Category Archives: Critiquing Classic Calvinism

‘The older Protestant theology was right to treat Aristotle as an adversary’

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There has been a resurgence, among Protestants, either towards affirming the classical theism of Thomas Aquinas (i.e., Christian-Catholic theology synthesized with Aristotelian categories) or rejecting it.[1] But even those, in the broader Reformed world who ostensibly reject it, still affirm it; insofar, that they operate with the philosophical-theological categories provided for by said Thomistic synthesis. I have, for decades now, been calling this Thomistic-Aristotelian mode of Reformed theology out. And yet, that machine will never really bust. It has tentacles reaching into the far reaches of the Christian world at this point. In the West, in particular, it has publishing houses, online warriors, pamphleteers, jargoneers, so on and so forth; which makes it exceedingly difficult to be critical of for the masses. Even so, I remain stalwart in my mission to bear witness to the world that there is only one “decree” of God, and his name is: Jesus Christ (and all that entails)! That is to say, rather than thinking God before meeting God in the face of Jesus Christ—as the reformed scholastics and their lesser descendants found in and among the Baptists and other 5 point environs—it is better to only think God after God has spoken, after God has first introduced Himself to us, for us, and with us in the prosopon (face) of Jesus Christ. For some reason, and I have many theories on this, this Reformed (and this isn’t just limited to the Reformed, there are also Lutheran iterations of this same mode) nut simply will not crack. I’d argue, primarily, that this is the case more for sociological rather than theological reasons. But that case will have to be developed at a later date.

Following, we will hear from none other than Reformed theologian par excellence, that heretic of old, Karl Barth. What did Barth, that theological charlatan, think of Aristotle, and how that impacted the array of theological developments following the Thomist synthesis. Here, here he is:

The more perspicacious of the older Protestant polemicists like A. Heidanus (l. c., p. 350f.) thought it right to mark off themselves no less from the theology and cosmology of Aristotle. For him the world is eternal and there can thus be no question of a creation. What then is his deity, his prime mover which is itself unmoved, his immaterial form, his actuality unburdened with potentiality, his reason which thinks itself (and therefore the best)? Does this πρώτον κινοῦν [first mover] move otherwise than as the principle and exemplary model of all other movement? Does it move otherwise than as the good and goal which has no other goal beyond itself, towards which everything else strives in virtue of the attraction which everything loved (and this unconditionally as the perfect and the imperfectly loved) exercises on that which loves, on which therefore everything depends and towards which everything must move? Does it even more, asks Heidanus, as a captain moves his ship, a conductor his choir or a field-marshal his troops? Is this prime mover of all things more and other than the law, the eternal prius, of their movement? That in which alone the Aristotelian world-principle would resemble the God of the Christian doctrine of providence is obviously the freedom of will and movement, the sovereignty and above all the inner self-determination of a God who confronts the world as its Creator and can thus approach its movement independently and determine it from without. But since the Aristotelian mover of all things is not their Creator, it is necessarily too exalted (or from the standpoint of the Christian doctrine of providence too poverty-stricken) to be capable of this movement in relation to the really distinct from it. The Aristotelian cosmos has a kind of god ordering it, unlike the Epicurean. But since this god is not the Creator of his cosmos, since he is not above but in it (thus finally resembling the Epicurean gods), the Aristotelian cosmos is also in fact one which is abandoned by God. The older Protestant theology was right to treat Aristotle as an adversary in this respect, and we can only wish that it had freed itself more basically and radically and generally from the spirit of this picture of god and the world, and the argumentations dictated by it.[2]

If you have followed my work (along with Myk Habets’) on Evangelical Calvinism over the years, the above should find lots of resonance with the themes put forward and developed vis-à-vis our critique of Aristotelian formed Reformed (and Lutheran) theologies, respectively. It is unnecessary, even within the history and development of Reformed theology and ideas, to presume that its only expression and iteration is under the unmoved mover offered by Aristotle and his theological tribe; even as Barth rightly notes in the above passage.

At the end of the day, dividing and “conquering” various theologies is not that difficult. Some might fear that my suggestion runs afoul of an untoward reductionism, but I would protest. Theologies done after Deus dixit (God has spoken) definitively and copiously without remainder in the vocal cords of Jesus Christ, in-breathed by the Holy Spirit, are diametrically different than theologies done prior to hearing that voice. Theologies based on hearing from the philosophers, about “godness,” prior to actually encountering God in Jesus Christ, will deleteriously suffer from offering and speaking of a god who looks and sounds like the god[s] of the Greeks rather than the God of the Man from Nazareth. This is surely a theological methodological issue, but one that shouldn’t come prior to God’s theology for us (so in that sense, a tautology) in Jesus Christ. I would aggressively argue that if a Christian is genuinely going to do Christian theology that it will only be as they dialogue and cohabitate, through the mediating and vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ, with the triune and living God. A genuine Christian theologian will first be a child of God, rather than a thinker for God. We must get this order right. We must first gestate in the bosom of the Father, with the Son for us, prior to maturating into thinkers and speakers and witnessers for God, if we are going to actually be thinking and speaking and witnessing for the true God. But alas, our egos would rather imagine that we have a place in this world, by virtue of just “showing up” in this world, to the point that humans come fully and naturally equipped with the antennae to think, speak, and witness for God on our own profanely imagined terms, rather than upon those provided first for us in the heart of the living and triune God.

These are stark and even deep matters; I hope that hasn’t thrown the reader off the scent of what matters. At the end of the day the Christian either is in point of contact with the real and living God or not. Ironically, those who have presumed the title ‘theologian,’ even for the millennia, often are the furthest away from representing the true and living God found attested to, purely and simply in the Bible. May God have mercy on us all!

[1] As an aside: I take it that anyone who affirms, at the basest level of Reformed theology, the 5 points of Calvinism up to and including Federal-Covenantal theology, to be appropriating the Thomist-Aristotelian synthesis; categorically, that is. Decretal theology (theology based on the so-called decretum absolutum [absolute decree of predestination, election-reprobation], in its classically Reformed iteration, necessarily is reposing in the theological lagoon provided for it by the Thomist-Aristotelian synthesis, to one degree or the other).

[2] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3 §48 [011] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 10 [emphasis mine].

On the Corrupted Gospel and its Performance and Transactional Bases

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The nomist (law based) “Gospel” is a performance-based message that has no grounding in the true message of the Incarnation&Atonement of God in Jesus Christ. It is based on a mercantile quid pro quo transactional framework present in medieval and reformational times that isn’t attested to in the canonical Scriptures. Either the Gospel is God’s Grace all the way down, or it is a works-based Gospel typically associated with, in the history, what is known as Pelagianism. The tragic thing is that people in the classical Calvinist and Arminian, and generally Latin frames of Christian theological understanding, are beholden to this type of framework. Such that, the “framework” has been so conflated with the clear and pure teaching of Holy Scripture and the Gospel, that folks are unable to critically distantiate and disentangle themselves from the artificial non-biblical hermeneutic they have inherited; indeed, in the name of being the biblical hermeneutic.

The above is true even at the theologically academic level. And if this is the case, how much more so is this true in the downstream environs of the churches (places where doctrine is uncritically absorbed, typically, and where the people themselves don’t even generally read the Bible)? Hence, a result of this, especially at the “churches” level, is that people have no critical resource to allow them to be biblically and theologically discerning; since, for one thing, what they “receive,” subconsciously or consciously, is so baked into the way they are taught to read and think Scripture, that to question that is to question the Gospel, the Bible itself (the source of Protestant authority).

Jesus for the Bruised Reeds and Smoldering Wicks: Against Law-Based Salvations

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“Here is my servant whom I have chosen,
the one I love, in whom I delight;
I will put my Spirit on him,
and he will proclaim justice to the nations.
19 He will not quarrel or cry out;
no one will hear his voice in the streets.
20 A bruised reed he will not break,
and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out,
till he has brought justice through to victory.
21     In his name the nations will put their hope.” –Mathew 12.18-21

If, ten years ago, you had told me that I would live to see literate evangelicals, some with doctorates and a seminary teaching record, arguing for the reality of an eternal salvation, divinely guaranteed, that may have in it no repentance, no discipleship, no behavioral change, no practical acknowledgment of Christ as Lord of one’s life, and no perseverance in faith, I would have told you that you were out of your mind. –J. I. Packer

 

I just came across the above quote of J.I. Packer from someone on X/Twitter. It seems that some are not aware that Packer was a proponent of what has been called experimental predestinarianism; even to the more idiosyncratic version of that as propounded in John MacArthur’s book, The Gospel According to Jesus (i.e., JMac’s Lordship Salvation book). We could identify these things, more simply, as a nomist or juridical/law-based theory of salvation. Without getting into the depths of its socio-economic background and development within the late mediaeval and early reformational milieu in Western Europe, suffice it to say that this theory of salvation is largely framed by an appeal to a quid pro quo mercantilist framework of thinking. As this theory further developed it later became known as Federal or Covenantal theology, again funded by a contractual-transactional notion of salvation. Packer would be much more closely aligned with this historic development, while MacArthur simply abstracts the themes he prefers from it, and pastes them into his own stylized version of a Baptistic theology (so, a mere 5-point Calvinism). But functionally, and thematically, as noted, Packer could agree with the type of requirements that MacArthur delineates in his Lordship salvation. They both agree that there must be some type of moral transformation and ongoing action in the purportedly elect’s life, if in fact we should think that said professor of salvation is actually a possessor.

And yet, Jesus came for the Bruised Reeds, the Smoldering Wicks among us. He came for the sick, not the healthy. He came for the people who are in fact failures, and know it. He places all of the expectations of salvation on Himself—He who knew no sin became sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God in Him—as such the broken can give up; they can quit striving; they can look away from their own performances, and instead look at God’s performance for them in the acts and facts of Jesus Christ. If Jesus was walking the streets today, He’d literally be hanging out with the tweakers, the crackheads, and bums who inhabit the streets and tunnels in our various cities. These types of people are the elect of God in the Kingdom of Heaven. The Kingdom of God in Christ turns the system of this world upside down; it takes what would appear weak and foolish and makes it the wisdom of God. In Christ, who is indeed, the elect of God for us, the bums among us find repose and hope to live one more day; a day for and up to eternity in and from the everlasting life of the triune God for them in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. It is His resurrection power, His re-created humanity that has “checked all the boxes” of God’s holiness requirements. He knows that we will continue to be simul justus et peccator (simultaneously justified and sinner) as we inhabit these bodies of death; He knows that we will continue to sin, even to the point that even if we say we have no sin we make Him a liar and His truth is not in us. This is why Christ is the Advocate for us before the Father; not just for now, but for all eternity. The scars in his hands, feet, and side will remain forever unto all the ages to come as a reminder that we are only standing in God’s presence, in His glorified body in Christ, because He first loved us in Christ, that we might secondly love Him from Christ’s love for us in Him.

The nomist theory of salvation is balderdash! It heaps loads and burdens on the peoples that the peoples were never designed to bear. God’s salvation is His Grace for us ‘all-the-way-down.’ God’s Grace for us starts at the bottom of Christ’s feet and ascends all the way up through His ascended body into the heavenlies, at the Right Hand of the Father, where He always lives to make intercession for us. If you are striving under these balderdash theories of salvation—the ones that press you further into your navels, into your performance and ‘pact-keeping’—reckon such thoughts as dead, and understand that you are now alive in Christ’s new creation for you, His resurrected and ascended body for you/us. The Gospel is either all of God for us, or it is none of us for God. The “proof of salvation,” God’s salvation for us, is the Christ seated next to the Father from moment to moment. It is through union with Christ, unio cum Christo, wherein we find the anchor of our souls. We don’t reflexively look at our lives prior to looking to Christ’s life for us (the nomist way of salvation). We look immediately to the Father through the eyes of the Son, through the body of the Son, as we in participation with Christ (participatio Christi) dwell in the bosom of the Father; wherein, Christ forevermore exegetes the Father, the shared coinhering life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit for us. ‘This is eternal life that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.’

Pierre Maury Contra the ‘Horrible Decree’ of Predestination in the classical Calvinists

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Pierre Maury was Karl Barth’s ‘French connection’ and friend. Without Maury’s thinking and writing on a reformulated Reformed doctrine of predestination, Barth’s turn, and own treatment of predestination (as exemplified in his Church Dogmatics II/2) may never have happened; at least not in the shape that it did. Here is Maury on a critique of the classical Augustinian inspired doctrine of election/reprobation (especially as that developed within what came to be called Post Reformed orthodox Dogmatics in the 16th and 17th centuries, respectively):

Before we proceed further, there is an important point which must be made clear. If what we have said is true, it is obvious that the decree of election—call it predestination here, if you will—is not, as classic theology has maintained, from Augustine to Luther Calvin and the orthodox dogmatic theologians of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, the obscure and impenetrable decision of a divinity who does not, on this point, reveal his designs. It was because they asserted that the absolute decree of the Creator, anterior to any creation—and even to any fall, as the Supralapsarians held—was the unknowable secret of an absolute power, that predestination frightened even those who defended it with the most unflagging ardour. There was Calvin, for instance, whom the ‘labyrinths’ of this mystery filled with a kind of holy terror. How can it be otherwise, if we know and can know nothing of the motives which lie behind God’s creative activity, if the liberty with which he loves us is replaced by the arbitrary decision of pure omnipotence? How can such a God of the covenant, appear in that eternity (and so in time, in which his purposes are worked out) as anything but a capricious tyrant; not the God of grace but the wielder of a crushing power who is worshipped only in terror? How is one to be sure that it his will to save the lost?

Of course I do not wish for a moment to detract from the mystery of God’s sovereign liberty. He wills to act only in accordance with his good pleasure (Phil. 2.13), but is a good pleasure. His entire revelation tells us so, tirelessly. There is nothing higher than his goodness, nor anterior to it. God loves always, from all eternity. And his purpose, before which, and outside which, there is none other, is to ally his life with the life of men in mutual love. Often, moved by their adoration of the divine majesty, the great predestinarian doctors—especially Calvin—have exalted the mystery of the absolute decree. But why have they turned it into a mystery as impenetrable as night, the secret of an opaque God? God does not live and act in the obscurity of eternal darkness, but in light—‘unapproachable’, yes, but light! Darkness and night are, in the Bible, the abode of the Devil, in which he plans and prepares his ‘works of darkness’. If there is any tyrannical power that would victimize man, it is he, not the Father ‘who hath delivered us from the power of darkness’ (Col. 1.13), and ‘hath called [us] out of darkness into his marvellous light’ (I Peter 2.9).

If it is necessary, then, to maintain the mystery of election—and it is absolutely necessary, for God’s freedom is the sovereign liberty of the Creator, which our liberty may neither dispute nor judge: ‘O man, who art thou that repliest against God?’ (Rom. 9.20)—it is only on the basis of knowing and preaching that this mystery is none other than the peace that passes understanding. It is unfathomable because the love of God is unfathomable. And the only act of adoration God expects of us is our wonder at a purpose that overwhelms us.[1]

If the reader is aware of Barth’s own reformulation of a Reformed doctrine of predestination, what we just read from Maury should ring familiar to you.

Whether reading Barth, Torrance, Maury et al. the theme remains the same: for them, respectively, to think a doctrine of predestination (election/reprobation) in abstraction from a purposeful ground in Jesus Christ, is to not think a genuinely Christian, and thus biblical doctrine of predestination. This is the crux of it all: i.e., how someone arrives at their relative conclusions in regard to a doctrine of predestination, have directly to do with the theory of revelation (and authority) they affirm. If they are committed to a principled revelational understanding of knowing God, they will look something like Maury on a doctrine of predestination. If not, and they hold to a principled speculative and negative understanding of knowing God, they will look something like Thomas Aquinas, and his respective heirs in the Post Reformed orthodox development.

The issue, ultimately, comes down to a very practical and spiritual one. The way we think God determines all subsequent doctrinal developments. If we think God’s will toward us remains hidden in some sort of ‘horrible decree’ of election/reprobation, then we will have good reason to live in an unhealthy fear of Him. If we believe that God has fully Self-revealed Himself for us in the face of Jesus Christ, in a filial relationship of triune love, then we will have a healthy fear and love of the Father. This will latterly shape the way we engage with and treat others; both within the Church and world.

For further reading on Pierre Maury and his theology, especially as that relates to Barth’s own developing theology, see: Simon Hattrell’s exquisite book:  Election, Barth, and the French Connection, 2nd Edition: How Pierre Maury Gave a “Decisive Impetus” to Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Election.

[1] Pierre Maury, Predestination and Other Papers (Richmond, Virginia: John Knox Press, 1960), 35–6.

Barth’s Dialogical Theology

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Dialogical theology is a better way to describe Barth’s so-called dialectical theology. A personalist theology rather than an intellectualist or substance theology. A prayerful theology of correspondence and communication and fellowship within the triune frame, rather than a speculative theology of abstraction and negation and Ramist logic chopping within a monadic frame.

Created Grace

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I have pressed the idea for decades now, after being alerted to these things by my former historical theology seminary professor (and still mentor), Dr. Ron Frost, in regard to Thomas Aquinas’ synthesis of Aristotelian categories with Christian [Augustinian] theology. I am referring to the Thomist thinking on created grace. There are many retrievers of scholastic Reformed theology these days, inclusive of Matthew Barrett, in his own idiosyncratic way. Richard Muller has identified the swath of Post Reformed orthodox theology as Christian Aristotelianism. This would be another way of simply saying (for the most part): Thomism or a neo-Thomism of sorts. This is why I have argued, along with others, that Tridentine Catholic theology, along with those who appropriated said theological categories, like the Reformed scholastic, have taken over a semi-Pelagian soteriology; or a cooperative theory of salvation vis-à-vis God and the human agent. Within the scholasticism Reformed frame, we see this type of cooperative model developed under the aegis of what is known as a Covenantal or Federal theology. The elect are provided with a created grace (distinct from the personal grace that is the Holy Spirit’s unction), by which, in the Federal scheme, they are able to cooperate with God in meeting the conditions of the promisso, or bilateral covenant betwixt God and man/woman, in regard to attesting to and appropriating their elect status.

There is more to be said about all of the aforementioned, but I wanted at least to provide a theological context or background for the points made by Gilles Emery, as created grace looked in the theology of Thomas Aquinas—as distinct and opposed to the personal grace of the Holy Spirit. The scholastics Reformed will often equate the personal grace of the Holy Spirit notion with created grace, with the point of downplaying the Thomistic/Aristotelian flare found in what can be called the habitus theology of Thomas Aquinas. Someone who doesn’t downplay these things though is indeed, Richard Muller. Emery writes,

Thomas actually emphasizes the necessity of a created grace. When the Holy Spirit is given to human beings, he does not enter into a synthesis with someone with whom he is ‘mixed’ or ‘fused’. Even in Christ, there is no mixture or conflation between the divine and the human nature. For a human being’s own nature to be raised into communion with God, it is necessary to recognize, from the moment of their participation in God onwards, a gift in her which will be the intrinsic principle of her sanctification, a reality which has a human size, and so is a created one, situated on the ontological plane of creatureliness: this is the grace which is called ‘created’. This gift comes from God alone, because it is God alone who divinizes, God alone who makes human beings participants in his own divine nature. But, even when he gives himself, God remains distinct from human beings. In the scholastic terminology, it is necessary to see that God is not the ‘formal cause’ of the life of grace, because he does not enter into formal composition with the human (both God’s simplicity and the created condition of human beings make this unthinkable, for we would then be faced with a conflation of the divine and human nature). In this light, grace is a created disposition which human beings receive from God. It is, so to speak, a gift from God which puts itself onto the ontological level of human nature, proportioning itself to the human in order to make it possible for men and women to be united to God from within their own human life. Such created grace disposes human beings to receiving the divine person. Thomas states,

the gift of sanctifying grace disposes the soul to possess the divine person; this is what the formula ‘the Holy Spirit is given through the gift of grace’ means. But the gift itself is the grace coming from the Holy Spirit; this is what Paul means when he says, The charity of God is poured forth in our hearts by the Holy Spirit.

The insistence on the necessity for a created gift (habitual grace with its gifts of wisdom and charity) must not make us forget that its aim is to make human beings capable of receiving the Holy Spirit himself, and, beside the Holy Spirit, the Father and the Son, who come to build their dwelling in the saints (‘to possess the divine person’). St Thomas is very clear on this:

through the gift of sanctifying grace, the reasonable creature is not only perfected in such a way as to be able to make use of the created gift, but also in such a way as to enjoy the divine person himself…. the grace of the Holy Spirit is given to human beings in such a way that the actual source of the grace is given, to wit, the Holy Spirit himself.[1]

It is important to understand what a Thomist Intellectualist anthropology is at this point (which I clumsily wrote about in a seminary paper back in 2002, my first real exposure to these things). Suffice it to say, when a theologian starts with an Augustinian conditioned doctrine of predestination and election—wherein the elect (and reprobate) is thought of in abstract and individualistic ways—it is possible to end up with the thinking we see evinced in the outworking of Thomas’ theology of anthropology/salvation. There is an utter need to think the human agent away from the divine, to the point that when the Christ comes as God enfleshed, we end up with a necessary rupture between God’s person and work; to the point that even Christ’s human nature would need a created grace to cooperate with God in the work of salvation. This, in a Thomistic frame, is why a created grace is constructed in the first place: i.e., in order to keep the pure nature of an independent humanity in tact vis-à-vis the Creator/creature distinction, distinct. But this move becomes unnecessary, that is, the move to think of God’s grace in dualistic ways; i.e., personal and created. It is unnecessary because God’s Grace is God’s being in becoming for us; God’s grace is an eternal act of triune felicity (relative to the Deus incarnandus ‘God to be incarnate’).

There are things that need further detailing in order to tie up the dangling definitional ends in this post. But as usual, this will have to suffice for a blog post. I haven’t strung all of the dots together for you, but that’s part of the fun; I’ll leave it to you to bring some of the implications of what I have been writing on together.

[1] Gilles Emery, OP, The Trinitarian Theology of Thomas Aquinas (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 253–54.

Athanasius as an Antidote to Federal Theology

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I often speak of T. F. Torrance’s view of the atonement as the ontological view, which is inextricably related, for Torrance to the Incarnation (which is why his most recent posthumously published books Incarnation & Atonement came in the order that they did — there is a theo-logical and even, dare I say it, necessary relation between the two). Well I just wanted to quote Athanasius directly, so that folks won’t think that Torrance fabricated such things out of whole cloth. Here’s Athanasius discussing the apparent dilemma God has set before Him given the reality of the “Fall” (and the non-existence or non-being that it brought humanity separated from Him), and the fact that not just a “legal” kind of relation had been violated between God and man through the “Fall,” but in fact an actual corruption of man Himself and the loss of grace as an intricate aspect of man’s relation to God had occurred — man’s very “nature” and even “heart” had been broken to the point of death (non-being and separation from God). Athanasius is sketching the only way the only dénouement possible for God to remain consistent with Himself as the Creator of man in His image; he writes:

. . . Yet, true though this is, it is not the whole matter. As we have already noted, it was unthinkable that God, the Father of Truth, should go back upon His word regarding death in order to ensure our continued existence. He could not falsify Himself; what, then, was God to do? Was He to demand repentance from men for their transgression? You might say that that was worthy of God, and argue further that, as through the Transgression they became subject to corruption, so through repentance they might return to incorruption again. But repentance would not guard the Divine consistency, for, if death did not hold dominion over men, God would still remain untrue. Nor does repentance recall men from what is according to their nature; all that it does is to make them cease from sinning. Had it been a case of a trespass only, and not of a subsequent corruption, repentance would have been well enough; but when once transgression had begun men came under the power of the corruption proper to their nature and were bereft of the grace which belonged to them as creatures in the Image of God. No, repentance could not meet the case. What — or rather Who was it that was needed for such grace and such recall as we required? Who, save the Word of God Himself, Who also in the beginning had made all things out of nothing? His part it was, and His alone, both to bring again the corruptible to incorruption and to maintain for the Father His consistency of character with all. For He alone, being Word of the Father and above all, was in consequence both able to recreate all, and worthy to suffer on behalf of all and to be an ambassador for all with the Father. [Athanasius, On The Incarnation, §7, 32-3]

Rich stuff. Now if you’re into the “kind” of Covenantal/Reformed/Federal Theology that Michael Horton & co. (who seems quite popular now-a-days, see here) articulates, then you might as well throw Athanasius’ insights, just quoted, in the burn pile. Here’s why. Horton style Covenant theology offers a “Juridically-Forensically” based view of the atonement — the kind that would actually fit into the “repentance-only” model that Athanasius says NO to — that frames what takes place on the cross as a Divine transaction between the Son and the Father. The “Law” (eating of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil cf. Hos. 6.7) has been broken (Covenant of Works), and the Father-Son agree to a pact (Pactum Salutis or Covenant of Redemption) wherein the Son will become a man, die on the cross for particular people (elect), “pay” their penalty (or fee), and give them back to God (Covenant of Grace). On the face that might sound good, but let’s think with Athanasius. All that has occurred in the Hortonian view of salvation is essentially to deal with an “external” issue and payment (which is akin to Athanasius’ point on repentance). The fundamental problem with this approach, as Athanasius so keenly points out, is that the issue isn’t primarily an external issue wherein a legal repentance will do; the issue is an issue of nature. Man’s nature was thoroughly corrupted and even lost. The only remedy is for the image of the Father (the Son) to literally become humanity; penetrate into the depths of our sinful souls through His redemptive grace; take that corrupted nature/heart from the manger to the cross to the grave; and resurrect/recreate it into the image of the Father which can only be realized as we are vicarious participants in Christ. The issue is not primarily an issue of a broken “Law;” the issue is that we have broken “Hearts,” and only God’s grace in Christ in the Incarnation can reach down into those depths and recreate us in Him. Horton’s approach to salvation does not allow for such thinking. It doesn’t deal with the heart, and thus we are left in our sins non-being.

**repost, originally posted on February 14, 2011.

“Beggars All”: On Abandoning the Progressive and Legalist Mode of Salvation

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I don’t think I’ll ever understand the impulse towards perfectionism; not in light of the Gospel, that is. And yet it is rampant, especially as given non-stop expression on “Christian social media” (I’m mostly thinking of X/Twitter). There are always these extremes on a continuum. There are those who think to be anti-legalist is to be progressive and loose to everything. On the other hand, there are those who think to be holy (saved) is to be legalistic to the point that all of what they say about others never applies to them; as if they have perfectly arrived; as if they just are one of the elect and everyone else is reprobate, or at least highly suspect. But both centers stem from the same type of “meism.” As if the human agent is the determiner, on either side, of what is good, and beautiful, and free. This, I take to be, the perfectionist impulse; which really is just a performative mood wherein a person, one way or the other, simply must assert their own self-contrived standing before God and others. Either they assert their “freedom,” or they assert their ”legalism”; both being given ground by the homo incurvatus in se.

We aren’t saved based on being so-called “free” or so-called “constrained by our obedience.” We are justified before God because He who knew no sin assumed our unrighteousness that we might become the righteousness of God in Him; it is because of His poverty that we are made rich in the beautiful garments of righteousness which He has robed us with. All our righteousness is like filthy rags; that doesn’t end once we become Christians. We live, moment-by-moment, afresh anew, by His righteousness for us; by His re-creating for us and in us and with us. We remain simul justus et peccator (‘simultaneously justified and sinner’), as such, we live by His mercy and grace as He always lives to make intercession for us.

Are there standards of righteousness and holiness that we bear witness to as Christians? Yes, but this by the Holy Spirit in Christ in us, and not just against the broken world out there, but the broken world “in here,” in our own fallen and broken hearts. We ought to call out unrighteousness and evil, exposing the darkness with the light of God’s Word, but in so doing we really are only exposing our own wretched hearts, outwith Christ’s heart for us. This ought to at least humiliate us to the point that we remain obedient, even to the death of the cross. And the ground of this obedience is funded by God’s eternal life of humility for us, as He freely chose to become us in the humanity of Jesus Christ (Deus incarnandus). We certainly do have freedom in Christ, but it is a freedom circumscribed by being for God, and not for ourselves. It is a freedom to be holy as He is holy. It is a freedom to bear witness to the world that the Son has set us free, free indeed.

I’m not suggesting that we ought to be looking for some type of balance between being libertine or legalistic. I am suggesting that we abandon that whole paradigm altogether. God’s righteousness in Christ confronts us in the living color of His flesh and blood life for us in Jesus Christ; indeed, as He continuously breathes and hovers over us, from within, by the Holy Spirit. His work is ‘out of nothing’ (ex nihilo), which means that our daily lives are totally contingent upon His Word and Way, and not ours. There is nothing inherent to this world system that supplies us with the sustenance we require to live in the free life that God has brought us into by yoking Himself with us in His freedom for us in Christ. We have a new creation life that comes from outside of us, as an ‘alien life,’ as if manna falling from the heavens in the morning dew each and every day. This freedom, this righteousness we have been given through union with Christ, and thus participants in the triune life Godself, is not a possession of ours, as if a self-possession; we, instead, are a possession of this righteousness’s. This cannot be stressed enough: our lives, as Christians, as human beings, are fully and continuously, moment-by-moment, contingent on God’s Logos. We bring nothing to this arrangement except our dissolute selves, which the Creator, the Sustainer, indeed, the Father in His eternal relationship with the Son, has entered into, in the Son’s assumption of flesh, taking the depth of our fallenness, which He alone can see, into the bones and marrow of His humanity, allowing that to have its final and just result in the human life lived in obedience unto the Father, finally eventuating in death, even death on a cross. We couldn’t and cannot do that. It takes the homoousios Theanthropos (GodMan) to do that for us. And while that event, in itself, is once and for all, it is an event that has ‘perfect tense’ reality insofar that we gain our reality before God, continuously, as events-in-happening, moment-by-moment, through God’s reality for us in His Melchizedekian life as the Son of David, our High Priest, who sits at the right hand of the Father always living to make intercession for those who will inherit His eternal life.

Since our lives are contingent in the above way, we have no space for boasting except in the fact that our God is indeed the living and triune God who has not left us as orphans. This ought to change the way we approach the world, others, and ourselves. We, as Luther was wont to say (paraphrase), “are beggars all.”

Calvin against the Calvinists: Alasdair Heron and Thomas Torrance on Calvin

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Here is a quote from TF Torrance on how he believed John Calvin contributed to the theological world, and thus how he would think on how “Calvinists” have used Calvin in the wrong ways, and for wrong ends; essentially muting the seismic Calvin into the tremor Calvin that is only allowed to shake to rhythms presented by classic Calvinism of today and even yesterday. True, Richard Muller and other post-Reformed orthodox Calvinists like David Steinmetz have placed Calvin in Context, but whose context? You should read the whole essay that I pilfer this quote from, from Heron; he might provide you with a rounder understanding of Calvin, and then of course Torrance’s appropriation of Calvin.

It belongs to the great merit of John Calvin that he worked out the difficult transition from the mediaeval mode of thinking in theology to the modern mode, and placed the theology of the Reform on a scientific basis in such a way that the logic inherent in the substance of the Faith was brought to light and allowed to assume the mastery in human formulation of it. Calvin has not always been interpreted like this, yet if he has been misunderstood, perhaps it was his own greatness that was to blame. Calvin made such a forward advance in theological thinking that he outstripped his contemporaries by centuries, with the result that they tended to fall back upon an old Aristotelian framework, modified by Renaissance humanism, in order to interpret him. Thus there was produced what history has called ‘Calvinism’, the rigid strait-jacket within which Calvin’s teaching has been presented regularly to succeeding generations.[1]

[1] Thomas F. Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction, 76 cited by Alasdair Heron, “Participaito” Vol. 2, p.46 fn. 2.

Nala’s Salvation: Against Her “Christian” Legalistic Critics

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Legalism continues to be rife on the theological interwebs. An OnlyFans porn star (at the top of the “game”) just gave her life to Christ (she grew up as a Baptist pastor’s kid, like me). I watched her whole interview, where she shared her life story and testimony, on the Michael Knowles show (2:20 minutes). She has gotten lots of pushback and skepticism, particularly on the website formerly known as Twitter. There is a high profile (on said website) Jewess who has been saying vile things about this former star. But she’s a Jewess and not a Christian; so, definitionally she wouldn’t understand the nature of God’s grace (at least not yet). But then there have also been “Christians” pushing back at this sister. I want to highlight one of these fellas. Of course, this guy has written a book on “biblical masculinity,” has a podcast on the topic, and unfortunately, has quite a few followers on X and probably other social media platforms. What he says about this young sister makes my blood boil; it is as antiChrist/antiGospel that someone can get (let his message be anathema). Here is part of what he said:

Nala’s entire life has been a lie. She has profited in multi-millions from the twin society-crushing evils of Feminism and the Sexual Revolution. She has led countless men astray for pay, selecting for her profession a task built on values that are explicitly anti-family, anti-Law, and therefore anti-Christ and anti-Logos. She should be revolted at the multi-generational forces that twisted a creature made in God’s image into this demonic mockery of a human female. God didn’t just save her from hell. He saved her from years of her own sin-enslaved wretchedness, which spread virally over the internet touching the lives of potentially millions in exchange for cash. Honorable men with grit under their nails and sweat on their brow and scars on their arms engaged in months of backbreaking labor to make less than she probably did for one weekend’s parade of digital sin. You do not understand the truly cosmos-rending chain of confession, repentance, mercy, grace, and salvation well enough if you think baptism and a few words on camera suffice to expunge the stain on the earth, let alone herself, that she has created. A repentant heart would scrape off all remnants of that clownish makeup to reveal the unadorned face of the woman underneath, as God sees her, and beg the men she exploited for forgiveness. She would stare into the image of the photo below with horror and never wish for one second to be mistaken for that death-cult parasite again. She would decry from the mountaintops the fallenness of the world that allowed and even encouraged her digital prostitution, and tear her garments witnessing the wickedness in her bones and bloodstream that seduced her into this line of “work.” Work which she then relished in perfecting her craft to infernal excellence, I might add. She would strip herself of artificial beauty and clothe herself in modesty then disappear into her husband’s home and hearth, next seen by the public with a small pack of children, and a tearful song of Romans 8:28-29 on her grateful lips. In so doing, she would model the true path home for women. We live in a Christ-hating nation that despises God with every fiber of its being, making a middle-class, single-income household all but impossible as an explicit attack on the institution of the family and especially the role of the father. And suddenly I’m supposed to believe we’re all celebrating a sinner being saved? On the network that just fired a female commentator, in part, for daring to say, “Christ is King”? Please. Candace Owens, who showed at least a flash of true courage, should be furious. Nala has stepped onto the public stage and been thrust into a default position of spiritual leadership, as many celebrities sadly are the moment they whisper the name of Christ to a camera. Thus I criticize her as a leader. “Give her time”? How about instead we bring on a repentant believer who has already had time? I propose Rosaria Butterfield. Maybe Nala should give herself time. Maybe the media should give her time. Maybe the legions of female sinners and their white knight cheerleaders should at this very moment be ushering Nala off the stage forever, for her own good, rather than clapping like seals in the hopes that she’ll legitimize their poorly-discipled, halfhearted repentance for sins. Because she won’t. She literally can’t. Not until Feminism and the Sexual Revolution that produced her (and women like her) are ripped up root and branch from the salted earth of the American family, burned, and the ashes cast into the brook Kidron. (2 Kings 23:6) But that’s not what we really want, is it? Women today desire to be led… but only where they were already planning on going. Others want this to be a “meat sacrificed to idols” moment. 1 Corinthians 8 is the world-befriending Christian’s dog-eared chapter, isn’t it? “It’s not that bad. I’m under grace not law.”[1]

All this gal is doing is sharing her testimony. When a person is “born from above” they are born again of an imperishable seed; the seed of Christ’s life blossomed to the right hand of the Father for them/us. This guy, Will Spencer, thinks we need to “wait and see.” Is that what Jesus did with the Samaritan woman at the well; or many other female sinners, inclusive of prostitutes? No, once the re-birth is realized in someone’s heart, they become participant with Christ (participatio Christi), and partakers of the divine and triune being of God. Nobody can separate Nala from Christ, not even her. She’s entered into an indestructible life that is not contingent on her obedience, but Christ’s for her (which in fact is what the Gospel is all about).

This guy, Will, is simply a product of a nomist subculture that has swallowed much of the North American evangelical community whole. It is through the “retrieval” of precisianist and juridical categories, as those are found particularly developed in the Post Reformed orthodox theologies of the 16th and 17th centuries, that this legalistic subculture, of the type this Spencer guy is fomenting, has come to have root. And yet, most of these cats aren’t aware of their informing theology. They simply receive it, and run with it. They don’t recognize, critically so, its historical and philosophical beginnings; and as such they simply conflate these mercantilist categories with the biblical Gospel. As a result, we end up with this “wait and see” attitude in regard to having certainty if someone is saved or not. This is absurdum! But this is simply a projection of their own uncertainty and lack of assurance before God. Barth was right when he wrote the following with reference to Calvin’s thinking on assurance of salvation:

How can we have assurance in respect of our own election except by the Word of God? And how can even the Word of God give us assurance on this point if this Word, if this Jesus Christ, is not really the electing God, not the election itself, not our election, but only an elected means whereby the electing God—electing elsewhere and in some other way—executes that which he has decreed concerning those whom He has—elsewhere and in some other way—elected? The fact that Calvin in particular not only did not answer but did not even perceive this question is the decisive objection which we have to bring against his whole doctrine of predestination. The electing God of Calvin is a Deus nudus absconditus.[2]

It is this ill-formed doctrine of election that hangs over all of these legalists’ heads; it’s actually rather tragic. Not only can they not find rest in Christ for them, but then they project that unrest and uncertainty on anyone else who confesses Jesus as Lord; like Nala. If Jesus isn’t both the object and subject of God’s election, then election simply hangs in the balances of the decretum absolutum (absolute decree). And it is this type of election, the type grounded in an unrevealed, secret and arbitrary decree of God, that leaves these types of legalists floundering in their salvation. But, often, such people believe they’ve hit some sort of magical mark in their lives, finding a level of assurance that they indeed are one of the elect of God (because they haven’t sinned in certain ways like they used to; so based on their performance). But they’re still “waiting to see” if other new converts really have come to Christ based upon some subjective and abstract standard of judgment vis-à-vis the performance of said new converts. That’s what this Spencer guy and others are now doing to Nala. Historically this exercise is called experimental predestinarianism, which entails exactly what it says.

I have written more than I intended. Let me leave Will Spencer and his cohorts with a parable of Jesus’. It speaks against the type of performance and legalistically based salvation he unfortunately has been “discipled” into.

“For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. 2 When he had agreed with the laborers for a denarius for the day, he sent them into his vineyard. 3 And he went out about the third hour and saw others standing idle in the market place; 4 and to those he said, ‘You also go into the vineyard, and whatever is right I will give you.’ And so they went. 5 Again he went out about the sixth and the ninth hour, and did the same thing. 6 And about the eleventh hour he went out and found others standing around; and he *said to them, ‘Why have you been standing here idle all day long?’ 7 They *said to him, ‘Because no one hired us.’ He *said to them, ‘You go into the vineyard too.’

8 “When evening came, the owner of the vineyard *said to his foreman, ‘Call the laborers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last group to the first.’ 9 When those hired about the eleventh hour came, each one received a denarius. 10 When those hired first came, they thought that they would receive more; but each of them also received a denarius. 11 When they received it, they grumbled at the landowner, 12 saying, ‘These last men have worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden and the scorching heat of the day.’ 13 But he answered and said to one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for a denarius? 14 Take what is yours and go, but I wish to give to this last man the same as to you. 15 Is it not lawful for me to do what I wish with what is my own? Or is your eye envious because I am generous?’ 16 So the last shall be first, and the first last.” –Matthew 20:1-16

 

[1] Will Spencer | Renaissance Man, accessed on X 04-08-2024.

[2] Karl Barth, CD II/2, 111.