Category Archives: Constructive Theology

The Last Word on a Reformed Doctrine of Election and Reprobation

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You go online in the Reformed space, and you get the same old trope on a doctrine of election and reprobation; you essentially get the L (imited Atonement) of the TULIP served up as the ‘hard teaching’ Gospel truth reality about the way God relates to part of humanity in a God-world relation. I am here to set the record straight once and for all! This is simply not how God has related to the world, and this based on the analogy of the incarnation. We aren’t groping around in the darkness for snipes, but as Christians, instead, we have been given God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ in the incarnation. This is a sui generis (non-analogous) event that itself stands behind all epistemic efforts, at a primordial level, to know God. In other words, to know God is to be reconciled to God; and to be reconciled to God comes unilaterally from God’s free decision of Grace to become human (Deus incarnandus) for us that we might know Him as He has first known us in the Son (the eternal Logos). That said, if knowledge of God is slavishly tagged to God’s becoming for us in Jesus Christ, then to think God, and thus all corollary doctrines, in abstraction from God’s Self-givenness for us is neither safe nor Christian. Based upon this pre-Dogmatic reality we have capacity to move into a discussion on election/reprobation.

Christian Election and Reprobation

If we are to think election/reprobation from within the Chalcedonian frame of the homoousion of God’s life as both fully Divine and fully human in the singular person of Jesus Christ, and we follow the Apostle Paul’s teaching that ‘He who knew no sin became sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God in Him’ (mirifica commutatio ‘wonderful exchange’), then we will think of reprobation as the general human status, post-lapse, that the eternal Logos assumed (assumptio carnis) in the assumption of our ‘fallen-flesh.’ As such, to think the reprobate status from this concrete revealed status of humanity is to think all of humanity, the only type of humanity present in the incarnation, as reprobate. But the force and anhypostatic ground of the enhypostatic person of the Son of Man, Jesus Christ, was such that its grandiose power, of the resurrection type, its “election and electing” power as it were, could not be resisted by the reprobate humanity that the Christ assumed. In other words, whilst Christ became fallen humanity, in the assumption of our humanity, the total humanity, or the massa, as Christ put ‘death to death’ (cf. Rom 8.3) in His humanity for us (pro nobis), His elect humanity as the ‘Greater, the Second Adam’ was always already going to win the day. That is to say, the everythingness of God’s triune life as active in God incarnate (Deus incarnatus), as the ground of the person, Jesus Christ, has no rival in the nothingness of the fallen humanity that was assumed in the Son’s enfleshment for the world.

This is the implication of the incarnation when applied to a doctrine of election/reprobation. We necessarily think such locus from God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ. Instead of wandering around in the wilderness, as if in exile because of disobedience, we flourish under the fount of God’s Self-knowledge as we have been invited into that in the banqueting table of His Holy and Triune Life. Interesting, isn’t it? This is where a discussion like this, on a topic like this, takes us. Typically, when people enter this fray, whether academic or popular, what is almost immediately bypassed is a consideration of how a properly understood Dogmatic taxis, or order, is necessary to acknowledge prior to downstream material discussions on a soteriological doctrine like election/reprobation represents. In other words, people too quickly gloss past the formal considerations that end up, latterly, informing their material theological conclusions when in fact they are ostensibly “theologizing.” When this type of Ramist, or loci styled schemata is uncritically adopted, when the ‘work of God’ comes to be abstracted, and thus separated from the ‘person of God in Jesus Christ’ we can end up thinking something like a doctrine of election/reprobation as if a procrustean bed; we can imagine a theological system wherein Christology can be thought of in abstraction from soteriology, and vice versa. This is how so-called (as I’ve called it) classical Calvinism and Arminianism has arrived at its conclusions in regard to election/reprobation in a God-world relation.

Conclusion

The moral of the story is this: When election/reprobation is thought slavishly from God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ, when it is thought of in terms of God’s humanity in the Chalcedonian register, what we end up with is something that is in line with what the biblical categories operate from with reference to election/reprobation (as these categories themselves are intended to map onto the biblical categories of ‘those being saved’ ‘those being destroyed’ see I Cor 1.18). What we end up with is the idea that Jesus Christ is both the electing God and elected human, and that by His free choice to become human, by His free choice to take on our ‘poverty’ we come to have the capacity to participate, ontically, in the riches of His elect humanity status as that is actualized in His resurrection from the dead (cf. II Cor 8.9.

Whatever the consequences of adopting this approach to election/reprobation turns out to be, one thing the exegete can rest assured of is that they are thinking in terms of the ecumenical grammar, the ‘creedal grammar’ of the Church catholic. If this is important to the exegete, then wherever this type of ‘Christo-logic’ might lead, said exegete will repentantly follow. Insofar as Jesus thought that the canon of Holy Scripture referred to Him (cf. Jn 5.39), then it behooves the exegete to imagine that their respective repose in the Chalcedonian grammar, constructively received, will present them with solid footing, no matter where that proverbial climb of theological endeavor might lead them. Further, when following Jesus’ lead, as far as thinking the res or ‘reality’ of Holy Scripture, our relative ascription to this or that ‘party theological tribe’ will end up taking second, if not third and fourth seats. In other words, the ‘catholicism’ of Christ’s life requires that a person is willing to think outside (if that’s what ends up happening) of their pet theological demarcations. That is to say, once a person adopts the hermeneutic proposed by the creedal grammar of something like Chalcedon, however that might be constructively received, it is the adoption into this hermeneutical family that said person will be formed by for the rest of their days. If this leads them, in explicit terms, to abandon say something like their beloved classical Calvinism, then so be it. There is no creed but Christ.

 

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 entrĂ©e 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 entrĂ©e 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.

On “The Neo-Dark Ages of Modern Theology”: Getting Beyond the Smorgasbord of 21st Century Evangelical Theology without Ditching the Modern

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Theology isn’t a smorgasbord, but to view my evangelical world you’d never know it. High church confessionalists/traditionalists have greater clarity in this area than does the low-Free-church evangelical world. This is largely due to the fact that us evangelicals were formed out of the post-Enlightenment, deconfessionalized mode of ecclesial identity. In other words, evangelicals, by and large, are a people of the Book, yet abstracted from the Bible’s broader historical reception as that perdured into the medieval and Post Reformed orthodox period. It is difficult to write on this just because what it means to be an evangelical these days represents a massive continuum. Many so-called evangelicals were raised in the sort of deconfessionalized vanilla evangelicalism I am referring to above, and it is for precisely this reason that these types are attempting retrieve what they believe to be the theological foundations of evangelicalism; particularly as that is found in scholasticism Reformed.

But what I largely take evangelicalism to be is indeed a mode of modernity. That is, most of evangelicalism is a product of the 18th and 19th centuries, and the revivalism/conversionism therein. This is a religion shorn of its historical antecedents, and one that focuses on the turn-to-the-subject, on a warm-hearted pietism that focuses more on an individualistic understanding of Christian spirituality rather than on a spirituality formed by the communio sanctorum. With this ‘turn’ in place, evangelicals, modern in just this way, feel free to roam the planes and valleys in search of whatever expression of the Christian development suits their fancy; however said fancy may have developed for them. These evangelicals aren’t anchored to a tradition, or a confession, per se; at best, their confession is: ‘me-and-my-Jesus-me-and-my-Bible.’ Armed with this mantra, girdled by a staunch solo Scriptura, such evangelicals have little time for church history; especially when church history for them started the day they received Jesus into their hearts. When church history starts in a center in the self-possessed self, it is this self that gets to determine what sorts of theologies they will be formed by. And even if this type of evangelical looks to the past it will always be grounded in the touchstone of their lives, them.

As far as sketches go, I think the above, in an oversimplified way works. When attempting to fellowship with Christians who have been spiritually formed under such conditions (the ones just mentioned) it becomes quite difficult to achieve any sort of depth dimension, insofar as that dimension exists in the tradition[s] of the church. If such evangelicals have intentionally shucked the husk of the church’s confessions it becomes almost completely impossible to go any deeper than 1973, or whenever said evangelical said yes to Jesus. This produces, at an essential level, a fragmented communion, and as such when communions like this attempt to stand together, say against the wiles of the devil, what ends up happening is that the spiritual vacuum their lives are funded by quickly becomes exposed. In an attempt to shore up this vacuum the evangelical will collectively project their sense of individuality onto their leader; i.e. their erstwhile charismatically gifted pastor. As such, a personality cult is born, and the peoples’ unity becomes contingent upon the man, instead of the cosmic Christ, as He has leavened His church with His wisdom throughout the centuries in the communio sanctorum (communion of the saints).

Maybe this helps frame the way of evangelicalism in these our days. Maybe you feel famished, bereft of any depth reality in your daily Christian spirituality. The church is part of a cosmic reaching reality just as her esse is grounded in Jesus Christ and the Triune God. When Christians are cut off from this deep theological (and even historical) well, it becomes seemingly bleak when attempting to move and breath as a Christian in the 21st century. Is the antidote to this to do what the evangelical theologians of retrieval are attempting, to demonize modern theological developments, and jump back to the ostensible formations of “genuine evangelical” theology, as that is supposedly funded and founded in the Post Reformed orthodox developments (of the 16th and 17th centuries)? This doesn’t seem, to me, to be the best way forward. While I am a proponent of being critical of the negative turns made by the ‘new theology’ of the 18th and 19th c. I am not of the belief that modern theology, and even aspects of so-called turn-to-the-subject are purely evil. I believe it is possible to take what modern (and its antecedent mediating) theology has handed to us, and constructively reify that from within a genuinely Christ conditioned confessional frame regulated by what I take to be the regula fidei (rule of faith) of Christ’s life who continuously is in-breaking into His church even today.

Personally, while I reject the smorgasbord self-interested spirituality and doctrinal quilting of most of 21st c. Evangelical style, I think it is imprudent to simply ditch the whole modern period as if representative of a neo-dark ages that must be ignored. I think this is imprudent because in order to do so the “jumper” (of the ditch of modernity) must posit themself in such a way (which itself is a purely modern way to think) to imagine that they aren’t inherently modern themselves. But they are indeed a modern people, and when they attempt to ignore modern theology, in se, they only assume modernity’s anthropological mode of positing or starting with a self-asserted self in search of the ‘true-theology’ (the one developed, in their discursive reasonings, in the 16th and 17th c). In my view, it is best to simply acknowledge that we are a modern people, and to understand that God has been speaking to and in His church in and through all periods. This way we, as the people of God, are starting in a position where we are not the magisterium, but the ministerium of God’s Holy people the church. In other words, when we acknowledge that God has been present throughout, as if a yeast, the ambit of all church history, up to and into the present moment, we are recognizing that we are simply beggars-all, waiting upon God. As we are formed from this alien starting point, in the center of God’s life for us in Jesus Christ, as He ever afresh anew makes Himself known to us, it is from this eagle’s nest, seated at the Right Hand of the Father, high above all rulers and principalities, that the Christian can genuinely operate from the confessional reality of God’s life for us in Jesus Christ.

This is just the beginning of a proposal.

The Logos is Greater than the Greek: The Resurrection of Language

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This builds on my last post, and continues to reference Helmut Thielicke. As we had occasion to notice in the last post, Thielicke helped us understand how the New Testament writers, and early Christian theologians (at their best) ‘used’ Greek philosophical grammar in order to help articulate the invisible God made visible in the mystery of the Incarnation. We came to a better understanding, I hope, of just how world-breaking and category smashing the sui generis nature of the Incarnation was (and is) for the world’s trajectory and telos at large. We came to understand how the profane categories of the pagan world could be utilized in a way, under the recreative pressure of God become human, that reifies or redefines the original meaning of said categories and words to the point that they now have a heavenly rather than secular meaning. If we are to think from the analogy of the Incarnation, and we should, it would be something like this: people often confuse Jesus as a simple man (and not the God-man) because He clearly was and is a man; so He looks profane like the rest of us. But He clearly is not profane; He is Holy God come in the flesh. He has made what was once sub-human, human, by re-conciling profane humanity with His Holy resurrected humanity; the sort of humanity that now can eternally and fully abide in peace with God. Likewise, this sort of thing happens with profane language. It can be ‘resurrected’ under the pressurized meaning that comes from ‘above’ in God’s Self-revelation, such that the profane language, say of the philosophers, can be commandeered, and given a completely new context and referent point for its meaning.

Thielicke, sticking with his previous example of the Stoic concept of Logos found reanimated in the Gospel of John 1.1 writes this:

before the Johannine Prologue could formulate the statement that the Word was made flesh, Greek philosophy, especially Stoicism, had played with the logos concept and given it cosmological significance as world reason or the subjective ratio that is analogous to the cosmic logos. When the Prologue adopts the term to describe the mystery of the incarnation, John strips it of its ideological content and uses it as an empty shell, as mere synonym for the Word of God. He thus avoids defining the phenomenon of Christ by the Stoic concept and in this way integrating Christ into the sphere of Greek thought. The reverse happens. What Logos means in John’s Gospel is defined by Christ, i.e., by what follows in the ensuing chapters. In second-century Apologists like Justin Martyr, however, we find the very opposite. To make Christianity understandable to those stamped by the Greek tradition, to bring it closer to them, an attempt was made to show that the Greek philosophers were in a sense precursors of Christ. What they said about the logos contained serious particles of truth and indications of what Christ would reveal in fulness and perfection as the manifestation of the world logos. The apologetic aim was that those influenced by Greek thought should not find in Christ something absolutely new and hence scandalous and offensive (1 Cor. 1:23), but a confirmation of their own thinking and a transcending and completing of their own fragmentary knowledge. This missionary view presupposed the need to accommodate the Christian message to Greek thought and hence to define Christ by the Greek logos, in contradistinction from John’s Gospel. Clearly, many essentials of the gospel, e.g., the folly of the cross (1 Cor. 1:18; 2:6ff) or miracles, fell by the wayside with this procedure. The logos concept loses its servant role as a conceptual instrument and takes on a normative and governing role. Christ is subsumed under the concept and becomes a mere illustration. We thus have here a classical example of the revolt of the conceptual means. In such cases it is impossible to extract the mere form of the term and cast off the material intention. The form becomes the content. This is the hermeneutical difficulty we constantly encounter.[1]

This reality, what Helmut is referring us to, is pretty much what has animated me for my whole blogging career. People’s failure to properly reify theological language and conceptuality UNDER God’s Self-revelation results in the sort of example Thielicke gives us with reference to the imposition of the Greek over the Revelation. I believe much of classical theism’s heritage, particularly the kind that developed in the Aristotelian mediaeval period, and what was unloaded into much of so called classical Calvinism (post reformed orthodoxy) [and Arminianism, and much of Lutheranism] went awry at just the point where this ‘translation’ process has unfortunately favored the Greek over the Revelation of God. The intention, in the best of cases, has been to not allow the Greek undo weight; but the reality is that the Greek has often been given undo weight. When the theologian’s conversation about God has language like simplicity, impassibility, immutability, eternality so on and so forth constantly attending and framing it—before language like Father-Son, triune Love, Incarnation etc.—we know almost immediately that we have fallen prey to what Thielicke identifies as a negative.

[1] Helmut Thielicke, Modern Faith & Thought, trans. by Geoffrey Bromiley (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1990), 11-12.

On Being a Protestant Constructive Theologian: A Freedom to Draw from the Church catholic

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You may get tired of me referring to Barth so much, but bear with me again. I just watched an excellent presentation by my co-Evangelical Calvinist and friend, Myk Habets. It was his inaugural address at Laidlaw College in New Zealand where he just became the head of their school of theology. In Myk’s talk he refers to David Bentley Hart’s language of ‘Strange Beauty,’ with reference to the triune God. I find that I am driven, mostly, by aesthetic and doxological modes when thinking theologically; I don’t think I am alone in this. As Myk underscored in his presentation, the ultimate beauty for the Christian is the reality of God’s inner-triune life. And the ultimate way for entering into this life is through the broken body of Jesus Christ; as Scripture says ‘he is the mediator between God and man.’

Often Barth is critiqued and found wanting because he is wrongly, in my view, framed as a “modern theologian.” In another book I just started reading, written by Jamie Smith, which is an introduction to Radical Orthodoxy, Smith picks up on the common critique that modern theology is defunct, offering a flat muddled conception of the triune God. As such, from this narrative, anything modern needs to be abandoned in favor of a return to the old paths and heights offered by pre-modern/pre-critical theologies that emphasize God’s transcendence and beauty therefrom. Smith places Barth into this sort of modern and flat sort of immanentized theological form; a form where the metaphysical/transcendent conception of God is traded in for a user friendly flat flabby postmetaphysical/domesticated God that can only be known through the optics of existentialism and self-absorbed navel-gazing.

But I protest. Barth, in my view, and this is the attraction for me, represents a theologian who indeed fully accepted and recognized his modern location, but put his foot in the ground forcing people back to God’s window of Himself for the world in Jesus Christ. Not to instrumentalize Jesus, but to understand with the evangelist ‘to see Me is to see the Father.’ It is this that makes Barth’s theology in line with the Fathers of the past; particularly of the Patristic past. Barth, along with Irenaeus, Athanasius, Cyril, the Cappadocians, even Augustine emphasizes the centrality of Christ to the whole theological reality. It is a reality that is not shrouded in an immanentized theological conclave, but the reality of focusing on Christ who transposes us from below to above in exactly the way God has chosen for that to happen. TF Torrance articulates this in his book Christian Doctrine of God: One Being Three Persons, he refers to this transposition as a ‘stratified knowledge of God’; a movement from the evangelical to the theological knowledge of God. This is what Barth, Torrance, and all the best theologians of the Church catholic have been about. They haven’t been driven by specifically tradition-oriented concerns, but instead to find the beauty of God as that is regulated and revealed in the face of Jesus Christ.

Barth is a constructive theologian, so is Torrance; a constructive theologian is driven by a desire to worship God. They are willing to draw off of a variety of streams provided for in the history of the Church’s theological ideas. This can be observed as the Christian reads Barth’s Church Dogmatics. He draws from reformed scholastic thinkers; medieval thinkers; patristic thinkers; modern thinkers; and whomever helps to bear the weight of attempting to magnify the beauty of the living God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. To be a constructive theologian is to be driven by a desire to magnify God; this is the work of the Holy Spirit (Jn 14—16), to build up the Church of Christ by pointing people to the witnesses of Christ, no matter what period these witnesses are found within. The aim of the constructive theologian isn’t to concern themselves with anything else than magnifying Christ. They aren’t stumbled by the artificial barriers created by sectarian hedges and traditions that want to silo off people’s ability to draw from the plenitude of rich resource offered in the whole of Christian reality. Instead, the constructive theologian only cares about opening up avenues wherein the beauty and majesty of the triune God is made known in the power of all that that is for us as revealed in the resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ.

This really is my mode. I see myself as a constructive theologian, or an always aspiring one. This does not mean I haven’t fallen prey to the seduction of sectarian shifts and turns, here and there. But it does mean that my ultimate aim is to draw from a variety of theologians and genuinely Christian traditions in such a way that the triune life of God is opened up for the Church to feast on and from as their life. This means that I can place themes in Calvin in conversation with Barth; or themes in Athanasius in discussion with Luther, so on and so forth. And after all of this, I say that I am ‘Barthianish’ because I think Barth offers the best example I’ve witnessed of what it looks like to be a Christian Protestant constructive theologian; he also fits best with my ‘baptistic’ sensibilities on certain doctrines (such as baptism, free church, free bible etc.). My aim, as a constructive theologian, is to work, along with the consensus patrum, from a revelational model, or kataphatic model of doing theology. This is not to say that there is nothing apophatic about the theological endeavor, it is just to recognize that the Deus absconditus (the hidden God) is the Deus revelatus (the revealed God). And within this hiddenness, as that comes in the ordinary flesh of a man from Nazareth, the transcendent wonder and beauty of God is opened up in exactly the way, with the certain character that He wants us to see of Himself. Here the immanentized-horizontal world we are seemingly trapped within breaks open as God penetrates the husk of the physical world, and shines His bright ray of triune light into the midst of it all. In this rupturing of things, He illumines the genuine beauty of God, and in so doing places creation into its proper orientation vis-à-vis God. Herein the beauty all around us in the created order truly takes on the beauty of God as we understand that He alone upholds it by the Word of His power in Jesus Christ. Within this frame we can begin developing theologies of nature, like St Ephrem the Syrian did, and understand that, as Calvin did, the created order is truly the theater of God’s Glory in the prosopon (face) of Jesus Christ.

This is the sort of theologian I seek to be. One that is consumed with the worship (doxology) and the beauty of God’s three in one/one in three life. Driven by this trajectory the theologian can engage in a specialized “haphazardness,” and draw off of whatever Christian streams, from whatever periods that help to magnify Jesus as Lord; and as the one who brings us into the pleroma of God’s inner Holy, Holy, Holy Life.

The Gospel is Greater Than the History it Comes To Us Within: On Being a Constructive or ‘Critical’ Theologian

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As constructive theologians our primary aim is to provide edification for the Church by retrieving and constructively engaging with theological ideas from the past. This involves engagement with historical work, along with exegetical, and philosophical work; with a host of other engagements. One thing that the theologian will begin to encounter in this process, very often, is that the historian and biblical studies person they are working with will set up a dilemma wherein nothing really constructive can be engaged in. In other words, the historian becomes so focused on getting the “history right,” that any retrieval of it, in order to maintain the integrity of the history of ideas, must really only be an exercise in repristination. That is, the historian might say: ‘okay, you can have the history and its ideas, but you are restricted to re-presenting it in the way I as the historian have reconstructed it.’ In this vein there is no real way for the theologian to ‘constructively’ appropriate the past for the present. In other words, the theologian isn’t allowed to imaginatively redress certain historical ideas in con-versation with the Gospel for its new context in the 21st century. For the historian, or biblical studies person for that matter, they so objectify the material aspect of their respective disciplines that they essentially hermetically seal it off, and disallow its inchoate ideas to blossom any further than its original givenness. This should not be!

I have written on this in the introduction to our last book, and so was happy to find Paul Hinlicky opining on the same issue. Hinlicky writes:

Today biblical scholars routinely dismantle the text’s claim as canonical and then proceed as experts to opinionate on traditional dogmatic questions without method or rigor. Constructive theologians, so-called, build the kinds of metaphysical systems that Kant long ago demolished for philosophers with a conscience — or with great flourish and fanfare deconstruct systems long since fallen from power — in discourses that few outside their shrinking guilds read or understand. Historical theologians jealously guard the historical particularity of what once was, anointing themselves gatekeepers who effectively block the process of critical appropriation in traditional discourses like doctrinal theology. So the hard work of critical dogmatics in testing of the church’s practice of faith in light of the aforementioned doctrinal norms freshly grasped and interpreted in every new generation has by and large given way to other models.

But theology is not philosophy, and the Holy Spirit is no skeptic. As a critical retrieval and fresh assertion of definite meaning, the “new language of the Spirit” is a hermeneutical process of appropriation that cannot proceed, to put it provocatively, without a certain measure of violence against the past. Not only does it take up the past selectively and then put these pieces to work in new ways, but it does so, as the critical historian sees things, from the uncontrolled perspective of the retriever. Of course, for critical dogmatics that uncontrolled perspective might be the fresh movement of the Holy Spirit. One cannot say in advance. It will be in any case some spirit! That must be discerned. The issue is less whether the appropriation repristinates any particular formation of the past than whether the new formulations are faithful to the gospel of the crucified and risen Christ in His ongoing history in the world. Historians are rightly concerned to focus on the development of theological ideas and the precise exposition of their contextual meaning. Theologians depend on this work, since Christianity is a historical religion that can go forward only by coming to terms with its past. If at the end of the day, however, historians want to take their stand and object categorically — Das ist aber nicht [that is not] Jesus! Paulus! Luther! — they may do so, but it begs the question — of Jesus, Paul, and Luther — whether we have found help moving forward on our pilgrim way.[1]

The Gospel is greater than the history it comes to us within. The Gospel is greater than Scripture itself; indeed, the Gospel is the context that gives Scripture meaning and canon. The Gospel is what gives history, the Bible, and all of reality its raison d’etre. This is what we should not lose sight of, no matter what our discipline of study. As Christians when we operate, we do so out of the power of God, out of the Gospel; this ought to impinge upon the way we function as human persons in the great theater of what is real and beautiful before and in the living God.

If the above is so, then the historian, biblical studies person, philosopher et al. ought to approach their craft with the humility that the Great Evangel of God injects into all He touches. This means that history, biblical studies, so on and so forth are to be, or ought to be in the service of the Gospel; not vice versa. Surely, as Hinlicky notes, we want to be as rigorous as possible in the historical work, in the biblical exegetical work etc., but that only goes so far. The Gospel itself breaks open new horizons of imagination about the grandeur of Who God not only was, but is for us in Christ. It is this imagination in combination with listening to the past that the Christian can grow beyond the past into the future of God’s life; indeed as God’s future life breaks into our present moment and rings true what only He can as He bears witness with our spirit about Who in fact He was, is, and is to come.

[1] Paul R. Hinlicky, Luther and the Beloved Community: A Path for Christian Theology after Christendom (Grand Rapids, Michigan/Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2010), xvii–xviii.

The Historical Theology Texts That Stand Behind Me

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I thought I would share three texts that have served most foundational for me in my theological development. Each of these texts was assigned to me by my former Historical Theology and Ethics professor in seminary, Ron Frost. I was privileged to serve as his teaching fellow and, as a result, became mentored by him. I will say that without Ron Frost at the seminary, my time at seminary would not have been as great as it was (and that’s saying a lot because so many of my other seminary profs were excellent in their own right, and in their own ways). But the texts that remain formative for me are these:

J.N.D. Kelly’s Early Christian Doctrine: Revised Edition.

Steven Ozment’s The Age of Reform 1250-1550: An Intellectual and Relgious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe.

And as supplementary readings (although I read the whole thing):

Geoffrey Bromiley’s Historical Theology: An Introduction.

You will notice that these are all historical theology related. I continue to maintain, that without having a foundation in the classical sources (so a reified ad fontes or ‘back to the sources’), and without having a grasp of their general doctrinal frameworks and trajectories, that it will be nay impossible for genuinely Christian theological development to take place. I take this as a given just as we find this sort of sentiment implied by the Apostle Paul when he writes in Ephesians 4: “11 And He Himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers, 12 for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ,13 till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ; 14 that we should no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting, 15 but, speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into Him who is the head—Christ 
.” This is a basic or fundamentum reality for me as a Christian; I believe we stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before us, and we are given a theological imaginary to think from thence.

So, I commend these texts to you. They will open you up to the ‘sources’, and allow you to engage in constructive theological theology in ways, that outwith, will not be possible. We see the dangers of people who attempt to do theology without this requisite background; they end up engaging in thought that is unmoored from the foundations that Jesus himself has offered his church, with the intention of causing edification and growth into the grace and knowledge that he himself is.

Ironically, I am often thought of us as a “Barth blogger,” or a “Torrance blogger,” and I’m fine with that. But it should be known that this only reflects the tip of the ice-berg for me. Years ago, when I first started blogging (in 2005), I might have been known as a “Luther blogger, Calvin blogger, or Sibbes blogger,” respectively. Typically my blogging is driven by whatever I’m reading at the time (as so many of you know by now). But in general Barth and Torrance have come to dominate the types of posts I generate; pretty much, because I have adopted that ‘tradition’ (and it is a tradition, just as much as the Thomist or Bavinckian or Calvinian are interpretive traditions in their own right) as my interpretive tradition. But, again, all of that is chastened by the sources. I have not lost sight of those, nor have I become a progressive-modern-liberalesque theologian who sees the past as a naïve and a pre-critical time (even if it was pre-critical 
 which actually is where its value is); least not in the pejorative sense that these former theologians see it as. Ultimately I will follow the theologians who point me most to Jesus Christ, no matter what period I find them in. I might be critical of some of the metaphysics as they are received by many these days; the metaphysics of say the mediaeval periods etc. But I can also critically recognize that these theologians were doing the best they could with what they had materially and formally available to them. I can recognize that they had the same impulses I have, in the sense that they wanted to magnify Jesus for the church in the sort of edifying ways that Paul refers us to.

Pax Christi.

 

 

Framing What I Think a Christian Theologian’s Life is Characterized By

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Being a Christian theologian is a consequence of being an active participant in the triune life of God in Jesus Christ. In this post I want to explicate, by way of reflecting on the fly, what I think being a Christian theologian entails.

Frame One. At a very basic level I think every Christian is a theologian. In other words, when a person professes Christ as their Lord, they are saying that they are in a committed relationship with the God of the cosmos; and that by definition of commitment, they are going to live in a mode of life that is fulsome with a doxological (worshipful) orientation as that is driven by a growing knowledge in the grace of God in Christ. In this sense, de jure, every Christian is a theologian.

Frame Two. Given the aforementioned, a Christian, or a theologian, will be a person who lives in this doxological frame by obedience to the Father, by the Holy Spirit; just as we see Jesus doing, over and again. I think this aspect of being a theologian is often lost on the Christian. We often think of obedience to God as some sort of legalistic bondage that the Son has come to set us free from. But if in fact the works and persons of God are indivisible in both their processions and missions, then it follows, as the Christian finds their life in that life in Christ, that a life of obedience, or submission to the Father’s will, will indeed characterize the Christian’s life.

So, we now have implicated frame two by frame one, and vice versa. In other words, while the theologian’s life is oriented by worship and a growing in the grace and knowledge of God in Christ, therein; this will be characterized by a life of constant obedience and repentance as we seek to be transformed from glory to glory by the Spirit who is the LORD. As I alluded to previously, the way these things are patterned are from the life of the Father and the Son in eternal bliss and plenitude by the Holy Spirit. It is as the inner-life of God is made extra for us in Christ that God’s grace is actualized in such a way that creatures are allowed to enter the inner life in and through union with Christ (unio cum Christo), and in and from this ground in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ, the Christian, in participatio Christi (participation with Christ) advances in a ‘stratified knowledge of God’[1], as God’s anterior life becomes interior to ours by the Grace of the living Christ. As the Christian comes into this evangelical reality, they now have bases to think God from the center of God in Jesus Christ (cf. Jn 1.18); this is what in the tradition is identified as an exitus/reditus (extraficiation and return — God comes out to us in Christ, and returns us to God in the resurrected and ascended Christ). Here we come into beatific vision by faith as we have access to contemplate in the Holy of Holies and inner sanctum of what it means to have life in the mysterium trinitatis and the mysterium tremendum; what it means to be confronted with the God who just is, first for Himself in the perichoresis of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and then for us out of (extra) this life as He chose to be with us and not God without us in and through the mediatorial humanity of the Son, who is the Christ.

These represent some lineaments of what it means to be a Christian theologian, from my perspective. It is an activity that is grounded in the triune life, and then lived out in worshipful exaltation of the living God as we move and breathe in and from the obedience of the Son’s active and passive obedience for us; as He gives both of these for us in the Incarnation&Atonement. We recognize all of this as a life of Love; a life that has eternally known itself in Self-givenness One for the Other as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is the shape that the obedient life has; as a life of eternal love between the Father and the Son bidden and begotten by the Holy Spirit. And it is this life that the Christian lives in and from on a daily and moment by moment basis. This is where knowledge of God is advanced; as the praxis is a piece with the doxa, and both actualized and realized for us in the resurrection power of the Son of God in Christ. Thus, being a Christian theologian has a concrete and staurological (cross) shaped character to it, such that the Christian theologian is actively living out the Great Commission making disciples of the nations, baptizing them in the singular Name of the multiplied persons of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; who is the One God (de Deo Uno). The Christian theologian therefore is an actor in the drama of God as God is the author and finisher of our lives in Christ; viz. the Christian theologian lives out the good activities of God as those were primarily and poetically worked out for us in the life of Christ. The Christian theologian knows God as they live in this commission of God’s life for us in Jesus Christ; a commission that encompasses the far reaches of the cosmos, first starting in Jerusalem.

Again, these are just some lineaments and off the top bases I think ought to characterize what the Christian theologian’s life might entail; and from whence that entailment gains energy and breath.

 

[1] See Thomas F. Torrance.