Category Archives: Critiquing Classic Calvinism

The Arminians Versus the Calvinists: Human Freedom and Divine Sovereignty in Combine

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The battle of the Arminians and Calvinists continues on ad infinitum; indeed, in different expressions and levels of discourse. Nonetheless, the gruel continues unabated. Ironically, and historically, the Arminians, particularly, Arminius himself, weren’t outwith, but within the Reformed halo. As is commonly understood, Arminius was intent on engaging with the theological-anthropological conundrum of human freedom vis-à-vis God’s ostensible sovereignty (as the Calvinists were wont to press in their own stylized way). It wasn’t, of course, that Arminius was attempting to undercut the Calvinist notion that God is sovereign—God forbid it!—but instead, he was challenging the character and way of God’s sovereignty related to human freedom. Jaroslav Pelikan offers nice coverage on this:

The most controversial attempt at such an elucidation within the Reformed communion was the one associated with the names of Jacob Arminius and Simon Episcopius, which eventually challenged openly the central affirmations of the Calvinistic doctrine itself. Arminian acquired its own confessional status in the Remonstrance of 1610 and then, after the Synod of Dort, in the Remonstrant Confession of 1621/22. Reiterating and developing many of the objections to predestinarianism that had already been current during Calvin’s lifetime, the Arminian and Remonstrant protest focused on the problem of will: of the human will as responsible for conduct and therefore in some genuine sense free of “fatalistic necessity”; and of the divine will as addressed to all and therefore in some genuine sense universal, but also as free of sin and evil and free coercion, since such freedom was “the perfection of the [divine] will.” Calvin’s “fictitious fate of predestination” was “hostile to religion” because it managed to undercut both the free will of God and the free will of man. Against “the iron and fatalistic necessity of the Stoics, Manicheans, and Predestinarians,” as well as against the “blind chance” of the Epicureans, stood the biblical doctrine of “the providence of God in the world, which rules everything in a wise, holy and just manner.” The providence of God, which followed immediately upon creation and which extended also to the work of redemption, was universal in scope, pertaining to “this entire universe and especially to man,” as an expression of “the wisdom, justice, and equity of God.” These divine attributes of wisdom, justice, and equity, as disclosed in providence, meant that God was free from “any internal necessity of his own nature or of any external power of some other force”; therefore it was Arminian and Remonstrant doctrine, no less than it was Calvinist doctrine, that God did foreknow future contingents and that he was free “to dispose for his creatures whatever he wills,” death or life, command or prohibition.

It was likewise Remonstrant doctrine, no less than Calvinist, that the grace of God, defined as “undeserved and unmerited favor,” was, as the Remonstrance put it, “the beginning, the progress, and the completion of all good.” But that did not mean that grace was “irresistible.” The analogy, drawn by Augustine and after him by Calvin, between God’s call to faith and the summons to resurrection addressed by Christ, irresistibly, to a dead body, was fallacious. For “those whom God calls to faith, he calls seriously”; if it were impossible to resist the grace of God, his offer of “a reward for Christian virtue” and his threat of punishment for immorality would both be vain. On the other hand, the distinction between what God willed and what God permitted, which Calvin had dismissed as a “falsehood” and an “evasion,” was essential to prevent “the overthrow of all religion”: divine permission did not imply that “it is not possible for anything but disobedience to follow,” but rather that “man can be disobedient, yet only if he so wills.” Therefore God permitted evil not because he will it, but to leave man free. And, contrary to Calvin’s theory, it was similarly “with the permission of God and in accordance with his just judgment,” but by their own action, that the hearts of sinners were “hardened.” Hardening, also in the case of the Jews, was a divine “declaration,” not the initiative of a divine “action.”[1]

A rather succinct presentation of the primary theme[s] present between the Remonstrants and the Calvinists.

I would suggest there is a better way. It is unnecessary to place humanity and God and God and humanity into either the Arminian or Calvinist combine. All that is required to overcome such enmity is to think the relationship between God-humanity through the singular personalis (person) of Jesus Christ. Both God’s downward movement to humanity and humanity’s upward movement to God can be understood from within this miraculous nexus. When election, predestination, human freedom vis-à-vis Divine freedom/sovereignty, so on and so forth becomes the ambit by which such loci is imagined, the Gordian knot of inimical theofare, as that obtains between the “Arminians and Calvinists,” is once and for all cut through.

Pax mundi theologica obtenta est.

[1] Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine: Reformation of Church and Dogma (1300—1700), Volume 4 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1977), 233–34.

Augustine’s massa damnata

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Augustine’s massa damnata (humanity is a damned mass) only fits well when understood within the context of Christ’s assumptio carnis (assumption of flesh) as archetypal humanity (what it means to be human at the blueprint level) for all of humanity. And even then the mirifica commutatio (wonderful exchange) isn’t transactional but filial.

You Don’t Even Know What the Word Reformed Means!

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Years ago, I would write on Reformed identity frequently. I have mostly lost interest in that. But at points my interest is once again piqued. For some strange reason I continue to visit X (formerly known as Twitter), and in the environs my algorithm leads me to I often come across people debating the virtues, or deficits, of Calvinism and/or non-Calvinism (Arminianism etc.). The constant orienting premise of these exchanges is that Calvinism or Reformed theology just is the 5 Points (TUILIP), or just is Westminster styled federal (covenantal) theology; within what Richard Muller identifies as Christian Aristotelianism. But I think if you think this way that you shouldn’t be commenting on Reformed theology, one way or the other (whether you are a self-professing Reformed person or a non-Reformed person). If you believe that what I just mentioned above is absolutely reflective of the whole Reformed theological development, then why should anyone take you seriously on anything else you might say about said tradition? If you just believe that Reformed theology is a monolithic tradition without baskets of doctrinal complexes and variation within its reality as a theological tradition, then you have no business engaging in the banter that typically attends ‘your’ online and offline exchanges with reference to what you believe is representative of the Reformed faith.

I’m Reformed. But I don’t fit any of the categories you reduce the Reformed tradition into. There are even early Reformed expressions that don’t fit the categories you reduce the Reformed trad into. You can find those everywhere (regionally, during Reformed theology’s developments). Some people in an ad hoc way will assert that only ‘confessional Reformed theology’ is representative of what it means to be Reformed. Okay, which confessions must be affirmed, and who decides what those are? Should the Reformed confessions, regional statements that they were and remain, be received in something like the ‘Three Forms of Unity?’ Some think so. But why not just receive the various confessions per your church’s theological needs? This in fact was the initial motivation behind the development of the Reformed confessions; i.e., to meet the regional needs of this or that Reformed church or cluster of churches.

Furthermore, as we have illustrated with our books on Evangelical Calvinism, there are in fact other Reformed expressions beyond and even contemporaneous with (as far as development) what people take Reformed theology to be today. None of this was done in a corner. Anyone familiar with church history and historical theology ought to know that the Reformed tradition comes in a stereoscopic fling of doctrinal variation, emphases, and categories. For example, I am Reformed, but more so of a modern development. Clearly, I work within an after Barth after TF Torrance expression; even a Calvinian one. Just because someone from a Westminster styled Presbyterian church in the 21st century might claim that only they are part of the succession of the truly Reformed church doesn’t make that assertion so. Particularly because the very essence of the Reformed faith is to be a tradition always already reforming by the dictates of and engagement with Holy Scripture. The Reformed faith proper recognizes that its principled ground is the Word of God, indeed, in contact with its reality, the living Word, Jesus Christ. Because of this, principially, the Reformed faith, whilst coming with a particular character, is never a static but dynamic and organic Christian reality and expression of the faith.

I simply want to register, once again, that there are no gatekeepers for the Reformed expression of the Christian reality. There are certain boundaries, which surely include the Reformed confessions and catechisms, but with an understanding and reception of those such that they are actively subordinate to Scripture’s reality (and not just in word only). Further, as alluded to earlier, the Reformed tradition is an expansive expression which is entailed by the fact that in its history and development it has various eddies, expressions, and exemplars. Next time you think that you know what the word “Reformed” signifies, make sure you are humble enough to recognize that it might, and in fact does have a greater valent than what you probably think it does (this will of course vary from person to person, and their understanding of these things).

On Barth’s Christologically Conditioned Doctrine of Biblical Inerrancy

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Karl Barth is often derided by evangelicals and contemporary Reformed orthodox types for rejecting a doctrine of biblical inerrancy and its underlying fount in a doctrine of Divine-verbal inspiration. This reception of Barth is understandable insofar that Barth does in fact say that he rejects the modern development known as inerrancy. But what shouldn’t be taken from this is that Barth somehow is holding hands with the Teutonic higher critics of the Bible; he is not! In fact, Barth is desirous, in a sense, of rescuing the Bible from the fires of Mordor as those are stoked by the ‘Bible critics.’ I would contend that it can be argued that Barth has a higher view of Scripture, formally, than even those who claim to affirm a doctrine of biblical inerrancy and its attendant understanding of Divine inspiration.

Barth firmly believes that the Post Reformed orthodox theologians were intent on securing the veracity and infallibility of Holy Scripture; this can be seen, as Barth underscores, the ‘Protestant Scripture Principle,’ which became the formal principle of the Reformed reformational theology. Barth was of the mind that the early Reformed theologians were eager in safeguarding the Bible from her early critics within early modernity (as that was fomenting in the 16th and 17th centuries, respectively). But just as the Fundamentalists of the 20th century built a theology upon their reaction to the higher critics of the 19th century, thus allowing the higher critics to set the agenda and categories and questions that “needed to be responded to,” similarly, I would argue that Barth maintained that the earlier and middle Reformed theologians allowed the early and developing rationalists of the time to set the agenda and categories and questions that ostensibly needed to be responded to. As such, in Barth’s mind, even those purportedly committed to the Protestant Scripture Principle, its defenders no less, so allowed their categories to be sublimated by their counterparts, that they ended up denuding the category of revelation itself vis-à-vis Holy Scripture, such that Holy Scripture lost its “Holy” character by being relegated to the level of just another profane book.

Barth writes,

We must not forget that the transition from biblical to biblicist thought does involve the transition to a rationalism—supranaturalistic thought it is in content. Therefore the relationship of theology to the truths of revelation which it has taken from the Bible is no longer the relationship to an authority which superior to man. It has fundamentally the same assurance and control with regard to them as man as a rational creature has in regard to himself, his experience, his thinking and therefore his world, believing that he is the master of himself as subject and therefore of his objects, or of his own relation to them.

As is well known the supreme achievement of the older Protestant orthodoxy was the doctrine of the verbal inspiration of Holy Scripture as developed in the later 17th century and given confessional status in the Helvetic Formula of Concord in 1675. There can be no doubt, however, that this was not merely worked out as a bulwark against a growing rationalism, but that it was itself, not an expression of an over-developed faith of revelation, but a product of typical rationalistic thinking—the attempt to replace faith and indirect knowledge by direct knowledge, to assure oneself of revelation in such a way that it was divorced from the living Word of the living God as attested in Scripture, pin-pointing it, making it readily apprehensible as though it were an object of secular experience, and therefore divesting it in fact of its character as revelation.

The irremediable danger of consulting Holy Scripture apart from the centre, and in such a way that the question of Jesus Christ ceases to be the controlling and comprehensive question and simply becomes on amongst others, consists primarily in the fact that (even presupposing a strict and exclusive Scripture principle) Scripture is thought of and used as though the message of revelation and the Word of God could be extracted from it in the same way as the message of other truth or reality can be extracted from other sources of knowledge, at any rate where it is not presumably speaking of Jesus Christ. But if Scripture is read in this way, the Scripture principle will not stand very long. Secretly the book of revelation is being treated and read like other books; and the question cannot long be denied whether the message we gather from it cannot be gathered from other books either by way of addition or even basically; whether the truths of revelation in the Bible are not of a series with all kinds of other truths; whether in them we do no simply have concretions of what is revealed concerning God and His will to all other men as such and by nature, of themselves, by the dictate of their reason? If Jesus Christ is seen to be the whole of Scripture, the one truth of revelation, this question cannot even be put, let alone given a positive answer. There is no other book which witnesses to Jesus Christ apart from Holy Scripture. This decides the fact that only in Holy Scripture do we have to do with the one and the whole Word and revelation of God. But if we do not see this, it is inevitable that the question of other sources of revelation should be put, and that sooner or later it should be given a positive answer.[1]

Barth is attempting to correct what he sees as a misstep made early on by the scholastics Reformed in their attempt to protect and elevate Holy Scripture; and this, based upon what he takes to be the wrong foundations. As clearly indicated by Barth’s above passage he believes that it is only when Holy Scripture is grounded in and framed by its reality in Jesus Christ that it can maintain its elevated and ‘Holy’ status as the written Word of God for humanity, for the church. Barth’s concern is always to unhitch the holiness of God from our own fallen and abstract speculations, and instead to ground them in the holy and elevated revelation of God’s triune life for the world in the second person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ. His critique of the normal receptions and understandings of the scholastics Reformed up to and including contemporary Reformed and evangelical theology cuts across this whole swath.

Conversely, Barth isn’t out to destroy the veracity or authority of Holy Scripture. Au contraire, he is seeking to provide a truly evangelical basis and theory of revelation for Scripture’s elevated status as the place where its gladhands are securely connected to its reality in the big-Hand of the Father as that is extended to us in the pierced hands of Jesus Christ. I think Barth might, at times, overextend himself when he refers to biblical inerrancy (see his Göttingen Dogmatics and Evangelical Theology: An Introduction), and come off sounding like he rejects the absolute veracity and holiness of the Bible. But even in the short passage we just read from him, it ought to become immediately apparent that this was not Barth’s intention whatsoever. In fact, if Barth’s critique is sound, and I think it is, it is the ostensible stalwarts of a biblical inerrancy and verbal inspiration, the contemporary Reformed and evangelicals among us, who unwittingly lower Holy Scripture’s provenance into the wastelands of the rationalists (Socinians) and higher biblical critics. Barth offers an alternative theory of revelation, inclusive of biblical revelation, particularly as he articulates that in his threefold form of the Word of God (and please understand, dear reader, that the scholastics Reformed first developed what has been identified as a fourfold form of the Word of God—so the heuristic is not a novelty developed by Barth, per se). Give him a fair hearing, and not a distorted one based upon his antagonists. Barth has a higher view of Scripture, based upon his christologically conditioned theory of revelation, than do, ironically, his critics on this very subject.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 §60 [368-69] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 11.

The Instrumentalization of the Christ//God’s Being Predicated

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I have left some context out of the following, but based on what you have read from me thus far (on the blog in general and over the years etc.), how would you translate my rather technical phraseology? Maybe you don’t think it makes sense. If so, where does it fail in regard to its theological premises and mutually implicating ideas? (I wrote this as a quick off the top thought on X and Facebook)

What folks don’t realize it seems, even at higher levels, is that when considering the decretal system and God, when it comes to the incarnation, Christ is understood in purely instrumentalist terms; thus making Him the organon of salvation, but not the person (the Theanthropos) of salvation. In other words, the person of Christ (who is the eternal Logos) is so wrested from the work of Christ, in the decretal schemata, that the Christ merely becomes a token and conduit of God’s work; thus, making God a predicate of creation (if in fact the attempt is made to still see Jesus’ person as eternally Divine).

The Goliath god of the Philosophers Versus the Father God of the Son

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. . . It is not a loud and stern and foreign thing, but the quiet and gentle and intimate awakening of children in the Father’s house to life in that house. That is how God exercises authority. All divine authority has ultimately and basically this character. At its heart all God’s ruling and ordering and demanding is like this. But it is in the direction given and revealed in Jesus Christ that the character of divine authority and lordship is unmistakably perceived.[1]

This follows from knowing God first as Father of the Son mediated through the Son by the Holy Spirit. And this is to the point and heart of an Evangelical Calvinism Athanasian Reformed mode of theological and Christian existence. The Son, the eternal Logos conditions the way we approach the Father, just as the Son has eternally indwelt the bosom of the Father. There is no discursive routing here and there on a way up to God to be taken. There is only the Son descended (exitus) to the point of death the death of the cross, and new humanity ascended (reditus) on the healing wings of the Holy Spirit as He in Christ takes us to the glory the Son has always already shared eternally with the Father. Indeed, it is in this oikonomia (economy) that God has freely chosen to make Himself known to and for the world, in the face of Jesus Christ. God’s exousia (authority) is not an authority of an abstract monad back yonder in the ethereal gases of the philosophers; such that He is some type of Goliath God. Nein. God’s authority, His sovereignty, His power is that of a gentle father with his children; it is a filial familial authority.

This is the interminable perduring seemingly unquenchable battle of the God of Jerusalem versus the God of Athens. God is Father of the Son, as Athanasius has intoned, or he is simply an abstraction plastered onto the God of the Bible; as if some type of graffiti that would seek to draw attention to its own self-projected beauty rather than the beauty of God’s manger and cross in Christ. Choose you this day who you will serve.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 §58 [100] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 97.

On A Critique of the Pactum Salutis and its Inherent Social [subordinationist] Trinitarianism

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Karl Barth operated with his own reformulated Christologically conditioned Covenantal theology. For Him there is one covenant (of grace), just as sure as there are two covenants, if not three (covenant of works, covenant of grace, pactum salutis i.e., covenant of redemption) that the Federal or classically covenantal theologians such as Cocceius, Ursinus, Olevianus, Bullinger et al. articulated. Barth was a strident critic of Federal or classical Covenantal theology, insofar that he detected a primacy of the Law as the antecedent ground upon which the conditions of the covenant of grace are ultimately fulfilled in the coming of Christ for the elect. That is to say, when Christ comes, as the decree of God prescribes, according to Federal theology, Jesus actively obeys all of the commands of the covenant of works (Law) thereby fulfilling the conditions required for a full justification, again, for the elect, to obtain. This fulfillment, per the federal structure, as decretally determined by God before the foundations of the world (e.g., decretum absolutum), is what the “Feds” identify as the covenant of grace. And within this schema, many of the federalists, also place what is often referred to as the pactum salutis (pact or contract of salvation), into the mix of the economic outworking of the covenant of works/grace within the type of Heilsgeschichte (‘salvation history’) they envision.

Conversely, we have a theological incoherency; or so I will suggest, and Barth will identify in the passage I share from him shortly. Ultimately, the incoherency present within the schema presented by Federal theology affects a proper doctrine of God. What I will suggest, after Barth’s passage is shared, and in concert with his critique of the pactum salutis, is that Federal theology, inadvertently, suffers from a subordinationist, even an eternal functional subordination of the Son (EFS), insofar that the Son is understood to be a distinct center of conscious, indeed, organ of God in obediently carrying out the decree of God (and a decree that is abstract and decoupled from the triune personage of the Monarchia [‘Godhead’]. Here is what Barth has to communicate with reference to the errancy of the Pactum:

[5] The riddle posed by the older Federal theology at this its strongest point appears to be insoluble. But perhaps we shall find the solution if we examine rather more closely how it understood the eternal basis of the covenant of grace. As we have seen, it was taken to consist in an intertrinitarian decision, in a freely accepted but legally binding mutual obligation between God the Father and God the Son. Now there are three doubtful features in this conception.

For God to be gracious to sinful man, was there any need of a special decree to establish the unity of the righteousness and mercy of God in relation to man, of a special intertrinitarian arrangement and contract which can be distinguished from the being of God? If there was need of such a decree, then the question arises at once of a form of the will of God in which this arrangement has not yet been made and is not yet valid. We have to reckon with the existence of a God who is righteous in abstracto and not free to be gracious from the very first, who has to bind to the fulfilment of His promise the fulfilment of certain conditions by man, and punish their non-fulfilment. It is only with the conclusion of this contract with Himself that He ceases to be a righteous God in abstracto and becomes the God who in His righteousness is also merciful and therefore able to exercise grace. In this case it is not impossible or illegitimate to believe that properly, in some inner depth of His being behind the covenant of grace, He might not be able to do this. It is only on the historical level that the theologoumena of the foedus naturae or operum [covenant of nature or works] can be explained by the compact of the Federal theology with contemporary humanism. In fact it derives from anxiety lest there might be an essence in God in which, in spite of that contract, His righteousness and His mercy are secretly and at bottom two separate things. And this anxiety derives from the fact that the thought of that intertrinitarian contract obviously cannot have any binding and therefore consoling and assuring force. This anxiety and therefore this proposition of a covenant of works could obviously never have arisen if there had been a loyal hearing of the Gospel and a strict looking to Jesus Christ as the full and final revelation of the being of God. In the eternal decree of God revealed in Jesus Christ the being of God would have been seen as righteous mercy and merciful righteousness from the very first. It would have been quite impossible therefore to conceive of any special plan of a God who is righteous in abstracto, and the whole idea of an original covenant of works would have fallen to the ground.[1]

Briefly, points of response. Firstly, Barth argues: there is no point in constructing a covenant of works to begin with. He argues that this ultimately is really a matter of adding a hermeneutical exemplum where God’s Self-revelation, attested to in Holy Scripture, never prescribed the need for one; at least not beyond what the text of Scripture itself is premised upon in regard to its reality in Jesus Christ. If our first encounter with God in Christ is Genesis 1:1, “in the beginning God created,” then it becomes artificial to construct a latterly construed beginning point with God that is based upon an ad hoc construct wherein God first relates to us on some aspect of Law (e.g., covenant of works). Secondly, for Barth, to posit this type of negative or abstract starting point for a God-human relationship, ends up relying on the speculative machinations of the philosophers and theologians rather than the positive affections provided for by God first encountering us in the face of Jesus Christ (in the grace of creation by God’s Word cf. John 1:1). Thirdly, for Barth, when this type of competitive relationship between God and humanity, based on an abstract notion of Law, is introduced into the eternal life of God, we end up with two distinct concepts of righteousness within the Godhead; i.e., wherein the Son, subordinately, submits whatever His sense of righteousness might be to that of the Father’s sense of righteousness. This is where I would argue the pactum salutis inherently lends itself to a social trinitarianism of the type where the Son can be understood as eternally subordinate to the Father. Fourthly, as inferred from Barth’s reasoning, we end up with a ’God behind the back of the covenantal schema’ in Federal theology, which entails the notion that we can never be quite sure if His ostensible revealed will is eternally in correspondence with His eternal or hidden will insofar there is no necessary relationship between His eternal and triune person and His work in salvation in the lineaments of a historical history.

Alternatively, and rightly, Barth simply scrubs the whole framework posited by a federal theology in favor of building his covenantal schema on the direct and immediate Self-revelation of God; indeed, without additions. Barth’s approach, I would argue, fits Occam’s Razor much better than Federal theology does, insofar that Barth doesn’t need to add unnecessary accretions to what God has already and intelligibly revealed in regard to the Gospel. That is, that rather than constructing a salvation-framework that adds more to the Gospel understanding, ostensibly, that Barth is biblically comfortable with working from the person and work of God in Christ as if the whole revelation of God without adumbration. When accretions are added, we end up with the heterodox and heretical liminalities that Barth has correctly highlighted for us in his critique of the pactum salutis in particular, and Federal theology in general. In other words, for Barth (and TFT and John the theologian): ‘when we see Jesus we see the Father’ without hesitation.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 §57 [065] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 61–2.

The ‘Father-Son’ Theory of the Atonement V PSA as the Frame

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Penal Substitution Atonement (PSA) theory has been in the news again lately (online/social media). As an Evangelical Calvinist (see V1&V2 of our Evangelical Calvinism books, and my articles-mini-essays on the topic) I have pressed what TF Torrance refers to as the ‘ontological theory of the atonement.’ Many evangelicals and Reformed folks think that PSA in fact is the Gospel simplicter. And so, to deny PSA would be to deny the Gospel itself. But as I have demonstrated over and again at the blog, the background to PSA theory isn’t as prima facie biblical as its proponents make it sound. The ‘theological’ framework that fomented what we think of as PSA today is largely rooted in the Federal (Covenantal) theology of the early Reformed theologians. It has humanity placed into a relationship with God that is necessarily framed by a forensic premise (i.e., the covenant of works). This forensic premise, or covenant of works, according to Federal theology, is ultimately fulfilled for the elect of God, when Jesus comes and meets the conditions of the covenant of works (that Adam and Eve) broke, thus restoring the legal connection to God that heretofore had been lost to humanity since after Eden. And it is this Federal (Covenantal) relationship that is given metaphysical orientation by the scholasticism Reformed commitment to what Richard Muller identifies as a Christian Aristotelianism. Suffice it to say, in nuce, PSA represents a theory of the atonement wherein humanity is genetically related to God based on a metaphysics of a Divine-Law-World relation; indeed, which requires that in order for fallen humanity, and the elect therein (think decretum absolutum ‘absolute decree of election-reprobation’), to be justified by God, that the Son of Man must become man, die on the cross, extinguishing the wrath of God, paying the legal penalty for sin, and allowing the elect humanity to come into a right and legal standing relationship with the triune God; particularly, the Father (whom the PSA proponents emphasize as the ‘Law-giver,’ per their juridical system).

Alternatively to that, one of the Fathers of us Evangelical Calvinists, John McLeod Campbell, a Scottish theologian of the 19th century, kicked back against the premise of the PSA position vis-à-vis the nature of the atonement, and against the Westminster theology that had codified the theological framework that funds the PSA position, particularly as that was being pushed in his context in the Church of Scotland (before he was excommunicated), as he gives us re-framing of atonement theory where the relationship between God and humanity ought to be framed first as thinking of God as Father rather than Law-giver. It was this re-framing that ended up getting Campbell kicked out of his beloved Church of Scotland, and which led him to minister elsewhere, as an independent of sorts. When you see what his view was, in a nutshell, as we will visit that now, as George Tuttle recounts that for us, you might be shocked to think that this would have the type of doctrinal gravitas required to get someone officially banned from their own denominational and local church. Tuttle writes of Campbell’s framing on the atonement:

Herein lies one of Campbell’s major objections to founding a view of atonement on the concept of justice —whether distributive or rectoral. Both systems visualize what he calls purely legal atonements, that is atonements, the whole character of which is determined by our relation to divine law. The real problem of atonement, however, is not merely to discover a way in which we may stand reconciled to God as a law-giver. The question contemplated in scripture and to which the Gospel is an answer is not how we can be pardoned and receive mercy, but how it could come to pass that the estranged can be reconciled. God’s intention is, as St. Paul declared, ‘to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.’ (Gal. 4:5). The relation between a judge or a governor and the accused subjects is vastly different from that of a parent to erring children. To distinguish the former from the latter is to move from an artificial atmosphere of impersonal display of benevolence to a warm and living relationship of love, Campbell therefore could not rest in any conception of the atonement which involved, as he says, ‘the substitution of a legal standing for a filial standing as the gift of God to men in Christ.’ This is not to say that Campbell denies the truth of a legal standing any more than he denies the inexorable demands of divine justice. Just as justice is brought with the concept of God as love, so the validity of a legal standing is brought within that of a loving relationship. Justice has its ultimate source in the love of God. When the loving God is honoured, justice is honoured also.

                The atonement is thus revealed retrospectively as God’s way of putting right the past, and prospectively as introducing us to a life marked by a filial relation to God eternally. Both are celebrated by believers, both must be included in their thought concerning the nature of the atonement.[1]

One might think this ought to be unremarkable. And yet in the face of meddling with the Westminster God of consensus, the Aristotelian-formed God who relates to the world through a metaphysic of a decree of law (e.g., covenant of works etc.); who must remain the ‘unmoved mover’ of monadic adoration; it is this very meddling, even if all the theologian is doing is attempting to shift the mind’s eye to the fact that God is first Father of the Son before He is ever a Law-giver/Creator, that will get you canned like Campbell was.

Some might imagine that the Campbell thesis was a minority report. In his particular environ it was at his time. But outside of his particular ecclesial and geographical environ (and even amongst it, among some other key theologians and pastors like himself), his view became a dominate one. Even overcoming many of the places and people who were initially against his alternative and kerygmatic reading of Holy Scripture. Even so, today, by the retrieval of many in the evangelical and Reformed sphere, we are only getting the Westminsterian Report. This simply wasn’t the case, even historically (which I have demonstrated elsewhere).

In the end what matters, though, isn’t whether this or that doctrinal position was the majority or minority report in the history. What matters for the Protestant Christian, is whether or not a position corresponds more proximate with the witness of Scripture. I would contend, and have done so vociferously over the years, that the Campbellian theory of the ‘Father-Son-Atonement’ framing is indeed the most biblically correlative and theologically resplendent view presented. If you don’t to hold it: repent!

[1] George M. Tuttle, So Rich a Soil: John McLeod Campbell On Christian Atonement (Edinburgh: Handsel Press, 1986), 82-3.

‘The Faith of Christ’ in Contradiction to the gods of the Metaphysicians

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What hath Jerusalem to do with Athens? A question from the days of Tertullian, and now down through the centuries. I would vociferously argue that Jerusalem must condition Athens in such a way that Athens becomes nothing more than a pretext to be used by the textuality of God’s life Self-revealed for the church and world in Jesus Christ. This question of “faith and reason” has been given many iterations and treatments throughout the halls of history, whether that be from someone as boisterous as Martin Luther, or someone as methodologically skeptical as Rene Descartes. Indeed, the reformational scholastics themselves, and their progeny, even into the repristinate of today, ostensibly maintain that the metaphysics of the classical Greek philosophers is in fact univocal towards thinking and speaking the Christian God.

I protest, and so does Eberhard Jüngel:

The faith which interposes such questions is a disturbance. But should not faith be seen as a disturber of the metaphysical thought of God, as even its greatest menace? Was it not necessary that a study of religion within the boundaries of pure reason would have to come to the aid of the metaphysical concept of God in order to reduce the all too human discourse about a God who reveals himself in history to a rational level? Did not faith have to be subordinated to that morality which was established without faith, if it were not to become irrational in and of itself and thus be dead?

But then faith will reply with the question whether it really is such a rational capacity that a theoretical or practical use of reason, separate from the event of faith, can prescribe reason’s function. What becomes of God when an abstract “I think” or an abstract “thou shalt” sets the context from the outset within which one then may and must decide what merits being called God? Although the intention to maintain the strictest possible distinction between God and man cannot be supported too strongly by theology, does not this approach lead to a result which is totally opposed to that intention? And finally, if God has been established as the securing factor for man, has not then the decision been already made that from now on the securing must become the god of man? Is not ultimately the categorical imperative the grand attempt to establish the morally understood security of the human race as its highest good? If “nothing can possibly be conceived in the world, or even out of it, which can be called good without qualification, except a good will,” then does not the good will which secures the welfare of the human race become the god of man?[1]

Prior to the above passage Juengal has been discussing how certainty and non-certainty might work within a theological and philosophical frame vis-à-vis God. Without getting into the details, for our purposes, the questions Juengal puts to the God constructed from classical and modern metaphysical premises are sufficient. Sufficient, for drawing attention to the fact that faith itself, if indeed it has to do with a genuine knowledge of the genuine and triune God of the Christians, has its starting point insofar as God starts with us first; that is, rather than us starting with God first. Is Christian faith intended to provide a provision of self-security in a seemingly insecure world for its own sake (something like a ‘god-of-the-gaps’)? Or is Christian faith purely focused upon knowledge of God that is focused on God as God, as God is in Himself as the reality who indeed is to be worshipped simply because He is, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? Well of course, the Christian should want to say the latter rather than the former. But methodologically so much of Christian theology, one way or the other, no matter how much piety and piousness is on display, has given way to thinking God only after God has first been thought by the profane mind. Indeed, the mind that is ultimately seeking a huge scratch for the itch of uncertainties, for the chaos that this world presents each and everyone of us with upon our respective arrivals on planet earth.

I think the moral here is that God’s Self-revelation is categorically distinct, in a sui generis type of way, from the metaphysics. That is, knowledge of God for the Christian entails a vulnerability. But the vulnerability isn’t about assuaging our own anxieties about the ostensible disorder of the world, and our place in it. The vulnerability is that we don’t have the capacity to disentangle ourselves from the chaos of this world order; no matter what type of metaphysical structures we might build in that very attempt. The genuine vulnerability we have is that without being rightly positioned within the order that God has set about, we indeed will seek to create our own veritable towers of Babel; reaching up to a certainty of reality that ultimately has to do with ensuring a salvation for ourselves rather than being reliant upon the One who can actually provide us with a true and rightly ordered salvation, as that obtains in Godself for us in Jesus Christ. And it is this, this faith of Christ, that confronts the metaphysically construed gods, who seek a faith built upon its own internal premises, rather than the alien premises of faith provided for, truly, by the living God for us in Jesus Christ.

[1] Eberhard Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, trans. by Darrell L. Guder (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf&Stock [reprint], 1983), 195–96.

Contra the Tradition Produced God of Natural Theology

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Natural theology separates God from his Word, and in the Reformed context this separation requires that another mechanism be constructed in order for God to enact relationship with the world; i.e. through the 𝑑𝑒𝑐𝑟𝑒𝑡𝑢𝑚 𝑎𝑏𝑠𝑜𝑙𝑢𝑡𝑢𝑚, or through a determining decretal system that inter-links God’s power and being to the rest of the world all along keeping God untouched by the world or the creatures who inhabit it (all in an attempt to sustain the philosophically developed loci known as simplicity, immutability, impassibility, infinity, etc.). The problem, if not recognizable, is that in this ‘classical’ system of theology proper God is taken captive by a set of conditions and categories that have nothing to do with God encountering us in his Word, Jesus Christ. How could it?! If the God produced by natural theology is necessarily uncoupled from his Word for us, the Son, Jesus Christ then how can we ever really say that we have encountered the living God? This is a serious dilemma. Why would I entrust my eternal well-being to a God that history or tradition has produced; wouldn’t this mean that I am really entrusting myself to the producers of the history and the tradition instead?