Category Archives: Dialectical Theology

As a Narrative Theologian You Pray, You Worship, You Write

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I prefer doing narratival theology. Why? Because to me it is the most organic expression of a dialogical theology. What is a dialogical theology? It is a theology where you’re constantly in prayer, in dialog with the One who has made and re-made us in Jesus Christ. It is a theology where you aren’t waiting to be participant or partaker with the divine nature, but actively keeping in step with that as the reality of the Christian daily existence. Narratival theology remains an open form. One that reflects a stream of worship, meditation, and con-versation with God, who is Father of the Son by the Holy Spirit. Dialogical theology operates from within the center of God’s life in Christ; it is greater than the written word, but not lesser. As such it can be written for the Church’s edification; indeed, grounded in the experience of Christ’s lived life, His vicarious humanity for us. So, a narratival theology as the expression of a dialogical theology is a highly personalist and experiential theology. But it isn’t a rationalist or romanticist theology insofar that the experience of God isn’t grounded in each one of us abstractly, but in God the Son’s experience for us in His archetypal and greater Adamic humanity for us.

As a narratival thelogian you simply pray, you worship, you participate in the triune life and the communio sanctorum (communion of the saints), and then write and speak upon it for others; for purposes of edification of the body of Christ writ large.

The Character of Barth’s Kantian and Feuerbachian Critique of the Metaphysical gods

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Ludwig Feuerbach

Karl Barth is often identified as a neo-Kantian, or just straight up Kantian in his theological orientation (and methodology). It seems too facile to me to maintain that Barth was somehow a slavish servant of Kant, especially materially. Maybe formally, Barth could be understood to be a Kantian in certain qualified ways. But in the air he breathed to be “Kantian” or neo-Kantian would be like saying that John Calvin et al. was an Aristotelian, or Scotist for that matter. The point being, often, formalities are not the all-encompassing thing in the theological project. Ultimately, what is at stake is what gets produced materially. In other words, it is surely possible for the theologian to be influenced by some intellectual tradition, and at the same time, under the Christian revelational pressures of thought, indeed, trinitarian pressures, to retext the form (in this case, the Kantian one) in a way wherein the kerygmatic reality becomes the conditioning and driving factor even behind the form itself.

The above is rather abstract, indeed. In order, to incarnate my points with a little more flesh and blood, let’s now refer to Eberhard Busch’s discussion on these matters, as that pertains to Kant’s and Feuerbach’s deliverances of a Barthian theology and knowledge of God.

. . . In Barth’s view, what Feuerbach “rightfully objected to” was that in human religion the one who prays, the pious individual does not “get beyond what he himself has thought and experienced,” that all his “attempts to bridge the gap. . . take place within this world.” The interpretation that leads Barth to entertain Feuerbach’s critique of religion is clearly in line with Kant’s critique of the assertion that the knowledge of metaphysical truth is on the same level as experiential knowledge. Once again it is Kant in whose thought Barth finds the intellectual possibility of overcoming Feuerbach’s critique of religion. He does this by advancing the thesis that God is not a hypothesis (of man) only when he is conceived of per se as the “presupposition” (of man). Therefore “God” is not untouched by Feuerbach’s critique when he is generally understood as a metaphysical reality beyond all human hypotheses, but only when he is understood as “the origin of the crisis of all objectivity devoid of all objectivity.” After all this we may assume that Barth is especially influenced by Kant, deepened by Neo-Kantianism but also by Feuerbach’s critique, when he insists in his Epistle to the Romans that God cannot or only supposedly can be recognized as an object of experiential knowledge. And we may further assume that the same influence is in play when Barth now separates himself from Schleiermacher and his own earlier position with the thesis that God can only be “recognized” as the critical boundary of human experience.[1]

Busch, in context, is referring to the earlier younger Barth, and yet, he is also notating that the form of Kant remained continuous throughout Barth’s theological project; indeed, to the very end. So, Barth surely was a Modern theologian under these terms. But as Bruce McCormack has rightly pointed out elsewhere, Barth, just as Busch has inchoately pressed here, flipped the Kantian project on its head by thinking it through the noumenal and phenomenal being grounded in the enhypostasis of the anhypostatic Son becoming flesh in the singular person of Jesus Christ; as such, removing the odor the type of projectile dualism Kant’s theology suffered from.

Conversely, and for the purposes of this post, I think it is interesting to hear some of Busch’s commentary on Barth and his respective positioning within the modern German/Swiss theological and philosophical milieu of his day (at formative points in his own intellectual development). Further, I also think Busch’s clarification on how Barth deployed Feuerbach, even by creatively sponging the Feuerbachian critique of religion through the Kantian possibility for true transcendence, to be very helpful. I have often referred to Barth’s appeal to Feuerbach and Feuerbach’s critique of religion as self-immanent-projection; and as far as that goes (because it cannot go all the way), it is a helpful acid to place on the unhealthy aspects of a pietistic venture. But just as Barth understood—because he was a Christian of no small stature—Feuerbach and Kant were only useful propaedeutics, insofar that they could be deployed as foils against the manmade gods of the philosophers, and even the scholastics.

I’m afraid this whole post has been rather abstract. The necessary context for this offering is reliant on the reader’s own familiarity with these things. Even so, here’s the reduction: knowledge of the genuine Christian triune God is purely contingent on this God Self-disclosing Himself to and for us in the face of Jesus Christ. It is possible, as Barth illustrates, to even use pagans against the appropriation of pagan categories for thinking God. This is what Barth did by using a retexted Kantian form, and a Feuerbachian critique, against “Christian” appropriations of God, categorically, that are too contingent upon speculative discursive reasoning, and the “discoveries” of the various natural theologians throughout the millennia, respectively; going back as far as Genesis 3, into the Antique Greek philosophers, and the whole stream following. Let God be true and every man a liar.

[1] Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth & the Pietists, trans. by Daniel W. Bloesch (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 119-20.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Living the ‘Confessional Life’ from the Life at the Right Hand

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Being a confessional Christian is the way. Some might read this and think I am referring to being ‘Reformed.’ But that would be mistaken; the Reformed might think they have a corner on this language, but they don’t. What I mean when I say ‘confessional’ is being a Christian in the Christian existence who lives and breathes and does theology based on the confession that Jesus is Lord. Doing theology based on the premise that God has spoken (‘Deus dixit’), and only after that fact, that reality can a genuinely Christian theology obtain. Being confessional is to live life in echo of the Son’s Yes and Amen for us by the Holy Spirit; His Yes and Amen as Son of the Father in homoousial (consubstantial) fellowship (koinonia). It is to live the Christian life as if there are no “competitors” that we must flummox first; that we must defeat before we get on with the business of living the Christian life before God (coram Deo). That is, to be a genuinely confessional Christian is to live an unapologetic (and thus not apologetic) Christian life; and allow this attitude, this posture from within the life of the Right Hand, to shape the questions and answers we find as Christians who know their Shepherd’s voice. To live as a confessional Christian is to recognize that God alone either presents His own Self-interpretation, His own Self-revelation for us, vicariously including humanity in His priestly humanity or He doesn’t. It is to live in the after of the fact that He has in fact Self-revealed and given us, and gives us afresh anew, a capaciousness within Himself pro nobis (for us), in the capaciousness of Christ’s vicarious humanity to be for God, with God, and in God by the Holy Spirit. To be a confessional Christian is to live in this slavish bondage to the holiness of God for us in Jesus Christ; and from this spring, the fount of everlasting life bursts forever already from the belly of our beings in Christ.

As Christians, new and old, as they enter the fray of the Christian theological existence, they will find it very difficult, as if in a famine, to find the aforementioned type of confessional living that I think a genuine Christian existence requires of us. That is to simply repose in the viva vox Dei (‘living voice of God’) as we encounter that afresh anew through encountering His prosopon (face) in the living Word of God; in the Holy Scriptures, as those gain their ‘holiness’ insofar that Christ resurrects by the Spirit from every page turned.

The moral: Be a confessional Christian, it’s really the only way to live the Christian life with the type of telos, purpose that God has poemed in the lyrics of Christ’s eternal melody for us. Holy, Holy, Holy is the LORD God Almighty; who was, and is, and is to come. amen

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

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

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

We may note three important implications from this double objectivity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Prayer-ful Hermeneutic Found in the ‘inner-text’ of Holy Scripture

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Depth Dimenson, that is the language TF Torrance uses when referring to an engagement with Holy Scripture’s deep context. He reifies the sacramental language of thinking Scripture as the signum (sign), and its res (reality) as Jesus Christ and the triune God that Christ mediates to the Church and world. The reification comes for Torrance as he thinks all things from the patristic homoousious and/or the double consubstantial (both fully God and human) person of Jesus Christ. It is from this analogy that Torrance thinks the relationship between Scripture’s broad canonical context, and the meaning that funds that context in Jesus Christ. So, for Torrance, the depth dimension of Scripture is none other than the Christ. It is within the context and space of God’s life for the world in Jesus Christ wherein Scripture, for Torrance, gains critical gravitas; meaning, that, for Torrance, Scripture’s inner-theo-logic must become the informing frame by which exegetical and interpretive conclusions are arrived at as the biblical exegete attempts to interpret Holy Scripture. If this isn’t the context, the fund for Scripture’s meaning, according to TFT, then all that one is left with is a literary piece of Ancient Near Eastern and Second Temple Judaic relevance. Scripture outwith the frame of its Christ conditioning, for Torrance, merely becomes an interesting piece of archaeological and artifactual history that the likes of an Indiana Jones might risk his life for, but not much more.

This type of theme, as being detailed above, is also present in Karl Barth’s approach to Holy Scripture (surprise!)—not to mention in much of the tradition of the Church. It is a confessional hermeneutic that starts with a confessional doctrine of Scripture wherein the belief is that Scripture is indeed God’s Holy Word. For Barth (and TFT et al.) of course, Scripture has a layered “ontology” as it finds its order first and foremost in God’s eternal Logos, Jesus Christ. Scripture is living and active precisely because of its deep reality in Jesus Christ and the triune God (which is just as true for all of creation, cf. Col. 1.15ff). Without belaboring these points further, let me refer us to Bruce McCormack’s rendering of how this all looks in the thought of Karl Barth.

Now because the ratio fidei (the Credo) is not identical with the ratio veritatis (the Word), conformity with the ratio veritatis will not be a simple matter of reading and understanding the outward text of the Creed. Revealed truth has an ‘inner text’ which must be grasped if the outward text is to be rightly understood. What is required is a special movement of thought which goes beyond mere reading. The outward text has to be read in relation to the inner text. But the inner text is not readily accessible. If the reader is to penetrate through the outer text to the inner text, she must be grasped through the reading of the outer text from the other side. It is not in mastering the object but in being mastered by it that the interpreter achieves a true comprehension of the ontic ratio of the object of faith, and the intellectus that is sought takes place. That means that the attainment of the ratio intellectus that is in conformity with the ratio vertatis hidden in the ratio fidei depends upon a divine decision, and therefore upon grace. That means further that the way to be taken in knowing God begins in prayer and faith.[1]

For those who know the Protestant Reformed history vis-à-vis the Scripture principle they will immediately recognize the type of riff that has been taken by Barth (as distilled by BLM) with reference to the thinking on the perspicuity of Holy Scripture (as that pertains to its inner and outer clarity). Neither Barth or Torrance is thinking too far away from the Protestant Reformation, in fact as Reformed theologians, they are constructively receiving it, and pollinating it with the categories and emphases of the conciliar past; that is, they are receiving the categories of the Protestant Reformation, and reifying them, as we already know, within a Christ concentrated frame. But no matter what they are doing, the point remains that for them, and for many others in the annals of church history, the biblical exegete has no point of reference to interpret Scripture from unless they are doing so from the fact that Scripture’s “depth dimension” is founded upon its ‘inner text’ who is Jesus Christ.

But the above stumbles some, especially the analytically typed. This is why I emboldened the last clause of the passage from McCormack. A depth dimensional reader of Scripture is doing so as a prayer, and from the tilt of the faith of Christ for us. That is, the depth interpreter is reading Scripture in dialogue with its reality as they are participants with Him in the triune life of the living God. This picks up on the Calvinian theme of faith as knowledge of God, and a knowledge of God in a Christ concentrated frame is a con-versant and growing knowledge as the disciple, the biblical interpreter is in constant discussion with the reality of Holy Scripture. It isn’t as if the genuinely Christian exegete is engaging with a relic to be bridged from now to back then. The genuinely Christian exegete knows the “bridge” of all of history, all of salvation reality, all of supranatural reality in the risen and ascended Christ. The Christian exegete speaks to the reality of Scripture, and allows that reality to confront and contradict them, as needed, as the Christian is being transformed from glory to glory. We have a speaking God who continues to speak to us in these last days by His Son. The depth dimensional interpreter takes full advantage of this access we have to the living God through the veil of the broken and glorified body of Jesus Christ. This is its concrete reality, not the secondary means of engagement that the exegete uses with reference to the literary, grammatical, historical components of Scripture. Those are components which have no orientation, and no meaningful place, without Scripture’s ontological reality as founded in Jesus Christ. Selah

[1] Bruce L. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909–1936 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 430 [emboldening mine].

On Being a Dialogical Rather than a Static Christian Thinker

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This post deals with some technical stuff that might not be interesting for all readers, but I find it quite instructive in better understanding why it is that Thomas Torrance rejects the determinism that shapes frameworks of thought like that found, theologically, within Arminianism and Calvinism. And it should also help to illustrate an alternative route to thinking about things in causally determinative ways; which implicates the ways that, in the West, in general, we have become most accustomed to think, even though someone like Einstein and his theory of relativity has demonstrated that reality, in fact does not work in mechanistically determinative ways. If this is so, then systems of thought like classical Calvinism and Arminianism are no longer viable in their classical theistic forms. Here is what Torrance writes about such things—just for a little context, he has been discussing the role of order, and contingency that we experience in creation; he persuasively argues that contingency (like creation presupposes) must presuppose a ‘rational’ ground of order beyond contingency, such that creation and contingency both find their orientation beyond themselves thus bequeathing to us an open-structured mode that only asks us to seek and think in accord with the intelligibility that stands beyond contingency—so contingency then allows for things, like knowledge, to be held in a dynamic relation relative to the personal ground of its reality V. a static relation that requires that we fill in the gaps between an unmoved mover and  what we experience in creation (and as), thus maintaining some sort of necessary constancy between the Creator and the creation (I doubt the context I just provided helps very much; like I said, this is rather technical material). Here is Torrance:

Now let us consider the other concept mentioned above, that of inertia. It is not difficult to trace its source either, in late Patristic and mediaveal theology — not to mention Neoplatonic and Arabian thought — particularly as the doctrine of the immutability and impassibility of God became tied up with the Aristotelian notion of the unmoved mover or a centre of absolute rest which was resurrected and powerfully integrated with Latin scholastic philosophy, science, and theology. In theology itself, it induced a deistic disjunction between God and the world, which scholastic thought tried to modify through bringing into play all four Aristotelian causes, the ‘final’ and ‘formal’ along with the ‘material’ and ‘efficient’ causes. The effect of this, however, was not to overcome the dualist modes of thought inherited from St. Augustine, the Magister Theologiae, but actually to harden the dualism by throwing it into a causal structure. This was particularly apparent in the conception of sacraments as “causing grace”, which was further aggravated (as in the doctrine of “real presence”) by the acceptance of Aristotle’s definition of place as “the immobile limit of the containing body”. In mediaeval science, on the other hand, the conception of a causal system ultimately grounded in and determined by a centre of absolute rest had the effect of obstructing attempts to develop emperical interpretations of nature for it denigrated contingentia as irrational.[1]

The moral is that we will either operate with something like an Aristotelian static view of metaphysics offers, or we will operate with a dynamic view of reality that is offered through a Trinitarian theology (and illustrated by an Einsteinian theory of relativity). One that is mediated through the contingencies of God become human in Jesus Christ.

[1] Thomas F. Torrance, The Christian Frame of Mind, 24-5.

*I originally wrote this for another blog of mine circa 07-16-2012.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is just the beginning of a proposal.