Category Archives: Doctrine Of God

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.

A Theology of the Cross Contra Metaphysics

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What role should metaphysics play towards developing a Christian theology? How many speculations added together equal a composite picture of a simple God? If God’s face (prosopon) is in the cradle of the philosophers; if their respective machinations and categories become the womb within which the Theanthropos (Godman) is gestated; how might we be sure that we are in fact encountering the living God at all; that is, in the face of Jesus Christ? Can the metaphysics, torn out of the vestiges of the created order, be deployed in an effort to grammarize God in intelligible ways for us? Or maybe there is a better way; an “evangelized metaphysic?”

Conversely, the Christian doesn’t come to the faith of a metaphysical actual being of pure act (actus purus); a monad, as it were. The Christian, the non-Christian on the street is encountered by the man cloaked in the veil of the flesh of a despised man; a man of sorrows acquainted with grief. This doesn’t cohere well with a God of the Metaphysics. But the so-called ‘Great Tradition’ says that the metaphysical god is the only God that might give us the goods in regard to having a point of intelligible and meaningful contact with Godness. Is this so? The Dominical teaching and life of Jesus Christ deposited for us in the New Testament says otherwise, I would contend; and so, would, Dr. Martin (Luther). Note Jaroslav Pelikan’s thinking with reference to Luther’s theologia crucis:

The Theology of the Cross

Although Luther himself never wrote a full-length exposition of his entire theology and, even when he undertook “to confess [his] faith before God and all the world, point by point,” did not present a system so much as a series of statements, he did find a term to characterize his system of thought. Contrasting, the theologian falsely so called, “who looks upon the invisible things of God as though they were clearly perceptible in those things that have actually happened,” with the authentic theologian, “who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross,” he labeled the first system “a theology of glory” and the second “a theology of the cross,” or, in the phrase of Hugh Latimer, “that religion that has the cross annexed to it.”

 At the basis of the theology of the cross was the proposition that “God can be found only in suffering and the cross,” so that “he who does not know Christ does not know God hidden in suffering.” In a similar vein the early Melanchthon declared that “to know Christ is to know his benefits.” The polemical target of both these propositions was a theological method that the authors attributed to scholasticism, which treated the truths of the Christian faith as objects of intellectual curiosity without reference to the cross and the benefits of Christ. Specifically, the dogmas of the Trinity and the person of Christ were not an exercise in logical inquiry or metaphysical speculation. Luther ridiculed the scholastics for investigating the relation between the two natures of Christ and branded such investigation as “sophistic.” “What difference does that make to me?” he continued. “That he is man and God by nature, that he has for his own self; but that he has exercised his office and poured out his love, becoming my Savior and Redeemer—that happens for my consolation and benefit.” For, as Luther said in a sermon on 1525, Christ was not called “Christ” because he had two natures, but because of his office as Savior. And Melanchthon attacked the scholastics for “obscuring the glory and the benefits of Christ” despite the formal correctness of their doctrine about the person of Christ.[1]

Far from having a diminished view of Christ’s person, christologically, Luther had an elevated view in the sense that he understood that the value of Christ for the world, the primacy of Christ for all of life, was that He was God for us in the very face of a man. It is here, in the kerygma (the announcement of the Good News) where the wisdom and knowledge of God is on display for all of humanity; for whomever will. This knowledge of God is not an abstract, speculative foment by which the theologian reasons their way back to the Actual Infinite. Nein, for Luther, the Christian God is fulsome for the ‘beggars all.’

In light of the above, would you continue to maintain that the God of the metaphysicians is really the God Self-revealed for the world in Jesus Christ? Or would you agree with me that some abstractions, with reference to truly knowing God, only lead us full circle back to the prying imaginations of sinful man; into things that such imaginations have no real access to?

[1] Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine: Reformation of Church and Dogma (1300—1700), Volume 4 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1977), 155–56.

God’s Wrath in the Theology of Karl Barth: The Theologian’s Theologian

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Karl Barth is often accused (erroneously so) of being a liberal theologian. This mistakenly happens under the neo-orthodox label, as if, at best, maybe a soft form of theological liberalism. And yet, Barth is more critical of theological liberalism than most of the so-called Reformed and Lutheran critics of Barth in the 21st century. Barth was more intimately related to, and formed by the mediating and liberal theologians, in direct ways, much beyond his critics today (and yesterday). The whole premise of Barth’s radical shift was in response to what he finally perceived as theological slop, in regard to the theological liberalism he had been trained under. He realized, famously, from his pulpit in Safenwil, that the theological pablum he had been fed in his university training, was just that. It had no real power, no grist or grit in the face of the fallout produced by WW1. As a result, he famously took such theology to task, initially, in his commentary on Romans (Der Römerbrief), and finally, in his Church Dogmatics.

What I want to highlight in this brief article is how false the aforementioned is. Barth, whilst radically, or consistently, following the Protestant Scripture Principle, brought critique against both theological liberalism, scholasticism Reformed, and much of the medieval harvest, that all, just the same, promoted portraits of God that ran afoul of the simple teaching and witness found in Holy Scripture. In this instance, in the example I am culling forward for this article, you will see how Barth might even sound like a conservative Reformed theologian of today (okay, I’m stretching that—he’s better). Here we see Barth’s commentary on God’s wrath:

To the critics of the term “wrath of God” and especially A. Ritschl (Rechtf. u. Vers., II, § 16 f.) were quite wrong when they said that “wrath” is not a quality or activity or attitude which can be explained in the light of God’s being, or brought into harmony with His love and grace. In reply to this criticism we have to say plainly that the grace of God would not be grace if it were separated from the holiness in which God causes only His own and therefore His good will to prevail and be done, holding aloof from and opposing everything that is contrary to it, judging and excluding and destroying everything that resists it. And grace would not be free grace if it were bound to any single form of its appearance and manifestation, if God always had to show Himself monotonously as “love,” or what we think of as love, if He were not permitted to negate that which has to be negated, if He could not conceal Himself when He is resisted, revealing His grace only in the alien form of unwillingness and wrath. Above all, grace would not be grace, the serious and effective address of God to man, the effective establishment of fellowship with him, if God did not oppose man’s opposition to Himself, if He left man to go his own way unaccused and uncondemned and unpunished, if He ignored the miserable pride of man, if the man of sin had nothing to fear from Him, if it were not a fearful thing to fall into His hands (Heb. 12.29). That His grace would not be grace without His judgment is just as true as the supposed opposite with which it is indissolubly connected, that there is no holiness of God which can be separated from His grace, and therefore no wrath of God—this is something which, unfortunately, A. Ritschl did not even remotely understand—that can be anything other than the redemptive fire of His love, which has its final and proper work in the fact that for our sake, for the sake of man fallen in sin and guilt, He did not spare His only Son.[1]

Let it be known, I don’t care whether or not Barth is palatable to the so-called conservative Reformed and Lutheran theologians of today. But let it also be observed that Barth is no churlish reader and receiver of the Reformed tradition such that he simply discards with what might sound offensive to the Romantic’s and Rationalist’s eardrums. Barth is a Bible reader. As a result, he attempts to do his theology in light of Scripture’s reality (res), Jesus Christ. As the passage illustrates, Barth understands God’s grace (and love) from within the context of God’s Self-revelation as that comes for us in His dearly beloved Son.

This isn’t so much an apology for Barth (in fact I repudiate such things), as it is a call for people to be good theologians. Don’t let foreign limiting factors enter into the theological task, such that said factors delimit the Word of God of being the only source and ground for the outworking of a genuinely Christian theology. In the aforementioned from Barth, we have an example of this type of outworking in the context of his rebuttal of a mediating (liberal) theologian Albrecht Ritschl. And yet, de jure, the basis upon which Barth reads a constructively christologically conditioned notion of God’s wrath, against, in this case, Ritschl, applies catholically across the board and all around to every period of theological development; into the present and forthcoming.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 §60 [490] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 131.

The Great Chain of Being in TF Torrance’s Theology

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For TF Torrance there remains a “chain of being” in regard to knowing God. But it isn’t from the effects and vestiges of creation worked back to God, in a hierarchy of being, wherein knowledge of God is derived from for Torrance. It is the chain of being of the inner-triune being of God for us, as that becomes evangelical for us in the coming of Jesus Christ, wherein the chain of being for knowing God comes. Jesus is God’s point of contact between God and humanity wherein the hidden God becomes the revealed God, invading our fallen humanity from the inside-up, thus loving us into His life with the Father by the Holy Spirit; and allowing us, to become participant by grace in the eternal fellowship and Self-knowledge God has of Himself, as that has become for us, in the bosom of the Father, in the face of the Son [of David]. As such, for TF, there is no abstract or independent chain of being between God and humanity whereby a naked humanity clothes itself with the righteousness and knowledge of God; indeed, as it ascends the ladder from seen to unseen, from effect to Infinite Causer. For sure, that would be an intellectual Pelagianism, at best. The chain of being is God’s triune being that has chosen to not be God without but with us in the second person of His being, in the eternal Son, the Logos, Jesus Christ. The interpenetrative bond, the subject-in-being onto-relation coinherent between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is a chain of being in perichoretic solidity that cannot be touched, but by the heart of God for us in Jesus Christ.

” . . . the illusion of an abstract monotheism”

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There is no God, but the One God; and we know this One God by the Son of God made flesh in the humanity of Jesus Christ. This One God is not known any other way. He is not known by the philosophers nor made known by the philosopher-theologians. He is only and ever centrally known as He has freely made Himself Self-known in the face of Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit; indeed, He would have no face for us without the Holy Spirit. The genuinely Christian God is One (de Deo uno) in Three (de Deo trino), Three in One in eternal koinonia from His a se existence. It is by the humility of this God, as exemplified by the free obedience of the Son in the Father by the Holy Spirit, whereby this God becomes known. The theological Philistines have attempted to reason their way to this God, but only because they first became aware of this God by this God’s Self-revelation; even as inchoate in His mediated presence through the Hebrews. In other words, it was only ever because of this triune God’s gracious stooping to the sons of men that the notion of One God was contrived in the first place. And the mesmerizing thing about this God is that He has always already been vulnerable enough in His inner and triune life to make this impossible a possibility; that is, to be willing to be made known, even with the possibility of being mistaken for some type of mechanistic simple Monad of the brutish thinkers. Even so, this God has contradicted such triteness; even by Him becoming obedient to the point of death, even the death of the Roman cross. There is no space for the monadic on the scandalous cross; this God is altogether too complex to be imagined, even in the greatest of the philosophical imaginaries among us. This God, the triune and eternal God, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in perichoretic bondedness, has taken on human blood in His own humanity as the Son of Man, Jesus Christ.

Someone else gets at the aforementioned much more eloquently thusly:

As we look at Jesus Christ we cannot avoid the astounding conclusion of a divine obedience. Therefore we have to draw the no less astounding deduction that in equal Godhead the one God is, in fact, the One and also the Another, that He is indeed a First and a Second, One who rules and commands in majesty and One who obeys in humility. The one God is both the one and the other. And, we continue, he is the one and the other without any cleft or differentiation but in perfect unity and equality because in the same perfect unity and equality he is also a Third, the One who affirms the one and equal Godhead through and by and in the two modes of being, the One who makes possible and maintains His fellowship with Himself as the one and the other. In virtue of this third mode of being He is in the other two without division or contradiction, the whole God in each. But again in virtue of this third mode of being He is in neither for itself and apart from the other, but in each in its relationship to the other, and therefore, in fact, in the totality, the connexion, the interplay, the history of these relationships. And because all division and contradiction is excluded, there is also excluded any striving to identify the two modes of being, or any possibility of the one being absorbed by the other, or both in their common deity. God is God in these two modes of being which cannot be separated, which cannot be autonomous, but which cannot cease to be different. He is God in their concrete relationships the one to the other, in the history which takes place between them. He is God only in these relationships of its modes of being, which is neutral towards them. This neutral Godhead, this pure and empty Godhead, and its claim to be true divinity, is the illusion of an abstract “monotheism” which usually fools men most successfully at the high-water mark of the development of heathen religions and mythologies and philosophies. The true and living God is the One whose Godhead consists in this history, who is in these three modes of being the One God, the Eternal, the Almighty, the Holy, the Merciful, the One who loves in His freedom and is free in His love.[1]

Well said, Uncle; well said.

Please notice maybe an almost unnoticed profundity when Barth refers to the history that obtains between and in and among the fellowship of the triune persons. It is within this space, this Father-Son-by-the-Holy Spirit relationship wherein all of human history and being takes place; indeed, as the electing God, the elected Man, the eternal Logos, the Son of God, graciously and freely chose to become us that we, by that act and actualism of Grace, might become human before God. It is His history, within His own Self-predestined and inner-triune life, whereby the creation obtains; wherein the redemption, the recreation, the elevation of humanity occurs. Just as the Son, before the foundation of the world, is freely Logos incarnandus (‘the Word to be incarnate’), it is within this freedom of God’s life by which the whole created order finds its determination. This, in the Eschaton, in the final and consummate reality actualized, and finally realized, is how it is that humanity becomes and is sustained as humanity simpliciter. That is by God’s freedom, by the obedience and humility intrinsic to the life of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, within the mysterium Trinitatis, by which anything, not least of which, humanity, exists at all; as worshippers and witnesses of their very life before God, by God, in God by the Spirit anointed humanity of the free God, the Son of Man, the Man from Nazareth, the Son in the bosom of the Father, Jesus Christ.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 §59 [203] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 196.

God’s Beauty in Jonathan Edwards’ Theology: With a Flourish of Inspired Worship

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A word from American theologian par excellence, Jonathan Edwards, on the beauty of the triune God:

It is unreasonable to think otherwise, than that the first foundation of a true love of God, is that whereby He is in Himself lovely, or worthy to be loved, or the supreme loveliness of His nature. This is certainly what makes Him chiefly amiable. What chiefly makes a man, or any creature lovely, is his excellency; and so what chiefly renders God lovely, and must undoubtedly be the chief ground of true love, is His excellency. God’s nature, or the Divinity, is infinitely excellent; yea it is infinite beauty, brightness, and glory of itself. But how can that be true love of this excellent and lovely nature, which is not built on the foundation of its true loveliness? How can that be true love of beauty and brightness which is not for beauty and brightness’ sake?[1]

For our purposes we will ignore the implicit analogia entis procedure of negative knowledge of God in Edwards’ above rumination, and simply focus on his conclusions.

Along with Edwards I think we need to ‘Make the Beauty of God Great Again’ (MBGGA). Not that we can predicate anything of God, but indeed, we must bear witness to the reality that is in fact lovely, beautiful. In the above statement Edwards refers to brightness as a synonym of beauty with reference to God. What this conjures for me is Genesis 1, and the Light of God’s Grace made known at God’s first Word: ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and earth.’ God’s Light is the primordial Light of the world, indeed the Light that will finally make the Sun and Moon no longer necessary in the Eschatological Light of the Son of Man as His presence in the abode of the Father by the Holy Spirit is unquenchably diffuse throughout the New Heavens and Earth, the Heavenly Zion as that spans the expanse of a de-futilized creation.

Further, implicit and at the base of God’s life for Edwards is that God’s beauty is fitting in the sense that God is a perichoretic relationship of interpenetrating filial and pneumic subject-in-being onto-relating Self-givenness one in the other eternal life. But it is precisely this, for Edwards, at least in my riff of him, that God’s love is indeed beautiful; that is, that God is not a philosophical monad, but instead a relationship of eternal persons in koinonial singular being as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. As such it is the mysterium Trinitatis that is deserving of all praise and worship. The mystery of God’s eternal life to be basked in by His creatures in Christ, in a doxological wash of bliss and beholdenness. The beauty of the triune God becomes the purpose of the human ensouled body. It is here, in this magnificent beauty of the Father, the Son in His bosom, hovered over by the Holy Spirit that the people recreated in His image in the face of the Son, Jesus Christ, that the sons of God long for; indeed, the revealing of the sons of God as they are unfurled from their bodies of death, and finally brought into the consummate participatory Beatific vision of the triune God. And for the Christian why wait? Even though our bodies of death attempt to keep us clinging to the dust of our earthly origin, the excellency of God’s life in us raises up over and again in the intercession the Son continuously makes for those who will inherit eternal life.

Amen.

[1] Jonathan Edwards cited by Nick Needham, 2000 Years of Christ’s Power: The Age of Enlightenment and Awakening 18th Century, Volume 5 (Great Britain: Christian Focus Publications Ltd., 2023), 364.

‘Very Man’

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Not only is Jesus Very God, but he is also Very Man. This is the Nicene-Constantinopolitan-Chalcedonian settlement in regard to the hypostatic union of Jesus person’ being both fully God, at His very being, and fully human as the ground of His being the Man from Nazareth in the Galilee. This post is meant to dovetail with the other side of this union where we looked at the way that Barth treated the personhood of Jesus Christ as ‘Very God.’ But without Very God, the Son of God, becoming Very man, we would of all people be most to be pitied. This is the stuff of the Gospel itself.

If God did not freely elect to become human, as both the electing God and the elected man, then there would be no way into reconciliation with the inner and triune life of God. We could not become partakers and thus participants in the divine nature if God did not first become us in Christ. As any good Bible reader understands, fallen humanity left to its own devices only remains in a vicious circle of self-love; a life constrained by the love of self, and its base desires, rather than being constrained by the love of God in Christ and His holiness. It took God to invade our war torn and dead sub-humanity, and re-create it such that the fallen person can finally be elevated into the throne-room of God’s life as the Son ascends with us back to the glory He has always already eternally shared with the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit. All of this to say: the ‘man’ (human) part of the Gospel is just as important as the God part, insofar that without God becoming us it would be absolutely impossible for us to pierce into His inner and triune life and be saved. So, the man part, funded by the God part, both hypostatically united in the singular person of Jesus Christ is in fact the Euaggelion (Gospel). And for this we should be full of gratitude and worship to our Father who is in heaven.

Barth writes:

This means primarily that it is a matter of the Godhead, the honour and glory and eternity and omnipotence and freedom, the being as Creator and Lord, of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Jesus Christ is Himself God as the Son of God the Father and with God the Father the source of the Holy Spirit, united in one essence with the Father by the Holy Spirit. That is how He is God. He is God as He takes part in the even which constitutes the divine being.

We must add at once that as this One who takes part in the divine being and event He became and is man. This means that we have to understand the very Godhead, that divine being and event and therefore Himself as the One who takes part in it, in the light of the fact that it pleased God—and this is what corresponds outwardly to and reveals the inward divine being and event—Himself to become man. In this way, in this condescension, He is the eternal Son of the eternal Father. This is the will of this Father, of this Son, and of the Holy Spirit who is the Spirit of the Father and the Son. This is how God is God, this is His freedom, this is His distinctness from the superiority to all other reality. It is with this meaning and purpose that He is the Creator and Lord of all things. It is as the eternal and almighty love, which He is actually and visibly in this action of condescension. This One, the One who loves in this way, is the true God. But this means that He is the One who as the Creator and Lord of all things is able and willing to make Himself equal with the creature, Himself to become a creature; the One whose eternity does not prevent but rather permits and commands Him to be in time and Himself to be temporal, whose omnipotence is so great that He can be weak and indeed impotent, as a man is weak and impotent. He is the One who in His freedom can and does in fact bind Himself, in the same way as we all are bound. And we must go further: He, the true God, is the One whose Godhead is demonstrated and plainly consists in essence in the fact that, seeing He is free in His love, He is capable of and wills this condescension for the very reason that in man of all His creatures He has to do with the one that has fallen away from Him, that has been unfaithful and hostile and antagonistic to Him. He is God in that He takes this creature to Himself, and that in such a way that He sets Himself alongside this creature, making His own penalty and loss and condemnation to nothingness. He is God in the fact that He can give Himself up and does give Himself up not merely to the creaturely limitation but to the suffering of the human creature, becoming one of these men, Himself bearing the judgment under which they stand, willing to die and, in fact, dying the death which they have deserved. That is the nature and essence of the true God as He has intervened actively and manifestly in Jesus Christ. When we speak of Jesus Christ we mean the true God—He who seeks His divine glory and finds that glory, He whose glory obviously consists, in the fact that because he is free in His love He can be and actually is lowly as well as exalted; He, the Lord, who is for us a servant, the servant of all servants. It is in the light of the fact of His humiliation that on this first aspect all the predicates of His Godhead, which is the true Godhead, must be filled out and interpreted. Their positive meaning is lit up only by this determination and limitation, only by the fact that in this act He is this God and therefore the true God, distinguished from all false gods by the fact that they are not capable of this act, that they have not in fact accomplished it, that their supposed glory and honour and eternity and omnipotence not only do not include but exclude their self-humiliation. False gods are all reflections of a false and all too human self-exaltation. They are all lords who cannot and will not be servants, who are therefore no true lords, whose being is not a truly divine being.

The second christological aspect is that in Jesus Christ we have to do with a true man. The reconciliation of the world with God takes place in the person of a man in whom, because He is also true God, the conversion of all men to God is an actual event. It is the person of a true man, like all other men in every respect, subjected without exception to all the limitations of the human situation. The conditions in which other men exist and their suffering are also His conditions and His suffering. That he is very God does not mean that He is partly God and only partly man. He is altogether man just as He is altogether God—altogether man in virtue of His true Godhead whose glory consists in His humiliation. That is how He is the reconciler between God and man. That is how God accomplishes in Him the conversion of men to Himself. . ..[1]

Very meaty stuff!

Without getting too distracted let me lift up one aspect of this, particularly as found in the second paragraph above. Some critics might latch onto the fact that Barth writes, “. . . the conversion of all men to God is an actual event.” They might claim that this makes Barth a dogmatic universalist (or maybe some Christian universalists might want to take this in the positive from Barth). But that would be to miss Barth’s theology. Barth has just got done communicating that ‘the man’ Jesus Christ is the conversion of God for all of humanity in actuality. Even so, whilst this christological objectivism is rightly present in Barth, this should not lead the reader to imagine that Barth is operating from some type of Aristotelian theory of causation; to the contrary. Barth’s primary focus is on the primacy of Christ’s archetypal humanity as the humanity ‘converted’ to God. And within this, it can be (and should be) explicated that for Barth’s theology this entails all of humanity after Christ’s. So, there is a universalist aspect to the incarnation and its implications for Barth, just as there is for the Apostle Paul. But it would be wrong and foreign (to Barth’s total theology) to conclude that this necessarily leads to all of humanity subjectively bowing the knee to Christ as their Savior. This freedom in Christ for God has now been recreated in God’s freedom for us in Jesus Christ. But it is still required that by the power of the Holy Spirit a person says ‘Yes’ to God, from God’s ‘Yes and amen’ for them in Christ, in order to become full participants in the actual humanity of the Godman, Jesus Christ. In other words, the way of salvation has been ordained for all of humanity in and from Christ’s humanity. But the lost person must still recognize this reality and finally acknowledge (repent in Christ’s repentance for them) that without them echoing Christ’s yes and amen for them that they will be left out on the shadow-side of God’s lefthand of final judgment. Which in the end remains as mysterious as the first fall of humanity in Adam and Eve’s rebellion to God’s Word.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 §58 [130–31] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 125–26.

The Instrumentalization of the Christ//God’s Being Predicated

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I have left some context out of the following, but based on what you have read from me thus far (on the blog in general and over the years etc.), how would you translate my rather technical phraseology? Maybe you don’t think it makes sense. If so, where does it fail in regard to its theological premises and mutually implicating ideas? (I wrote this as a quick off the top thought on X and Facebook)

What folks don’t realize it seems, even at higher levels, is that when considering the decretal system and God, when it comes to the incarnation, Christ is understood in purely instrumentalist terms; thus making Him the organon of salvation, but not the person (the Theanthropos) of salvation. In other words, the person of Christ (who is the eternal Logos) is so wrested from the work of Christ, in the decretal schemata, that the Christ merely becomes a token and conduit of God’s work; thus, making God a predicate of creation (if in fact the attempt is made to still see Jesus’ person as eternally Divine).

The Goliath god of the Philosophers Versus the Father God of the Son

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. . . It is not a loud and stern and foreign thing, but the quiet and gentle and intimate awakening of children in the Father’s house to life in that house. That is how God exercises authority. All divine authority has ultimately and basically this character. At its heart all God’s ruling and ordering and demanding is like this. But it is in the direction given and revealed in Jesus Christ that the character of divine authority and lordship is unmistakably perceived.[1]

This follows from knowing God first as Father of the Son mediated through the Son by the Holy Spirit. And this is to the point and heart of an Evangelical Calvinism Athanasian Reformed mode of theological and Christian existence. The Son, the eternal Logos conditions the way we approach the Father, just as the Son has eternally indwelt the bosom of the Father. There is no discursive routing here and there on a way up to God to be taken. There is only the Son descended (exitus) to the point of death the death of the cross, and new humanity ascended (reditus) on the healing wings of the Holy Spirit as He in Christ takes us to the glory the Son has always already shared eternally with the Father. Indeed, it is in this oikonomia (economy) that God has freely chosen to make Himself known to and for the world, in the face of Jesus Christ. God’s exousia (authority) is not an authority of an abstract monad back yonder in the ethereal gases of the philosophers; such that He is some type of Goliath God. Nein. God’s authority, His sovereignty, His power is that of a gentle father with his children; it is a filial familial authority.

This is the interminable perduring seemingly unquenchable battle of the God of Jerusalem versus the God of Athens. God is Father of the Son, as Athanasius has intoned, or he is simply an abstraction plastered onto the God of the Bible; as if some type of graffiti that would seek to draw attention to its own self-projected beauty rather than the beauty of God’s manger and cross in Christ. Choose you this day who you will serve.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 §58 [100] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 97.