Category Archives: Doctrine Of God

The OT and NT God are One in the Same

Posted on by

It is artificial and anachronistic for people to look back at the economy of God in the Old Testament, and presume that God Himself is subject to our modern ethical sensibilities (whatever those might be). The Old Testament took place in the Ancient Near East (ANE). And God’s dealings with humanity at that time were in those conditions (sitz im leben). Often modern and postmodern people look back at the OT, and its “violence passages,” especially the ones where God commands His covenant people to wipe out whole people groups and nations, and wince. They try to explain it away somehow, as if the OT God is really just a projection and construct the Jewish people created, in order to justify their bloodlusty ways (e.g. Peter Enns et al.). But this is antiChrist (it is also functional, Marcionism). This is to impose our own self-projections onto God, in an attempt to conform Him into our own self-perceived images. God is God. As Samuel says: “God gives life, and He takes it away.” God is and His way is much greater than our self-possessed wills would ever allow for. God is not our domesticated house cat. Repentance is constantly in order.

Disallowing Secular Unbelief to Dictate the Terms of God

Posted on by

Secular, worldly unbelief. I think Christians often allow the bar to be set much too low. Much of Christian theology, for example, especially those that have taken shape in the natural theology forest, allow the skeptic’s unbelief to dictate the types of questions the theologians seek to answer. Primary of which are observed in Thomas Aquinas’ Prima Pars (first part) of his Summa Theologiae. Here, Thomas seeks to answer the questions of God’s existence, and whether or not it is coherent to believe that God exists (like a generic God; albeit, in Thomas’ context this would be applied to the Christian God simplicter, but that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case for him). Once Thomas felt that he had sufficiently answered the skeptic’s arguments, about what God is; he then proceeded onto other matters—which would entail the Trinity, the Church, Justification and all other theological matters. It isn’t really the order of theology, per se, that is problematic with Thomas’ method (although I would qualify and say: that the order is bereft because it starts with a Monadic conception of God; even so, it starts with God, just from the wrong place). But the fact that he feels compelled to first prove “a God’s” existence, and then only after that apply this “proven God’s” existence to some of the more Dogmatic questions of the Church has a highly disordering effect after all.

So, the above is an example of how I believe, at a high level, theology can take its cues and categories from the wrong unbelieving people; and then, of course!, end up with the wrong theological and biblical conclusions. But I think this happens to each and everyone of us, as Christians (at least those attempting to walk as intentional Christians), as we are constantly bombarded with the wares of our Secular Age. As the Apostle Paul counters, even as he is referring to the false teachings and antagonisms of the Pseudo-Apostles in Corinth:

Now I, Paul, myself urge you by the meekness and gentleness of Christ—I who am meek when face to face with you, but bold toward you when absent! 2 I ask that when I am present I need not be bold with the confidence with which I propose to be courageous against some, who regard us as if we walked according to the flesh. 3 For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh, 4 for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses. 5 We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ, 6 and we are ready to punish all disobedience, whenever your obedience is complete.

I am looking at the principle embedded in the emboldened section in particular. Wherever these “speculations” are coming from, whether it be from Joe Pagan at work, or if it be Plato in the heavens, we are to discern such things for what they are, and “take it captive” unto Christ. The simple point I am drawing on is that it is a spiritual battle to ensure that the way we think God, as Christians, is only taken from, and in an immediate way, from God who has spoken to us (and speaks to us) in His Self-revelation in Jesus Christ. Even if there are hallowed traditions, some might call it the Great Tradition of the Church, without any further explication (i.e., it just is), these traditions themselves are always subservient to the reality of Holy Scripture, the theology of the Word, Jesus Christ. And this is the battle we face, on the daily, as Christians. This applies to all Christians, in one way or the other. We are faced with unbelief all around; that’s what this evil age entails. But we are to be more vigilant than theologians of glory, who seek to synthesize the wisdom of the world with the wisdom of the cross. Indeed, we are to be theologians of the cross; and by the wisdom of God, which is the cross of Christ, we are to recognize these false speculative and flighty ideas about God, even if they have many solid layerings and accretions of traditions behind them, in the name of the Church, and test them, in the face of Christ and the triune God, to see if they be so.

This is a prayerful way though.

The Accidental God and the God of Logical Possibility

Posted on by

Questions we are engaging with for this week’s philosophy of religion class. Part of this, the last part represents its own separate forum for the class; it is supposed to be a debate forum.

Creator of the world

Does the theistic view that God created the universe imply that the universe must have had a beginning? What might the implications of the answer to this question be?

Yes, the theistic view, in particular, the Christian theistic view entails that the universe had a beginning. I’d go so far to say that it entails the creatio ex nihilo (created out of nothing) position. What this implies is that all of reality, including knowledge, is contingent on God speaking (revealing) Himself for us.

Creator of value

Is something good because God wills it or does God will it because it is good?

Euthyphro’s Dilemma can be avoided if we posit what can be called a Trinitarian actualism (versus essentialism, which is the Thomistic way out of the dilemma). A trinitarian actualism entails a notion of God wherein God’s being is in becoming. That is to say, like essentialism attempts, that God just is. But in the actualistic sense, God just is his personal relation to the world; contingent upon nothing else but who he is in his inner-personal freedom as the triune God. Something is good, therefore, because God is good in himself; but he has freely chosen for himself that his goodness becomes what it is as he graciously and dynamically becomes us that we might become him (not by nature, but grace). More to clarify, but this will have to suffice for my sentence long response 😉.

Revealer

Does the fact that there’s such disagreement between theists over what exactly it is that God has revealed provide a reason to suppose that God hasn’t revealed anything? What would follow from this conclusion?

No. It isn’t this relative. It may be this relative for the outsider looking in. But if the work is done, like through comparative religions, for example, and we engage in an abductive exercise, so to speak, it is clear that not all “revelations” are equal. So, I think the question itself is non-starting in this sense.

Offerer of eternal life

Can an intelligible and plausible account of ‘eternal life’ be given?

As we’re interested in both the truth and meaning of this question you may want to break this down into the following:

    • Could personal identity endure after bodily death? Can any of the accounts that Mawson discusses be defensible? Why/why not?
    • In what way would ‘eternal life’ be a good?

You may want to begin to answer this question by offering a definition of ‘eternal life’, and its relation to bodily death.

I must answer this is as a Christian theist (of the Trinitarian variety) first; and attendant with that, refer to the only one who has provided a concrete answer for that question.

Eternal Life

Eternal life is God’s triune life in relation as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There is no other eternal life available. This life, entered into humanity (‘he who knew no sin became sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God in him [Jesus]), and made God’s eternal life available to all of humanity by taking all of human life, as he is archetypal human life, putting it to death (the sinful, separated heart of humanity from God), rising again (on the third day)—and in turn, raising all of humanity with his—which has thus forged a way for all of humanity, if they will, through his willing for them first, to participate in his eternal and ascended life with the Father forevermore; indeed, by the Holy Spirit.

A Raw Syllogism

P1. The triune God alone is eternal life.

P2. Human beings can participate in God’s triune eternal life, if God makes a way for them to enter that type of life.

P3. God has made a way for human beings to participate in God’s triune life, through uniting humanity to his humanity in Jesus Christ.

P4. Human beings can participate in God’s triune life, in the humanity of Jesus Christ, if they choose to do so.

P5. Therefore, human beings who choose to participate in God’s triune life, in and through the humanity of Jesus Christ, can experience God’s triune and eternal life that he alone is.

It seems as if Mawson is attempting to purely think of eternal life as the perdurance of human life, albeit in the presence of God. I don’t think this quite follows. The only perduring life and eternal life, in the theistic frame, is God’s life. As such, the discussion must be oriented by how it is that a human being might come to participate in God’s eternal life. I tried to tease that out above. I think Mawson hinders himself by presupposing that all of the so-called “Abrahamic faiths” are “essentially” referring to the same God. But that is, at the very least, a very debatable premise.

The motion we will be debating is: ‘This house believes that it is logically possible that there be a God.’

There is nothing inherently illogical in believing that a god exists. It is possible, as Mawson et al. has done, to construct a notion of godness that is self-referentially coherent vis-à-vis this god’s properties; whether, essential or accidental properties. But just because this notion of godness can be constructed in a self-referentially coherentist manner, does not in itself, lead to the conclusion that this god must necessarily exist, per se. It only leads one to the conclusion that such a god could exist (which seems to be the minimum being sought by the theistic philosopher).

So, alternatively, as a Christian theist, what I present as a thesis, in regard to a god necessarily, or even tacitly existing, is that we expand our horizons, categorically. I propose that in order for us to concretely know that God exists, that we adopt an orientation that sees revelation claims as the necessary ground by which the seekers might come to know that God exists. This might entail that the God we encounter through a revelation claim is not concordant with the self-referential and coherentist account of God that Mawson presented and argued for. It might mean, that if we were to encounter such a “revelational God,” through his self-revelation, that we might be asked to go beyond what a purely philosophical accounting of a god provides us with.

So, I would argue that merely presenting the seekers with a purely self-referential coherentist account of a god, as a logical possibility, while coherent, sets the would-be knower of God up for potential failure; in the sense that false expectations have been given over against the categories and emphases that a god outside of our “immanent frames” might present us with. Logical possibility vis-à-vis God’s existence is something that human agents might attempt to construct in an a prior fashion. But there is no guarantee that the god so constructed is corollary with the God who might potentially show up through self-revelation. In other words, I would argue that simply constructing an argument for the logical possibility of a God’s existence simply sets the would-be knower of God up with a procrustean bed. In which case, the logical possibility for there being a God might in fact bring the would-be knower of God to miss encountering the real God if he discloses himself in his self-revelation in such a way that ends up transcending the would-be knowers already developed notion of godness. At best, this would-be knower, upon encountering an ostensibly self-revealed God, might attempt to shape this self-revealed God into the form they had already constructed for this God to logically fit. But then, this might result in the seekers’ ultimately rejecting the logical possibility for a God’s existence; insofar that the philosophical construct and revelation claims end up being so discordant, that the seeker simply throws their hands up in frustration and disbelief.

In the end: I think Mawson and other theistic philosophers can present and develop an argument for the logical possibility for a God to exist. But ultimately, this could be a self-defeating venture; insofar that this God’s existence, circumscribed by the philosophers’ wits as it is, might cause seekers for God to miss the real God, if in fact the real God appears differently than the philosophers had imagined him to necessarily, or even to tacitly be.

Maimonides on Divine Simplicity: With Christian Relief

Posted on by

More from the philosophy class. As I reread this just now I didn’t really answer the whole question. Although, I amended it since in the class forum.

What does it mean to say that the concept of God is simple? Can this claim be held together with the claim that God has attributes? If so, how? If not, is this a problem for theism?

The concept of God as simple simply entails that the God conceived of by folks like Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas, Maimonides et al. is a Monad. I.e., a non-composite being who is not made up by its parts or properties in addition, but a singular substance who is also identified, within this complex as an actus purus (‘pure act’), pure being, unmoved mover so on and so forth. It is this construct, as in this case, exemplified and articulated in the tongue of Maimonides, that all of the so-called Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Islam, Christianity) can have a shared starting point in their respective God-talk.

As noted by Maimonides, his knowledge of God, after Aristotle and the philosophers, is arrived at by a process known as the via negativa (negative way). This speculative process is undertaken, as Maimonides develops, within an apophatic frame for thinking the ineffable God. That is to say, that God is so necessarily hidden in this frame, that all the would-be knower of God is left with, at a basic or primordial level, is to engage in a process of negating the seen, the “known,” like the negation of nature in general, or even human being in particular, and to think God’s perfections or attributes, from these speculative means; as the philosopher works their “way up” the supposed chain of being; whose first cause, is indeed the unmoved mover, the monad known as God.

Christian theism alternatively—and I use that language in a particular way, noting a trinitarian way for thinking God—I would argue is necessarily a kataphatic (versus apophatic, in a sense) religion. That is to say, Christian theism thinks God first, not from a negation of human being, or nature in general, but from God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ. John 1:18 says: “No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him.” The word translated as ‘explain,’ in the koine Greek is exegesato, to exegete, to “read-out.” Indeed, even in this passage there is a sense of apophaticism in God, that is to say that He indeed is a hidden God. But to the point, on the Christian account, God freely chose to Self-reveal and explain Himself in the face of His Son, Jesus Christ. This is why Christians first think God not as a faraway pure monadic being, but as our Father (as Athanasius emphasizes: “Father of the Son, Son of the Father”). A genuine Christian theology works from a via positiva (‘positive way’) towards thinking God. That is, from revelation rather than speculation.

In the end, classical theism, and as that has been appropriated by certain traditions within Christianity, does take on the type of thinking that Maimonides articulates in regard to divine simplicity; and “its” methodology. And yet there are other traditions, like the one I affirm, within Christianity, who think God from within only positive, Self-revealed terms; indeed, as the base of a theological methodology itself. And yet all orthodox Christians, at some level, will affirm that God is simple (non-composite). Even so, there are other more relational ways to engage with that notion. My teacher, Karl Barth, evangelizes the concept and re-terms it as ‘Divine Constancy.’ But that requires further development, and more space than available at the moment.

On Divine Transcendence, Immanence, Omnipotence in Philosophical Projection

Posted on by

More engagement with T.J. Mawson’s book, Belief in God, for my philosophy of religion class. I posted these, along with the one on personhood, which I shared in my last post here, in the discussion forum we have set up for our class. I thought I’d share them here too. These are clearly raw responses to the reading material we are engaging with.

Immanuel Kant

Divine transcendence can be thought of as God’s otherness; His otherworldliness; His awayness vis-à-vis the world.

According to Mawson direct knowledge and direct control are aspects of what it means to have a body. And yet I find this strained to the breaking point. He uses the “body” analogy as a way to construct a concept of a God-world relation. Again, I find this methodology to be flawed. I understand that it is the way of being a speculative/analytic philosopher; but it seems ad hoc, really. Given its “ad hocness” (or we could say “abstractness” vis-à-vis the would-be knower) I’m unsure how this can lead to an “open” notion of godness. That is to say, even if Mawson et al. can construct a concept of godness, and in this case, with reference to transcendence, and even if he can construct it in such a way that it is self-referentially coherent: it nonetheless remains a construct of his own making (and thus a purely coherentist permutation; i.e., lacking the need for real correspondence). I’m unsure how this type of self “projecting” can end up mapping onto an eternal living God. To me it seems like a project in constructing a procrustean bed, and then inviting God to lay His head on its pillow.

Divine immanence. In Mawson’s context it is in reference to God’s relation to the world; His presence in the world (it can also be in reference to God’s inner life, when considered from within a Christian and triune frame). Within Mawson’s system the world becomes God’s body. Not in the sense of the Church; which is how Christians understand God’s body, in participation with Christ’s body. Because of Mawson’s prior thinking on incorporeality, which he pushes into divine transcendence, he seemingly is forced to concede that the world is God’s body. For Mawson, this is how he explains God’s direct knowledge, control etc. And yet, what I find ironic, is that Mawson is in fact a Christian theist. His conception of God’s body, in Christian theological terms, could be referred to as ‘panentheism.’ That is to say, that the world is God’s body in the sense that God might grow and develop in relation to the world. Even so, panentheism sees a distinction, still, between God and His body (the world), wherein God remains its Creator and controller, so to speak. That said, I’d be curious to see if Mawson would own the label of being a panentheist. Or maybe he would prefer the language of pantheist proper; which is to say that God grows alongside and by being in the world as a participant. From a theological perspective, Mawson’s development on a doctrine of divine immanence needs further clarification in order to have some semblance of what in fact he is ultimately getting at with his notion of “God’s body.”

What is an omnipotent being? This seems to be a rather ironic question to ask, at least when left up to purely human machinations. It seems to be too big of a question. How can the human mind (even if it is “hived”) imagine something in such a way that it could ever transcend the would-be knower’s own finite self-limitations? There is a way, a way that developed in the medieval period, known as the via negativa (‘negative way’). This way attempts to develop a concept of godness by negating finiteness, for example. So, indeed, if we posit that humans are finite, if we negate that, we might end up with an infinite (pure) being or some such. So, on this way, if human beings are defined by being rational/intellectual, then to negate that, and extrapolate, the omnipotent being ends up being simply the Biggest brain in the heavens. What I am describing has also been called the analogia entis (‘analogy of being’); Thomas Aquinas, early on, is famous for deploying it in his Christian synthesis with Aristotelian categories. In a less particularized way, in the sense that Mawson is attempting to do an analytic philosophy rather than a Christian theology, per se, Mawson, and philosophers in general use the ‘analogy of being’ to conceive of a concept of godness. I.e., since human beings clearly aren’t “all powerful,” in its negation and extrapolation, the divine being must indeed be almighty, all powerful. I would suggest these are matters too great for the discipline of an analytic philosophy to pierce in any meaningful way. Apocalypse (unveiling/revelation) is required.

In the Rut of General Theism: Against Neutral Theology

Posted on by

Christians don’t believe in an abstract ethereal god. Christians believe in the triune God who has Self-revealed Himself in Jesus Christ. Period. This should be an unremarkable assertion. There should be zero pushback to this. But in the so-called Great Tradition of the Church, and those who are ostensibly “retrieving” it, this isn’t the case. Classical theism, so-called, as a contemporary way to identify certain expressions of the antique past, especially with reference to a theology proper, have so synthesized, say, the Aristotelian categories with an ecclesiastical doctrine of God, that it is nay impossible to make a distinction, in substance (pun intended), between the philosopher’s unmoved mover of pure act, and the God revealed in the face of Jesus Christ. In other words, there is such a conflation between the god of the philosophers, and the Christian God in this instance, that the god of the philosophers in fact becomes the Christian God in substance. Indeed, most of contemporary theology today, especially on the Latin side (i.e., Catholic and Protestant), traffics on the highway that the philosophers, and their theologians, respectively, have constructed for them. That is to say, contemporary theology, especially in certain iterations of Protestant theology, have so imbibed the cathedral of the Protestant development, that is primarily through the ‘schoolmen,’ or the scholastics, that to do theology, for them, requires a straight repristination; an outright and absolute reception of whatever the Protestant fathers said; a total gleaning, a harvesting, if you will, of whatever golden apples the oldmen of Protestant yesteryear planted in their gardens of theological delight.

But what if they were simply squished by their sitz im leben (situation in life); what if they were just doing the best they could with what they had available to them, intellectually, at that time? What if what they did was rather imaginative and forward thinking for their times, respectively, but in the end wasn’t the last or final word? I’m here to say it wasn’t; it wasn’t the last or final, or not even the best word. Karl Barth writes the following in his own analysis of those theological times. What you will find is that he agrees with me (or more correctly, that I agree with him).

Unfortunately the connexion between the belief in providence and belief in Christ had not been worked out and demonstrated theologically by the Reformers themselves. Only occasionally and from afar, if at all, had they seen the problem of natural theology and the necessity of a radical application to all theology of their recognition of the free grace of God in Christ. In their case, to be sure, we almost always feel and detect, even though it is so seldom palpable theologically, that when they speak of the world dominion of God they are in fact speaking with Christian content and on the basis of the Gospel, not abstractly in terms of a neutral God of Jews, Turks, pagans and Christians. And this is what gives warmth and force to the matter in P. Gerhardt. But if in him there is an unmistakable movement away from the Word of God to the experience of the Christian subject, this was to some extent a reaction against the dominant and self-evident abstraction with which the orthodoxy of his day followed another self-evident rut in these matters. This was the rut of a general theism which, apart from the mention of the Deus triunus [triune God], occasional quotations from the Bible and references to Church history, lacked any distinctive Christian content, being primarily concerned to distinguish itself from atheism, and limiting its consideration of the Gospel to the establishment and development of Christology and resultant doctrines. As if this were the real way to treat that primarium caput fidei et religionis [chief cornerstone of faith and religion].[1]

Surely, what Barth is explicating is the more sure word; relatively speaking. The Christian God is not neutral, He is not general, and He is not discoverable in some leftover vestiges of His presence in the fallen created order. That is to say, the fallen heart and mind of the fallen humanity has no access into the inner sanctum of God’s eternal life; that is, not without God first becoming us that we might become Him in Christ (by grace not nature). Isn’t there an infinitely qualitative distance between God and humanity?, as Kierkegaard so rightly identified. Aren’t human beings, us, born dead in our trespasses and sins with an ugly ditch between us and the holy God of triune wonder? This is all Barth is getting at. This is all I’m getting at, with reference to Barth. Selah

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3 §48 [032] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 31.

God is Not on a Binary or even Trinary: With Reference to Christianity and Sexuality

Posted on by

It’s unfortunate that, on a binary, either you are a “conservative” and thus believe that God relates to humanity as Law prior to Love; or that you are a “progressive,” and thus that God only relates to humanity as Love (which entails, that God stands with the other, so-called, in a purely affirming way—in this instance I’m thinking of so-called Gay Christianity and LGBTQ in general).

And yet it is possible, and I believe, required, to think God as triune Love, and yet a God of holiness who contradicts all of our righteousnesses; whether that be left, right, or in between somewhere. God’s life and act of love doesn’t allow us to stay where He finds us—tossed off into the brambles of the ditch in our mother’s afterbirth—but He picks us up, cleans us up, in His holiness, and sets us next to Him, as the Bride of His Son. He calls us to deny whatever we are predisposed to—that is, whatever base desires that reign prevalent in our lives, whatever those might be—and to live a life in participation with His, through union with Christ. A life that continuously burns away what we take to be okay and good and righteous, and instead clothes us with His robes of righteousness, wherein freedom for Him, and thus others abounds.

I am one of those who sees God as inherently loving and gracious. But at the same time believes that entails a Fatherly contradiction to what we, left to our own sinful natures, would project onto Him; as if He is simply there to affirm us in whatever we believe is the good way. God’s Law, as the Apostle Paul states, is the Law of Christ. Which is to say, that God is love; with all of the weight, contradiction, and transformation that comes with. As a consequence, we ought to expand beyond the secular social imaginaries we inhabit, and repose in what God has eternally imagined for us in participation with the Son of His bosom forevermore. First and foremost, it is to live a life of Godly love wherein His holiness, rather than “ours,” is the centerpiece.

God’s Triune Love-Knowledge as the Ground of Our Knowledge of God

Posted on by

‘Without love all knowledge means nothing.’ Some, many, take this to mean that gaining knowledge, like deeper theological and biblical knowledge, necessarily entails that this is an unloving thing to do. Of course, the passage in I Corinthians 13 does not say that. It just says: that knowledge without love means nothing. So getting knowledge, like of Jesus Christ and the triune God, is really everything. And entailed within that, as that is first established for us in the vicarious humanity of Christ, the object of our knowledge, who turns out to be the subject and ground of our very lives, is in fact love. All I’m struggling to say is that being “anti-intellectual” (for lack of a better term) in the Christian frame necessarily fails precisely because the Christ-frame is in fact full of the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ.

Also, I’m not promoting what is called an intellectualist anthropology, in fact, just the opposite. There are plenty of theologies out there, particularly in the Latin or Western world, that start in the intellectualist anthropological ground. This is primarily because these traditions have falsely appropriated philosophical notions of godness wherein what it means to be God is to be the Big Brain, the pure act (actus purus) in the sky by and by.

And of course, the aforementioned isn’t who God has Self-revealed Himself to be for us. He has Self-revealed Himself to be Father, our Father, of the Son, in the eternal felicity and bond of the Holy Spirit. This is why God just is love; because He’s an eternal Subject-in-Being interpenetrating perichoretic koinonial co-inhering communion of intimate oneness-in-threeness / threeness-in-oneness.

 

Triune Time as Eternal Life and Rest

Posted on by

“If any man be in Christ, He is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come.”

Time in abstraction, that is, time thought of in a way that is not thought from God’s triune time for the world in Jesus Christ, can only lead to a life of despair and futility. The 21st century’s busy-ness that most are preoccupied with often has the tendency to glaze over the futility of life, without Christ, which can often last someone a lifetime; that is until they are finally confronted with the reality of their mortality. Indeed, the reality of mortality is ultimately to face the Firstborn from the Dead, Jesus Christ. And to finally meet the ground of all reality, and the purpose of the created order in general, after a person has “expired,” is a fearful thing indeed. It is as if such a person has finally had to come to terms with the fact that they have trampled the blood of Christ underfoot, counting it a vain thing.

Barth writes:

Again by way of anticipation, the presence of Jesus in His community is full of import for the future. His presence impels and presses to His future, general and definitive revelation, of which there has been a particular and provisional form in the Easter history. Hence even the presence of Jesus in the Spirit, for all its fulness, can only be a pledge or first instalment of what awaits the community as well as the whole universe, His return in glory. But it must never be forgotten that He who comes again in glory, this future Jesus, is identical with the One proclaimed by the history of yesterday and really present to His own to-day. The thorough-going eschatology for which the interim between now and one day necessarily seems to be a time of emptiness, of futility, of lack, of a progressive and barely concealed disillusionment, is not the eschatology of New Testament Christianity. And again it is only an unspiritual community which can tolerate such a view. The fact that the man Jesus will be includes the fact that He is; but the fact that He is does not exclude that He is “not yet.”[1]

For about a decade, starting in the mid-nineties, the Lord, as He began to do a heavy work in my life, allowed me to feel what life would be like without Him as the ground of it all. I can only describe that season of time as a literal hell. Indeed, clinically it might have been “diagnosed” as depression and general anxiety, but it went much deeper than that. Its basis was indeed spiritual. It was tied into a heavy intellectual (although not affective) doubt of God’s existence I was experiencing; even as a Christian. I felt the hell of nihilism whilst in the depths of deep depression and deep anxiety (indeed, these became mutually implicating things). I only made it through that because God is gracious.

Even so, as Barth underscores, we are included in the time of Christ; the new time of God in recreation for us (pro nobis). We have the guarantee of the eschatological time to come even as He in-breaks, by the Holy Spirit, into our broken lives while we continue to inhabit this in-between time. But His parousia (presence) is just as real and weighty now as it will finally be when the consummate reality of the revealing of the sons of God ultimately enfolds us into its full participative esse (ground) as that has been, and always will be, mediated for us in the priestly humanity of our High Priest and Brother, Jesus Christ. Take heart, even though we might experience many and deep tribulations here, Christ has overcome the world!

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/2 §47 [468] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 32–3.

Being in a Personal, Relational Relationship with God, On Triune Terms

Posted on by

God is not an analogue to analyze. God instead is a triune and eternal relationship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one God (de Deo uno) in three persons (de Deo trino) to be inhabited, through Christ, and enjoyed. The Christian is in an immediate relationship with the triune God through union with Jesus Christ. We are indeed, as Christians, in an intimate and personal relationship with the living God. Not because we are persons in relationship with God—thus predicating what God’s relationality and personalist reality must be—but because God is eternally personal and [onto]relational within the inner-reality (in se) of His life. In other words, we have intimacy with God not because of some type of from below emotionalism we foist upon God, but because of who He is as personal and relational within His inner being.

It seems to me that there are some, especially those of the intellectualist orientation (often academics), who want to poo-poo the idea that Christians ought to be in this warm-hearted love relationship with God. They want to think, seemingly, that because of an identifiable movement within Protestantism, particularly as that is found in the work of Phillip Jakob Spener and Nikolaus Ludwig, count von Zinzendorf, in 17th and 18th century Germany, and then later in England, through the Keswick spiritual tradition, and also in America, within the revivalist movements, and many more threads, that such intimacy talk and religion vis-à-vis God can be dismissed and relegated to an index and categorization of church history (and sociology). Indeed, while many movements within the history of the church can be described by the intellectual and theological historians, this in and of itself doesn’t negate the theological substance that may or may not stand behind these types of shifts and orientations among the people of God through the centuries.

I am simply wanting to register that at a purely theological level the idea that the Christian is growing in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ entails a deeply personal and warm-hearted relationship with God, indeed, a dialogical (prayerful and worshipful) one, wherein the sheep can know the Shepherd’s voice. And this, as already noted, is not because of anything inherent to an ‘below’ urge from us to God. But instead, it is from an ‘above’ movement of who God freely has chosen to be for us in Jesus Christ; and this in correlation with who God eternally is in His triune Self. This is how the Christian encounters God, by the Spirit, through whom we affirm that Jesus is Lord. The Christian doesn’t encounter a speculatively produced pure act (actus purus) or pure being God whose reality is adumbrated by our philosophical negations and projections upon what this being must be like. No, the Christian, by definition, only is such as they come into encounter with the One who is their Brother, who is their Father, in the bond of the Holy Spirit. God determines, He pre-destines who He is in Himself to be who we become in Christ by Grace (not nature); that is, co-heirs with Jesus Christ, beholding the glory the Son has eternally shared with the Father in the bondage of the Holy Spirit.

The sum of it is that we ought to pursue this personalist, relational relationship with the living God because that is what He has already determined to be the case for us in Jesus Christ. We ought to be in doxological adoration of who He has Self-revealed and exegeted Himself to be for us in Jesus Christ; in the kerygmatic reality of the Good News that He is in proclamation. He isn’t a God out there, but a God with us, and God ‘closer to us than we are to ourselves’ (per Barth). That said, He isn’t available to be taken captive by our own untoward passions and desires. He instead sets the frame in the sobriety of His own life for us. As such, our worship and relationship with Him is predicated upon this type of discoursing, dialoguing intercourse with Him wherein what it means to be personal, relational, and intimate is dictated by who He is for us, rather than who we are towards Him (in our fallen frames of dust). He sets the boundaries of relationship relative to who He is, and because He created us to be in relationship with who He is, our re-creation in Christ finds a relational correspondence, in a fitting way, as that has been already laid for us in His telos (purpose) for the world in Jesus Christ.

Hopefully the reader is seeing how I am attempting to thread this needle. I.e., We are in a personalist, onto-relational relationship with the living and triune God on His terms rather than an abstract set of terms that we determine about Him based upon our own fallen and broken dispositions.

Thanks for reading me thinking out loud again.