Category Archives: Doctrine Of Creation

The Primacy of Christ: Ecclesiology and Protology

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Some brief interactions I’ve recently had on X with reference to a question on the relationship between Christ and creation, and another question on how I view the institutional church on earth. These questions were posed by two different interlocutors. The one on the institutional church has some further interaction behind it that I won’t share here. Interestingly these two loci are not unrelated; i.e., a doctrine of creation and an ecclesiology. A genuine Christian dogmatics sees the taxis, the order and interrelationships that all inhere and cohere in and through, we might say, their Archimedean and primordial point in Jesus Christ; who is the triune God for the world in his being in becoming, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in whose works are indivisible from his reality as God.

Interlocutor 1. Trying to understand what you’ve written here… Are you saying that no institutional church exists on earth?

My response. No, I’m saying that the institutional church on earth only becomes that by her active union with Christ; who in fact, in his Theanthropic person, in His vicarious humanity for the world, is in fact constituently, in himself, the institutional church—“for as He is so also are we in this world.” 1 Jn 4.17

Addendum: Christoph Schwöbel, writes, with reference to Barth’s conception of the visible and invisible church (and this is what my thinking reflects as well):

For Barth, the visible Church is also an article of faith. The church is believed both as invisible and visible Church. “Visible” and “invisible” are not two species of the same genus, he emphasizes, but one and the same subject in two respects. In order to explain the dialectic, Barth points to a parallel in his doctrine of the Word of God. Just as God’s revelation is the Word becoming flesh in Christ, this Word becoming Scripture and Scripture becoming a human word in proclamation, so the invisible Church is where the visible Church is. However, the visible church can never by itself be an object of faith; the visible Church belongs to faith as pointing to its ground in God. By itself, it is a creature in which one cannot believe, because one can only believe in the creator. Everything else is idolatry. Therefore Barth can say: “One believes in God when one believes in the visibility of the Church that falls from above into history—because that is He, that is His work of reconciliation—just as an individual human person believes in God by believing in the grace falling from above into his boundless unholiness.” Believing in the Church means to believe in God as God creates, preserves, and perfects the Church. For Barth it is therefore clear that the visible church witnesses to the invisible church and in doing so witnesses to God as the only object of faith: “The glory of the church is to give all glory to God.”[1]

Interlocutor 2. Does Christocentrism deepen the reality of created, historical existence, or does it end up quietly dissolving it into something more like a single, seamless divine act?

My response. There are many versions of “christocentrism” out there. The one I follow sees Jesus as the whole reason for creation (see Col. 1.15 and the primacy of Christ therein). Also, following Barth, the external creation is really just the inner relation of God’s covenanted life of triune grace, given expression as the effulgence of who He has freely chosen to be for and with us in Jesus Christ. So, yes, contra a torpid pantheism, or panentheism, the created reality, in the account I follow, is charged with God’s triune being in becoming for us in Jesus Christ. Which would entail that He is closer to us and all of creation than we are to ourselves. David Fergusson rightly opines: “the world was made so that Christ might be born.”

As usual my own thoughts, idiosyncratic as they are, are indeed mine. They require greater clarification and “fleshing” out than my off the top responses have rendered. But that does not mean that type of work or thought hasn’t or cannot be done. Time and space restraints are always a factor when engaging in a communicative act. In other words, I recognize my responses require further explication, but since they are brief responses intended for social media consumption, they will remain as currently stands. That isn’t to say I am not willing to hash things out further; or that I’m not open to further interrogation. It just means that these responses represent a running commentary on where I am at myself in the developments of my own thinking on these matters.

Interior rerum creatarum natura in foedere gratiae trina est.

[1] Christoph Schwöbel, “’The Kingdom of Christ Now Present in Mystery,’ and the Question of the ‘Distance between Christ as Lord, King, and Judge and His Church,’” edited by Matthew Levering, Bruce L. McCormack and Thomas Joseph White, OP, Dogma and Ecumenism: Vatican II and Karl Barth’s Ad Limina Apostolorum (Washington D.C., The Catholic University of America Press, 2020), 104-05.

The Impossible Possibility: Heaven

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One day the impossible possibility will finally be possible in consummate form. Faith will become the concrete sight that it is even now, but in its fully living bodied-color. The dead grass will blow away once and for all, and all that will be left standing is the enduring and eternal Word of God (Verbum Dei manet in aeternam). And all those in participatory union with the Logos of God; indeed, all the saints, both militant and triumphant will finally come together in eschatological bliss, in the One who is blissful for us, the Eschatos of God, Jesus Christ. The brokenness, the woefulness, the despair, and angst, the doubts and anxieties, the unbelief and its heartache, will finally be put under the Savior’s feet; indeed, as He declares ‘the last enemy, death,’ is dead. The futility the unwilling world was put under will be doused by the springs of eternal life as they flow freely from the belly of the Son of Man for us, for the world. Even though we will, even though we do experience tragedy upon tragedy, thlipsis unimaginable in this fallen and broken world; take heart, Jesus says, for “I have overcome that world.” New creation has come, is coming afresh anew, and will finally come! Maranatha

The Fittingness of God to Become Human / The Unfittingness of Humans to Become God

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It is unfitting for man to exalt himself to the status of God. But it is entirely fitting for God to become man (human). It is fitting for God to enter His creaturely sphere, to become His creaturely magnum opus, and redeem and elevate it from the inside up. It was so fitting for God to become human (man) that He freely elected that status for Himself, even before the foundations of the world, as He elected humanity for Himself; which was ultimately going to be for us (pro nobis). To invert that order is to imbibe the spirit of the Antichrist. The very spirit that slithered upon the Holy ground of Eden and whispered into Eve’s ear with its serpentine forked tongue: “you will be like God.” Barth writes,

We can state at once the impotence of this enterprise and therefore its inward futility. God becomes and is man. His condescension to us, His being as we are, is an event. It is actuality. It is the act of the One who is free and able to do this. It is the powerful execution of His eternal resolve. It is a triumphant and indisputable and irrevocable fact. But man, on the other hand, only wants to exalt himself and to be as God. He can never do it. He does not have the freedom or power. He may determine on it for long enough, but nothing will ever come of it. He will always fall back on himself and still be man. It is not paradoxical or absurd that God becomes and is man. It does not contradict the concept of God. If fulfils it. It reveals the glory of God. But it is certainly paradoxical and absurd that man wants to be as God. It contradicts the concept of man. It destroys it. Man ceases to be a man when he wants this. It does not involve any alteration in God for Him to become a creature. Even as such He is still the Creator. But it does require an alteration in man—and one that is not given to him—to become God. He cannot hope and he need not concern himself that this will finally be attained. For his own good it is provided that he cannot pass his own limits, try how he will. The only result of his attempts is the revelation of his impotence to do so, and, because he ought not to do so, the revelation of his shame.[1]

This bespeaks the goodness and very goodness of God’s creation. All things in their proper order (taxis) in relation to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and within that given, that gift humans have the capacity to flourish in the ways intended by the living God. Rebel against this order, as we are wont to do by our ‘sinful natures,’ and it all goes to hell.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 §60 [419] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 61–2.

God’s Adversary and Ours: A Brief Theology of the Devil / A Book Impression

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Just finished. It is a good provocative read. It is written in a nice narratival theological style, which definitely works within the spirit and ambit of the Barth style (i.e. engagement with Holy Scripture throughout). Philip re-places a doctrine of the devil into the second article, so, Christology and Soteriology (think Apostle’s Creed) versus the traditional placement as found in the first article with reference to original creation and God’s providence. This reorients thinking the devil from emphasizing him as a fallen angel, and instead sees him primarily in the scenery of the wilderness, as the adversary (of Christ), as adventitious, and anarchic. These three themes serve to organize the way that Ziegler seeks to place the devil within a dogmatic location of the second article. And it shouldn’t be forgotten that Ziegler is doing all of this work as a type of revitalization of a satanology for and within Reformed theology, proper.

One question I had going into this book was to see if Philip would hold to the idea that the devil is “personal,” or if the devil has an ontology of diabolical sorts. In the long and the short of it: yes, Ziegler affirms a type of nothingness beingness (my phraseology) which pairs well with Barth’s doctrine of sin or “nothingness” (das Nichtige)—which you can read about in CD III/3 (I also have some passages on that in my Barth Reader).

As a North American evangelical, like myself, I am conditioned to think of the Devil in the first article. As someone who reads Barth and Torrance and Calvin a lot, I am re-conditioned to think within the second article. And so, this clash continues for me, particularly when it comes to such matters as a satanology represents. Beyond that, as a basic evangelical Christian, there are too many real-life encounters that I have had with the demonic—ones that mirror those in the Gospels etc.—that experientially keep me from falling into any type of crass physicalism when it comes to the dark spiritual realm. Even so, the themes that Ziegler develops, therein, don’t contradict that reality, it just textualizes them in ways that some readers might think envelopes this matter into a purely intellectual exercise; but that would be wrong. Take it up and read for yourself.

Discoursing Our Way to an Angelology; Philosophy V the Bible; Thomas V Barth

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Barth attempts to offer a Biblical Angelology. In the process he surveys some of the most primary developments on an angelology, in the history, as those were offered by Dionysius and Thomas Aquinas. Just on that level his treatment is interesting and rewarding. But in the midst of that, since he is slavishly beholden to the Protestant ‘Scripture Principle,’ he also identifies what I also take to be primary to a truly Christian presentation on the angels. As is typical, especially with reference to my own interests, Barth rightly recognizes the role that a prolegomena/hermeneutic will end up having on how a respective thinker will arrive at their veritable conclusion on what in fact angels (and demons) are. This a priori commitment to whatever hermeneutic someone deploys in their attempt to understand the supraphysical verities in God’s world, will in the end determine whether or not said thinker actually has a point of contact with God’s world or not.

In the following passage the reader will observe how Barth believes a philosophical/speculative attempt at developing a doctrine of the angels, as is present in Aquinas’ guiding habit, ends up providing something highly interesting and imaginative to contemplate; but beyond that, for Barth, this speculation only generates a notion of ‘angelness’ that only can get as high as the virtuoso’s genius. That is, Barth believes, for example, in Thomas’ attempt to prove the existence of angels, that insofar that he stays correspondent within his self-referencing universe, that Thomas does indeed offer something on “the angels” that entails a coherence. But that’s what makes it something of interest to Barth, rather than something of substance (pun intended).

It cannot be contested that in a specific sphere and on a specific assumption proof is here given of the existence of a specific object interesting to the one who conducts the proof. It might be asked whether this sphere is real, and if so accessible, and if so able to be marked off in this way and approached with this assumption. It might be asked whether the proof furnished on this assumption and in this sphere is really conclusive and convincing either in detail or as a whole. But if we assume that everything is in order in this respect, and that Thomas has legitimately proved what he really could prove, there can be no doubt that with this assumption (or with the criticism or partial or total rejection of his demonstration) we are merely making philosophical and not theological decisions. Whether there are intellectual substances without bodies, and whether their existence can be proved in this or some other way, may be a question which is interesting and important in the sphere of philosophy. It may be one which can be discussed and even decided in this sphere. It may even be one which is decisive. But it is purely philosophical. On the basis of the Word of God attested in Holy Scripture we are not asked whether there are or are not substances of this kind, nor are we required to prove their existence in some way. If there are, and if their existence can be proved, this does not lead us to angels in the biblical sense of the term. And if there are not, and their existence cannot be proved, this is no argument against angels in the Christian sense. What are called angels in the Bible are not even envisaged in Thomas’ proof of the existence of these substantiae separatae [distinct substances], let alone is anything said for or against their existence, or anything meaningful states about them at all, with the eight proofs. And what Thomas later constructed upon the demonstrated existence of these substantiae separatae is very different from a doctrine of angels in the Christian sense of the term. In his demonstration Thomas has given us philosophy and not theology, and he has done so far more exclusively than Dionysius. He does so occasionally refer to Holy Scripture, and therefore it may be asked whether he does not incidentally and in some sense contrary to his own intention make some contribution to theological knowledge. But fundamentally and as a whole he simply offers us a classical example of how not to proceed in this matter.[1]

In nuce, if the Christian is going to attempt to offer a genuinely Christian doctrine of angels, they will, as Barth so rightly presses, be committed to the biblical categories rather than the philosophical ones. And of course, it is this methodology that funds the whole of Barth’s style of a confessional trinitarian-dialectical christologically conditioned way of doing theology from the reality of the Bible. The Christian philosophers among us would sneer at this; the classical theologians, the ‘Great Traditioners’ in our midst, would mock; how ironic.

Stay Biblical my friends.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3 §50–51 [393] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 104.

Abortion, Sex Trafficking: Its Antidote in the Strength of the Babe from Nazareth

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O Lord, our Lord,
How excellent is Your name in all the earth,
Who have set Your glory above the heavens!

2 Out of the mouth of babes and nursing infants
You have ordained strength,
Because of Your enemies,
That You may silence the enemy and the avenger. –Psalm 8

I want to underscore one simple yet profound point by way of reflection on the above Scripture. ‘Out of the mouth of babes and nursing infants You have ordained strength.’ Ultimately, we understand as Christians that there is an archetype Babe elected for the world from eternity past, born of the Virgin Mary, wrapped in swaddling cloths and laid in a manger. We understand, in a proto-evangelical (cf. Gen. 3.15) way, that the Seed of the woman came and crushed the head of the serpent. Indeed, the strength of God was made manifest through the Babe for the world in Jesus Christ, the Man from Nazareth; obedient unto death, the death of the cross.

That is the most central aspect that I take from Psalm 8. But another, more sinister reality of this reality can be made by way of inference. One might wonder why the most innocent and vulnerable among us in the world—either children in the womb, or outside of it—are targeted so viciously by the abortionists and child sex traffickers; that is, why are pagans so bent on destroying the youth; whether that be through murder in the womb, or by taking their innocence from them in the process of sexualizing them? Why would the Enemy through his pagan spawn so target the “least of these.” Why did Herod target children under the age of two in an attempt to wipe out the Messiah, the coming King? Exactly that. The Enemy of our souls, from first to last, hates nothing more than the idea that God has saved the world by first becoming a babe in the womb of a woman. This resonance for the serpent of old remains. He seeks to destroy the babes, the infants as much as is possible as an homage to his hatred for the Son of Man, come as a babe. The murder and destruction of young lives is the satanic sacrament of the religion of death he is lord of. Maybe this deathlord is so deluded that he still thinks he might be able to thwart yet the coming of the Son of God. Or maybe the coming of the Son of God in the womb of Mary, as the way of Life for the world so irritates the son of murder, that as an expression of his nugatory life, he is constrained by his hatred to bring death where in fact God has brought ultimate Life; through the gestation of His Life for the world in the womb of a mother.

 

The Father, The External Power of Our Existence

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All creatures, since that are from nothing, to that extent share in nothing . . . and are in need of some external power for every moment that they exist.

–H. Heidegger cited by Heppe cited by Barth (CD III/3, 74)

All of humanity is sustained by the Word of God’s power. He came into this world, having made the world, and yet the world knew Him not. He is closer to us than we are to ourselves. If people could begin to lean into this point, made by the Reformed theologian, Heidegger (not the other Heidegger), we would lose so much of our angst and anxiety that we generate all the days of our weary lives. If we could come to recognize that the world is not contingent upon our waning ideas and breaths, and instead, that it is contingent upon God’s indestructible life; all of sleeplessness and depressions could be cast upon the One who cares for us. If we could submit to the idea, in worship, that God is God and we are not; we could finally repose in our Father’s everlasting arms of rest.

The Heavenly Dust: Christian Knowledge of God

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As Christians we want to think about God as Christians. Christians, definitionally, aren’t profane persons. Indeed, according to Scripture, Christians are saints; i.e., set apart in Christ who is our Set Apart in the presence of the Father for us. This might seem scandalous to even recognize, but Christians are simply in a different place in regard to knowing reality as it is; insofar as the Christ (Jesus) allows us entrée in these, our bodies of death, in this in-between time. Some might want to push back and describe my observations as idealist. But it is just the opposite, in fact. Only Christians, in regard to thinking God and all else, can operate as non-idealists. That is to say, the Christian is confronted in their very beings with the fact that they, in themselves, left to their profane-selves, are sublated by the very dust and water their flatlander bodies consist of. Further, this entails that Christians, as they are confronted by reality in Jesus Christ, can acknowledge their subhuman statuses as profane persons; repent, because God in Christ first repented for us; and experience life re-created on the primordial plane of God’s elect and elevated life for us in Jesus Christ. On this new plane the dust the Christian consists of is no longer mortal and earthy, but immortal and heavenly; it is of a new body, with new capacities, which entail a capacity to actually think the living and true God from within a center in Himself for us in Jesus Christ. If this is the case, it behooves the Christian, who is distinct from the profane or secular person, to learn to imbibe and think from the sensory-tablet provided for by the Son of Man, as He sits at the Right Hand of the Father.

Torrance writes:

Here we are faced with another fundamental characteristic of the Truth of God as it is in Jesus; it is both divine and human. Knowledge of it, accordingly, is essentially bi-polar. This bi-polarity corresponds to the two-fold objectivity of the Word we have already noted. Knowledge of God is given to us in this Man, Jesus, but that knowledge does not allow us to leave the Man Jesus behind when we know Him in His divine nature. There is an indivisible unity in the ultimate Fact of Christ, true God and true Man. Theological knowledge rests upon and partakes of that duality-in-unity in the Person of Christ. In Him we know God in terms of what God is not, namely, man, for in Christ God, who is God and not man, has become Man and comes as Man, but in such a way that what God is in Christ He is antecedently and eternally in Himself. We know God is indissoluble unity with Jesus as we encounter Him through the witness of men, and we know Jesus in His human and historical actuality in indissoluble unity with God.[1]

The Christian inhabits another world whilst grounded in this world by the grace of God in the face of Jesus Christ. The Christian doesn’t have to leave this world to see the antecedent world of God’s Kingdom. Precisely because God’s Kingdom, in the wisdom of the Cross, the wisdom of God in Christ, comes to us; here, where we are in this mortal dust, in order to make us partakers of the heavenly dust of His recreated-resurrected-ascended humanity.

[1] Thomas F. Torrance, Theological Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 149.

“What is natural to him is life, not death”: On the Stupidity of Death

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31 But regarding the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was spoken to you by God: 32 ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead but of the living.” 33 When the crowds heard this, they were astonished at His teaching. —Matthew 22:31–33

I remember when I was diagnosed with a rare and terminal-incurable cancer, called desmoplastic small round cell tumor-sarcoma (DSRCT), back in late 2009. My mortality was flung into my face in undeniable ways. The phone call from the doctor’s office, and of course the subsequent consultations, plunged me into a world of surreality, of the dislocated and disjointed; into a cosmos that seemed to be filled with ghosts, as if I no longer had concrete fixture on the earth beneath my feet. Death is not natural; humans were not created to die; they were not created to be disconnected from the fleshy bodies they were conceived with. Human beings were created for life, and not just life, but that more abundant life in the elevated reality of the living and triune God as that is mediated for us through the pre-destined humanity of the Son of God (Deus incarnandus). Unlike Confucian philosophy where life and death are simply an ebb and flow in the great circle of life, for the Christian we were created to worship God in Spirit and Truth; which, indeed, entails that we do so as we were created to be: i.e., in ensouled bodies built of the dust of the earth, with flesh and blood, hair and bones and teeth intact. The idea that people die is unnatural within the economy of God’s life for the world, the world He has pre-temporally predestined and freely chosen to be, in His choice to not be God without us, but with us, Immanuel.

Barth, as typical, has a really good insight on the dis-naturality of death:

In biblical demonstration of what has been said, we can first point only to the wholly negative character which the Old Testament gives to its picture of the nature and reality of death. In the perspective of the Old Testament, what is natural to man in his endowment with the life-giving breath of God which constitutes him as the soul of his body, not his subsequent loss of it. What is natural to him is the fact that he is and will be, not that he has been. What is natural to him is his being in the land of the living, not his being in the underworld. What is natural to him is life, not death. Death, on the other hand, is the epitome of what is contrary to nature. It is not, therefore, normal. It is always a kind of culpable extravagance to man when he longs for death, like Elijah under the juniper tree (1 K. 19.4) or Jonah under the gourd (Jonah 4.8). It is only hypothetically that Job protests to God: “So that my soul chooseth strangling, and death rather than my bones. I loathe my life; I would not live alway” (Job 7.15f.). In extreme situations a man may curse the day of his birth (Jer. 15.10; 20.14f.; Job 3.3f). But he cannot rejoice at his death, or seriously welcome it. It is an exception which proves the rule when Job 3.21f. speaks of those who “long for death, but it cometh not; and dig for it more than for hid treasures; which rejoice exceedingly, and are glad, when they find the grave,” or when reflection about all the injustice that there is under the sun culminates (Eccles. 4.2) in the statement: “I praised the dead which are already dead more than the living which are yet alive.” Hyperbolic statements of this kind do not mean that death is naturalised or neutralised or made into something heroic. When Saul (1 Sam. 31.4) falls upon his own sword, or when in later days Judas (Mt. 27.5) goes and hangs himself, these are deeds of despair which demonstrate their rejection of God and prove that death is the supreme evil of human life.[1]

When the Christian is faced with their respective mortality it is normal to have a feeling of angst and dearth. Indeed, as Christians, because of Christ, ‘though we die yet shall we live’; and this a “feat” that we are constantly living within as we, even today, by the Holy Spirit, count ourselves dead to sin and alive to Christ. Even so, the fact remains that when the days of our ‘now’ life are numbered, when the count is finished, and depending on the circumstances, like in the case of cancer or some other deadly prolonged disease, it is in fact rather normal to shrink back in disgust and disdain at the reality of our now exposed shadowy lives; not just in theory, but now in the concrete, in the practice of actually and consciously dying. Maranatha

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/2 §47 [599] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 159.

The Primacy of Christ’s Seed: Contra Christendoms, Nationalisms, Traditionisms

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Barth appeals to the primacy of Jesus Christ in all things. In one instance, in his Church Dogmatics, he is developing what it means to understand that Jesus is God’s ultimate plan for all of creation, all of history; which ultimately entails a disruption from all else, even as all else is taken up into the life of Christ as God’s history for the world. Here Barth is in the process of developing his treatment on such things, with particular reference to a doctrine of time vis-à-vis eternity. We will pick up with him mid-paragraph:

At any rate, as a human ministration it is related to the work of Jesus Christ in the same way as in the Old Testament the human act of blessing is related to the real word of blessing which has its power only from God, and which can therefore be uttered only by God Himself. However that may be, the birth of the Christian life “of water and of the Spirit (Jn. 3.5) signifies a direct relationship of the individual Christian to Jesus. He does not follow father and mother or the line of his ancestors, but, taken out of this succession, or at any rate in independence of it, he follows Jesus. He believes that there is one holy catholic Church, and that he may be a living member of the same. Yet he does not believe in the Church, but in the Holy Spirit, who is consubstantial with the Father and the Son. He does not therefore honour and accept the Church’s tradition and order in becoming a Christian and confessing himself to be such, but he places himself behind and confesses the beginning which all ecclesiastical tradition and order can only serve, and which he can now recognise and receive as his own beginning. He believes, thinks, speaks and acts therefore, not as the member of a so-called “Christian nation,” but in gratitude to the Lord that even in his—in no sense Christian—country He has community, by and to whose ministry among this people he himself is called.[1]

This kicks against some of the Christian zeitgeist online right now; which is an extreme turn into postmillennial theonomy. But these types of immanentist turns are exactly what the true Gospel confronts, contradicts, and brings an end to. In the Gospel there is a mediated immediacy, in Christ, to the living and triune God; one that allows the Christian person to live before God rather than anyone else. To find a ground for Christian identity in anything other than the immediate and direct life of God for the world in Jesus Christ is to collapse and thus conflate God’s ways with the contingencies and particularities of the accidents of history; in the sense that Christian identity, in such a frame, begins to predicate God’s ways and in-breakings upon an a prior set of foundations and structures that He has not laid in Christ, but that we have laid in the power of our wit, albeit in the name of Christ.

Barth isn’t saying that salvation history isn’t important, that the historic Church isn’t important, that the catholic creeds aren’t important; He is simply noting that they aren’t the ends or circumscriptions of the reality they are ostensibly pointing beyond themselves and to, in their respective reality, as is all of creation’s, in Jesus Christ. The point is, there is no authority that supersedes the viva vox Dei (voice of the living God); that there is only one authority for the Christian person, as an individual member in the body of Christ (I Cor. 12.27), and His name is, Jesus Christ. The Christian’s birthright isn’t through a nation, an ethnicity, a Christendom, a political party, a ‘blood and soil,’ or anything else. The Christian’s birthright has been seeded in the seed of God as that was given life by the hovering work of the Holy Spirt within the womb of Israel, within the womb of Mary to be sure, but these only as vessels for the ultimate and prime reality of all of reality who is Jesus Christ.

I have grown very weary of being confronted with supposed ‘Protestant’ ‘Reformed’ ‘Lutheran’ ‘Anglican’ ‘Baptist’ ‘Wesleyan’ et al. ad infinitum theologies that end up being nothing more than appeals to some type of socio-politico construct that has been ostensibly harvested from the past as its best repristination for the 21st century church. There is an oppressiveness about all of this to me that does not evince the Spirit’s presence, which is liberty. Indeed, we are a social and political animal as creatures, but our end is not defined, or should not be defined, by this type of extension into space and time. We have been born directly from above, alongside the Son’s freely elected humanity for us, within the womb of the Father by the Holy Spirit. And it is from whence that we have our whither and warp in this fallen and decrepit world. It is by the blood of Immanuel’s veins, quite literally, that we have life; no matter what state, country, or church tradition we inhabit; if indeed we have such life at all.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/2 §47 [585] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 146.