Category Archives: Critiquing Classic Calvinism

Unlimited Atonement in a Reformed Theology as Told by James Torrance and John McLeod Campbell

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James B. Torrance, brother of Thomas F. Torrance, offers a very nice and concise synopsis of the entailments of what me and Myk Habets (along with our various authors) have identified as an Evangelical Calvinism. JBT’s synopsis comes as he wrote the foreword for a book titled, So Rich a Soil: John McLeod Campbell on Christian Atonement by George M. Tuttle. Here, JBT is explicitly referring to the themes of John McLeod Campbell’s theology, particularly as that developed as an alternative to the juridically/forensically framed understanding of the Calvinism that we find in Federal (Covenantal) theology; indeed, as that gets codified in the Westminster Confession of Faith, among other confessions and catechisms. As JBT notes, Campbell’s theology, as an alternative iteration of Reformed theology, indeed, a Scottish Theology, challenges the assumption that God primarily relates to humanity through a covenant of works, rather than a relation based on triune love, thus leading to an ostensible Christian spirituality that leaves the would-be saint always wondering about their standing before the Lawgiving God. With further pinpointed clarity, JBT, also shines a light on the implications of thinking of God’s relation to humanity through a Love-giving God, as that is resplendent in Campbell’s theology, and how that rightly alters the way the seeking person might approach God; indeed, as an adopted child in the loving and caring arms of the Father of Life who freely gave His life for the world, in His dearly beloved Son, Jesus Christ. If you are looking for an alternative theology, Reformed even, that first sees God as Father, before Creator and Lawgiver, then what you will find in an Evangelical Calvinism might be just what you have been longing for.

Here is JB Torrance at some length:

A few years ago, while teaching for an academic year in the Vancouver School of Theology, I came across Dr. Tuttle’s doctoral dissertation in the library of the University of British Columbia, on ‘The Place of John McLeod Campbell in British Thought Covering the Atonement,’ and was so impressed by it that I encouraged him to have it published. McLeod Campbell was a remarkable Scottish theologian – thought by many to Scotland’s greatest – whose theology was hammered out on the anvil of his pastoral experience. Here was an invaluable study, not only of McLeod Campbell’s theology of atonement, but also of his influence on subsequent thought, not least on nineteenth century Anglican theology. Now Dr. Tuttle, from his own rich experience as a pastor and teacher in the training of men and women for the Christian ministry, has written this splendid study showing how McLeod Campbell’s theology is such fertile soil and so relevant for us today.

                As a young minister in Row in Dunbartonshire, Campbell was aware of a strong ‘legalistic strain’ in the religion of Scotland, coupled with an introspective lack of joy and assurance which he believed derived from the high Calvinism of his day, with its doctrine of a ‘limited atonement,’ that Christ did not die for all but only for an elect number. Generations of Scots had been taught to ‘examine themselves’ for ‘evidences’ of election. But this had produced an inward looking, too often guilt-ridden, attitude which contrasted so sharply with the joyful triumphant faith and assurance of the New Testament church. So he tells us he made it his early concern to give to his people ‘a ground for rejoicing in God’ by directing their minds away from themselves to the love of God the Father is revealed in the whole life of Christ, and supremely on the Cross.

                He soon came to see that our answer to the question of the extent of the atonement depends on our view of the nature of the atonement. The doctrine of a limited atonement, in the federal Calvinist tradition, especially taught by John Owen, the English Puritan, and Jonathan Edwards in North America, flowed from two convictions about the nature of God. The first that justice is the essential attribute of God, but the love of God is arbitrary, seen in his will to elect some individuals and send Christ to die for them. John Owen had taught that love is not God’s nature, but his will. This, Campbell saw, was not true to the New Testament and the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, that God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is Love in his innermost Being, and has created us and redeemed us in love and for love – for ‘sonship.’ With the ancient fathers, in their negation of Sabellianism, he saw that what God is towards the world in love, in creation and redemption, he is in his eternal nature, as the Triune God.

                The second was that in the federal (covenant) scheme, law is thus prior to grace. God is related to all humankind by ‘the covenant of works (law)’ and only to some by ‘the covenant of grace’ in redemption. Hence atonement was construed in terms of the view that God would only be gracious if law was satisfied and sin punished, that is, by Christ fulfilling for the elect the conditions of the covenant of works (law). McLeod Campbell saw that this inverted the Biblical order, that grace is prior to law, that ‘the filial is prior to the judicial.’ Both creation and redemption flow from grace, and law is ‘God’s heart coming out in the form of law.’ Law is the gift of grace, reveals our need of grace and leads to grace. The Incarnation and the Atonement, which must be held together, are the Father’s act of sending his Son to fulfill for humankind the filial and judicial purposes of creation. Atonement is God’s act of grace in which he takes to himself for us his own divine judgments ‘in order that we might receive the adoption of sons.’ The filial purposes of creation and incarnation are secured by atonement. Hence atonement must be interpreted in terms of both the Trinity and the Incarnation, ‘retrospectively’ removing condemnation on past sin and ‘prospectively’ leading to sonship.

                In our own day, theologians like Barth, Rahner, Moltmann, Jüngel and von Balthasar have seen how Western theology has too often operated with concepts of God which owe more to Aristotle and the Stoic Lawgiver, than the New Testament, and has consequently drifted away from seeing the centrality of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. McLeod Campbell discerned this long ago, and saw its implication, both for the pastoral ministry and for our understanding of the doctrine of God, that the sufferings of Christ the Son on the Cross reveal the suffering Love of the Father. ‘He who has seen me, has seen the Father.’

                Dr. Tuttle’s book is profoundly relevant for the contemporary situation both theologically and pastorally in its concern to show that the Gospel is the Good News of God coming to restore to us our lost humanity, ‘to bring many sons to glory’ – and therefore good news for every creature.

James Torrance[1]

There isn’t much to add to this. Only that, to my chagrin, as I have been sitting with this above reality since around 2002, and more pointedly since in and around 2007, when I first started reading TF Torrance et al., becoming aware of this development within a Reformed theology, I can really only continue to shake my head. I see so many young and old alike continuously running full speed ahead into a Reformed theology that is indeed shaped by the juridical/legal parameters that Campbell, JBT, TFT, Karl Barth et al., in their own respective ways, have presciently offered a more biblically based alternative to. Whether this be at the scholarly level or popular level, no matter, theologians and laymen/women, continue to harp and joust back in forth; as if the Calvinist/non-Calvinist binary, black and white as it apparently is, in regard to sides, is the only way through this theological malaise. I continue to see the masses in evangelical and Protestant christianities hem and haw, as if they have found the golden scepter of theological truth; and this within, again, their respective binary of Calvinism/non-Calvinism—to boot, with all the theological imagination of a dodo bird (sorry, too harsh? . . .). May the Lord give more eyes to see and ears to hear that in fact God is Father of the Son first, before He is ever Creator. With this realization there is a theological hope that outstrips much of the pablum being fed to the people today. Kyrie eleison

[1] George M. Tuttle, So Rich a Soil: John McLeod Campbell on Christian Atonement (Edinburgh, The Handsel Press, 1986), 6–7.

Just Be a Philosopher Already: On Being a Thomistic Theologian

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For me I only have the capacity to follow a Dogmatic or Systematic theology insofar that I believe it is sticking to the theo-logic inherent to the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. This is what keeps it Biblical. This is what keeps it from adulterating and going beyond the 𝑡𝑒𝑥𝑡; that is, by going to its inner and upward reality in the Godman (Theanthropos), Jesus Christ. In other words, speculative theologies, ones that reason from the being of humanity to the being of God; ones that reason discursively about nature vis-à-vis God, as if nature holds vestiges of God; are balderdash to me! If that is all I had to go with theologically I would fully walk away from the theological endeavor. The Biblical witness, the Biblical attestation to its triune reality in the God revealed (Deus revelatus), can be the only line of theological reasoning the Christian can really take. Not in assertion, as if just claiming loudly, over and over again, “that we follow the Scripture Principle,” but in concrete fact; i.e., that Scripture indeed is the only source and ground of the theological engagement.

These theologians constantly touting Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle as the bee’s-knees of theological performance might as well do it right. They might as well become professional philosophers of religion, and at least learn how to think philosophically in nuanced and correct ways if they are going to elevate a philosopher-king as their theologian, rather than the actual Biblical witness. Instead, they lazily lay claim to the whole of church history, as if the Patristics, for example, were simply doing what Thomas Aquinas was doing with Aristotle in mediaeval times. Indeed, they sublate their bad philosophical takes as theology takes, as if they are ultimately takes provided for by Biblical exegesis.

John MacArthur, Near Death and the Parousia of Christ

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Longtime pastor and seminary Dean, John MacArthur, is currently on his way to be with the Lord. It was announced at his church, Grace Community Church, in Sun Valley, CA, that JMac has come down with a pneumonia that he isn’t expected to survive (like only days left). This is sad news, but also points-up, once again, that this life truly is but a vapor. May we hold his family and close friends up in prayer at this time.

Relatedly, I have been a longtime critic of JMac’s, online in particular. I started out my blogging career in 2005 bantering back and forth with JMac’s editor, executive director of Grace to You radio ministry, Phil Johnson, at his personal and then team blog, Pyromaniacs. My critique of JMac’s theology, like many’s, has to do with what he famously identified as Lordship Salvation in his book The Gospel According to Jesus. In reduction, so-called ‘Lordship Salvation,’ really, is just a Baptistic form of 5 Point Calvinist soteriology. For MacArthur’s version though, he presented this schema with a pointed emphasis on perseverance of the saints (the “P”). In other words, JMac’s soteriology presses the notion of “good works” in salvation as the proof of salvation in very Puritanical types of ways. To the point, I have argued, that instead of causing the person to be assured of their salvation before God in Christ, they are constantly ‘thrown back upon themselves’ (to riff, TF Torrance’s phrase) as the source and ground of knowledge of their salvation. As far as a Christian spirituality goes, this is terrible doctrine, which causes the person, ironically, to ‘turn to the subject,’ to the point that ultimately, if sensitive to such introspection (many aren’t), a person can only despair and hope that they are indeed one of the elect for whom Christ died. But when the basis of the person’s assurance of salvation is their own good works (whatever those are, and however that is supposed to look), the person is really just thrown into the winds of a black abyss.

The aforementioned was the nub of what I have been critical of with reference to JMac’s soteriology. It is no small matter, and I have made many arguments and critiques against it; both directly, and more generally, as I have critiqued its more critical grounds as found in Federal (Covenantal) theology. Indeed, JMac is not a Covenantal theology proponent, but the mercantilist/transactional nature of the doctrine of salvation he propounds, finds its historic rootage within the broader framework provided for its themes, within Federal theology. In fact, I wrote a whole book chapter on these matters, which you can read via Google Books, here.

This has been part of my long connection with the ministry of John MacArthur. Beyond that, I grew up in Southern California (LA county), where JMac’s presence is rather ubiquitous in the evangelical environs therein. It has been a critical relationship for sure. Even so, JMac is representative of a nearly bygone era of evangelical church ministry and ministers that is grievously leaving us right now (just because of lifespan). I don’t like that aspect of this at all.

May John MacArthur repose in the bounties of God’s triune life in Christ, as he pierces the bonds of his body of death (Rm 7), and enters into the banqueting table of the LORD.

On the Thomistic Captivity of the Protestantisms: Knowledge of the triune God

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Human agency is lost in the fall (which remains an inexplicable thing). The only hope for human agency to be reestablished before God is for God to re-create it as He has for us in the human agency of the Second and Greater Adam, who is the Christ. This is one reason people of a certain ilk reject the notion of a natural theology, and its subset in the anologis entis (analogy of being). Hence, knowledge of God is a purely Graced reality, and not a natural one in any way. I am, in fact, of said ilk (shocking!) I will always find it shocking the self-professed Reformed orthodox and Lutheran orthodox folks affirm natural theology as the fundamentum of their theological projects. Don’t you see why? These forlorn Protestantisms claim to hold to a radical form of Total Depravity, wherein what it means to be human, in a fallen sense, is to be so polluted by and riddled with sin, that ostensibly the ontic capacity, along with its noetic counterpart, cannot and will not come to know the true and the living God.

And yet I would suggest these Protestantisms are held within a Thomistic Captivity. That is, for them, as with Aquinas, what it means to be God, and then as corollary, what it means to be human, is to constantly have a resident and active intellect at play. And for the creature, even postlapsarian, this entails that the intellect, at the very least, retains its spark of being. That is, in order for the integrity of God’s being to be upheld, for those in the Thomist Captivity, human being’s intellect must be upheld even post-fall. As Steven Ozment so eloquently describes this chain of being for Thomas and his children:

The assumption that real relations existed between God, man, and the world made possible Aquinas’s confidence in a posteriori proofs of God’s existence; finite effects led necessarily to their origin, because they were really connected with it. The same assumption underlay Aquinas’s distinctive views on the “analogical” character of human knowledge and discourse about God. According to Aquinas, one could speak meaningfully of one’s relationship to God by analogy with one’s relationship with one’s fellow man because a real relationship existed between the values of people shared and those God had prescribed.[1]

With Thomas, for me, it isn’t the idea “that real relations existed between God, man . . . ,” I am a critical/theological realist after all. The problem in the Thomistic frame is that the ‘point of contact’ between God and man, the point of relation, is predicated by a chain-like continuity between God’s intellect and humanity’s (intact, at whatever level postlapse). But the Bible teaches otherwise in regard to the effects of the fall, on both the world simpliciter, and humanity.

I submit, that in order for humanity to come to have a genuine knowledge of the triune God, that the triune God must become us that we might become Him by grace. Without this participatio Christi all the human can do, even in the name of Christ, is construct monuments of their own intellects and worship them as God. This is why I reject the premises of a natural theology; and this is why I would recommend that you do the same.

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

A Rejoinder to Grok on a God of the Decree

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I asked Grok to describe what a decree is in theological parlance. Below is its answer. I will briefly offer rejoinder to this from my Athanasian Reformed perspective.

In theology, a decree refers to God’s eternal and sovereign plan or purpose, through which He ordains everything that happens in the universe. This concept is particularly prominent in Reformed theology (Calvinism) and emphasizes God’s absolute authority and control over all events, including creation, providence, and salvation.

Key Points:

    • Eternal and Unchangeable: God’s decrees are made in eternity, before the foundation of the world, and are immutable, meaning they cannot be altered (Ephesians 1:11).
    • Comprehensive: They encompass all things—every event, action, and outcome in history, from the grandest to the smallest (Romans 11:36).
    • Sovereign: God’s decrees reflect His supreme will, and nothing happens outside of His divine plan (Isaiah 46:10).
    • Types of Decrees:
      • Decree of Creation: God’s decision to create the world and all that exists.
      • Decree of Providence: God’s ongoing governance and preservation of the world, directing all events toward His purposes.
      • Decree of Election: In soteriology (the study of salvation), this refers to God’s predetermination of who will be saved (elect) and who will not, often tied to doctrines like predestination (Romans 8:29-30).

Theological Context:

    • Reformed Tradition: The Westminster Confession of Faith (Chapter 3) defines God’s decrees as His eternal purpose, according to the counsel of His will, whereby He foreordains whatsoever comes to pass.
    • Catholic Theology: While less emphasis is placed on “decrees” as a term, the concept aligns with God’s divine providence and omnipotent will, as seen in teachings on divine foreknowledge and predestination (e.g., Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica).
    • Arminian Perspective: Arminians may view God’s decrees as less deterministic, emphasizing human free will in cooperation with divine grace, though still acknowledging God’s overarching plan.

Scriptural Basis:

    • Ephesians 1:11: “In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will.”
    • Acts 2:23: Refers to Jesus’ crucifixion as part of God’s “definite plan and foreknowledge.”
    • Psalm 33:11: “The counsel of the Lord stands forever, the plans of his heart to all generations.”

Practical Implications:

The doctrine of divine decrees underscores God’s sovereignty, providing comfort to believers that nothing happens by chance and all things work together for God’s glory and the good of those who love Him (Romans 8:28). However, it also raises complex questions about human responsibility, free will, and the problem of evil, which theologians have debated for centuries.

It is clear, even from this cursory overview by Grok, that a decree of God presupposes a certain notion of Godness. It emphasizes a God of decision, of intellection. A God who would fit the intellectualist tradition offered by the categories and syntheses of various Latin theologians in particular. Some might see decrees as a function of a voluntaristic action of God; that is, purely will-based like we see in the nominalist potentia de absoluta–potentia ordinata. Either way, the Godness presumed upon in a decretal understanding of a God-world relation is to think of God acting in rather impersonal, rationalist, ad hoc, even capricious ways. The person of God as triune, as genuine Christian thought understands Godself, is not corollary with a God of the decree.

The genuinely Christian understanding (GCU) of God doesn’t think God as an intellectual actor way up there who only relates to us, His creation, through a mechanistic means known as decrees. The GCU of God only knows God as Son of the Father (as Athanasius has taught us so well in Contra Arianos). The GCU thinks of the Christian who abides in the bosom of the Father, as co-participants within the Son’s vicarious humanity. There is nothing abstract or removed in the GCU, in regard to thinking a relationship between God and humanity; there is only a concretized knowledge of God through a relation (analogia relationis) of faith (analogia fidei), that is simply in correspondence with the relation and faith of Christ that Christ has always already had for us with His Father in and through the bondage of the Holy Spirit.

Always more to say on this front, but I must cut this short . . ..

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘At any rate, it is not at all clear that He controls dogmatic thinking concerning Himself.’

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It is time to break my blogging fast. It is fitting, the topic of this post, because I am nearing the end of my Philosophy of Religion class at the University of Oxford (next week is the last). There is one unit left, it is on Faith, Prayer, and the Spiritual life. The class is largely populated by atheists and agnostics. The text we used for class (which was augmented by many other readings and lectures) was written by an Oxford philosopher named T. J. Mawson, Belief in God. He is a Christian theist, but a panentheist who holds to a Christian universalism. What became stoutly reinforced to me was that the god of the philosophers (or the no-god) has no correspondence with the God Self-revealed in Jesus Christ. Mawson is arguing for the existence of a philosophical Monad; a Pure Being; an Unmoved Mover; Pure Act (actus purus). Indeed, he is arguing from within an analytic philosophical key; but, nevertheless, this key is still funded by the Hellenic Monad of the classical philosophers.

Unfortunately, too much of that “key” has been pressed into the development of Christian theologies; both antique and modern. This has always been at the basis of my critique of what I have called classical Calvinism (as a riff on classical Theism). Too much of the ‘being’ that can be proven is synthesized with the God of Christian revelation, such that the God produced is something of a hybrid notion of God wherein God functions more like a philosophical monad rather than a personal and relational God of triune Self-given love, one-in-the-other as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The god of the philosophers has no place with the God who we have come to know in the face (prosopon) of Jesus Christ.

Karl Barth, observes the same thing as that has largely taken place in the ‘older orthodox theology’ of the Protestant Reformed of the 16th and 17th centuries, respectively. Indeed, what is imbibed by the orthodox, it could be said, is simply just the re-gestation of a mediaeval theology as that developed on the ‘Western front’ of the Latin church. Barth writes:

The weakness of the older orthodox theology was that in all its doctrine of the divine providence, and of the creation and man, and earlier of God and the election of grace, it believed that it could dispense with this relationship either entirely or almost entirely. It thought and spoke about the divine ruling as an idea. With all of its divergence from individual philosophical systems, its development of the concept was far too like the philosophical development of a concept. In spite of the testimonies from Scripture, it was content with what was basically a quite formal and abstract consideration of the subject. It did not make it at all clear to what it ought really to be looking at as a Christian theology, and more often than not it did not even look there, but somewhere else. This was the root of all its uncertainties and deviations, of all the dangers to which it more or less openly exposed itself as it proceeded, and above all of the insipidity or colourlessness of all its thinking to which we drew attention at the outset. The One who is described as King in Holy Scripture is acknowledged to be such, but He does not act as such. At any rate, it is not at all clear that He controls dogmatic thinking concerning Himself. At many points He seems in fact not to control it. What does control it, and what is passed off as the authority which controls the whole universe, seems rather to be the concept of a supreme being furnished with supreme power in relation to all other beings. And the credibility of what is ostensibly said about the rule of God seems to depend upon the existence of this being. With regard to this, we may say: 1 that the existence of such a supreme being is itself highly doubtful, and therefore the credibility of a doctrine of God’s rule cannot be a Christian doctrine because the God of Christian teaching is certainly not identical with that supreme being. If we are still under the shadow thrown by this twofold difficulty, it is high time that we moved away from it.[1]

I clearly concur with Barth’s last clause (and the whole passage!): “. . . it is high time that we moved away from it.”

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3 §49 [176] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 180.

The Early Aristotelianization of Reformed and Lutheran Theology

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Barth on the stillbirth of the Protestant Reformation. He underscores a reality that I have been, we have been writing about for years, in regard to the scholasticism Reformed and Lutheran. That is to note, the reception of the Aristotelian mantle that had, ironically, brought to formation the very Church, and her doctrina, that Luther was seeking to reform. Unfortunately, very early on in the second and third generation reformers (on both the Reformed and Lutheran sides) imbibed the theological categories that had originally led to the status of the Roman Church that Luther and others believed needed to be reformed from within.

Face to face with the difficulty of both schools, the Reformed no less than the Lutherans, made a formal borrowing at this point from a philosophy and theology which had been re-discovered and re-asserted at the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th centuries—the philosophy of Aristotle and the theology of Aquinas. The borrowing consisted in the adoption and introduction of a specific terminology to describe the two partners whose activities are understood and represented in the doctrine of the concursus [accompanying] in terms of a co-operation, the activity of God on the one side and that of the creature on the other. The concept which was adopted and introduced was that of “cause.” For it was by developing the dialectic of this concept that they both effected the differentiation of themselves on the one side and the other, and also decided the difference which already existed at this point within the Evangelical faith itself. This, then, is the controlling concept for the form assumed by Evangelical dogmatics in this and in all kindred topics.[1]

This theological arrangement, ended up thrusting people back upon themselves (as TF Torrance phrases it frequently), by thinking of a God-world relation from within a competitive frame. God above, the great decretal “causer,” and the human below, the striver attempting to meet the conditions of God’s causal-ness (this sounds something like what we see in a Federal or Covenant theology). In this frame we end up with a bilateral, yet asymmetric, relationship between God and humanity, such that God decrees certain things to obtain, whilst the elect of God must discern these things, and again, meet the conditions of the decree; of the covenant of works released through the so-called covenant of grace.

The aforementioned reflects just one example of how this ‘causal’ based relationship gets formulated and expressed. For Barth this would be a theology of the decretum absolutum (absolute decree of predestination, from within a classically construed Reformed theology, in particular). The Lutherans have their own expressions of this type of decretal theology. For a contemporary example see Jordan Cooper’s work.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3 §49 [098] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 97.

In the Rut of General Theism: Against Neutral Theology

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Christians don’t believe in an abstract ethereal god. Christians believe in the triune God who has Self-revealed Himself in Jesus Christ. Period. This should be an unremarkable assertion. There should be zero pushback to this. But in the so-called Great Tradition of the Church, and those who are ostensibly “retrieving” it, this isn’t the case. Classical theism, so-called, as a contemporary way to identify certain expressions of the antique past, especially with reference to a theology proper, have so synthesized, say, the Aristotelian categories with an ecclesiastical doctrine of God, that it is nay impossible to make a distinction, in substance (pun intended), between the philosopher’s unmoved mover of pure act, and the God revealed in the face of Jesus Christ. In other words, there is such a conflation between the god of the philosophers, and the Christian God in this instance, that the god of the philosophers in fact becomes the Christian God in substance. Indeed, most of contemporary theology today, especially on the Latin side (i.e., Catholic and Protestant), traffics on the highway that the philosophers, and their theologians, respectively, have constructed for them. That is to say, contemporary theology, especially in certain iterations of Protestant theology, have so imbibed the cathedral of the Protestant development, that is primarily through the ‘schoolmen,’ or the scholastics, that to do theology, for them, requires a straight repristination; an outright and absolute reception of whatever the Protestant fathers said; a total gleaning, a harvesting, if you will, of whatever golden apples the oldmen of Protestant yesteryear planted in their gardens of theological delight.

But what if they were simply squished by their sitz im leben (situation in life); what if they were just doing the best they could with what they had available to them, intellectually, at that time? What if what they did was rather imaginative and forward thinking for their times, respectively, but in the end wasn’t the last or final word? I’m here to say it wasn’t; it wasn’t the last or final, or not even the best word. Karl Barth writes the following in his own analysis of those theological times. What you will find is that he agrees with me (or more correctly, that I agree with him).

Unfortunately the connexion between the belief in providence and belief in Christ had not been worked out and demonstrated theologically by the Reformers themselves. Only occasionally and from afar, if at all, had they seen the problem of natural theology and the necessity of a radical application to all theology of their recognition of the free grace of God in Christ. In their case, to be sure, we almost always feel and detect, even though it is so seldom palpable theologically, that when they speak of the world dominion of God they are in fact speaking with Christian content and on the basis of the Gospel, not abstractly in terms of a neutral God of Jews, Turks, pagans and Christians. And this is what gives warmth and force to the matter in P. Gerhardt. But if in him there is an unmistakable movement away from the Word of God to the experience of the Christian subject, this was to some extent a reaction against the dominant and self-evident abstraction with which the orthodoxy of his day followed another self-evident rut in these matters. This was the rut of a general theism which, apart from the mention of the Deus triunus [triune God], occasional quotations from the Bible and references to Church history, lacked any distinctive Christian content, being primarily concerned to distinguish itself from atheism, and limiting its consideration of the Gospel to the establishment and development of Christology and resultant doctrines. As if this were the real way to treat that primarium caput fidei et religionis [chief cornerstone of faith and religion].[1]

Surely, what Barth is explicating is the more sure word; relatively speaking. The Christian God is not neutral, He is not general, and He is not discoverable in some leftover vestiges of His presence in the fallen created order. That is to say, the fallen heart and mind of the fallen humanity has no access into the inner sanctum of God’s eternal life; that is, not without God first becoming us that we might become Him in Christ (by grace not nature). Isn’t there an infinitely qualitative distance between God and humanity?, as Kierkegaard so rightly identified. Aren’t human beings, us, born dead in our trespasses and sins with an ugly ditch between us and the holy God of triune wonder? This is all Barth is getting at. This is all I’m getting at, with reference to Barth. Selah

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3 §48 [032] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 31.

Jesus, Plato, Aristotle and the Theobros Walk into a Bar . . .

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I shared the following sketch, diatribe of sorts, on X just yesterday. A so-called Theobro (all bro no Theo) reshared it for his friend group, and they went to town. Memeing me galore. Dismissing me out of hand from their dilettantism. Not recognizing that I was leaving space for evangelizing, so to speak, even the philosophers; albeit in non-correlating ways. I.e., taking the philosophers’ respective grammars and language bags, and retexting them in a way that they are deployed in service of the King; insofar that that is possible or advisable. These guys are all bark and no theological bite. They claim to be scholastics reformed, proponents of Aristotelian Christianity, Christian Nationalists, so on and so forth. And yet they couldn’t even recognize how my off the top form vis-à-vis my post was written in a scholastic type of style. These immature souls are not worthy of engagement. They haven’t put any donkey work in, and they simply must rely on their swarming behavior; as if a hornets’ nest rattled by the Raid of God’s Word. My post, much like what I’m writing now, was just an in-the-moment venting of whatever came to mind as I wrote on a theme. It wasn’t really worded exactly the way I would have worded it if I was attempting to write with total clarity. It was simply a working out of my themes and thoughts that are seemingly always present to my mind’s-heart.

As anyone knows who has read me for any amount of time, you will notice how these themes are the themes I often opine upon as I engage the theological wormwood present in the forests of the correlationists and logic-choppers.

Objector. One has to wonder: when Aristotle and Plato were available to Jesus, why he didn’t use their respective philosophical categories to explain Himself to the world. Indeed, He was (is) Jewish; and He came first for the house of Israel, as the Jew from Nazareth. Even so, Philo was a Jew too.

Response. My conclusion: He considered the god of the philosophers as antiHim, even if some of their grammar might be commandeered and evangelized in non-correlationist ways later.

I think the response to this will be that He came for the Jews first, and was the Son of David, indeed. As the Gospel spread it had to be translated into different languages and conceptual frameworks. It had to subvert those languages and frameworks, disrupt even, for its own triune purposes (i.e., not colonial). His missio Dei, in the economy, was to mediate salvation to the Jews first, as a Jew, and then to the Gentiles. Which is why He was such a skandalon, a stumbling block, to both the Jews and the Greeks. He resisted the categories of this profane world, by irrupting within it, from the world He inhabited in the triune life; as the Bread of Heaven. He brought what the world was created to be (so a fittingness), in His incarnation and atonement; in the manger and the cross (as synecdoche). A world (from Heaven) of ostensible foolishness and weakness, particularly because He was just one man; a Jew even.

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P.S. One of my respondents even condemned me to hell for writing such words contra Aristotle and Plato. Hopefully these poor souls will ultimately come to know the joy of the Lord. I fear that its absence in their lives intimates a deeper delirium, beyond what they currently perceive of themselves coram Deo.