Category Archives: Analogia Fidei

On Being the Listening Church: How Dialectical Theology, Properly Understood, is Dialogical Theology

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What is dialectical theology? Barth is often referred to as a dialectical theologian; especially the earlier Barth. Some want to implicitly criticize Barth by asserting that because Barth was a dialectical theologian, he, eo ipso was a Hegelianizing theologian (i.e., putting Hegel’s dialectic to work for his theologizing). And yet, Barth is much more original than that. He was clearly a modern theologian, as is anyone who currently does theology in the 21st century. Even so, his methodology was to allow Holy Scripture and its reality in Jesus Christ to regulate his deployment of any other mechanisms he might have had available to him. That is to say, just as the best of the patristic fathers did with Hellenic grammars—evangelizing them into a non-correlationist salvation—Barth, I would argue, did with not just Hellenic grammars, but with his modern ones as well; whether that be with reference to Kant, Hegel, or whomever. For Barth, it wasn’t the tails of the philosophies or the grammars that wagged the dog, so to speak, but it was the “dog,” the Self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ, who ends up wagging the tail of said and available intellectual grammars of the time.

We can see the aforementioned sentiment as that is illustrated by Barth in response to one of his contemporaneous detractors, Eric Peterson. Barth, while he took Peterson’s critique of his dialecticism seriously, believed that Peterson sorely misread him. Notice how Alan and Andrew Torrance, respectively, lift up the way Peterson was critiquing Barth on Barth’s deployment of dialecticism:

In his booklet “What is Theology?,” Peterson stresses that if “revelation is paradox, then there is also no theology,” and, if this is the case, “there is also no revelation.” While Barth had frustrations with Peterson’s reading of him, he still took his words seriously. . ..[1]

In response to Peterson’s critique, Barth writes the following:

The revelation of which theology speaks is not dialectical, is not paradox. That hardly needs to be said. But when theology begins, when we humans think, speak, and write . . . on the basis of revelation then there is dialectic. Then there is a stating of essentially incomplete ideas and propositions among which every answer is also again a question. All such statements reach out beyond themselves towards the fulfilment of the inexpressible reality of divine speaking.[2]

Peterson was afraid that Barth’s theological methodology left things in a contradictory wash, such that no genuine knowledge of God, and subsequent doctrines, could ever critically obtain. And yet as we see in Barth’s response to Peterson, Barth is operating with a theological ontology wherein subsequent theological epistemologies (in regard to how we know and speak of God, humanly) must operate with the type of deference towards the ineffable and living God, that is demanded; such that, at our best, in Christ’s mediation, we can only proximate knowledge of God, that is, on this side of the Eschaton. And so, for Barth, really, as we pressed in our own way, in our Evangelical Calvinism books, and in a thesis, Barth’s (and Torrance’s) dialectical theology is really more of a dialogical theology wherein we cry out and pray to our God who is Holy. It is this “cry” that becomes the theological developments the church has witnessed throughout her existence post-ascension and pre-descension at the second coming of Jesus Christ. The priority in this frame is on the fact that Deus dixit (God has spoken … and in fact, continues to speak). In this way, for Barth, proper theological development is a matter of being the ‘listening church,’ the ’responsive church.’ In this relational and prayerful and koinonial frame, for Barth, and many of us following, to know God is to hear from God; and then to speak with God, and con-versate in this type of triunely directed and Self-given marriage of Himself for us; and thus, for Himself, just as Christ is for the Father for us in the bond of the Holy Spirit.

[1] Alan J. Torrance and Andrew B. Torrance, Beyond Immanence: The Theological Vision of Kierkegaard and Barth (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2023), 235.

[2] Barth, Church and Theology, 299–300 cited by Torrance and Torrance, Beyond Immanence, 236.

The Spoken Word of God Theology for Us: On a Dialogical Theology

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Dialogical theology. It is one of our theses we put forward in our first Evangelical Calvinism book. What is it; what are its entailments; and why am I such a strong proponent of it? In nuce, dialogical theology is exactly what it sounds like: it is a theological “method” that allows the object of theology, who is also Subject for us, to confront us, to speak to us first that we might speak to Him; that we might come to know Him as He knows Himself from a center in Himself for us in Jesus Christ. So, this approach, this theological prolegomenon, starts as God starts with us in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. This prolegomenon ingresses as God invades our humanity in and through His assumption of humanity in the humanity of Jesus Christ. It is in this [hypostatic] union that humanity comes to have the capacity to hear God’s Word, as God’s Word becomes us in the grace of Jesus Christ. It is here where a theological coinherence of knowledge can obtain, insofar as God has pre-destined Himself for this coinherence in His free election to become humanity in Jesus Christ; and all of this, in order that humans might come into the parousia (presence) of God, as God presences Himself with us in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit’s free unction of adoptive grace. Underneath this total covenantal relationship between God and humanity in Jesus Christ there are the everlasting arms of God’s triune life of love for us. It is a purely relational, even marital and filial relationship wherein a genuinely Christian theology comes to have wings to breathe and fly freely over and within the hinterland of God’s city; where God’s Word serves as the foundation of everything.

As Evangelical Calvinists (or now, Athanasian Reformed), we have taken our cue from TF Torrance (along with Karl Barth) on thinking a dialogical theology. It will serve us well then to read along with Torrance as he develops his own thinking on a dialogical theology; indeed, as he does so as he engages with Barth’s ‘double objectivity’ of God (see CD II/1), in both God’s archetypal and ectypal reality for us (ab intra, ad extra).

We may note three important implications from this double objectivity.

(i) The object of theological knowledge is creaturely objectivity bound to divine objectivity, not just creaturely objectivity in general but that specific creaturely objectivity which the divine objectivity has assumed, adapted and bound to Himself, Jesus. Thus theological activity is concerned with that special creaturely objectivity in its relation to divine objectivity, and therefore with that creaturely objectivity as it is given ultimate objectivity over against all other objectivity within the created universe. We shall see how this distinguishes theological science from other sciences.

(ii) In the nature of the case we cannot break through to ultimate objectivity, to the sheer reality of God, simply by an examination of this creaturely objectivity, for of itself it can only yield knowledge of the empirical world of nature.

(iii) Nevertheless we are bound unconditionally to the creaturely objectivity of God in the Incarnation of His Word in Jesus Christ. What scandalizes rationalist man is that in his search for ultimate objectivity he is bound unconditionally to contingent and creaturely objectivity, in fact to the weakness of the historical Jesus. To try to get behind this creaturely objectivity, to go behind the back of the historical Jesus in whom God has forever given Himself as the Object of our knowledge, and so to seek to deal directly with ultimate and bare divine objectivity, is not only scientifically false, but the hybris of man who seeks to establish himself by getting a footing in ultimate reality. Scientific theology can only take the humble road in unconditional obedience to the Object as He has given Himself to be known within our creaturely and earthly and historical existence, in the Lord Jesus Christ.

(d) A fourth scientific requirement for theology arises from the centrality of Jesus Christ as the self-objectification of God for us in our humanity, that is, from the supremacy of Christology in our knowledge of God. All scientific knowledge has a systematic interest, for it must attempt to order the material content of knowledge as far as possible into a coherent whole. It would be unscientific, however, to systematize knowledge in any field according to an alien principle, for the nature of the truth involved must be allowed to prescribe how knowledge of it shall be ordered. In other words, the systematic interest must be the servant of objective knowledge and never allowed to become its master. The order is in the Object before it is in our minds, and therefore it is as we allow the Object to impose itself upon our minds that our knowledge of it gains coherence. In theological knowledge the Object is God in Christ whom we know as we allow Him to impose Himself upon our minds or as we allow His Word to shape our knowing in conformity to Him. Scientific theology is therefore the systematic presentation of its knowledge through consistent faithfulness to the divine, creaturely objectivity of God in Christ.

It is the centrality of Christ that is all-determinative here, for He is the norm and criterion of our knowing and it is out of correspondence to Him that theological coherence grows. Scientific theology is systematic, therefore, only through relation to Christ, but its relation to Christ cannot be abstracted and turned into an independent systematic principle by means of which we can force the whole of theology into one definite and fixed pattern. Some use of formal Christology is necessary in systematic theology for the way that the Word of God has taken in the Incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Christ is the way in which God has revealed Himself to us and the way in which He continues to do so, but we cannot abstract it from dialogical encounter with God in Christ for it is only through sharing in the knowledge of the Son by the Father and the knowledge of the Father by the Son, that we can know God as He has given Himself to us in Jesus Christ.

Thus the organic unity of theology goes back to Christ to the unity of the Godhead, but in the nature of the case theology cannot, and must not try to seek knowledge of God apart from His whole objectivity, divine and human, in Jesus Christ. Therefore the modes and forms our theological knowledge must exhibit an inner structural coherence reflecting the nature of Christ. Moreover, it is because mystery belongs to the nature of Christ as God and Man in one Person that it would be unfaithful of us not to respect that mystery in our knowing of Him and therefore in our systematic presentation of our knowledge. It is upon this fact that every attempt to reduce knowledge of God to a logical system of ideas must always suffer shipwreck.[1]

The astute reader, among other things, will see how the above from TFT implicates a so-called natural theology, or a speculative theology. The aforementioned becomes an impossibility in the type of ‘dialogical’ ‘kataphysical’ ‘epistemological inversion[al]’ theology TFT is proposing. That is to say, for TFT (and me following), to do a genuinely Christian theology first presupposes that Godself in the objectivity of His own eternal and internal life as triune Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, freely chooses to make His objective Self known to His ‘very good’ creation; indeed, as that very good creation, that is “us,” was created to be a counterpoint of koinonia-fellowship that God might share His superabundant life with forever and into His eternal life of pleroma and bliss. The ground of this type of theological endeavor, for TFT, isn’t reducible to a ‘systematic’ frame wherein the would-be knower of God comes with an a priori and immanent frame of reflection to think ‘godness’ from. Instead, as TFT has made clear, it is a matter of God, the God who freely chose to become Creator because of who He eternally is in triune relationship, to impose Himself upon is, with the patterns and emphases of life and love that have always already formed His life as the Monarxia (‘Godhead’).

If you understand what Torrance is getting at in the “short” snippet above, then you will understand what has animated my own theological work for these last couple of decades. It really isn’t a matter of pointing to “my work,” or even “Torrances” though, it is a matter of pointing beyond ourselves to the risen and ascended Christ who intends on coming once again bodily; even as He comes to us moment-by-moment now by the Holy Spirit.

[1] Thomas F. Torrance, Theological Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 137–39.

The Vultures Have No Knowledge of God’s Kingdom: Living in the Theology of the Cross

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for we walk by faith, not by sight . . .[1]

It is certain that man must utterly despair of his own ability before he is prepared to receive the grace of Christ. That person does not deserve to be called a theologian who looks upon the »invisible« things of God as though they were clearly »perceptible in those things which have actually happened« (Rom. 1:20; cf. 1 Cor 1:21-25), he deserves to be called a theologian, however, who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross. A theology of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theology of the cross calls the thing what it actually is. That wisdom which sees the invisible things of God in works as perceived by man is completely puffed up, blinded, and hardened.[2]

Above we have both the Holy Spirit/Apostle Paul and Martin Luther underscoring the same thing. That is, the Christian, in the far country of this world, in this in-between time, doesn’t see, doesn’t endure, doesn’t know, lest it be by seeing the things that are unseen; the things re-created in the blood drenched soil of the cross of Jesus Christ. It is when the seed falls into the ground and dies that new life, a new creation comes into existence. The vision the Christian operates from comes from this new order of the apocalyptic and disruptive reality of God become man in Jesus Christ. The profane has no quarter here. This seems radical, foolish and weak even, but indeed, it is the via crucis. When daily life, even at its deepest possible reality, is understood as the measure and boundary of what and who can be known, all that we end up with is a superficial and immanentist knowledge of things. But the reality of the world, as Barth says, the reality of the external world (i.e., creation) is the inner life of the covenant bonded between God and humanity in the hypostatic union of God the Son with humanity in the visceral and concrete humanity of the man from Nazareth, Jesus Christ. The Christian reads reality from this type of unio mystica (‘mystical union’), which indeed is not of this world, even while being fully and freely for it.

If the Christian misses this most basic insight, then they will be well on their way to living a highly disillusioned life as a Christian. They will attempt to force things into place that are impossible to force, simply because the ultimate ground of reality is in fact a Miracle. And yet, this isn’t an abstract ethereal thing; i.e., as has already been noted, it is grounded in the concrete of God’s life for the world in the flesh and blood humanity of Jesus Christ. This ought to lead the knower into the realization that they sit in a vulnerable place, as if a newborn babe thrown to the side of the road in its mother’s afterbirth, waiting either to be eaten alive by the circling vultures, or instead, to be picked up, dressed in swaddling cloths, put to rest in the manger, and finally ascended to the right hand of the Father. It is indeed this radical. The vultures have no quarter in the kingdom of God.

[1] Holy Spirit and the Apostle Paul, II Corinthians 5.7 (Macedonia: GNT, 55/56 AD).

[2] Martin Luther, Heidelberg Disputation 1518.

Contra epistemological Arian[os]

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Too often, a stress on the centrality of the incarnation is dismissed, by liberals and conservatives alike and without clear argument, as “Barthian” or “Christomonist,” thereby giving them permission to function as epistemological Arians.[1]

What do Alan and Andrew Torrance mean: ‘epistemological Arians?’ They are simply noting that if there is some type of general independent free-floating ontological knowledge of God without being radically grounded in God’s own Self-revelation in the Son, the Logos of God, Jesus Christ, that in fact such knowledge would be something that is finally subordinate to God; something that was abstract and a thing that once was not but came to be, as that sparkled in the minds of a pure and abstract humanity. Abstract, because humanity’s knowledge of God would come epistemologically prior to God’s ontology as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (thus artificially implicating God’s ontology by imposing an abstract human and thus epistemological procrustean bed on God). That is to say, an epistemological Arianism operates from the notion that a knowledge of “Godness” can be conjured, a more accurate knowledge that is, without first encountering said knowledge through the reconciling and revelational work of God in Christ for the world.

The moral: Don’t be an epistemological Arian. (it is sort of heretical and such)

[1] Alan J. Torrance and Andrew B. Torrance, Beyond Immanence: The Theological Vision of Kierkegaard and Barth (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2023), 153.

Dark Heart-Inscrutable Sin Contra Natural Theology-Law

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“The heart is more deceitful than all else
And is desperately sick;
Who can understand it?
“I, the Lord, search the heart,
I test the mind,
Even to give to each man according to his ways,
According to the results of his deeds. –Jeremiah 17:9–10

This is going to be a very brief screed on the inscrutable reality of sin and evil. As the prophet Jeremiah speaks for Yahweh, or as Yahweh speaks directly through Jeremiah, something is quite clear about the human fallen heart: i.e., it is beyond our comprehension. The only commentary or explicator provided for its depths comes in the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. It was this that was required in order for the ‘desperately sick’ and ‘deceitful’ heart to be dealt with. Just as with the torture and evil happenings that befell Job, God never explained the background behind it all to Job. Via dramatic irony the reader understands that it was the devil who was given permission by Yahweh to “slay” Job, but Job didn’t know that while in the midst of it all. I bring Job up merely as an analogy for the depths of sin and evil, and the way God explains it to us; He doesn’t. Even so, what can be gleaned from this is that sin and evil have an inexplicable core-depth to it that the human mind could never grasp; God alone has real knowledge of good and evil; God alone is good, as Jesus said of His life in the triune Monarxia. Yahweh’s engagement with evil, with sin as a subset, is to become human, be put to death for all of humanity, and by so doing reverse the dissolving effects of evil and sin into the nothingness-reprobate status that it entails.

The above has many implications. One of those implications has to do with the impact that the dissolvent of sin and evil has upon the intellect. According to Scripture its effect is so far reaching that it kills humanity; that is, it kills humanity’s capacity to be in right relationship with Yahweh; to have a real knowledge of the triune God; to even have the capacity or desire to follow God. We know from Jesus, particularly in the Gospel of John, that the fallen heart loves the darkness rather than the light. That is to say, the human fallen heart is ensconced within the darkness and loves it that way. Without an outside “intervention” or intrusion we would stay captive to our greatest affections, even as those find their source in a heart always already inward curved.

The aforementioned is why I reject any form of a so-called natural theology. The noetic-ontic effects of sin in an evil world are so deep and dread that the fallen human’s knowledge of God is always and only contingent upon a person’s participation within God’s life as that is mediated through the vicarious-priestly humanity of Jesus Christ. This is a purely biblical theological account. When you have folks within Protestantism, especially those who claim to be the Reformed orthodox or Lutheran, claiming that a natural theology, natural law is in play for developing a Christian theology, you know that they are relying on an extrabiblical account of things. You know that they are relying on some type of intellectualist anthropology (typically, Thomist) wherein they maintain that while humanity is totally depraved, some small spark of the intellect, which is the essence of what it means to be human, just as it is the ultimate essence for God to be God (as the Big Brain in the Sky), has remained untouched. It is in this small space of a spark that they reason even a fallen humanity, through a naked reason, has enough inherent intellectual power to rightly think Godness; to think the categories of God’s life. But biblically this cannot be sustained. This, at its very reduction, is why Barth forever rejected natural theology, particularly as that was juxtaposed with his in-person and Roman Catholic correspondent, Erich Przywara.

No Chain of Being Between God and Humanity, Just Jesus

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Christians don’t believe in a chain of being between God and the world. Christians believe that God in-breaks into the world with irruption that this world could never produce. Without God’s gracious and free election to invade this world, this humanity, we would have no access into God’s inner life; which is eternal life. The Christian believes in a life that was first set for them in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ; indeed, a life, a Deus incarnandus (‘God to be incarnate’), that was there ever before this world was this world. Deus incarnatus (‘God incarnate’) is humanity’s only access point into the heavenlies. God, in Himself, in His eternal fellowship of triune interpenetrating self-givenness, has freely deigned that this be so; indeed, in fitting correspondence with His choice to not be God without us, but with us in Jesus Christ.

On Being a Real Protestant: Calvin and Barth against Thomas and the Thomists on a Vestigial Knowledge of God

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Is God really knowable, secularly, in the vestiges of the created order? In other words, does God repose in the fallen order to the point that vain and profane people can come to have some type of vestigial knowledge of the living God? According to Thomas Aquinas, and other scholastics of similar ilk, the answer is a resounding: yes. Here is Thomas himself:

as we have shown [q. 32, a. 1], the Trinity of persons cannot be demonstratively proven. But it is still congruous to place it in the light of some things which are more manifest to us. And the essential attributes stand out more to our reason than the properties of the persons do, for, beginning from the creatures from which we derive our knowledge of the personal properties, as we have said [q. 32, a. 1]. Thus, just as to disclose the persons we make use of vestigial or imaged likenesses of the Trinity in creatures, so too we use their essential attributes. And what we call appropriation is the disclosure of the persons through the essential attributes.[1]

Karl Barth makes appeal to John Calvin to repudiate this type of ‘vestigial’ knowledge of God, as we find that in Thomas Aquinas previously. Calvin might not develop an anti-natural theology in the ways that Barth does, but he does share with Barth a principled and prior commitment to a radical theology of the Word, to a knowledge of God as Redeemer prior to Creator. And so here we have Barth and Calvin joining forces, even if only in incipient ways, on Calvin’s part (mediated through Barth), against the Angelic Doctor, St Thomas Aquinas:

To my knowledge, the strongest testimony of theological tradition in this direction is Calvin’s foreword to his Commentary on the Book of Genesis (1554). In this work he recalls 1 Cor. 1:21: “For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.” What Paul obviously means is: it is in vain for God to be sought by reference to visible things, and indeed that anything should remain, except so that we should be brought straight to Christ. Therefore we should make our beginning not with the things of this world, but with the gospel, which puts forth one Christ with his cross and holds us in him. In view of this, Calvin’s conviction is also: indeed it is vain for any to philosophize in the manner of the world, unless they have first been humbled by the preaching of the gospel, and have instructed the whole compass of their intellect to submit to the foolishness of the cross. I say that we will find out nothing above or below that will lift us to God, until Christ has educated us in his school. Nothing further can be done, if we are not raised up from the lowest depths and carried aboard his cross above all the heavens, so that there by faith we might comprehend what no eye has ever seen, nor ear ever heard, and which far surpasses our hearts and minds. For the earth is not before us there, nor its fruits supplied for daily food, but Christ himself offers himself to us unto eternal life; nor do the heavens illuminate our bodily eyes with the splendor of the sun and stars, but the same Christ, the light of the world and the sun of righteousness, shines forth in our souls; nor does the empty air spread its ebb and flow around us, but the very Spirit of God quickens and enlivens us. And so there the invisible kingdom of Christ fills all things, and his spiritual grace is diffused through all things. To be sure, this ought to prevent us from looking to heaven and earth as well and in this way fortifying ourselves in the true knowledge of God. For Christ is the image, in which God not only allows his breast to be seen, but also His hands and feet. By ‘breast’ I mean that secret love, by which we are enfolded in Christ; by ‘hands’ and ‘feet’ I understand those works which are set before our eyes. But: As soon as we have departed from Christ, there is nothing is so gross or trivial that we can avoid being mistaken as to its true nature. (C.R. 23, 10 f.). We do not find in Calvin any more detailed explanation or exposition of this programmatical assertion either in the Commentary on Genesis or in the relevant passages in the Institutio. Yet there can be no doubt that he has given us a stimulus to further thinking in this direction. The step which we ourselves have attempted along the lines he so impressively indicated is only a logical conclusion which is as it were set on our lips by the statements of the fathers, although they did not draw it for themselves.[2]

This is one reason among many why any serious Reformed person who would ever think that resourcing Thomas Aquinas and his Aristotelianism as a ‘congruous’ means by which to think God becomes quite staggering. Such a move flatly contradicts a principled and intensive commitment to the so-called ‘Protestant Scripture Principle.’ And yet, as the Post Reformed orthodox history bears out this is exactly what many of these Reformers did; they built their “Reformed” systems of theology on the Thomistic and Aristotelian ground provided for them in the Latin theological heritage so bequeathed. I’m still of the mind that it’s better to actually be principially Protestant rather than functionally Tridentine and Roman Catholic in my theology, as a Protestant. Many like Matthew Barrett, Craig Carter, and more seriously, Richard Muller and David Steinmetz et al. disagree.

[1] Thomas Aquinas, ST 1, q. 39, a. 7 cited by Gilles Emery, OP, The Trinitarian Theology of St Thomas Aquinas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 328–29.

[2] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/1 §40 [031] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 30–1 [italics mine, they represent the translation of Calvin’s Latin].

Job’s Dramatic Irony: Getting God Right Through Suffering Rather than Nature

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The biblical book of Job, literarily, operates with what is called dramatic irony. Here is how the Oxford Dictionary defines dramatic irony:

a literary technique, originally used in Greek tragedy, by which the full significance of a character’s words or actions are clear to the audience or reader although unknown to the character.[1]

As a reader, or even movie-watcher, we the audience have the capacity to read or watch with this type of ‘irony.’ We can skip to the end, and then read the beginning to the end, knowing what the final outcome is. Or we can read through a book or watch a movie in total, and next time we come to read or watch said book or movie we will already know what the characters present in the storyline remain unaware of throughout. Indeed, the drama of our lives before God, could be characterized as a dramatic irony as understood in Christ. We have the capacity, in God’s life of Grace, who is the Christ, to know how it all ends. We don’t have the details of how that looks in our daily and personal lives, but we know the One who does; and in a general way, with important specifics in tow, we know what we can expect in the end/Eschaton. As such, we can look at our unfolding stories in light of the End, the Beginning and End, and rest in the knowledge that no matter what we walk through, both the deep waters and the fire, in this cruci-shaped life, we will indeed resurrect.

In the instance of Job’s story, we have many of the details. We know that God judged, and in the end found Job faithful, and Job’s friends faithless (not even acknowledging the youngster, Elihu’s existence). But I was thinking, as I just finished reading Job again: when you listen to Job’s “friends” and their “counsel” or “beratement” of him, at first blush it sounds like they might be offering many profound insights with reference to the character and action of God. But what we know, even from the beginning of the story, is that Job’s friends, while stating, surely, some true facts about God, that they were working off a faulty natural theological assumption based on their own lights. They presumed that Job must have been in some sort of vile sin, thus justly undergoing God’s judgement on his life. Throughout the plotline of Job’s travail, he grows in the grace and knowledge of the LORD, while his friends stay static, thinking of God through static terms, based on their own naturalistic reasoning, their own prefabricated notions in regard to God’s ways, and thus arriving at horrifically bad conclusions as they approached their “friend,” brother Job.

I was just thinking, I don’t want to operate like one of Job’s friends. I want to be Job instead. I want to know who God is as I trust and depend on the One who alone raises the dead. With Job I want to be the one who says “I know that my Redeemer lives, and at last He shall stand on the earth.” I don’t want to think God based on my own wits, or others’, thus arriving at faulty and crooked theology and its attending spirituality. I want to know God through the shape of His cross in Jesus Christ; depending upon His grace, which is sufficient, thereby genuinely coming to know the true who-ness of God from His inner-life, as I participate in that through the mediatory person of Jesus Christ, through union with Him by the re-creative and bonding work of the Holy Spirit.

[1] Oxford Dictionary, accessed 05-05-2024.

On a Crucifixional ‘Certainty’ of Faith as Knowledge of God: With Reference to Herbert McCabe

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Herbert McCabe on the certainty of the Christian reality (contra wishful thinking, so on and so forth):

Now there are some people who will admit even this. They will admit that Christianity is reasonable even in this sense, that it is not merely logically coherent, but also a pretty reasonable hypothesis. They will admit that there is a lot of evidence of one kind and another to suggest that Christian beliefs are true, just as there is a lot of evidence of one kind and another to suggest that telepathy is quite common or that Queen Elizabeth I was in love with Essex. What they find so unreasonable in Christians is that, instead of saying that Christianity is highly probable, they claim to be completely certain. When you do establish something by this kind of probable and convergent argument, you have every right to hold it as your opinion, but you have no right to claim absolute certainty and to be sure that you will never meet a genuine refutation of it. This is what finally seems unreasonable about faith to the openminded liberal sceptic. And here I can agree with him. In this sense I am prepared to admit that you might call faith unreasonable.

It is not unreasonable in the sense that it is absurd or incoherent. Nor is it unreasonable in the sense that there are not good reasons for it. But it is, if you like, unreasonable in that it demands a certainty which is not warranted by the reasons. I am completely certain that I am in Oxford at the moment. I have all the evidence I need for certainty on this point. It is true that I admit the logical possibility that I may be drugged or dreaming or involved in some extraordinarily elaborate deception. But this doesn’t really affect my certainty. Yet the evidence which makes it reasonable to hold, for example, that Christ rose from the dead comes nowhere near this kind of evidence. One might say that the evidence is spite of all probability does really seem to point to this fantastic conclusion, but it is certainly not the kind of evidence which makes me quite sure and certain. And yet I am more certain that Christ rose from the dead than I am that I am in Oxford. When it comes to my being there, I am prepared to accept the remote possibility that I am the victim of an enormous practical joke. But I am not prepared to envisage any possibility of deception about the resurrection. Of course I can easily envisage my argument for the resurrection being disposed of. I can envisage myself being confronted by what is seems to me to be unanswerable arguments against it. But this is not the same thing. I am prepared to envisage myself ceasing to believe in it, but I am not prepared to envisage either that there really are unanswerable arguments against it or that I would be justified in ceasing to believe it. All this is because, although reasons may lead me to belief, they are not the basis of my belief. I believe certain things because God has told them to me, and I am able to believe them with certainty and complete assurance only because of the divine life within me. It is a gift of God that I believe, not something I can achieve by human means.[1]

As a Christian, full of the Spirit, doesn’t McCabe’s thinking resonate with you? It certainly has resonance with the thinking of Barth on faith, and Christ’s faith for us as we find correspondence with His and from His by the Holy Spirit. It isn’t that there is no physical or historical evidence for such things, it’s that it goes way beyond such parameters. It isn’t that it is some type of existential foray into the mystical; indeed, as that might be generated by an abstract human’s innards. It is that God has made concrete contact with us through the interior life of His life for us, with us, and in us, in Christ. McCabe isn’t referring to some sort of epistemic certainty that satisfies our base hopes. Instead, He is referring to the triune God’s unilateral Self-determination to bring us, to elevate us into the very heart of His inner life; to share in the glory that the Son has always already shared with the Father by the Holy Spirit. This type of certainty of relationship comes with an inherent vulnerability to it, of the sort wherein a child is dependent upon their parent. This knowledge of God, of our relationship with Him, comes with a desperateness to it; of the type where the Christian knows that they know that they don’t continue to stand without their Father standing for them in the Son, the Savior of the world. It is a primordial situation wherein we just show up in this world, and our Father graciously comes to us, as if a babe tossed into the weeds and dust of the wastelands, picks us up, cleans us up, and brings us into the eternal life spring that is showering forth from the One in the bosom of the Father; indeed, in the Son.

I take what McCabe is referring to as a ‘taste and see that God is good,’ or an Anselmian fides quaerens intellectum (‘faith seeking understanding’) mode of being. And as I already noted, there is a primordiality to all of this. That is to say, as Barth’s theology does, that the Christian has entered into a new creation in the resurrected humanity of Jesus Christ. We are on a new playing field wherein the eyes to see the invisible as the concrete, are the eyes of the faith of Christ that we have come into union with by the grace of adoption into the family and triune life of the eternal and living God. Barth scholar Robert Dale Dawson communicates these truths in the following way, with reference to Barth’s theology of the resurrection (I’ve used this quote multiple times because I think it is helpful towards piercing into what Barth is after throughout his theological oeuvre):

A large number of analyses come up short by dwelling upon the historical question, often falsely construing Barth’s inversion of the order of the historical enterprise and the resurrection of Jesus as an aspect of his historical skepticism. For Barth the resurrection of Jesus is not a datum of the sort to be analyzed and understood, by other data, by means of historical critical science. While a real event within the nexus of space and time the resurrection is also the event of the creation of new time and space. Such an event can only be described as an act of God; that is an otherwise impossible event. The event of the resurrection of Jesus is that of the creation of the conditions of the possibility for all other events, and as such it cannot be accounted for in terms considered appropriate for all other events. This is not the expression of an historical skeptic, but of one who is convinced of the primordiality of the resurrection as the singular history-making, yet history-delimiting, act of God.[2]

According to Barth, and I think the Gospel implications themselves, we are not thinking of reality in terms of a grace perfecting nature or a revelation perfecting reason (ironically, McCabe is a Thomist, but uniquely so); we are thinking from the new theo-logic that comes from a city not of our own making or machination. As Christians, and I see this in McCabe’s thinking, our bases for knowing God come from an otherworldly, that is indeed thisworldly reality. As such, we have a certainty about it in the ways already noted, but also in a way that this world considers both foolish and weak. There is a staurological (crucifixional) ground to this type of thinking that understands that knowledge of God comes first from a putting to death of what we consider “reasonable,” by our inborn lights, and a resurrection unto a new creation wherein what is reasonable is only determined by God’s pre-destination for His consummate and concrete Kingdom to come, and currently coming minute-by-minute. amen

[1] Herbert McCabe, Faith Within Reason (London: Continuum, 2007), 28–9.

[2] Robert Dale Dawson, The Resurrection in Karl Barth (UK: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007), 13.

The Gospel of Truth Confronting Our ‘Happily Sick’ Selves

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The Gospel is a Gospel of offense. Christ in the assumptio carnis doesn’t only explain God to us from within Himself and the triune life (Jn 1.18), but He explains who we are as fallen human beings vis-à-vis the holiness and person of the living God. The Gospel doesn’t allow us to remain comfortable with our sins; the Gospel doesn’t allow us to find companionship with our evil, dark and depraved hearts. The Gospel is the Way, the TRUTH, and the Life; as such, it puts us in our place. For the natural [hu]man this causes squirming, it challenges our base desires at their very root; the desires we’d rather live our live-long days with. But the Gospel pronounces a disruptive and loud, No! Gracefully, the Gospel doesn’t just take us to the dark side of our fallen condition; it dialectically, and at the same time, elevates us into the Light and Life of God.

Read along as father and son duo, Alan and Andrew Torrance explain how this looks in the theology of Kierkegaard:

To analyze Kierkegaard’s position more precisely, there are primarily two ways in which he considered Christ to be offensive. The more obvious of the two ways is that Christ proclaims a deeply countercultural message. While Jesus ultimately brings good news to the world, not everything he says will be immediately appealing, especially to elite members of society. For Kierkegaard, this point should be obvious to any sincere reader of Scripture. The reason Christ’s message is unsettling is that so many of us are content with the shape of our sinful lives. In the grip of “the sickness unto death,” we define ourselves according to our own finite ends in a way that is dead to God and in “the state of deepest spiritual wretchedness.” As Climacus puts it, the sinner exists in a state of imprisonment in which he “holds himself captive,” and in this state, he is oblivious to the sickness that accompanies his overly positive view of his life. When caught up in sin, it is extremely difficult to notice, let alone take seriously, our state of despair. We are happily sick, so when the true world-changing gospel message is spoken into this situation, it cannot simply be taken as a message that supports us in our daily lives. When God assumes human form, God does not settle in with us in our “sickbed,” nor does God comfort us in our sinful ways. Rather, God reveals Godself by acts of revelation that seek to deliver us from sickness. Anti-Climacus writes:

Christianity did not come into the world as a showpiece of gentle comfort, as the preacher blubberingly and falsely introduces it—but as the absolute. It is out of love that God so wills but it is also God who wills it, and he wills as he wills. He will not be transformed by human beings into a cozy human god; he wills to transform human beings and he wills it out of love.[1]

We will pick up with the ‘second way’ next time. Suffice it to say, Kierkegaard is onto what should appear to be the obvious: i.e., as fallen creatures we are more than comfortable with our fallen ways. Indeed, as fallen creatures, we aren’t even really aware that we are in fact, sick; more biblically, dead! As the Christology of Kierkegaard underscores, outwith Christ’s penetration into the soil and slum of our souls, we would simply run head-long, with glee, into the eternal abyss. But God’s love is greater than our blindness; and because God is gracious, He elects our humanity for Himself in Christ, and gives us His vicarious eyes. He gives us His eternal Light that we might see Light, and come to recognize the darkness that we so gleefully inhabit outwith His disruption into our humanity.

As an aside: the aforementioned has another implication. It implicates the way knowledge of God does or doesn’t work. If Kierkegaard’s theology is true on this front (and I think it is), this entails that fallen creatures left to themselves have no capacity in themselves, other than to see their darkness as light. Indeed, left to themselves, fallen humanity will construct God and gods in their light, which in fact, of course, is only their darkness in the end. The fallen creature needs God’s Life to assume theirs; bring their life up into His; and it is then only from that inhabitation that fallen humanity is elevated into a status and capacity, through union with Christ by the Spirit, that they can come to think and speak God’s thoughts Deus dixit (‘after He has spoken’). Natural theology simply doesn’t have the chops to offer a theological ontology/epistemology/anthropology that brings a fallen humanity into a genuine and viable knowledge of the living God. Christ alone remains the only mediator between God and humanity whereby fallen humanity can become adopted and elevated humanity as participants in and with Christ’s vicarious humanity for them/us.

Many other implications to be visited, but this will have to suffice for the moment.

[1] Alan J. Torrance and Andrew B. Torrance, Beyond Immanence: The Theological Vision of Kierkegaard and Barth (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2023), 77.