalyptic is his emphasis on the role of Francis as the initiator of the period of renewal and his hope for the conversion of all peoples in the course of the final events.[1]

Olivi was a student of the infamous mediaeval theologian, Bonaventure. But I thought this treatment by McGinn on Olivi was telling. Telling in regard to the patterns and thematics of theological development. Telling, in regard to how theologies and emphases often repeat themselves in various and all periods of theological development throughout history. As McGinn highlights, Olivi was concerned with a “carnal Church”; he was concerned with the imposition of Aristotle’s categories upon Christian theology (which of course Thomas Aquians was famous for doing). We also observe, that for Olivi, according to McGinn, he saw that the Catholic church itself had corruption riddling it throughout; he saw the Antichrist coming from within the Church, not without. This latter development is interesting to me because it reminds me of Martin Luther’s view that the office of the Pope would finally produce the Antichrist (the Lutheran Church Wisconsin Synod still holds to this position in their confession). And then, we see in Olivi, a belief in something like a postmillennial understanding of the very end of history. He believes, according to McGinn, that the whole world will be Christianized prior to the second coming of Jesus Christ.

Many things stood out to me in this one paragraph on Olivi’s theology. The primary hook for me, and this won’t be surprising to my readers, is that Olivi was critical of Aristotle’s presence in the development of the sacra doctrina within the Church. Olivi, like his teacher, Bonaventure, believed that Aristotle could only serve as an artificial grammar for articulating Christian doctrine. Such sucralose, in the minds of Bonaventure and Olivi, respectively, had no place in affecting a theology for the Church, insofar that Aristotle himself thought a construct of God as a pagan.

It is important for Christian folks in the 21st century to get beyond theology purely sourced from Twitter/X and other social media platforms. What the genuine student finds, if they study the books, is that things are much more complex and less concretized than they might want to think. There have been various strands of development, various traditions cultivated in the Church’s history that transcend the parochial and sectarian and absolutized divides we see today on the interwebs. I think this one paragraph alone on Olivi helps to illustrate that point.

Within evangelical/reformed theology today there is a movement towards retrieval. And yet what this has come to mean, especially through the work of someone like Matthew Barrett and Craig Carter, is that what is really being retrieved is one strand of development that is Aristotelian/Thomist heavy; as if ‘Christian Aristotelianism’ was the only development present within the mediaeval and early and post Reformed churches. This simply is not the case; again, as our passage illustrates.

Conversely, I am anti-Aristotelian myself (no shocker there!) Some might think that this is because of my appreciation for the theologies of Barth and TF Torrance alone. Again, this is not the case. I was anti-Aristotelian way before I ever read Barth and TFT. I was exposed to the Bonaventure-Olivi thread of development twenty-three years ago in seminary. This thread was developed further with the sparker of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther; he looked back to such threads in the via antiqua through his direct mentor, Johann von Staupitz, and before him, Jean Gerson.

Anyway, this post is somewhat of a smorgasbord of hits on various issues; something like a Miscellanies. But I hope, at least, the reader might be able to better appreciate the “problematized” nature of doctrinal development within the Church of Jesus Christ. In other words, I hope that folks might be alerted to the problem of reducing and then absolutizing one’s pet positions. Surely, we ought to be convicted about the theological things we believe. But those convictions ought to first take shape (in a spiraling and continuous way) through the caldron of toiling with the sources (ad fontes) of the history of interpretation and development of the sacra doctrina.

[1] Bernard McGinn, Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 205.

What is Love? Against the Cultural and Psychological Conceptions in the Church

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Helmut Thielicke makes an excellent observation as he engages with the “conscience” as that is distilled in the epistle to the Romans. He notes that there really is no such thing as an autonomous conscience. For Thielicke the conscience, as understood biblically, is either going to be “ridden” by a fallen broken human nature, or it is going to be ridden and shaped by God’s triune life; there is no via media or Swiss neutral ground. And it is within this understanding, which we might say is the Pauline understanding, wherein Thielicke will argue that the point of contact between God and humanity is not resident within a native (to an abstract person’s) conscience, but instead it is only as God in Christ circumscribes our humanity with His; it is only as Christ condemns sin in His body for us that we come to have the capaciousness to know and be for Him.

Thielicke writes:

We see here at the same time the consequences of Roman Catholic anthropology, which we have already discussed in some detail in connection with the doctrine of the imago Dei. If the human person is not understood in relationship, but instead is given ontic autonomy as the bearer of demonstrable components of nature and of ontic substances of grace, then loving with one’s whole heart can no longer be understood personally in terms of existence in fellowship with God. It has to be understood instead as the ontically demonstrable content of the heart, as a psychodynamic state of being filled with loving impulses. The ontology of man leads at once to psychology, and indeed to a theological-speculative kind of psychology. Once we enter upon this path, we cannot avoid the conclusion that in terms of psychical structure man’s “infirmity”—i.e., the fact that soul is necessarily filled with shifting contents, with varied impressions and desires as well as with tasks and duties which claim our attention and devotion—man’s “infirmity” is completely incompatible with his being totally filled with love for God. Love for God as a psychical “content” then enters at once into competition with other potential contents of the soul. In any case love’s claim to be total is wholly illusory—until these competing contents of the psyche are eliminated in the uninterrupted and undeflected vision of God in the life to come. Thus the command to love loses its unconditional character the moment we enter the ontological-psychological plane of thought. For on that level it is no longer possible to grasp the personal category of love.

It is precisely at this point that we can find help in the formulation of Luther whereby the subject of faith—in this context we may with equal propriety say: the subject of love—is a “mathematical point” [punctum mathematicum]. Luther uses this extreme formulation to combat the fatal psychologizing of faith and love. He refuses to regard the subject of faith and love as merely an extended psychical tract filled with diverse forces and aspirations. There is thus no place for such questions as whether we are supposed to believe or to love at every single moment of our lives, or how such permanence is to be understood psychologically. Faith and love are characterized by their object, not by the psychical accomplishment of believing and loving. I confess him who loved me, and I believe in him who has given me his promises.

Thus the life of piety has as its goal not that all our time should be filled up with “conscious” faith and love, i.e., with conscious acts of believing and loving, so that everything else is dismissed from our minds as we move to at least approximate that total filling of the psyche. On the contrary, Luther recommends periods of prayer and devotion merely as “signs” that my time is under God, not as devices for filling up my time—at least partially—with thoughts of love and faith. The object of my faith , God’s love and righteousness, is still effectively present even when I “feel” nothing, even when I am “empty” or terrorized by doubt.[1]

As Thielicke presciently identifies (along with Luther): as the root goes, so goes the tree. If the root is rotten, the tree will be rotten. If the root is healthy and vibrant, the tree will be healthy and vibrant. You will notice that Thielicke is really critiquing the Roman Aristotelian (and insofar as that is picked up in Post Reformed and Lutheran orthodox theology) categories of thinking of grace in terms of habitus (disposition and its habituizing), and as substance and qualities. In other words, he is critiquing the Thomist synthesis wherein grace becomes its own independent substance resident in an abstract self-possessing humanity. He is rightfully arguing that when such categories are deployed, in regard to thinking about an ostensible notion of God’s grace, that the person under such notion-izing is flittering about in an inward curved movement of the soul upon the soul in a striving attempt to make their innards, their ‘feelings’ somehow correspond with what they speculate, what they perceive to be God’s love, God’s affection, God’s feeling. But according to Thielicke, to use a Torrancean (TFT) phrase, “this is only to throw the person back upon themselves.”

What Thielicke is offering as the alternative to the aforementioned is the biblical reality wherein humanity, and its conscience therein, is understood to be grounded in an alien conscience; but one that has been brought into union with us, insofar that God in Christ has brought us into union with Him, and His vicarious humanity for us. The problem that Thielicke vis-à-vis Luther is identifying is that the human propensity is to constantly think itself as the prius to all else; so the ‘turn to the subject’ that modernity has sophisticated for human consumption.

There are multiples of implications to all of the aforementioned, particularly as we think about the state of the Christian church in the West (and elsewhere). We can immediately see the effects of what happens when the church ingests a psychologized self wherein people, Christians in their spirituality, are reduced to performing for themselves and others. When genuinely triune love is not what constrains us, as that is truly actualized for us in Christ, then all that we ultimately have is a love within the ‘accidents’ of our being that we can strive to produce and express in “sacrosanct” efforts to demonstrate that while we were yet sinners we died for Christ’s sake. That is to say, as Thielicke has: that when love is thought of in philosophical rather than personalist terms what we necessarily end up with is a self-driven and cultivated notion of love that is not necessarily at the core of our beings coram Deo (before God).

[1] Helmut Thielicke, Theological Ethics: Foundations (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966), 342–43.

On Barth’s “Lack” of an Experiential Theology: A Brief Impression on Zahl’s Reading

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I am just starting to read Simeon Zahl‘s book, The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience. I think overall it is going to be an excellent read. But he is, right off the bat, critical of both Martin Luther and Karl Barth, respectively, when it comes, to what he claims to be their theological penchant to squash a place for human experience in the performance of theological activity. The following is what I just punched out quickly (on my phone) as a first impression on my Facebook timeline. I’m sure there will be more to come, but I wanted to share my initial impressions here and now.

When Barth’s critics attempt to “defeat” him by periodizing him (reducing his theological efforts and their implications to their own space and time in German/Swiss environs and in early to the mid 20th century), they engage in a reductionistic fallacy (if not an inverted golden age fallacy [i.e., genetic fallacy]). It isn’t that the conditions of his theological environment didn’t have basic impact on Barth’s theologizing; but it is a question of whether or not the fundamental questions he was engaging at the time have parallel proponents even now in the 21st century. His anti-natural theology approach wasn’t merely his response to Nazism (even though it was one of the targets of his aim), it primarily was rooted in age old theoanthroplogical issues; particularly as those pertain to a doctrine of sin, and the attendant impact that has on humanity’s capaciousness vis a vis a theological ontology and epistemology. It’s not that human experience has no role in Barth’s theologizing vis a vis the performance of theology, per se. But it is that, for Barth, the conditions for human experience in theology have no ground outwith God’s human experience for us, as that is first established in His firstborn of creation, in the Christ (cf Col 1:15ff). It is plausible to conclude that Barth might flatten everything down by a ‘Christological objectivism’ and or ‘Christomonism,’ as is often the critique levied at Barth. But when Barth is understood from within the broader thematics of his total CD, I would suggest that he offers the only real ground for affectivity and experientiality to obtain within His Church. That is because for Barth’s theology, without the resurrection of the Godman, Jesus Christ, the conditions for *anything* to obtain (like at all) are non-starting. I can agree that there is a lacuna in Barth’s theology in regard to a developed pneumatology (same goes for TF Torrance). But that shouldn’t lead someone to the conclusion that the resources for such development are inherently squashed simply because Barth et al. didn’t fully develop that in toto. Just because Barth has a particular reception history, this does not necessarily entail that he has been received properly (per the “received” and perceived implications of his theology).

God is Cruciform Love not Zealot Law

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God is love. He isn’t a sappy sentimental love. He is the Holy triune love of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There is an overreaction in either direction. Some so overreact to the law-based God they grew up with, or who they were first introduced to, that they construct a “God of love” who ends up affirming them in all their desires and fleshy wants. We need to come back to the God of our first love, in Jesus Christ. He is a God of justice, but it is a staurological (cross) shaped justice that flows from and is grounded by His life of love. But He truly is love. He is our Father, just because He is first the Son’s Father by the Spirit. This is the God of love we need to proclaim. He isn’t simply a winsome God; He is a God of expectation; an expectation that has been met for us in the vicarious humanity and obedience of Jesus Christ. Nevertheless, He expects that we be transformed from glory to glory; to be holy as He is Holy. This kind of love ought to inculcate a life of holy gratitude; a life of repentant thinking and living; a life of emboldened and holy living, of the type that reflects and bears witness to the ground of our newly created lives in the resurrected and ascended humanity of Jesus Christ. Let God be true, and every man a liar.

On the other hand, others so run from the pietistic, sappy God of love presented to them by mainstream evangelicalism and mainline churches, that they end up turning God into an Iron Fist. They prefer this God because He appears to be a God of moralistic law-coding wherein the person’s obedience begins to almost count towards “their election/salvation.” They like this God because within the bilaterally configured relationship they think this God operates with, in a God-world relation, that they have their end of the covenant/pactum to keep; that is if they are going to persevere and demonstrate the fruits of an effectual salvation. These folks like to cudgel others into submission, almost as if Allah and their God have something in common. Indeed, their God, and the Muslim’s God, respectively, are construed from the same fount of Aristotelian intellection; of the notion of actus purus (‘pure being’). As such, these Christians begin to emulate their God of metaphysical law-coding. They don’t think of others in terms of God’s love, but instead in terms of a God who expects them to keep their end of the bargain; to keep their end of the salvific promisso.

There is a better way to think God’s love, I already referred to it above with reference to God as cruciform-shaped. The triune God, who is love by way of His Self-givenness for the other, in the other, as a subject-in-being love that so interpenetrates the other that it becomes impossible to think the other apart from the self and vice versa. This is the ground of Christian love; that is, God’s triune interpenetrating love. It is a love, that in the assumptio carnis (‘assumption of flesh’) has so interpenetrated all of humanity’s lives that it becomes impossible to think of the other apart from God’s life for them. This is the way we ought to approach all others in and from the life of Jesus Christ. He loves people, as if sheep without a shepherd. He is the Great Shepherd of Israel, of both Jew and Gentile alike. Treat others with this type of love, even as this love is grounded not in the winds of the cultural turbines, but in the holy and triune life of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Let God be true, and every man a liar.

What is Real Reformed Theology?: My Constructive Confessionalism

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Abstract, Introduction

My personal journey into what we came to call Evangelical Calvinism, after TF Torrance’s usage of that language in his book Scottish Theology, didn’t start with Karl Barth or TF Torrance. My entrée into this Reformed iteration started in seminary under the tutelage of my historical theology and ethics professor, who would later become a mentor and supervisor of mine, Dr. Ron Frost. He introduced me to the wonderful world of historical theology with particular reference to patristic, late mediaeval, magisterial reformation, and Puritan aspects of this varied world of the Christian history of ideas. It was through Frost’s doctoral work on Richard Sibbes, and the history leading up to and following Sibbes, that alerted me to the fact that the Reformed house is in fact, and always has been a ‘divided house.’ That is to say, I first came to realize, through Frost, that the Reformed development, in the history, has various eddies and streams of development that cannot be easily fitted into a singular narrative framework, as it is often presented to us. Frost shows, along with Janice Knight and others, that Puritan theology, as an iteration of English and American Post Reformed theology, was woven together with concerns others than those we so often receive as the pure milk of Reformed theology as that is expressed in something like the Westminster Confession of Faith. Frost showed me, historically, that the Reformed development cannot be fitted into the Christian Aristotelianism of Richard Muller’s Post Reformed orthodoxy that so many contemporary retrievers of Reformed theology would have us believe.

The Affective-Turn and Variances

Conversely, Frost showed me that theologians like Sibbes, Cotton, Preston et al. were concerned with presenting a theology proper that properly focused on God’s Trinitarian and relational nature; a God who is theistically personal, winsome, and who desires relationship through marriage, with us, His creaturely creatures recreated in the humanity of Jesus Christ. Frost identified this stream of development within the Reformed house as Affective theology, Janice Knight identifies the same thing as The Spiritual Brethren (in contrast to the Westminster types who she calls The Intellectual Fathers). These designations ought to alert the careful reader to something indicative of the distinctions being drawn: Frost, Knight et al. have identified, what is at base, a theological anthropological difference between our respective houses in the Reformed development. That is to say, as was true to the day and development, a tripartite faculty anthropology (i.e. affections, intellect, will), and the way that was disparately developed, respectively, by the competing factions, finally gave way to the sort of various eddies within the Reformed house I have been alluding to heretofore. The Affective theologians, as Frost so eloquently argues, were those who saw the affections as the defining component of what it means to be human before God (coram Deo); whereas the ‘Intellectual Fathers’ (the Westminster Calvinists), following their reception of Thomas’ synthesis of Aristotelian categories into Christian theology, necessarily saw the intellect/will as definitive of what it means to be human before God. Indeed, the Intellectual Fathers, believed that at the Fall, the affections (i.e. heart) was the weak “emotional” part that drug the pristine elevated part of what made humanity human down into the dregs of rupture between God and humanity. As such for the Intellectual Fathers, in a grace/nature – disease/remedy symmetry salvation comes when a created grace is ‘shed abroad’ in the elect’s life such that they can cooperate with God, within a Federal or Covenantal schemata of course, meeting the legal requirements of God’s law, thus being restored or re-conciled with God through the restoration of their broken (but not completely dead) intellect/will; insofar as the weakness of the affections polluted what it truly means to be human. It is this superadditum of grace, in the ‘intellectualist’ frame, that gives the elect the salvific energy to habituate [habitus] (or persevere) in a life of godliness, which finally obtains in an eternal justification and thus glorification (think of the Tridentine distinction between iustitia Dei and iustitia Christi and the attendant viator theology).

Contrariwise, as Frost describes what was originally called Free Grace theology, as articulated by people like Richard Sibbes, William Erbery et al. focused on the affections as the point of contact wherein God disclosed Himself to the waning heart of a fallen humanity and invites them into an intimate relationship of triune love that heretofore could never have been imagined. Frost writes, in descriptions of Sibbes’ ‘affective theology’:

While Sibbes acknowledged some biblical support in calling Christians to obedience as a duty (Erbery’s category of ‘low and legal’ preaching) Sibbes clearly understood that duty can only be sustained if it is supported by the motivation of desire. Thus, Sibbes featured God’s winsome love more than his power: the Spirit accomplishes both conversion and sanctification by a single means: through the revelation of God’s attractiveness by an immediate, personal disclosure. This unmediated initiative was seen to be the means by which God draws a response of heartfelt devotion from the elect.”1

Notice the anthropological variance from what we have described as the intellectualist version of Reformed theology, as defined and articulated by the Westminster divines, among others. The focus for the Spiritual Brethren or Affective theologians is on the affections, on a renewed heart, of the sort that we find in the New Covenant language of both the Old and New Testaments in Holy Scripture (cf. Jer. 31; Ez. 36; II Cor. 3; Heb. 8 etc.). For the Sibbes’ school, and thus a whole traditional development within historic Reformed theology, the point of contact between God and humanity was through an immediate disclosure of God’s overflowing love for them as demonstrated and actualized in His incarnation in Jesus Christ. For this tradition it was a matter of wooing, invitation and response to God, to enter into the halls of Holy Matrimony with God, such that the elect might experience what it truly means to be human before God, as that is realized in participatio Christi (participation with Christ). Frost goes on to differentiate between these two houses of Reformed development, respectively:

In this framework some additional theological assumptions were revised. For instance, Sibbes understood grace to be God’s love offered immediately (rather than mediately) by the Spirit to the elect. By identifying grace primarily as a relational characteristic of God—the expression of his goodness—instead of a created quality or an empowerment of the will, Sibbes insisted that God transforms human desires by the Spirit’s immediate love and communion. Faith, for Sibbes, was not a human act-of-the-will but a response to God’s divine wooing. God’s laws, Sibbes argued, must be ’sweetened by the gospel’ and offered within a framework of ‘free grace.’ He also held a moderately developed form of affective anthropology. . . .2

This ought to suffice in alerting the reader to the antecedents of my type of Evangelical Calvinism. It is representative of a historic iteration and development within 16th and 17th century Calvinism that emphasized God’s triune life of relational and personal love as that took shape within the inner and singular life of the Monarxia. Indeed, as both Frost and Knight have persuasively argued, this iteration and development of Reformed theology was in fact the ‘orthodox’ version over-and-against what has become the dominant and received form today, that being the intellectualist or Christian Aristotelian type of Calvinism as codified in something like the Westminster Confession of Faith, attended by a decretal and metaphysically Law-shaped God of monadic origination.

The Barthian-Torrancean-Turn

With the aforementioned understood, and there is more to that development, but time and space constraints keep me from commenting further, I came to Thomas F. Torrance and Karl Barth (circa 2006 in earnest). Thomas Torrance, a Scottish theologian primarily of the 20th century, could be known as the theologian of Trinitarian theology par excellence. As I began to read Torrance, his books A Christian Doctrine of God and Scottish Theology, I came to realize that Frost wasn’t the only person seeing the variegated tapestry of Reformed development in the history. Torrance made many similar critiques of Westminster Calvinism, as Frost et al. were making, albeit from a different entrée point, and he did so by emphasizing the winsome, relational triune nature of God with a soteriological focus on unio cum Christo (union with Christ). I came to realize that TFT could serve, at least, as a complement, a constructive theological complement to what I had already come to understand through Frost’s tutelage (and Frost is neither a Torrancean or Barthian, to be clear). One of the primary points of contact between Frost’s insights and TFT’s, respectively, was their focus on John Calvin’s theology of union with Christ, and duplex gratia (double grace) soteriology. As I kept reading Torrance, I also started to read Barth in depth. Both Barth and Torrance fit well with Frost, in both their critiques of Christian Aristotelian styled Reformed theology, the God of the decretum absolutum, and their respective focuses on a theistically personalist God who desires a love grounded fellowship or koinonia with us. There of course is some pretty substantial variance between Frost and Barth/Torrance, particularly as that comes to a head in Barth’s reformulation of election, but there is enough overlap, at least in the way that I have constructively received them, such that when properly cross-pollinated much fruit can be produced and made ready for harvest for whosoever will. The piece that was missing in Frost, and was present in Barth/Torrance, was a focus on a robust doctrine of the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. Frost’s offering works from purely Augustinian themes, whereas Barth/Torrance work from largely Athanasian themes; at least when it comes to a focus on a God-world relation in the analogy of the incarnation.

Concluding Remarks

The aforementioned represents the antecedents and constructive foci of my type of Evangelical Calvinism—what I am now calling Athanasian Reformed theology. The broad framework is historically derived; it originally comes from an Augustinian development but ends up with an Athanasian hue; there is a Christological concentration that starts in both Luther and Calvin, threads through some of the Puritans Frost focuses on, and on some Scots that TFT identifies, and eventuates in the work of Karl Barth and Thomas Torrance, respectively. The primary foci doctrinally are on God’s Triune nature as the ground and grammar of everything; on a doctrine of union with Christ through a personalist understanding of God-world relation; all grounded in a radical Christ concentration as the warp and woof of all theological development. These various themes and developments, as noted, are not foreign, but intimate to the broader Reformational developments proper. No matter how much the 21st century Reformed machine asserts that the so-called ‘Intellectual Fathers’ version of the Reformed faith, just is the confessional and only form of Reformed theology available, under scrutiny this simply falls as the house-of-cards that it is.

Evangelical Calvinism, or Athanasian Reformed theology, while its antecedents are firmly rooted in the historical developments of Reformational theology, is a constructive iteration of Reformed theology in the 21st century. It works within the confessional making ‘always reforming’ (semper Reformanda) spirit of the best of Reformed theology. It rejects the calcification-model offered by the so-called retrievers of Reformed theology today, wherein the thesis is that the only real way to be faithfully Protestant, and thus Reformed, is to cull the history through the intellectualist-Reformed lens, and repeat (or repristinate) what is found in the variegation of the various ‘orthodox’ theologians culled. Athanasian Reformed theology is grounded in the reality of Holy Scripture, rather than the speculations of the schoolmen, insofar that its categories and emphases are derived from a radical focus on God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ; indeed, as that is attested to in doxological key within Holy Writ. We do not believe in imposing speculative categories for thinking God, as the Intellectual Fathers do, by borrowing from Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas in order to think God in an ostensibly intelligible way. We are slavishly committed to thinking God from God, Light from Light, and allowing His Self-exegesis as that comes from the womb of the Father in Christ (cf. Jn. 1.18) to inform all that we do say and think to the glory of God coram Deo.

 

1 Ron Frost, The Devoted Life, quoting from: William Erbery, The Testimony of William Erbery (London: n.p. 1658).

2 Ibid., 82.

Take Heart: The Role Affections Have in Our Thinking and Acting

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Affective thinking: we might have all the critical thinking skills in the world; we might be able to cross all our modal t’s and dot our logical I’s; we might be able to put together the tightest syllogisms and identify all the formal fallacies in the world; but if we have values or ‘loves’ that are awry our conclusions, no matter how sound they are per our leading premises, will ultimately be wrong. The Apostle Matthew writes of Jesus’s viva voce “19 “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. 20 But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves do not break in or steal; 21 for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” This is an illustration of how affective thinking will shape how we conclude; no matter what skill we have in deploying all the analytic tools at our disposal. In short: what we love will determine the values we operate with in all of our life choices on a daily basis; whether those are little choices and acts, or big paradigmatic types of choices and acts.

I simply want to register how important the ‘root’ is towards determining how we arrive at our conclusions about life and reality. As James writes (in echo of Jesus’s teaching): “11 Does a fountain send out from the same opening both fresh and bitter water? 12 Can a fig tree, my brethren, produce olives, or a vine produce figs? Nor can salt water produce fresh.” A bad tree produces bad fruit, and a good tree good fruit; our aim ought to be to be good trees.” As Christians we know, because of Jesus’s teaching, that there is no one good but God. If this is so, if we want to be ‘good’ then it is clear that we must be attached to or participant in the life of God. As we are brought into union with God’s life through Christ’s life for us, it is at this point that God’s ‘affections’ or ‘values’ become our own (in a sanctifying way), and we are on the way to deploying all the analytic and other tools towards God’s aims and telos for our lives, in particular, and the world, in general. This is why holiness is so important; as the epistle of Hebrews writes: “14 Pursue peace with all people, and holiness, without which no one will see the Lord.” Without holiness, without being joyfully participant in God’s Holy life, in His Good and Gracious Life, we will not have the means to see God; and if we can’t see God how will we be able to bear witness to God? But if we are participant in this life of holiness we will come to have the affections of God shaping our choices and determining our theological, ethical, political and a whole host of other conclusions that have meaning towards our place in God’s Kingdom in Christ.

I want to press this idea of affections, and the role they play in everything. This can be taken both positively and negatively. Negatively the Apostle Paul writes of affections this way:

17 This I say, therefore, and testify in the Lord, that you should no longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles walk, in the futility of their mind, 18 having their understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart; 19 who, being past feeling, have given themselves over to lewdness, to work all uncleanness with greediness.

The pagan heart determines the conclusions that the world arrives at in their journey to exist in a meaningless world. It shapes the choices they make, and the acts they participate in through their daily lives. We all have affections, and without Christ they can only be for the self; this is what Luther was after in his language of the ‘bondage of the will’ (with riff on Augustine). We need an ‘alien righteousness’ an extra nos (outside of us) life to break through our self-possessed affections, and give us the affections from above. It is as Christ breaks through these ‘in bondage’ affections, and gives us His, as He ‘sheds His love abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit,’ that we have been brought into the center of God’s triune Love Live. It is herefrom that we have been given capacity to operate with an otherworldly approach, and have our lives ‘poured out as drink offerings on the sacrifice and faith of others.’ We need this ‘logic of Grace’ (cf. TF Torrance) to be the active ground of all that we do, say, and think.

The world does not have this transcendent ground, as such their values are skewed from God’s. They can have all the good intentions in the world; they can be philanthropic and compassionate towards others; but without the heart of Christ as their heart, at the end of the day, they are being philanthropic and compassionate from a heart that ultimately is seeking some sort of praise of the self rather than the other. If someone hasn’t been ‘transferred from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of the Son of His love’ then all this person can do is attempt to do the best they can do in mimicry of what they see in the lives of people who are genuinely bearing witness to the living Christ. The point is, is that a pagan can have all the analytic and other tools in the world, and without having the value center of Christ’s as theirs, they will only and ever seek their own end rather than God’s. Their choices will be conditioned not by love of Christ, but love of self; and this will have fallout in ways that we can only point to the broader world now and say “see.”

As a former professor and mentor (Ron Frost) of mine was wont to emphasize: “23 But he who doubts is condemned if he eats, because he does not eat from faith; for whatever is not from faith is sin.” It is the faith of Christ that serves as the ground of the new affections we will have once we have entered into the Kingdom of God. The pagan does not have this faith by definition; as such they are incapable of making choices and arriving at conclusions that are corollary with God’s values. As Christians we are to bear witness to others of God’s affections as those are present in our lives, and invite everyone else to the banqueting table of the living God. Once people take this invitation they have now entered into God’s affections, into God’s values; and the way they think will have the capaciousness to think God and the world rightly. They will be able to utilize all the analytic and other intellectual tools God has provided for in and from their proper orientation in Jesus Christ. This is not say, as Luther was quick to point up, that we aren’t simul justus et peccator (simultaneously justified and sinner); we are that still. But even though we still are sinners, we now have the new creation of God’s life for us in Jesus Christ as the primacy of our lives wherein we can put to death the sinner and walk with the affection of Christ as our affection for God and the world. May we live this way, and not the other way (the pagan way).

 

 

“Disbelief in God’s love is the root of all evil”: Engaging With Luther’s Theology of Desire, Doctrine of Sin, and Freewill

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Sin, desire, and freewill; each of these can be trigger words that often lead to intense theological debate among various parties. In this post I want to address these loci from a particular angle; the angle will have to do with salvation and theological anthropology in particular. When I was in seminary my mentor/professor, Ron Frost, introduced me to his work on what he calls Affective Theology; I’ve written of it, more than once here at the blog, and years ago wrote a very introductory post detailing what it entails in its entailments. I want to redress this ‘theology’ again, not only referring to Frost, but some insights that I’ve picked up from Paul Hinlicky and his work with Luther, Melanchthon, Leibniz, and Barth’s theology; and how his work dovetails nicely with Frost’s work in the area of Affective Theology.

In brief Frost’s Affective Theology is largely a theological anthropological endeavor that, of course, as with all theological projects, reaches back into a doctrine of God. In the main Frost’s thesis, as he focuses most pointedly on Puritan, Richard Sibbes, is to argue, from within a tripartite faculty psychology (per theological-anthropological concerns), that unlike the Thomist Intellectualist tradition, the most basic and defining component of what makes someone human is not their intellect/rationales (which is the major Western Tradition following Thomas Aquinas et al.), but instead it is their ‘affections’ or more biblically attuned, the ‘heart.’ Frost argues that this anthropology can be identified all the way back to Augustine, and then into Bernard of Clairvaux, Bonaventura, Gerson, Von Staupitz, Luther, Calvin, Sibbes, Cotton et al. Here is some of Frost’s work that should help the reader get a better feel for what his thesis was about. Here you see him comparing and contrasting Richard Sibbes and William Perkins; the latter representative of the more dominant Western tradition—the tradition being uncritically retrieved today by young (and many older forebears) evangelical Reformed theologians.

Some final observations may be made about the positive and privative views of sin. The two approaches differ fundamentally on the reason for sin; while man is identified as responsible for sin in both views, he tends to be portrayed more as a pliable innocent overcome by the serpent’s deceit in the privative model. It is Adam presented as inadequate, not because he was unable to fulfill the law, but, because, in his mutability as a creature, he was vulnerable to moral change. This the serpent exploited while God was willfully away. In scholastic terms, the formal cause of sin was twofold, given the double causality associated with God’s sovereignty. God, as the primary agent for all things, determined the outcome by his withdrawal. In this he was arbitrary but just. The second agent, Adam, failed to apply the grace he had available and thus was culpable for his own fall, albeit as something of a victim. In both considerations the issue of grace is pivotal in its absence. For the privative model, as seen in both Thomistic and Reformed theology, this leads to a greater emphasis on the acquisition and application of grace in hypostatized or commodity-like terms, and a tendency toward Aristotelian moralism — the establishing of one’s righteousness through righteous actions based on grace. To the degree that grace becomes an impersonal quality, the greater the impression one has that something worthy of appreciation, if not merit, is being accomplished.

The doctrine of positive sin, on the other hand, rejects any tendency to see man as a victim; Adam is always the culprit in that he willfully replaced the Creator with the creature as the object of absolute devotion. It also recognizes human mutability as a fact which allows the fall, but rejects it as a meaningful explanation. The fall, in positive sin, remains an impenetrable mystery; Adam is not portrayed as deceived and God is not portrayed as withholding grace. In the positive model sin is always a competition: Adam seeks to usurp God’s role while God confounds Adam’s autonomy.

Thus, the most important difference between the two models is found in the way God is portrayed. In the privative view, as Aquinas and Perkins have it, he remains a supplier of grace — withholding what is needed for salvation except to the elect. He even remains parsimonious to the elect but, as their efforts prevail, is increasingly generous. In the positive view, on the other hand, he is an enemy until conversion which comes by the Spirit’s direct intervention. He invites the elect to see God as he really is: righteous, strong, and loving. Conversion, in fact, is a litmus for the two views: the privative model generally adopts a catechetical process which culminates in an affirmation of faith. The positive model, while recognizing that the Spirit uses prevenient stirrings, expects a more distinct Paul-light conversion which displays the moment in which selfish autonomy melts before God’s self disclosure. For the one, nature remains very much in view; for the other, God, once unveiled by grace, dominates the scene.

The importance of the affections for Sibbes and the nomists differed in profound ways. For Sibbes the affections were both the avenue by which sin entered the world and the avenue by which God, through the Spirit, restores the fallen soul. Slavery of the will was seen to be an enslavement by one’s own desires, something broken only by transforming vision of God as more desirable than anything human autonomy offers. Perkins and the nomists, on the other hand, saw the affections as a subordinate element of the will; they also provided a suitable theology for the prominent will by adopting the Thomist privation-enablement model of sin and grace.

Perkins and the nomists thus established human responsibility as the center-theme of salvation; the moral law became the locus of the soul in the process of sanctification. The belief that the covenant of grace is essentially a legal contract shaped all spirituality into a restorative stance: life is seen as an effort to regain and sustain Adam’s original obedience through the Spirit-enabled will. This generated a Christology which emphasized the juridical work of Christ to the point that, for pastoral ministry, the purpose of restored communion was easily reduced into the preaching of moralist endeavor.

Against this view, Sibbes, in line with Augustine, emphasized the place of Christ as much more than the source of justification, but primarily as one to be loved. The promise of the indwelling Spirit, whose ministry in Christ’s life is now allocated to the Christian, gives promise of a greater hope than the nomists offered: full and eternal intimacy of the Godhead through a true, although mystical, union with Christ. The feet of the soul are the affections and the affections are meant for communion with God.[1]

Hopefully you can get a better grasp on what Frost’s theory on Affective Theology entails. I think he identifies a pivotal reality that is lost, in serious ways, when it comes to the Reformed theology being retrieved today. Frost’s is actually a retrieval of a genuinely formed Reformational (versus post-Reformational) theology, one that hearkens from Luther himself; one that has been lost to the Christian Aristotelian tradition that Richard Muller et al. is wont to emphasize as THE dye that ostensibly serves pervasive in the whole of Reformed theology in thematic ways. What Frost demonstrates is that this ‘affective theology’ was as pervasive in and among the development of post-reformation theology as was the Christian Aristotelian form that people focus on today.

Okay, Hinlicky, someone who works even more so as a constructive theologian (versus Frost who is more of a historical theologian) whose period is from the modern angle, interestingly (to me), identifies these same themes in Luther’s et al. theology as Frost gleaned from Puritan theology; the point of convergence for both of them is indeed, Martin Luther and Augustine. Hinlicky brings the discussion that I want to have, on the role of desires, loves, sin, and freewill into relief as he writes (at serious length):

What Augustine and his tradition chiefly deny, however, is that any conceivable creature, pre- or postlapsarian, has freedom of desire. This is the “popular” sense of human free-will (which Luther identified and rejected as presuming “a power of freely turning in any direction, yielding to none and subject to none”). Creaturely desire instead spontaneously and as such involuntarily seeks the good and averts from evil. Desire that sought its evil would be pathological. The creature cannot help but seek its good and assent to it, or conversely, avert from its evil. The creature is motivated by its loves. It is analytic to the creaturely state that, as Aristotle famously declared at the outset of the Nichomachean Ethics, all by nature seek the good. Being creatures, they do not, as Martin Luther put it commenting on the first article of the creed, have life in themselves such that they can ever be free from desire: “Thus we learn from this article that none of us has life — or anything else that has been mentioned or could be mentioned — from ourselves, nor can we by ourselves preserve any of them, however small and unimportant.” As long as they live, in order to live, creatures must desire what appears good to them and avert the evil; the will spontaneously desires its perceived good. If it did not, it would be sick to death. The will is bound to desire and is bound to desire. This is what is in mind, then, when this tradition speaks of the bound or enslaved will, voluntas, not arbitrium (though Luther muddles the two terms). As Jan Lindhardt has shown: “St Augustine (d. 431) determined in extension of the Platonic tradition, that a man was identical with his love. He defined love itself as concupiscentia (desire).” This yielded a view of “man more as a unity than as a creature subdivided into various departments. . . . It was not the distinction between body/soul/reason, which occupied his attention, but the direction adopted by the soul or will, or drive,” and this “was interpreted during the Renaissance as representing a completely different view of man,” “not conceived of as an active subject, but as a receptive object” taking on the form of what is loved. Luther agreed with this understanding of Augustine’s anthropology, that “a man is his love.” This is the basis for his eccentric anthropology. Any will other than God’s is a will bound to desire the good that appears to it from without; this desire becomes one’s own will (not another’s) by virtue of free choices from among the available goods that one actually, historically, biographically pursues, since a human being is free to act, or to critically refrain from action, in the face of such choices. In just this way she forms the story of her life, as patient of her own passions and agent of her own actions.[2]

To make what Hinlicky just wrote crescendo he writes further:

In running roughshod over the important differentiation between freedom of choice and freedom of desire, Luther wanted to indicate how making choices contrary to God’s will in disobedience reflects the deeper fault of a root usurpation of God’s place as Creator. The root of all evil choices is disbelief in God’s love, seeking instead by one’s own choices and actions creatively to bestow value on something by one’s own sovereign good-pleasure. Human works are never what they appear to be on the surface; they are always acts of faith or disbelief. Choices are never merely temporal decisions, but decide whether or not in faith to rest in God’s good pleasure that bestows value on oneself, precisely as patient of one’s own sufferings, maker of one’s own choices, and agent of one’s own actions. Disbelief in God’s love is the root of all evil. Thus the ontologically impossible possibility of human freedom of desire, that desire sovereignly creates the object of its desire by the triumphant assertion of its will. This usurpation no theology that upholds the ontological difference between Creator and creature can admit. Even as arrogant pride presumes this freedom, there comes a Day of the Lord to topple it from its throne. One can want to be Hitler or Stalin, one can really make this choice, one can provisionally and disastrously for self, for others, and for the cosmos act on it. But finally one cannot succeed in it. “God’s purpose in this [causing failure of the human choice to be one’s own god] is that the heavenly City, during its exile on earth, by contrasting itself with the vessels of wrath, should learn not to expect too much from the freedom of the power of choice, but should trust in the ‘hope to call upon the name of the Lord God.’” We may recall here as well Barth’s well-intended but problematic teaching that a real alternative between God and the abyss of nihilism is ontologically impossible. Unlike Barth, however, for Luther or Augustine the nihilism of human superbia is impossible because hell puts the end to evil that will not otherwise die. The wrath of the God of love forces away from His company the usurper who wants to be God and not let God be God. That finally (not until then! Rev. 20:10) is how the real evil in the world is refuted. Actual evil is the presumption of divine “power of freely turning in any direction, yielding to none and subject to none,” that is met and matched, fire met by fire, not by persuasion but with force. If there are possibilities of mercy beyond this ultimate threat, they cannot in any event be conceived apart from it, only somehow through it and beyond it. In the interim, for Augustine, the relation of human freedom to divine sovereignty is not symmetrical: “when the will turns from the good and does evil, it does so by the freedom of its own choice [i.e., a logical alternative is available], but when it turns from evil and does good, it does so only with the help of God.”[3]

There is too much to attempt to address, but let me try and emphasize the themes we started out with. We see in Hinlicky’s treatment the same sorts of themes present in Frost’s analyses of different figures. But as I highlighted earlier the common thread between Frost and Hinlicky is to focus on Luther and Augustine. What I am hoping you, the reader, are picking up is how profound the affections/desires are and were for Luther[an] theology, and how that theme never went away; even if it unfortunately became overshadowed by much of the Aristotelian formed post-reformation theology that developed latterly.

Something else I hope the reader is picking up, without me attempting to draw all the pieces together (between Frost’s and Hinlicky’s analyses) is how the way we view humanity flows from the way we view God. If God is Triune love, a God’s who being is defined by his intra-relation as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, if that reality defines our “metaphysics,” if that reality is allowed to evangelize our metaphysics, then the way we develop anthropology, and our doctrines of sin/evil, so on and so forth will be radically re-oriented by this understanding of God. We see this re-orientation in what Frost and Hinlicky are offering us as they engage with Augustine, Luther, and the tradition itself. It is an emphasis that many today would make us think is fringe or non-existent; or that it reflects a revisionist understanding of the history of ecclesial ideas that isn’t totally accurate. To the contrary! There are threads in the tradition that fit much better with the idea that what stands at the center of who humans are has to do with God’s love,[4] and the human love attenuated by that love, rather than seeing people defined by their intellect; the latter coming from an understanding that sees God as the Big Brain in the sky, the Brain that relates through decrees rather than filial love by the Holy Spirit in Jesus Christ.

There is more to say, more technical things to get into and unpack. But let’s what I’ve offered from Frost and Hinlicky suffice for now, and maybe we can attempt to distill these things further, and more technically at a later date. We never really did get too far into the issues broached in regard to freewill etc. But hopefully, at the very least, from the long quotes, you can see how we might develop these themes vis-à-vis the greater frame provided for by a theology of desire/love.

P.S. This new theme I just plugged in doesn’t seem to overtly provide a way for commenting (if you want to). If you’d like to comment on this post then simply click on the title of the post, and it will open up the combox for you to write a comment[s].

 

[1] Ron Frost, Richard Sibbes’ Theology of Grace and the Division of English Reformed Theology, [unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, 1996 University of London Kings College], 94-96. Frost’s work has since been published as, Richard Sibbes God’s Spreading Goodness.

[2] Paul R. Hinlicky, Paths Not Taken: Fates of Theology From Luther Through Leibniz (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009), 151-52.

[3] Ibid., 153-54.

[4] Which is what we are also identifying with Evangelical Calvinism, with a particular focus on Thomas F. Torrance’s theology.

The Moralistic Focus of Covenant Theology: Further Notation on What is Being Recovered in the Reformed ‘Resurgence’

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As a continuation from the last post I wanted to get into William Ames’s Federal or Covenant theology a bit further; in order to do that I will be referring to Janice Knight—at great length!—with the purpose of highlighting what in fact are the guts of Covenant theology. Within the field of Covenant theologians there are a range of nuances and views, whether that be historically or contemporaneously, relative to the way that this theologian or that emphasizes this syllable or that in the covenants (of works, grace, and redemption). That noted there is also a general self-referential ambit within which someone who is considered a Federal theologian thinks from; it is within this shared reality, conceptually, that I want to lift up Ames’s theology as exemplary of what the foundational stuff of Covenant theology entails. Knight, as our tour guide, I think, provides insightful analysis and description of Ames’s theology, with the type of critical attention that is often lacking in others when engaging with this period of theological development.

As a caveat, before we get into Knight’s analysis, I want to make clear that she isn’t writing as a Barthian, Torrancean, or even an Evangelical Calvinist; she is writing from the perspective of a historian who is attempting to critically offer penetration through the historiography of this period.[1] She is attempting to break down the wall that early 20th century, Puritan expert, Perry Miller set in regard to reading the Puritans monolithically; to reading Calvinism and Reformed theology in general as monolith. Her work is typically dismissed by the establishment historians and theologians of this period; ironic, I know! Clearly this is why she is so appealing to me; her work coalesces well with the work that Evangelical Calvinists are engaged in (e.g. broadening the landscape or the scope of the makeup of Reformed theology in the history). With this in mind let’s turn to Knight, and allow her to explicate the clarion of federal theology in its classic English form.

William Ames was careful to maintain the distinction between covenant as contract and as free testament; he argue that the first sense properly applied only to Adam’s bond. The fall of Adam made necessary the death of Christ and the testament of his free grace. The first covenant was between friends and implied mutual responsibilities; the second was a “reconciliation between enemies” made possible only by divine intercession.

Yet Ames’s discourse, like that of his famous teacher William Perkins, seems consistently caught in the undertow of legalism. His admirers argue that “theologically and propositionally Ames preached the omnipotence of God,” yet admit that for Ames “on the practical level man was responsible.” Detractors like R.T. Kendall claim that Ames’s theology “is ‘Arminian’ in every way but in the theoretical explanation that lies behind the actual practice of the believer.”

In terms of the covenant, this emphasis meant that despite strong reminders of God’s provenience, Ames exhorts auditors as if faith were a condition of the covenant, contingent on human action. Practically speaking, the doctrine of the covenant became an exhortation to the saint to work out his or her salvation with fear and trembling; it offered a means of assurance but also enjoined the saint to make that assurance secure. In one sense, it was a doctrine of great comfort, motivated by a humane desire to provide a place for human initiative. In another sense, however, it bound men and women to unremitting self-scrutiny and anxiety.

The stress on conditionality evolved with the elaboration of English covenant theology; it entered into the formulation not only by the avenue of antecedent faith but from the other direction, by a consequent moralism. Once elected, God’s saints manifested their gratitude by observing the moral law. Since Ames de-emphasized the doctrine of perseverance, keeping within the covenant also became tinged with the conditional. Even theologians who were adamant about the absolute freeness of grace might admit conditionality in this second sense. Flexibility with respect to perseverance of the saints, then, allowed conditionality even where God’s prevenience was insisted upon. Covenant-keeping became the province of human beings, and the engine for communal as well as individual exhortation. It was by this means that the tribal identification with Israel was effected, and the jeremiad as a rhetorical strategy for social control was born.

Ames first introduces the covenant as a part of God’s providence, his special government of intelligent creatures: “the revealed will of God, which is the rule for the moral life, applies to the rational creature” and requires obedience. God’s governance demands that he “give to everyone according to his ways and according to the fruit of his action.” From this sense of justice and reasonable recompense, “from this special way of governing rational creatures there arises a covenant between God and them.” Resting on justice and its conditions, “this covenant is, as it were, a kind of transaction of God with the creature whereby God commands, promises, threatens, fulfills; and the creature binds itself in obedience to God so demanding.” This description properly applies to the governance of creatures under the covenant of works.

In this context, Ames seems to advocate the kind of contractualism with which he has been so widely associated. He argues that moral deeds done under the rubric of the covenant “lead either to happiness as a reward or to unhappiness as a punishment.” In theory, however, he protects God’s sovereignty by adding that “the latter is deserved, the former not.” Men and women are fallen creatures who deserve only reprobation; grace is wholly gratuitous. The terms of the covenant of works are satisfied only by the sacrifice of Christ. Accordingly, at one point Ames declares that the new dispensation is termed a testament as well as a covenant. Yet, this is a designation and a meaning he does not pursue.

Indeed, though Ames repeatedly reminds his readers that God fulfills all of these conditions under the covenant of grace, in practice he begins to exhort them, to stress the necessity of an active faith. Just as he argues that the two covenants are parts of the single work of redemption, differing only in application from age to age, so too Ames discovers conditions in both covenants. Christ performs obedience to God’s decrees, but human being must accept Christ’s offer of righteousness. Drawing on biblical injunction to believe and live, Ames and his followers argued that the covenant of grace depends “upon condition of faith and obedience.” Even though God himself provides faith as the fruit of his favor, human beings must actively hope in Christ. To the Amesians, the very term covenant implies this reciprocal relation. In contrast to the unilateral testament of the Sibbesians, Ames asserts that this is a covenant in which faith defines human obligation.

The original relation of the sinner and God, based on such vast disproportions of sin and power, now issues in relation suggesting greater mutuality. Emphasis on the condition of faith focuses Ames’s theology on practical divinity. Indeed, though his rhetoric takes him further in the direction of human voluntarism than he would wish, it might be argued that the central concern of the Marrow is to map the ordo salutis as a series of predictable and practical increments. The first step on Ames’s path involves not only passive receiving of the habit of faith but also active believing, in which the individual turns to Christ. For Ames, both of these steps precede justification.

Faith is the virtue whereby “we learn upon [God], so that we may obtain what he gives to us.” Ames uses active verbs to describe the life of faith: “by faith we first cleave to God and then fasten on to those things which are made available by God.” Faith is “our duty towards God,” the condition by which we enter his covenant and secure his promises for ourselves. Ames is not afraid to spell out the “divers duties . . . which both ought and are wont ordinarily to be performed by the certainty of this grace can be gotten.” As with Perkins, there is an implied condition or contract whereby human beings deal with God. The activism implied in the constructions “to cleave,” “to labor,” “to fasten on to” become more pronounced in Ames’s followers, as does the appeal to self-interest in laying hold of the covenant.

Conditionality is admitted into an otherwise predestinarian scheme by way of the distinction between chronometricals and horologicals—God’s time and ours. This distinction allows for the simultaneous understanding of God’s promise as absolute and conditional, and therein underwrites an emphasis on preparationism. Ames argues that justification is a twofold change, “relative and absolute.” In real terms, “the change, of course, has no degrees and is completed at one moment and in only one act.” This absolute change, however, is according to God’s reckoning. As Ames goes on to say, “yet in manifestation, consciousness, and effects, it has many degrees; therein lie justification and adoption.” This space between the relative and absolute allows preparationism to thrive, and with it the pragmatism closely associated with American religious expression. By focusing on relative change, men like Ames and Hooker could map the steps to the altar and enjoin their auditors to make their salvation sure. Their antinomian critics, however, would argue that even when deployed in the interests of a pastoral pragmatism, preaching the conditionality of faith invests doctrine with a legalistic aura.[2]

Much to consider. I will not try to unpack what I just quoted from Knight, I’ll let what she wrote stand on its own and allow it to impose itself on you one way or the other (this quote covers a whole little sub-section on her coverage of Ames and the conditionality and preparationism inherent to his style of federal theology).

In closing though, let me just put this out there in anticipation of the dismissiveness that comes with sharing critical things like this from Knight. Indeed, someone offered this response to my last post, and what I shared from Knight (this is very typical):

From a Calvinist perspective, I don’t recognize this critique at all. There seems to be a lack of familiarity with the Puritan and Reformed tradition if Sibbes is seen as an outlier. What about Rutherford? What about Goodwin? Andrew Gray? There are so many Puritan sermons and works which pointedly attack the love of Christ merely for his benefits and not his person.[3]

The respondent in the last post failed to appreciate the gravitas of Knight’s thesis; her thesis isn’t that Sibbes and those of his company were the “outliers,” no, just the opposite. Knight’s thesis is that Richard Sibbes offered an alternative emphasis and trajectory within the English house of Puritanism which was just as much, and even more so in England, the accepted or majority report among many of the more successful Puritan pastors and theologians. Knight addresses this respondent’s other concerns as well; but what is required is that he actually reads her argument in full. Will he; will others?

For further reading from ecclesial historians who also see the things that Knight does (and some of these are on the side that Knight is critiquing when it comes to their own theological moorings), to one degree or another let me suggest:

There are of course more resources, the primary literature itself; but these are helpful in getting a handle on Knight’s own claims. At the very least it should problematize the critic’s easy-dismissivism of Knight’s work.

 

[1] It’s funny that I feel compelled to make this caveat, but I feel I must since so many simply reject what they perceive might be informed by Barthian themes in regard to anything historical theological; particularly when it comes to Reformed theology. Believe it or not there are other critics of the turn to Muller historiography of things; in Knight’s case she is critiquing a thesis that Muller himself follows in Perry Miller’s reading of English Puritanism. He set the stage, just as Muller is nowadays, for how historians ought to read the Puritan age; she thinks he flattened things too much thus missing important movements within the period. Rather than simply being a complexity within a monolithic frame (think Muller’s own thesis in regard to the Post Reformation Reformed orthodox period), Knight sees English and thus American Puritanism as an amalgam of two distinct movements. She doesn’t downplay emphasis, instead she thinks this is definitive in the formation of the distinct movements of Puritans that she is engaging with.

[2] Janice Knight, Orthodoxies in Massachusetts: Rereading American Puritanism (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1994), 93-6.

[3] Unnamed respondent from a Facebook thread.

A Riposte to Derek Rishmawy’s Post: Handling Legal Matters

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I wanted to offer a quick reply-post to Derek Rishmawy’s post on the purported value of reading the Bible through a Latin forensic reading of Holy Scripture and the subsequent doing of theology therefrom. Derek writes:

A similar sort argument is often lodged against the Western tradition in general. Depending on the subject, it is charged that the Latin tradition has always tended towards a more forensic, legal conception of the salvation, the relationship between God and man, etc. Instead of blaming feudal social arrangements, here we meet the claim that the Roman legal tradition exerted undue force, through say, Tertullian, Ambrose, or that perennial (because undeniably influential) whipping boy, Augustine.

Sometimes this is done with an eye towards promoting a superior Eastern account of deification. Or it is used by contemporary theologians to try to supplant the account with some proposal of their own, more attuned to the cultural needs of the current moment. Because, you know, moderns have no concept of guilt and such.

Now, as Sonderegger demonstrated in that last post, simply noting that a point is contextually-rooted, or more appealing to someone in a different cultural context, does not mean it is not translatable or valid in our own.

But let’s go even further. Conceding that Anselm was influenced by feudalism, and the West in general by Latin legal tradition, isn’t it just possible that was a good thing at points? Isn’t it just possible that these cultural influences were not hindrances but providential helps in aiding the church recognize real truths within Scripture that, say, a more Eastern perspective focused on gnosis and ontology might tend to gloss over? Or from which our contemporary culture, possibly over-prone to therapeutic denials of guilt, might want to avert its gaze?

I mean, think about the narrative of Scripture. God is presented as Lord, king, and judge of the earth. He gives Israel a Law-covenant to order their relationship summed up in the 10 Commandments. This covenant is a legal-relational reality which, beyond cultic elements, has large sections of material concerned with the organization of Israel as a people, the administration of justice, courts, and so forth. Indeed, both Leviticus and Deuteronomy have large chapters which include blessings and curses based on the legal-relational matter of obedience and fidelity God as the covenant-Lord.[1]

One of the patron saints of Evangelical Calvinism, Thomas Torrance, refers to Augustine’s influence on the development of Christian ideas/theology as the Latin Heresy; for one reason among others (i.e. what he sees as a dualistic/Platonic problem), because he believes Augustine unduly elevated the forensic/juridical to an improper level when thinking things salvific.

But I think, really, Rishmawy’s post sort of misses the critique; at least from the Torrance angle—and from other angles of the same critique (not just from Torrance). It isn’t that the ‘legal’ aspects found in Scripture are unimportant or absent, it is that, at least for my money, these shouldn’t be understood as the frames of how we think of a God-world relation. Derek writes further as he brings up John Calvin and the role that Derek sees the forensic playing in Calvin’s theology (under Augustinian pressure no doubt):

Nonetheless, it should give pause to those of us tempted to appeal to neat “just-so” stories about cultural influence, which often amounts to no more than a sophisticated form of the genetic fallacy. The question can never merely be a matter of whether Calvin’s legal background pushed him towards a legal understanding of atonement. The question is whether that legal background blinded or enlightened him to something in the text.[2]

Again, the issue isn’t whether or not the ‘legal’ aspects are present or not in Scripture—they clearly are—the question is: Whether or not this aspect should be allowed to frame the way the theologian and biblical exegete not only approaches the scriptural witness itself, but beyond that, whether or not they should approach the res (reality) of Scripture this way? In other words, does God want us to approach him through the idea that his relationship to us is contingent upon legal matters being settled first, or does he want us to approach him as a bride approaches her Bride-groom; as if God first loved us that we might love him? This is the point of the critique; it’s the point of the critique targeted at Federal theology and Westminster Calvinism that I am wont to make here at the blog and in our books etc.

It’s not that the ontological must be in competition with the legal framing of Scripture, it’s just that the ontological is the ground for any legal happenings to take place to begin with. I mean could you imagine a world made up of a legal framing vis-à-vis God without the ontological being in place first (by way of logical and even chrono-logical ordering)? No? Me either; I mean we wouldn’t even be here if there was no ontology. As a rule I follow the axiom that ‘being’ precedes ‘knowing,’ and knowing, whether that be of the legal or romantic sort (or other sorts), is premised first upon there being ‘being’ in the first place. This is one reason why here at The Evangelical Calvinist we place such an emphasis upon ontology; why we follow what Torrance has called the ontological theory of the atonement etc; it’s because there is a depth dimension to reality, to a God-world relation, that the legal frame alone cannot handle nor account for. And in highlighting this, simply following the contour of Holy Scripture we would be remiss to not mention that God’s primary “metaphor” for framing his relationship to humanity is not legal (not even in Genesis), it is that of a bride-groom (cf. Gen 2; Eph 5 for the Pauline recapitulation of Gen 2. etc) with his bride who walks in the cool of the garden with her. The legal is present, but not prior to the romantic/affective (which I take to be the ontological grounding of all else).

Addendum: I’ve heard back from Derek, and he thinks my post distorts the real intention of his post. He didn’t apparently have Torrance’s program in mind when writing his post, and thus believes that me bringing TFT into this discussion skips off the atmosphere of the real referents of his post (whoever and whatever those might be). Be that as it may, I do think TFT fits squarely within the sights of the type of critique Derek is responding to (just survey the landscapes of such critiques in the literature), and let me know if you can find better candidates than Thomas F Torrance (with his strong language of Latin Heresy etc.).

[1] Derek Rishmawy, On the “Legal Influence” of the Latin West (A Thought on Culture and Atonement), accessed 02-16-2018.

[2] Ibid.

Miscellanies. Jonathan Edwards’s Lockean Theology of the Affections

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On the Edwardsean reification of Lockean ‘sensations’ and how that created a theology of affections for Jonathan Edwards and the evangelical outlook. The following quote will be less a post and more a bookmark for my future reference. If you find it beneficial, then good! If you have read me at all it might remind of how ‘affective theology’ has been an impetus for me in my own theological development as I was introduced to that by Ron Frost and his development of affective theology in a Sibbesian key. Maybe I’ll try to draw other connections later—between Edwards’ affective theology, Luther’s, and Sibbes’ (one thing I find, maybe pregnant, is a kind of parallel between Luther and nominalism and Edwards and Locke)—here’s the quote (you can check the bibliographic info in the footnote):

The Great Awakening marked the triumph of sensation over ratiocination. To understand supernatural grace, Edwards did not resort to the language of theology and logic but to aesthetics and, again drawing on Locke for his own purposes, what he termed a “new sense of the heart.” I his classic 1734 sermon “A Divine and Supernatural Light” (much more the essential Edwards than his better known sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”), Edwards employed a sensory visual vocabulary to describe the essence of regeneration as a “divine light,” an evangelical enlightenment. At its essence, the divine light was a new sense of the heart. Drawing on a vocabulary grounded in aesthetics and Locke, rather than medieval logic, Edwards described the new sense of the heart, not as a set of theological propositions dutifully memorized and endorsed, but as a new perception of beauty:

This spiritual light primarily consists . . . in a real sense and apprehension of the divine excellency of things revealed in the Word of God. A spiritual and saving conviction of the truth and reality of these things, arises from such a sight of their divine excellency and glory; so that this conviction of their truth is an effect and natural consequence of this sight of their divine glory. There is therefore in this spiritual light a true sense of the divine and superlative excellency of the things of religion; a real sense of the excellency of God, and Jesus Christ, and of the work of redemption. . . . There is a divine and superlative glory in these things; an excellency that is of a vastly higher kind, and more sublime nature, than in other things; a glory greatly distinguishing them from all that is earthly and temporal. He that is spiritually enlightened truly apprehends and sees it, or has a sense of it. He don’t [sic] merely rationally believe that God is glorious, but he has a sense of the gloriousness of God in his heart. There is not only a rational belief that God is holy, and that holiness is a good thing; but there is a sense of the loveliness of God’s holiness. There is not only a speculatively judging that God is gracious, but a sense of how amiable God is upon that account; or a sense of the beauty of this divine attribute.

If you were counting, you will have noticed that Edwards repeated the word “sense” ten times in this paragraph. By understanding grace aesthetically as a “new sense of the heart,” rather than logically, Edwards represented regeneration or the “new birth” in ways to be visually pictured rather than logically deduced. By shifting the ground to aesthetics, Edwards participated directly in the Enlightenment project in ways that would usher in a new spirit of romanticism.

In addition to speaking of regeneration as a new sense of the heart, Edwards revolutionized the traditional “faculty psychology” that had governed theology by giving primacy to reason and the understanding over the heart and the affections. Edwards reversed the priority, giving primacy to the affections and, in the process, again turned Locke on his head. As summarized by Miller: “Edward’s great discovery, his dramatic refashioning of the theory of sensational rhetoric, was his assertion that an idea in the mind is not only a form of perception but is also a determination of love and hate. . . . For Edwards, in short, an idea became not merely a concept but an emotion.” This would lead to a radical definition of grace as “a new simple idea” supernaturally implanted.

In so framing his argument in this context of love and hate, or in Locke’s term “delight or uneasiness,” Edwards, more than any other eighteenth-century theologian, would anticipate Freud. In his Treatise on the Religion Affections, Edwards collapsed the distinctions of the faculty of the will and the affections, asserting that “the will, and the affections of the soul, are not two faculties; the affections are not essentially distinct from the will, nor do they differ from the mere actings of the will and inclination of the soul.” In his new ordering of the senses, Edwards again borrowed from the Enlightenment to say that humans do not act in response to rational calculations but in response to their emotion predispositions of love or hatred. There was no possibility of a “perfect indifference” to anything. The difference between Edwards and Locke was Edwards’s emphasis on overweening supernatural grace. For the affections to be redirected toward their proper spiritual objects, God had to intervene.[1]

The discussion on the transformation of “faculty psychology,” is something to keep your eye on; even if in our contemporary period we have moved on from developing theological-anthropology this way, there remains a serious usefulness to grasping this. A serious usefulness because even if we don’t consciously think theological anthropology this way, these days, it nevertheless, the force of it remains present in forming the way the evangelical psyche functions before both God and people in general.

For me, as an Evangelical Calvinist, there is resonance here with Edwards’s affective theology because of the primacy he places on relationality; this type of emphasis works well with a focus on Trinitary theology (and the kind of relational understanding of God we glean from this reality grounded in his life). These are the types of themes I seek to integrate into the broader project that we are calling Evangelical Calvinism; attempting to resource this type of “love-grounded” mood that has permeated the theological history of the church ever since the beginning.

There are other interesting things to reflect on with reference to this quote; for me, maybe how nominalism and Lockeanism work together in regard to developing an epistemology. Or more minimally how these constructs implicated Luther’s and Edwards’s theologies, respectively; to wonder if there might be any constructive way to bring these types of ostensibly disparate periods of theological development into mutually implicating and flourishing discussion around a theology of the affections.

[1] Harry S. Stout, “What Made the Great Awakening Great?,” edited by Heath W. Carter and Laura Rominger Porter, Turning Points in the History of American Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2017), 13-15.