Category Archives: Doctrine Of Creation

The Gospel of the Forty Days

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The resurrection of Jesus Christ is what all of history is contingent upon. All that we experience, linearly, has a ground behind, underneath, and after it that is in fact the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Without that centraldogma there is no history; there is no nothing. I think we, especially as Christians of all people, really need to get our heads around this reality. When we do we start living as those who have the hope of Christ in us, the purifying hope. We have a critical valence to look at the world from that is not purely conditioned by the immediate hype and circumstance. This is what Barth captures so well:

For the history and message of Easter contains everything else, while without it everything else would be left in the air as a mere abstraction. Everything else in the New Testament contains and presupposes the resurrection. It is the key to the whole. We can agree finally that acceptance or rejection of the Gospel of the New Testament, at any rate as understood by the New Testament itself, depends on our acceptance or rejection of the evangelium quadraginta dierum [gospel of the forty days]. Either we believe with the New Testament in the risen Jesus Christ, or we do not believe in Him at all. This is the statement which believers and non-believers alike can surely accept as a fair assessment of the sources.[1]

On one hand you can hear in Barth a critique of Bultmann’s demythologizing project. But more theologically significant is simply the establishment of the fact “that Christ is risen” explains everything immediate, in regard to the composition of the New Testament itself. But even more, the resurrection makes sense of the whole of reality in a very organic rather than totalizing way. That is to say, the resurrection of Jesus Christ presents us with an openness of life towards the triune God. It is here where a theology of nature, and a theology of everything else is resident; that is, in the resurrected humanity of Jesus Christ. Without His humanity there would have never been any tinder for this world to be formed by; never a purpose for it to rotate in the Milky Way. Until this radical reality is apprehended the Christian will continue to inhabit a wilderness like experience. They won’t have the eyes to see or the ears to hear the depth reality and intonation of God’s still small voice as it breezes by them afresh anew by the Spirit’s hovering life. The resurrection makes all things new. It puts to death the old (sorry natural law/theology), and presents humanity with God’s humanity for the world in Jesus Christ. If we are going to have any chance of knowing God, of accessing His created order, and its telos, we will only come to this through participation with Jesus Christ; through His union with us, that we might be in union with Him, in the triune life of the eternal God.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/2 §47 [444] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 7.

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.

Disruptive Grace as Protology and Eschatology

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Grace was disruptive in the protology (beginning Gen 1:1ff) just as Grace is disruptive in the eschatology (the ‘end’ II Cor 5:17 etc). As such there is no stable creation (nature), there is only its enduring Word of upholding wherein stability is found. The continuity of the creation, and its various “properties,” is not based in an inherent independence of its own (waiting for discovery abstract from God’s intensive witness in the Christ), but upon the Grace of God’s Word that continuously gives it life, even in the face and reality of its certain death (Rom 8:18ff). That is to say: creation is a creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing), which entails that its value and meaning is always contingent upon God’s Word as He presences (parousia) Himself, afresh anew, through the hovering breath of the Holy Spirit. To look to creation/nature as if a means of grace, is to confuse the creation with the Creator who is the Christ.

The Miracle of the Gospel against Worldviewism

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When we think of ‘worldview’ as an analytic tool, in order to categorize various belief systems worldwide, we often think, as Christians, that we have a spot in that type of indexing. But I am not ultimately a proponent of thinking of the Christian reality in the philosophical terms presupposed for thinking in terms of a worldview. Even so, insofar as this discipline of intellection goes, it can be helpful in at least providing a sense of order in regard to thinking about the various juxtapositions of the various ‘belief systems’ that populate the world, and its peoples. But at the same time, when the Christian gets into the ‘meatier’ things what ought to become evidently clear is that the Christian reality, who is the Christ and the triune God, are incapable of being subject to the sociological strictures used to adjudicate belief systems. The Christian reality gets behind such maneuvers; it is basic to the very fabric of seen and unseen reality; it has no analogues in the created order; it is a miracle of sui generis and novum magnitude.

For the remainder of this article, I want to provide a good word from Karl Barth on the problem that thinking about the Christianity reality, in terms of worldview, presents the Christian with. This type of thinking might contradict dearly held beliefs about the very structure of reality, for some. But I think that what Barth is getting at is, indeed, the most faithful telling the Christian can hear in regard to thinking about both protology and eschatology with reference to their center in Jesus Christ. What will be observed, as I develop this a bit further, is the primordial nature of the Christian reality; such that its reality has no competitors, as if in a dualistic duel.

Robert Dale Dawson writes, with reference to Barth’s theology of the resurrection, and the primal significance and reach such theology has towards Barth’s thinking.

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.[1]

Dawson sets us up to read Barth well with reference to the problems that world-view presents its would-be practitioners with. The reader will notice how Dawson’s description of Barth’s thinking of “the primordiality of the resurrection as the singular history-making, yet history-delimiting, act of God” dovetails nicely with Barth’s thoughts in general, with regard to thinking the Evangel in the terms that world-view presupposes.

Barth writes at length:

. . . We conclude this introductory consideration with an observation which in the light of this applies to the Christian doctrine of creation as a whole.

Its theme is the work of God which is characterised by the fact that—because the covenant is its basic purpose and meaning and God in Jesus Christ is the Creator—it is divine benefit. The character of its theme, established in this way, is what distinguishes the Christin doctrine of creation from all the so-called world-views which have emerged or may conceivably emerge in the spheres of mythology, philosophy and science. It differs from all these by the fact that it is based on God’s revelation. But this is not merely a formal difference. It is also material. The Christian doctrine of creation does not merely take its rise from another source. It also arises very differently from all such world-views. It not only has a different origin, but has a different object and pursues a different course. The divine activity which is its object can never become the theme of a world-view.

The truth of this assertion is seen at once from the fact that none of the world-views so far known to us has attained to the concept of creation by following to the end the way from noetics to ontology and genesology, but has usually remained stuck either in noetics or at most in ontology. The philosophical equivalent for the theological idea of divine creation would have us to be at least that of a pure and basic becoming underlying and therefore preceding all perception and being. But the world-views normally take their point of departure within the circle of perception and being, subject and object, and are content to describe it according to the relationships determined by a particular view, the variations and differences, progressions and retrogressions, between the individual systems being so great that on the one hand the universe seems to be more like a great thought, and on the other more like a great machine. In some cases the basic problem of becoming, the question of the whence of the universe, whether it be conceived as thought or machine, is not even noticed but naively ignored. In others it is not overlooked but consciously left open, with a resigned or emphatic assertion of its inherent unanswerability. In others again there may be an attempt to answer it, but only in the form of a geneseologically deepened noetics or ontology, so that it is not really answered but only distorted. For the problem of becoming as opposed to that of knowledge or being is a new and independent problem which cannot be answered by any interpretation of knowledge and being and their mutual relationship. It must be viewed independently if it is to escape the suspicion that it has not really been viewed at all.[2]

The reader might better be informed now, at the very least, as to why Barth rejects the discipline and categorization that world-view offers as an analytic tool; at least in regard to thinking the Christian reality. I am, once again (surprise!), in agreement with Barth on this. His rejection of worldview thinking, of course, fits well with his rejection of natural theology; indeed, his rejection of natural theology naturally (pun intended) leads to a rejection of thinking in terms of worldviews.

When it comes to the evangelistic task (gift), personally, I make use of whatever tools seem necessary for that particular engagement. Speaking in terms of worldviews, initially, might be helpful towards grabbing some sort of intellectual footing among the people we are seeking to reach for Christ. But for me, really, the better way is to go the way of Barth; at least when proclaiming the Gospel to people. People (all of us) need to be confronted with the unapologetic and weightiness of the living God; that’s what a genuine presentation of the Gospel does (and comes with). It is the ‘natural man’ who wants to reason their way to whatever they want to reason themselves to. But the Gospel, and its eternal reality, is not natural. The Gospel is supranatural even as it comes veiled in the natural of the human body. It is in this way, on the analogy of the incarnation, that the Gospel (God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ; for ‘revelation is reconciliation’) is in the world, but not of it. God is genuinely and fully human in Christ, but human in the sense that He is, in Christ, the archetype, the firstborn of creation, humanity (cf. Col 1.15). He is the One for the many. Even this movement itself, its unilateral ingress, ought to show the seeker the Way, the order of God; indeed, the order of the Gospel itself. The order, as Dawson, with reference to Barth, and Barth himself have shown is of a primordial nature vis-à-vis the creation (and re-creation) of the world. There is no “worldview” that can account for that since the world has no view without first being created and re-created ex nihilo, as it were, in and from the resurrection of God in the humanity of Jesus Christ. Worldviewism can attempt to give account for these heights via propositions and generalizations, but the Gospel itself ultimately resists such attempts; the Gospel represents, to use philosophical jargon: the scandal of particularity. The claim of the Gospel is that there is only One living God, and that He is for us, for the world in Jesus Christ. The claim of the Gospel is that Christ alone is the way, the truth, and the life; that is the primordiality of the whole thing. The Gospel, and all of its implications, is the MIRACLE.

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

[2] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/1 §42 The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 335-36.

Barth’s Argument from Contingence: Creation’s Inner-Reality

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In Barth’s Church Dogmatics III/1 we get into his doctrine of creation. As I was reading along, as is typical when reading Barth, I was struck with something he noted in regard to creation’s beginning; with reference to creation’s telos. Here he presents what sounds something like an argument from contingence, in regard to God’s Word as the inner ground and reality of the externally created order. Unlike the proof for God’s existence, like we often come across in philosophical or apologetic theologies—indeed, where an argument from contingence is used to argue for the universe’s non-contingent fund, namely, God—here Barth is arguing for our existence. He is emphasizing the fact that humanity, that the earth, that the universe has no-inner or independent telos; that outwith a loving Creator God who is Father of the Son, such humanity, and the rest of the creaturely order, simply reduces to annihilation, abyss, and futility of dread. Barth writes:

The creature is not self-existent. It has not assumed its nature and existence of itself or given it to itself. It did not come into being by itself. It does not consist by itself. It cannot sustain itself. It has to thank its creation and therefore its Creator for the fact that it came into being and is and will be. Nor does the creature exist for itself. It is not the creature itself but its Creator who exists and thinks and speaks and cares for the creature. The creature is no more its own goal and purpose that it is its own ground and beginning. There is no inherent reason for the creature’s existence and nature, no independent teleology of the creature introduced with its creation and made its own. Its destiny lies entirely in the purpose of its Creator as the One Who speaks and cares for it. The creature’s right and meaning and goal and purpose and dignity lie—only—in the fact that God as the Creator has turned toward it with His purpose. Any other attitude than that of God’s free acceptance of this turning towards it and therefore of this advocacy and care; any claim to a right inherent in its being and nature, to a meaning which has not first been received, to a goal which it  has fixed for itself, to a purpose which it has in and for itself, to a dignity independent of the free will of its Creator—all this is just as meaningless as the illusion that it came into being of itself, that it consists in itself and that it can sustain itself. By its very creation, and therefore its being as a creature, all such views are shown, like illusion, to be basically impossible, and thus disclosed as falsehoods.[1]

There is something inherent to human being, to creaturely reality that points away from itself, and to its ultimate ground in her Creator. As the Teacher writes, “He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end” (Eccl. 3:11). Even so, knowledge of the Creator is not inherent to an abstract or naked humanity; it requires that He, the hidden God (Deus absconditus) become the revealed God (Deus revelatus), which is exactly who Jesus Christ is. It because He freely chose to create, first as He elected our humanity as His own in Jesus Christ, indeed as the Son is the imago Dei for us, that humanity comes to have knowledge of their telos. Without this ground of being and relationship the human squirms around as if a babe thrown to the side of a dusty road simply waiting for the inevitable end,

And as for your birth, on the day you were born your cord was not cut, nor were you washed with water to cleanse you, nor rubbed with salt, nor wrapped in swaddling cloths. 5 No eye pitied you, to do any of these things to you out of compassion for you, but you were cast out on the open field, for you were abhorred, on the day that you were born.

6 “And when I passed by you and saw you wallowing in your blood, I said to you in your blood, ‘Live!’ I said to you in your blood, ‘Live!’ 7 I made you flourish like a plant of the field. And you grew up and became tall and arrived at full adornment. Your breasts were formed, and your hair had grown; yet you were naked and bare. (Ez. 16:1-7)

And yet He passed by, He came and found us and has since elevated us to Himself in the exaltation of humanity in the vicarious and resurrected humanity of Jesus Christ. Creation itself groans under a futility waiting to be released at the revealing of the sons of God. We have been given the arrabon, the guarantee of the Holy Spirit as the deposit of Hope that God is for us in Christ. So, we groan with hope, with words unutterable, even as the Spirit within straightens them as words of an arrow that pierces the warm heart of the Son as He reposes in the bosom of the Father as our faithful and high priest. The operative word for the Christian is that we live with hope, because God is the God of Hope; and He never disappoints. Hold onto this purpose, even as God in Christ blows His life into us afresh anew by the Spirt who hovers over our hearts bringing new life from Christ’s new creation for us.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/1 §41 The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 93-4.

God’s Wrath Towards Sin: In Ontological Perspective

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God is angry about sin, just to be clear. He judged sin, because there was actually a legal penalty associated with sin. But that isn’t the crux of what was judged. The crux was the ground, the source of sin; it has ontological depth. The human heart loves the darkness rather than the Light. It has competing affections that all are premised upon love of self. Unless this was put to death, and unless a new heart was re-created, the problem of sin wouldn’t have ultimately been dealt with. God surely hates sin, but only because He first loved us so much in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us. God has wrath towards sin, but only because He loves His very good creation and desires fellowship and intimacy with us through the Son, Jesus Christ. Sin destroys and eats away at the very good creation, and as a result the good (or rest of) creation is corroded and thrown into chaos. The requirement then wasn’t simply a penalty paid—even if that is an outer aspect of the atonement—but a new heart created (cf II Cor 3; Ez 36). It is this inner reality, this depth ontological reality that was required if and fact creation was going to be elevated to its ultimate telos (purpose) in abiding and eternal fellowship within the bosom of the Father in union with Christ by the bond of the Holy Spirit.

God the Father

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God is my Father.[1] Jesus said to Mary post-resurrection, “I ascend to My Father and your Father, and My God and your God.” God is our Father. Athanasius writes: “Therefore it is more pious and more accurate to signify God from the Son and call Him Father, than to name Him from His works only and call Him Unoriginate.”[2] This is the Christian way for knowing, for thinking God; this is the way those who have the Spirit can call Jesus, Lord; that is, as recognizing their Shepherd, knowing His voice as Son of the Father. As Athanasius rightly noted we don’t think God prior to God thinking us for Himself in Jesus Christ; we don’t attempt to approach God by some sort of two-step into His presence through an abstract creation. As Christians we only know God as Son of the Father by the Spirit; if we don’t, we only know a god of our own imagination and fabrication. Indeed, a notion of godness developed from our fertile imaginations, as if we might see God in the trees, the birds, the fishies, even ourselves. This really is the only alternative to thinking God as our Father. If God is not first the Father, then He is not the Son of the Father, and instead He simply turns out to be a brute creator contingent upon our predication of Him.

Barth writes:

(a) The subject “God” of which it speaks—and in the creed this obviously brackets all three articles—is not synonymous with the concept of a world-cause, rightly or wrongly postulated, disclosed or fulfilled. We may take any view we like of the existence or nature of a world-cause, but it is always posited by man, and therefore even if it is an uncreated, creative and supremely perfect being, it still belongs to the creaturely sphere. It is not God. It is a successful or unsuccessful product of the human mind. It is not identical with the Creator coeli et terrae [Maker of heaven and earth]. Nor can it be subsequently identified with Him and given His titles and predicates. Whenever this happens, belief in the Creator loses its basis and therefore its certainty, its original meaning and therefore its credibility and practical import. The God who created heaven and earth is God “the Father,” i.e., the Father of Jesus Christ, who as such in eternal generation posits Himself in the Son by the Holy Spirit, and is not therefore in any sense posited from without or elsewhere. It is as this Eternal Father, determined in the act of His free expression and therefore not from without but from within, determining Himself in His Son by the Holy Spirit and Himself positing everything else, that He is also the Creator. And it is again as this Eternal Father, and not in any other way, that He reveals Himself as the Creator, i.e., in Jesus Christ His Son by the Holy Ghost, in exact correspondence to the way in which He has inwardly resolved and decided to be the Creator. As He cannot be the Creator except as the Father, He is not known at all unless He is known in this revelation of Himself.[3]

As Barth rightly points out, when we attempt to establish certainty of God on our own, whether that be individually, or collectivistically, we end up circumscribing a notion of God not from God, but from ourselves. When we go this route, abstract from God, and we understand ourselves as the concrete that founds the certainty of God’s existence, He necessarily ceases being our Father, and at best (or worst) becomes a cloned god; a mirrored existence of ourselves who we pump up with superhero powers of the sort that can create worlds populated with the birds and the bees, and thus us. As Barth grasps, and Athanasius prior to him, Jesus’s declaration to Mary wasn’t some type of throwaway statement made in passing. Indeed, what Jesus was once again emphasizing was that in the face of resurrection, indeed the re-creation, the first Word of God is that God is Father. As Father, and Son of the Father by the Holy Spirit, the children of God have an “apocalyptic” basis through which they have gained a capaciousness to think, to know God in real reality. That is to say, to know God not upon a foundation Mary had prefabricated, indeed, her imagination only took her as far as the gardener. But to think and know God the same way that the Son, the One in the bosom of the Father who came to explain Him, knows God, and has known God as His Father, just as sure as He is eternally the Son by the Holy Spirit.

These are deep matters, doxologically sourced by the Father for us in His dearly beloved Son, Jesus Christ. Miss ourselves for the “Father,” and we construct a world in our image, and then attempt to bear its burden. This is the fallen world we inhabit, a world populated by a humanity who can only think God as far as the groundskeeper; a world that would rather they be Father and attempt to manage a world of their own making in the face of the living Father. This, of course, only ends in a world of orphans and destitution. When the person comes to finally recognize that the Father has adopted them into His family through and in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ, it is at this point that they can cease from bearing the burden of false-fatherhood they have been attempting to live out since their conception.

“Pray, then, in this way:

‘Our Father who is in heaven,
Hallowed be Your name.
 ‘Your kingdom come.
Your will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven.
 ‘Give us this day our daily bread.
 ‘And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
 ‘And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.’

 

[1] I have written on this theme previously in my personal chapter for our first volume of Evangelical Calvinism. My chapter is titled, “Analogia Fidei or Analogia Entis: Either Through Christ or Through Nature.” This chapter also, more recently, has served as a basis (among others) for my dissertation and PhD by publication currently under examination.

[2] Athanasius, Contra Arianos 1.9.34.

[3] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/1 §40 [011] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 10.

The Ethics of the Resurrection: Applied to Transgenderism

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I was contemplating the absurdity of the man who claims to be a woman, who then puts on a swimsuit, enters a woman’s swim-meet, wins the contest, and then is declared the fastest swimmer among some of the top-tier women swimmers in the world. As I contemplated this, I tweeted the following: “You can identify as a bird all you want, but the second you step off the Golden Gate Bridge physics take over.” I elaborated further on Twitter, this way:

And just to be clear, physics isn’t the judge, God is the Judge. When people rebel, and physics, physiology, psychology, presses back against their rebellion, it isn’t those components that have an inherency of their own; they simply reflect God’s recreative order. People aren’t simply being “metaphysical rebels,” they are acting out according to their sin nature; the nature that self-possessively and viciously maintains that it is God, and that the real God is not. When they rebel, they are loving themselves, and not God. And it is this self-love, incurved upon itself, that leads to the various aberrations and disaffected expressions we see all around us. According to the logic of self-Godhood, even when something clearly bespeaks aberration, new logics must be constructed in order to persuade the self and others that in fact their personal expression of sin is no aberration at all; that it is in keeping with the kingdom they have constructed as “self-God.” The problem arises because these self-declared self-Gods inhabit the only genuine and living God’s creation, and recreation in Jesus Christ. As such, we end up in a diabolical spiritual battle wherein all of humanity is born believing itself to be God, while all along being confronted with the fact that they live in a universe that inherently declares the very opposite by the wisdom of the cross. The wisdom of the cross, and/or the staurologic therein, is the ground of the new creation that finally attests that the old has gone the new has come. It declares that God is God, and we are not. It isn’t until the person ‘repents’, bows the knee to the wisdom of God in Christ, that the Son finally sets them free indeed. But to the logics of the world the freedom of the Son looks like bondage because it contradicts the very essence of what the world takes to be the way, the truth, and the life; that they are God, and God is not.

I want to be clear that creation itself has no built-in or abstract value-center of its own; that’s why I refer to staurologic or the wisdom of the cross. The original creation, I take it (protologically), to be created so that Christ might be born (see David Fergusson). In other words, the created order is eschatologically conditioned by God’s free choice to be for the world, in the world, in Jesus Christ; i.e. He is the telos of creation. As such, when He comes into this world order in ‘Bethlehemic flesh,’ it serves as an irruption, of the sort wherein this world finally comes to understand its actual orientation. So, the new creation that God accomplishes in Jesus Christ was always already the reality of this world’s trajectory to begin with; sin, in this sense then, becomes an aberration that only God, extra nos (outside of us), could invade, take to Himself, enter it from the inside/out, and put it to death. It is as this ‘seed’ fell into the ground, died, that new life could come to blossom, such that the old becomes the new, but under the pressures of a totally elevated and/or actualized sort. In other words, what I am attempting to articulate, is that the point of continuity between the old and the new isn’t an inherency that the “original creation” had potent within itself. The point of continuity between the old and the new is God’s choice, before creation, to be for the world and to create the world for Christ; but not without us, but with us. He is the order of this world, the new has left the old behind, but the old bore witness to the coming of the new insofar that the new was in fact the origination of the old to begin with; that is in God’s free election to be God of the humanity of Jesus Christ.

Hence, the aforementioned entails that what it means to be human was already actualized prior to creation in God’s choice to be human for us in the ‘to be’ enfleshment of the Son (Deus incarnandus). Since His humanity is the ground of the created order, even as that is given subjective-distinction in the particularity of ‘our humanity’ as ‘images of the Image,’ this entails that creation itself is not free to be free in abstraction from its root and reality in the vicarious and archetypal humanity of Jesus Christ. As such, judgments about what is right and wrong are not left to self-proclaimed human agents, as if this was an obtainability inherent to simply being created. Human agents, as has been observed, are not free unless they are living in and from what it means to be humanly free coram Deo (before God). It is only in this freedom, since anything outwith is bondage, wherein right and wrong before God comes to be known, internalized, and with the possibility of creational reversal and transformation through the re-creation of creation’s telos and esse in the resurrection of humanity in the eternal Logos’ Self-assumed humanity in the man from Nazareth.

It is from this continuously irruptive reality that a human agent comes to understand the order of the Kingdom, as that has always already had a cruciform shape. It is in this mode and posture before God in Christ whereby creatures, as participants in God’s life through the grace of God’s humanity in Jesus Christ, come to have the capaciousness to discern the straight from the crooked. This vicious desire to be self-God becomes non-directive for the creature attempting to live against their ‘election’ to be genuinely human in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ, and thus they come to have the lights to live from the Light of God. There is an experience of freedom that invades their lives with the result that the new life of the new creation explodes upon them such that God’s order becomes the only order for them that appears safe and secure. Living outwith this order becomes as distant as the old is to the new; as Barth says: “What took place on the cross of Golgotha is the last word of an old history and the first word of a new.” This ‘first word’ becomes the norming norm for the new-creatures’ life, and, for example, being born a biological male, rather than female, or vice versa, is lived into as the order and telos that God recreated as the eschatological bliss He saw fit for the world to begin with; just as the bride to the groom symmetry bears witness to the beauty of God’s design in Christ to His Church.

The Cosmic Ontological Frame of Salvation: God’s Providence Goes Deeper than Creation out of Nothing

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So much of the soteriological discussion these days is focused on individual salvation; that is as that takes shape in the combine between the elect and reprobate within substance causal theories of God and His relation to the world through the decretrum absolutum. While ‘individual salvation’ is a central, if not centraldogma of the soteriological reality, its reach is rather more extensive and cosmic than purely focused on various individual people—and their angst of whether or not they are one of the elect (by whatever means that is actualized). The Apostle Paul understands the cosmic aspect of salvation in the following way:

18 For I consider that our present sufferings cannot even be compared to the coming glory that will be revealed to us. 19 For the creation eagerly waits for the revelation of the sons of God. 20 For the creation was subjected to futility—not willingly but because of God who subjected it—in hope 21 that the creation itself will also be set free from the bondage of decay into the glorious freedom of God’s children. 22 For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers together until now. 23 Not only this, but we ourselves also, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we eagerly await our adoption, the redemption of our bodies. 24 For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope, because who hopes for what he sees? 25 But if we hope for what we do not see, we eagerly wait for it with endurance. -Romans 8.18-25

This throws much of the soteriological discussion into relief precisely at the point that it isn’t obsessively focused on me, but instead it focuses on the ‘revealing of the sons of God.’ As is clear from the Genesis narrative God’s economy elevates humanity to a level distinct from general creation in the sense that humanity is the height of His created order; in the sense that humanity is supposed to steward and cultivate the created order with the aim of magnifying its Creator in Jesus Christ. If we allow the creation-pressure to frame a soteriological discussion we end up with a different focus in our own spirituality, among other things. Salvation’s frame becomes an ontological rather than purely forensic focus precisely because we are now focused on the One who created, rather than the ones created. In this frame we can come to see the depth dimension of sin’s rupturing power vis-a-vis its relationship to God’s relation to the world. We can come to realize that what is required for genuine salvation to obtain goes deeper than the creatio ex nihilo; it goes as deep as the mystery of the incarnation, of the Creator become human so that humanity might become one with the Creator through the grace of adoption.

TF Torrance, as he is reflecting on God’s sovereignty with particular reference to Divine providence, writes the following. You will see that he is very much so in line with the Pauline motif, and the notes we have been previously discussing:

First, human existence and history are not separable from the material universe, for man precisely as man is body of his soul as well as soul of his body and it is in the wholeness of that soul-body, body-soul relation that he has been created for fellowship with God. This means that the human being is not exempt from the material forces imminent in the spatio-temporal universe, or therefore exempt from the control of its physical laws impressed upon it by the Creator. Somehow it is not just man who has fallen but the whole created order along with him, so that we may not isolate our understanding of human evil from natural evil, or moral evil from material evil, the pain and suffering of human being from the suffering and misery, the pain and travail of the whole creation. There is what may be called a principle of evil in nature, but of course a perverted principle. It is not surprising, therefore, as the Holy Scriptures tell us, that real redemption from the power of human sin and guilt involves a radical change in the material world and calls for the complete redemption of the created order. That is why both the Old and the New Testaments speak prophetically of a new heaven and a new earth. Our understanding of what this means is governed by the physical or bodily nature of the death and resurrection of Christ, an event with space-time coordinates. Redemption is somatic as well as spiritual, for moral and physical evil infecting the creation may not finally be separated from one another. This cannot but apply to the providential activity of God which involves material as well as spiritual power and therefore an on-going interaction of God ad Creator and Redeemer with the physical universe. The power by which he redeems the world and exercises his providential care over its history is the very same power as that by which he created the world in matter and form out of nothing. Just as his creative power brought the world into physical existence and endowed it with a rational order, so it is in virtue of the same creative power that his redemptive and providential activity operate with the space-time structures of the ongoing world. But just as we cannot comprehend how God created the world out of nothing, or how he brought Jesus Christ forth from the grave, so we are unable to grasp how his redemptive and providential activity makes all things, material as well as spiritual, to serve his eternal purpose of love.1

Rather than thinking God’s relation to the world, and thus thinking the world’s relation to God through a dualistic frame, as Torrance underscores, it is better to think the God-world relation through the analogy of the incarnation. There is a mystery, indeed, to all of this, but God has so made himself vulnerable for us in Christ, that this mystery has concrete extension for us flatlanders to abide with. In other words, while all of the created reality is vouched in the mystery of God’s aseity, at the same time, He has freely elected that we might not remain orphans in a blind universe, but instead participants in the seen reality of God’s life for the world.

One other thing of note: the created order is such that God has mysteriously baked His very life into it, as He is for it, while at the same time remaining distinct from it as its Creator. This might help explain why God did not simply scrap this world, and start over. He had already personally invested Himself in and for this world in Christ, just as the very telos of the world is for the magnification of the Son, Jesus Christ. If this is creation’s frame, that is its recreation in the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus Christ, then God’s investment goes simply beyond some sort of brute power an actus purus (pure being) god might be known for. The Christian God, who is Father of the Son by the Spirit’s bond of lovely fellowship, cannot abandon His first creation, simply because He had always already planned to elevate this creation to the Right Hand of His fellowship in the Son in the second recreation of the second Adam; the greater Adam.

 

1 Thomas F. Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God: One Being Three Persons (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016), 226.

A Reflection on Hebrews 10:26 and the Futility of Fighting for this World Order

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26 For if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, 27 but a fearful expectation of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries. 28 Anyone who has set aside the law of Moses dies without mercy on the evidence of two or three witnesses. 29 How much worse punishment, do you think, will be deserved by the one who has trampled underfoot the Son of God, and has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has outraged the Spirit of grace? 30 For we know him who said, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay.” And again, “The Lord will judge his people.” 31 It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. —Hebrews 10:26-31

I want to focus on the emboldened clause in verse 26. It seems lost on people, Christian people even, that the One who spoke the world into existence, the One who continues to hold the visible and invisible worlds together by His power, this One became human that we might by the grace of adoption become sons and daughters of the living God; just as Jesus Christ is our brother. I enter this brief excursus with the aforementioned attempt to orient our perspectives because everything, all of reality hangs on that reality. The incarnation and atonement, the death, burial, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ has become too domesticated. The sui generis otherworldly / thisworldly nature of the Theanthropos, Godman breaking into this world has become all too common. Because of this people generally fail to grasp the significance of the clause under consideration.

What people, in the main, fail to appreciate is that God become human in Jesus Christ, all the way unto the obedience and death of the cross, means that there no longer is a normal world to which we can return. The world has genuinely and apocalyptically been put to death, and anyone attempting to find their identity therein, and therefrom, are only attempting to breathe life into a corpse incapable of resurrection. ‘There no longer remains a sacrifice for sins’ entails that there was only One person, God in Christ, who had the resource and power to penetrate into the dark abyss of the fallen human heart, put it to literal death, and from that start afresh anew and re-create a new heavens and earth, under the foot and dominion of the Son of Man, and all those co-heirs with Him. In other words, this sort of pining away for a recuperation of the world that Christ has already declared dead, and put to death, by His death of all deaths, is the satanic errand that even the Egyptian high priests knew was the fool’s errand; they knew, and so should we, that only the ‘finger of God’ can bring new life ex nihilo. 

Robert Dale Dawson sums up what I am after as he comments on a doctrine of the resurrection in the theology of Karl Barth: “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.”1 I take this notional reality in Barth’s theology of the resurrection as the ground for allowing the author to the Hebrews to make the astonishing claim that ‘there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins,’ if and fact a person rejects God’s Self-sacrifice for them, for the world, in Jesus Christ. In short, for the Christian, there is no other world to return to, but the Kingdom of God that has been established outwith human hands; the Kingdom, the new creation that has been established and re-created by God alone. It is high time that Christians demythologize the notion that in this world we have a home; we surely, and clearly do not. We are ambassadors of the fact that this world in fact is no more, and that the only world that has concrete perduring reality to it is the one that has come in the dust and blood of Jesus’ body.

1 Robert Dale Dawson, The Resurrection in Karl Barth (UK/USA: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007), 13