Category Archives: Doctrine Of God

God, Our Father; Not Our Judge: The Judge judged

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When God is understood as the unmoved mover, the Great Law-giver in the sky; when God is known to work through decrees, in a God-world relation; when God is understood as a pure being (or pure act actus purus); when God is known to have ad hoc favorites among the massa of humanity; there is no place for disobedience.

The above is to say the following: if God is first understood as the Judge rather than the Father, if He isn’t known as the Judge judged, as the Father of the Son by the Holy Spirit, then all that is left, to understand who is in and who is out, is whether or not a purported Christian follows the Law to a T (in emulation of Christ’s active obedience for the so-called elect). But if God is, indeed, understood to be our Father, as He surely is, according to Scripture; then, there is plenty of room for disobedient children. The Old Testament is replete with examples like this, as is the New Testament. Not that this is the ideal, of course. But if a person’s “assurance” and reality of salvation is contingent upon an outward display of obedience (for all to see); if this is the summum bonum, that is, to be constantly striving to live up to a righteousness that was already out of reach to begin with; then, indeed we are all most to be pitied among men.

My only point with this post is to underscore the fact that the way we think God, in a doctrine of God, has radical consequences towards the way we view the world, and our lives within that world. If I understand my relationship to God to be based, primarily, upon a filial relationship, rather than a forensic one, I will know that no matter what happens He will never leave me or forsake me. The nomists don’t have this understanding of God, and so they are always uncertain on whether or not they are actually going to make it. They can’t run to God as their abba Father, I mean in their piety they will say they can; but in reality, bubbling underneath the whole paradigm, God remains a Monad, a singularity who is pure act. In this frame, these folks, in the background, constantly have this gnawing fear that God, in the end, might decide in all of his arbitrary might, that they weren’t in fact one of the elect; that He had only given them a temporary faith, that appeared real, all their live long days, but in fact was only a temporary faith. These folks won’t have recourse to cry out to God as their dearly beloved Father, they simply can only slump back into the dregs of performance, and hope that God, the Judge, in the end, in fact did die for them in the humanity of Jesus Christ.

To think God, biblically, is to think the following: “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy Name . . ..” This is the basic ground of who God is for us, in His eternal life, as He freely elected to become human in the Son, that we might become sons and daughters in the grace of the hypostatically unioned life that the Man from Nazareth actually is. When God is for us, because God is our Father, as co-heirs with Christ, who can be against us? There is no decree, no artificial covenant (of works/grace), that stands behind the back of Jesus Christ. When we see the Son we see the Father without remainder. Take heart bruised reed, there really is a real hope of life eternal in the God who is our Father of the Son in the bond of the Holy Spirit. Rejoice!

Eternity’s Christ and Triunely Conditioned Reality

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Eternity isn’t some abstract future happenstance. Eternity is in fact God’s triune Life. He alone is eternal. He, by grace and adoption, brings us into participation with Him through Christ. This is the eternity we stand before, and within. It is not some type of cosmic expanse, or some energy/force that just supposedly is the primal one; a pantheistic or monistic concept (think Eastern mysticism, or Western New Agism). Time and space in fact have an empirical beginning, that is by inferential deduction. But even more so, time and space have a personal beginning, that is ‘in the beginning God … and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ There is a relational and personal and loving concrete ground that stands behind, and that currently upholds all things, from moment-by-moment, by the Word of God’s triune power. But this is the inner reality of the created order, including all of its cosmic ramifications; whether terrestrial, or stellar; seen or unseen; that is, God’s triune life of interpenetrating and eternal love. This is the eternity we stand before, and within; as He graciously, and firstly elected to be for us, in us, and with us for all time, now, and forevermore.

Being Robed in the Eschatos of God’s Triune Light

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For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent,
And for Jerusalem’s sake I will not keep quiet,
Until her righteousness goes forth like brightness,
And her salvation like a torch that is burning. -Isaiah 62:1

“Arise, shine; for your light has come,
And the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.
 “For behold, darkness will cover the earth
And deep darkness the peoples;
But the Lord will rise upon you
And His glory will appear upon you.
“Nations will come to your light,
And kings to the brightness of your rising. -Isaiah 60:1-3

I will rejoice greatly in the Lord,
My soul will exult in my God;
For He has clothed me with garments of salvation,
He has wrapped me with a robe of righteousness,
As a bridegroom decks himself with a garland,
And as a bride adorns herself with her jewels. -Isaiah 61:10

And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. -Genesis 2:25

 

A quick reflection on the Eschaton. The thought just occurred to me, once again, of just how self-incurved we are as fallen, yet redeemed, creatures still. We suffer from an unquenchable thirst for attention. We inherently desire, as creatures of the sin, that we would be accepted by others; not for the others’ sake, but for our own self-incurved fantasies. When we walk by a pane of glass, lit-up by the sunshine, we often look at ourselves to make sure we still look good; with our brand-new kicks in tow. We often compare ourselves with others and think: I might not be a supermodel, but I’m definitely better looking than that guy or gal. We are born with vain hearts that are disorderedly in love with themselves. In our very hearts, as fallen creatures, we seek our kingdom, and our righteousness; and all these other things are ultimately lost unto us (as King Solomon and so many others have learned by experience over the millennia.)

But what of the glorified bodies that we will put on at the second coming of Christ? The Prophet says we will be, and are in fact, robed in the garments of salvation, the robes of righteousness; indeed, Christ’s righteousness. Moses by the Spirit says that Adam and Eve were both naked and yet were not ashamed. They were literally naked and weren’t stumbled by the physical form in the perverted ways that fallen creatures now are. We see the Prophet refer to God’s Light for us, in a radically eschatological sense. I would suggest, that even beyond what Adam and Eve experienced, we will be, and even are now (by eyes of faith), so shrouded about with the Life of God’s triune Light for us, that in the Kingdom-sense we simply are radiating the Light of Christ’s life; that our bodies are ensconced in the Light of Christ, as we are participants in His life, that it is not possible but to evince and emote His Light; that we have become, in Christ’s resurrected and ascended vicarious humanity, witness bearers, to the nth degree, of God’s Life, as we have become encapsulated in His radiating Light. In other words, when we finally receive our new glorified bodies, like Christ’s, we could be naked, and not be stumbled because we will so effuse the life of God, indeed as God’s triune Life, is in fact our life, by the adoption of grace, that we will no longer have the capacity, nor the desire to focus on ourselves any longer. We will indeed be like our Father, in the Son, by the Holy Spirit. We will be so other focused from within God’s being (ousia), just as He is as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, that self-consumption in an abstract fallen sense will no longer be a possibility. We get a taste of what this might look like on the Mount of Transfiguration:

Six days later Jesus *took with Him Peter and James and John his brother, and *led them up on a high mountain by themselves. 2 And He was transfigured before them; and His face shone like the sun, and His garments became as white as light. 3 And behold, Moses and Elijah appeared to them, talking with Him. 4 Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, it is good for us to be here; if You wish, I will make three tabernacles here, one for You, and one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” 5 While he was still speaking, a bright cloud overshadowed them, and behold, a voice out of the cloud said, “This is My beloved Son, with whom I am well-pleased; listen to Him!” 6 When the disciples heard this, they fell face down to the ground and were terrified. 7 And Jesus came to them and touched them and said, “Get up, and do not be afraid.” 8 And lifting up their eyes, they saw no one except Jesus Himself alone. -Matthew 17

I long for the day when faith is swallowed up by sight. When we will no longer have this inherent penchant to constantly be self-consumed, and only be consumed by the life of the triune God, and all those participant in that life. I can’t wait till this body of death is finally put under Jesus’ feet, as the last enemy that it is, only to consummately be risen afresh anew with the glorified body of our Lord’s.

When you think about it, all of the world’s ills are formed by the incurved heart, the “Enlightened” turn to the subject. We want and do not have, and so we either literally kill, or figuratively kill, to get what we don’t have, but want. May Christ have mercy sooner than later! Maranatha

The Free Grace of God Counterposed with a Law Based Grace

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How does the Christian know the depth of sin; how does anyone? How does a Christian have knowledge of themselves; how does anyone? According to Scripture we only know the depth of human sin through God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ. To think sin, to think humanity even, from any other ground than the ground of God’s Light of Light for the world in Jesus Christ will give us a skewed sense, a perverted perspective on just who we are as fallen humanity. Until we come to the realization and understanding of the depth dimension of our status as fallen creatures, before a Holy God, we will not be able to live life from and in the straight way. We will construct images of God in images of ourselves, and think that we are in fact “good people”; even though Scripture alone tells us, as it attests to Christ, that we are in fact bad people in need of justification before God. The incarnation of God demonstrates, beyond a shadow of doubt, that our personal status as sinners required the Creator of all life to become His creation in the humanity of Christ, and enter into the consequences of what we have brought to pass as sinners—a rupture between the “good life” God had always intended as we lived in “fellowshipped” lives within His triune life. What Christ’s life demonstrates for us, is that what it means to be genuinely human is to be Holy as God is Holy. What Christ’s life does, as He penetrates our lives by His vicarious humanity, is reveal God to, for, in and with us, and through His reconciling work brings us into His capacity to see and know God. And it is from this whence that we as human beings are adopted back into the place God had always already intended for us as counterpoints of His overflowing and superabundant life of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit love.

Thomas Torrance spells the aforementioned out in the following way:

The human situation as revealed by the breaking in of the kingdom of God in Christ

The vexation and compassion of God in Christ over the distress of humanity

If we are to be true to the witness of the Gospels, the point from which we must begin here is the vexation of the heavenly Father over the condition of his children. God in Christ is burdened with the griefs and pains of men and women. He does not will their hurt or distress or destruction, but on the contrary wills that they shall be made whole, and therefore God allies himself with them against the evil that afflicts them and intervenes as the enemy of all that destroys humanity. That is the primary revelation of man in the light of the kingdom, a revelation that comes from the fact that God the Father looks upon men and women in compassion and vexation as he sees their fears and anxieties, their torments and sorrows and hunger and oppression. That is why the Acts of the Apostles can sum up what it has to say about the ministry of Jesus by the words that he went about doing good and healing all that were oppressed with the devil, while the evangelists all show how much Jesus carried upon his spirit the burden of people’s ills and hurts and gave himself to them in healing.

But what vexes and distresses God in Christ is not simply the sickness and pain of humanity but the fact that it is engulfed in an abyss of fearful darkness, too deep for men and women themselves to understand and certainly too deep for them ever to get out of it—a pit of bottomless evil power. Mankind is entangled in sin not wholly of its own making, enmeshed in the toils of a vast evil will quite beyond it; it is chained in terror and is dragged down and down into the poisonous source or pit of evil. It is evil at its ultimate source, evil at its deepest root, in its stronghold, that God has come to attack and destroy.

This revelation of the condition of humanity from the vexation of God is supported and redoubled by the fact that God in Christ acts towards mankind in its helplessness and distress in sheer grace, grace that is utterly free. Nowhere does Jesus accuse the sick of their sins before he stoops to shoulder their weakness (astheneia). The astounding thing is that God does not put responsibility upon them but takes the responsibility on himself. That is the most miraculous thing about the miracles and healings, the fact that God comes among sinners and makes himself responsible for their condition and even takes their sin and culpability upon himself vicariously. But that in turn reveals the ultimate helplessness and hopelessness of man, apart from such a stupendous act of divine grace.[1]

What is most pressing, at least for me, with reference with Torrance’s above writing, is how he emphasizes the role of God’s utterly free grace. That is to say, God doesn’t come as the punisher, but the slain Lamb. He doesn’t condemn the world; He redeems the world in Jesus Christ. This is the Good News: that God in Christ, who, rightly, could in fact condemn us for not being Holy as He is Holy, has entered into our depraved state, and reversed the curse of the whole thing. It is this reversal that the Christian has been redeemed by; and it is this reversal that the Christian, as an ambassador of Christ, has the privilege of declaring to the world that they too have been given freedom in Christ, the very power of God; and that this freedom is grounded in the eternally triune life of the living God.

The above is very different from the juridical gospel being communicated to many in the world; whether that be of the Protestant or Roman flavor. The juridical gospel has Jesus coming to the world as the instrument of an absolute decree, wherein He meets the forensic requirements of salvation for the world so that the elect (out of the world) might finally be loved by God. Do you notice the shift between the latter and the free grace view? God, in the latter view, primarily relates to the world as a brute Creator and Law-giver. Because the Law (Covenant of Works) has been broken God is no longer free to love His good creation; that is, not until the consequences of failing to meet God’s love are paid for. In this account, once God has found a feasible payment plan, He is free to love those he paid the fee for.

Even through this brief sketch of things it ought to be apparent that what is at stake, between these and various other competing theology propers, is the way we think of who God is. It is one thing to understand that without knowledge of God we cannot have knowledge of ourselves (and our sin, so on and so forth). But it is another thing to actually get a doctrine of God right. If we fail at that, we won’t have a real knowledge of ourselves, or the condition of the world around us. These are heavy matters that require prayer and sobriety as we consider them before the living God. Who are you God? If you have seen Me (Jesus), you have seen the Father.

[1] Thomas F. Torrance, Incarnation: the Person and Life of Christ, edited by Robert T. Walker (Downers Grove, Illinois: IVP Academic, 2008), 240-41.

No One But God is Good: And Its Implications for Modern People

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Some people confuse the Enlightenment for the New Creation. To the point that the human spirit has come to a crossroads in its development, and become civilized, or good. But this is not what the Gospel says. The Gospel says that we are constantly being given over to the death of Jesus that His life might be made manifest through the mortal members of our bodies. This presupposes that as Martin Luther rightly emphasized, as Christians, we are simul iustus et peccator (simultaneously justified and sinner) while we continue to inhabit this in-between time within our bodies of death. The New Creation is not an abstract human achievement; that is to say, there is no turn or development to the good without the Godman (Theanthropos), the mediator between God and humanity, becoming sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God in His vicarious humanity for us. It is the lie of the desperately wicked and above all evil hearts, that fallen humanity is born with, that asserts that humanity has a spark of good (or divinity) built into them. Indeed, the ultimate lie is that humanity, on its own, has the capacity to achieve a holiness deigned by its own whims and desires; that it can simply call something good, and it is so. All that the Enlightenment did was push the Edenic lie further into the hearts of men and women; that is, that they could be God in and of themselves. It said that the indomitable human spirit in fact is God, and that humanity stands the best chance of flourishing by finally accepting the notion that all of the traditional attributes of God are in fact really just projections of the collective humanity of all times. As such, the conclusion (to the Enlightenment) is that humanity, in fact has really been God all along; that humanity has the capacity to be good on its own self-possessed and self-designed terms. Look at where this type of thinking has gotten us in the world. The world is literally collapsing under the pressure of its own “enlightened” thinking. Kyrie eleison (Lord have mercy!)

Barth’s Analogy of the Filioque for His Theology of the Word

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Karl Barth, in his Göttingen Dogmatics, takes from neo-Reformed Dutch theologian’s, Herman Bavinck’s notion of Deus dixit (‘God has spoken’), as a way to think about the way God has revealed Himself bound up in a radical doctrine of the Word of God. Many have probably heard of Barth’s threefold form of the Word of God; it is in the early years of his time at Göttingen that this line of thinking got started for him; particularly as he was pressed upon to teach a Reformed dogmatics within a Lutheran setting. The following showcases the way Barth articulated his understanding of a threefold form of the Word in his early German days as an honorary professor of Reformed theology:

‘Verbum domini manet in aeternum.’ It is no other in that it is now the first, now the second, now the third; and always, whenever it is one of the three, it is also, in some sense, the other two. The Word of God upon which dogmatics reflects is . . . one in three, three in one: revelation, Scripture, preaching . . . not to be confused, not to be separated. One Word of God, one authority, one truth, one power—and yet, not one but three addresses. Three addresses . . . and yet, not three Words of God, authorities, truths, and powers, but rather, one. The Scripture is not the revelation, but rather proceeds from the revelation. Preaching is neither revelation or Scripture, but rather proceeds from both. But Scripture is the Word of God no lass than revelation, preaching no less than Scripture. . .. no “prius” or “posterius” therefore; no “maius” or “minus”; the Word of God in the same glory, the first, the second, the third: ‘unitas in trinitate’ and ‘trinitas in unitate’.[1]

If the reader is familiar with the Latin (Western) doctrine of the filioque Barth’s development on the Word of God is immediately apparent. Barth’s appeal to an analogy of the Trinity is rather evident in the way he develops his thinking on the Word of God. Some might think there is an inherent subordination present within the Latin filioque; the Greek Orthodox church thinks so. Even so, Barth’s genius is to take the Latin dogma on the Trinity and use that pattern as the way he attempts to think God’s Word for us in and from the eternal Logos who is the Christ. It is his turn to Christ wherein he finally has a way to think a theological development from a genuinely Christ conditioned way; as is evident in his development of the threefold form of the Word of God. Once Christ becomes the center of Barth’s thinking, in concrete ways, his lights turn on in a way that begins to illumine his theological development for the rest of his life.

What the cash out is from all of this for me is to continue to see how a genuinely Christ concentrated theology looks; from the Word down, as it were. Christians need to have this type of grounding in order to genuinely think Christianly. As Christians our aim, as Paul asserts, is the perfection of Jesus Christ. As the evangelist and theologian, John, tells us of the Dominical teaching on the Holy Spirit: “These things I have spoken to you while abiding with you. But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I said to you (Jn 14.25-6).” This is what Barth is picking up on in his theology of the Word; i.e., that any genuine Christian theology will avoid speculation, and instead listen to the concrete breath of the Holy Spirit as He points us to the verities that Christ has taught, and continues to teach us as the Word of God for us.

[1] Karl Barth, The Göttingen Dogmatics, 3 cited by Bruce L. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909–1936 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 339.

God is Cruciform Love not Zealot Law

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God is love. He isn’t a sappy sentimental love. He is the Holy triune love of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There is an overreaction in either direction. Some so overreact to the law-based God they grew up with, or who they were first introduced to, that they construct a “God of love” who ends up affirming them in all their desires and fleshy wants. We need to come back to the God of our first love, in Jesus Christ. He is a God of justice, but it is a staurological (cross) shaped justice that flows from and is grounded by His life of love. But He truly is love. He is our Father, just because He is first the Son’s Father by the Spirit. This is the God of love we need to proclaim. He isn’t simply a winsome God; He is a God of expectation; an expectation that has been met for us in the vicarious humanity and obedience of Jesus Christ. Nevertheless, He expects that we be transformed from glory to glory; to be holy as He is Holy. This kind of love ought to inculcate a life of holy gratitude; a life of repentant thinking and living; a life of emboldened and holy living, of the type that reflects and bears witness to the ground of our newly created lives in the resurrected and ascended humanity of Jesus Christ. Let God be true, and every man a liar.

On the other hand, others so run from the pietistic, sappy God of love presented to them by mainstream evangelicalism and mainline churches, that they end up turning God into an Iron Fist. They prefer this God because He appears to be a God of moralistic law-coding wherein the person’s obedience begins to almost count towards “their election/salvation.” They like this God because within the bilaterally configured relationship they think this God operates with, in a God-world relation, that they have their end of the covenant/pactum to keep; that is if they are going to persevere and demonstrate the fruits of an effectual salvation. These folks like to cudgel others into submission, almost as if Allah and their God have something in common. Indeed, their God, and the Muslim’s God, respectively, are construed from the same fount of Aristotelian intellection; of the notion of actus purus (‘pure being’). As such, these Christians begin to emulate their God of metaphysical law-coding. They don’t think of others in terms of God’s love, but instead in terms of a God who expects them to keep their end of the bargain; to keep their end of the salvific promisso.

There is a better way to think God’s love, I already referred to it above with reference to God as cruciform-shaped. The triune God, who is love by way of His Self-givenness for the other, in the other, as a subject-in-being love that so interpenetrates the other that it becomes impossible to think the other apart from the self and vice versa. This is the ground of Christian love; that is, God’s triune interpenetrating love. It is a love, that in the assumptio carnis (‘assumption of flesh’) has so interpenetrated all of humanity’s lives that it becomes impossible to think of the other apart from God’s life for them. This is the way we ought to approach all others in and from the life of Jesus Christ. He loves people, as if sheep without a shepherd. He is the Great Shepherd of Israel, of both Jew and Gentile alike. Treat others with this type of love, even as this love is grounded not in the winds of the cultural turbines, but in the holy and triune life of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Let God be true, and every man a liar.

How Torrance Handles ‘Persons’ Language and The God Given For Us in That Reality

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In the Tradition ‘person,’ or in the Greek, hypostasis (ᜑπόστασÎčς) is appealed to when referring to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. For some this poses a problem; for Barth in fact. There are a variety of reasons why Barth does not prefer to use this word for describing the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; primary of which is the context he found himself in, and the way person had come to be understood under existential pressures. Not to mention the fact that even early on in the Patristic development the language itself also was less than amenable for many of the theologians. Nevertheless, this is the language that came to be used when referring to the ‘persons’ of the Godhead. Barth opted for his ‘mode of being’ language in place of person, but most have not followed that.

There has been some concern, following von Harnack’s ‘Hellenization thesis,’ that the Greek world was uncritically imbibed by early Christians resulting in the morphing of some of the early Christian theological developments into a hybridized version of the biblical reality. Classical theists push back at this, but some like Thomas Torrance took some of that thesis to heart; in so doing, he offers an alternative account, and thus response, to the Harnackian thesis, by attempting to demonstrate that what happened wasn’t a wholesale appropriation of Hellenic philosophical conceptual patterns being imposed on Christian revelation; but instead, he argues that the early church Fathers, while taking much of the Hellenic language, retexted it in such a way that its grammar was given new conceptual orientation under the pressure of God’s Self-revelation in Christ. Peter Leithart calls this the ‘evangelization of metaphysics’;[1] at a level I agree with that. Here is how TFT reasons this through:

The basic term used in this development was the word hypostasis (ᜑπόστασÎčς) taken over from the New Testament reference to Christ the Son of God as ‘the express image of his being (χαραÎșτᜎρ Ï„áż†Ï‚ áœ‘Ï€ÎżÏƒÏ„áœ±ÏƒÎ”Ï‰Ï‚ Î±áœÏ„ÎżáżŠ)’. Then within the context of the Church’s deepening understanding of the Gospel the word hypostasis was adapted to express the objective self-revelation of the Son and Word of God made flesh in Jesus Christ full of grace and truth who encounters us and speaks to us face to face as the incarnate ‘I am’ of the living God. But it was only when this was further thought out in the light of the three-fold self-revelation of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit that the specific concept of ‘Person’ took shape, and then only within the inter-personal relations of the Holy Trinity as one Being, three Persons. In the course of this development the term hypostasis was filled out through association with ‘name’ or áœ„ÎœÎżÎŒÎ± used in its concrete sense, ‘oneself’ or αᜐτός and especially ‘face’ or Ï€ÏÏŒÏƒÏ‰Ï€ÎżÎœ, to refer to self-subsistent self-identifying subject-being in objective relations with others. In its theological deployment, therefore, the term hypostasis was not taken over from Greek thought unchanged, but was stretched and transformed under the impact of God’s trinitarian self-revelation through Christ and in the Spirit to such an extent that it became suitable to express the identifiable self-manifestation of God in the incarnate economy of divine salvation as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – that is, as three distinctive hypostatic Realities or Persons. This change from a Hellenistic impersonal to a Christian personal way of thinking is very evident in the penchant of early Church theologians to qualify words for ‘God’, ‘Word’, ‘being’, ‘life’, ‘authority’ etc., by attaching to them the expression for ‘oneself’ or αᜐτός, as for example Î±áœÏ„ÎżÎžÎ­ÎżÏ‚, Î±áœÏ„ÎżÎ»ÏŒÎłÎżÏ‚, Î±áœÏ„ÎżÏ…ÏƒÎŻÎ±, Î±áœÏ„ÎżÎ¶Ï‰Îź, Î±áœÏ„ÎżÎ”ÎŸÎżÏ…ÏƒÎŻÎ±, in order to stress the intensely personal nature of God’s interaction with us through the presence and power of his Word and Spirit. Thus Logos, far from being some impersonal cosmological principle, is identified with the Son or Word of God, the divine ĐáœÏ„ÎżÎ»ÏŒÎłÎżÏ‚ incarnate in Jesus Christ who reveals himself to us fact to face Ï€ÏÏŒÏƒÏ‰Ï€ÎżÎœ ÎșÎ±Ï„ÎŹ Ï€ÏÏŒÏƒÏ‰Ï€ÎżÎœ, and speaks to us in the Holy Scriptures directly in person, ጐÎș Ï€ÏÎżÏƒÏŽÏ€ÎżÏ…, or Î±áœÏ„ÎżÏ€ÏÎżÏƒÏŽÏ€Ï‰Ï‚.[2]

I don’t know about you, but I rather like the way Torrance reasons his way through this. What we end up with, as we always do with Torrance, is an emphasis on the personal reality of who God is. Not in a contrived, existentialist, or modern sense, but in the revealed and biblical sense of what it means to be personal as that is given in and for us in the antecedent life of God pre-destined for us in the Son of the Father by the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit.

But you see the way Torrance disentangles this issue, which frankly, is a rather knotty issue in the history, by reasoning from the inner-theo-logic itself, as that is given in the Self-revelation of God in Christ, and allowing that to be the material reality that then goes on to shape the grammar adopted from the Greeks? Some people charge Torrance with hagiographically reading the Fathers by imposing his own style of personalist reading onto what they in fact did with the Hellenic pool of grammar they were working with. Personally, whether or not he does engage in this sort of liberty, does not ultimately bother me; what we end up with, material-theologically from Torrance is where the cream is. Yes, we want to be as accurate as possible with the way we engage with the history of ideas, and the history itself. But the greatest gift a constructive theologian, par excellence, like Torrance can give us, is the reasoning he did about God’s filial life for us; for the church catholic and the world for whom He gave His life in flesh and blood.

For my money, we need to know that God loves us, and still recognize at the same time that God is God and we are not. This is what Torrance does for us in a masterful way. He honors the Creator-creature distinction, while, in an Athanasian key, emphasizing God as He is in Himself as a prius, in the eternal bond-age of Self-given love as Father of the Son, Son of the Father in the koinonial fellowship of the Holy Spirit. Christians need to know that this is the God with whom we have to do. It is in this that we can avoid the moralistic therapeuticizing deity who dominates most of the minds of the evangelical churches (in North America and the West); and at the same time walk in an intimate hand-in-hand relationship with the wonderous and ineffably triune God of eternal life who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

[1] In his book on Athanasius.

[2] Thomas F. Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God: One Being Three Persons (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016), 156.

 

TF Torrance on the Holy Spirit in the Triune Life

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At the Council of Nicaea in 325 A. D. the Fathers spoke of the Holy Spirit only in the last single sentence: ‘We believe in the Holy Spirit’. Brief as this was, it brought into sharp focus the universal emphasis in the New Testament upon the personal and divine nature of the Holy Spirit who, with the Father and the Son, is both the subject and object of faith, he through whom and in whom we believe in Jesus Christ and are saved. In him God himself is immediately present in our midst, miraculously and savingly at work, and through him God reveals himself as Lord, for God himself is the content of what he does for us and communicates to us. The Spirit is not just something divine or something akin to God emanating from him, not some sort of action at a distance or some kind of gift detachable from himself, for in the Holy Spirit God acts directly upon us himself, and in giving us his Holy Spirit God gives us nothing less than himself. Since God is Spirit, the Giver of the Spirit and the Gift of the Spirit are identical. Thus in the Nicene Creed belief in the Holy Spirit is bracketed together with belief in the Father and in the Son, as belief in one God and Lord. -T. F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 191

God Alone is Good

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17 And as he was setting out on his way, one individual ran up and knelt down before him and asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do so that I will inherit eternal life?” 18 So Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. 19 You know the commandments: ‘Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not give false testimony, do not defraud, honor your father and mother.’” 20 And he said to him, “Teacher, all these I have observed from my youth.” 21 And Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said to him, “You lack one thing: Go, sell all that you have, and give the proceeds to the poor—and you will have treasure in heaven—and come, follow me.” 22 But he looked gloomy at the statement and went away sorrowful, because he had many possessions. -Mark 10:17-22

“No one is good except God alone.” Ponder that, think about it. I have been lately, it’s the premise of the whole thing. If we are going to see God, we must likewise be good. But we are creatures, and fallen creatures at that. How are we supposed to bridge the gap between God, who alone is good and Holy, and we ourselves, who are fallen and sinful human beings? We somehow have to come to have ‘eyes to see and ears to hear’ the Holy face and voice of God.

Humans are worshipping beings by design. Born into a fallen and ruptured state with the living God, we think ourselves to be all knowing gods, and this by nature. God alone is good according to Jesus. If we are to see and hear God, we must also be good. Good not in the sense of relatively good (i.e., compared to our neighbors), but good in the absolute sense; like God. This is the only avenue that leads to being able to see God in His fullness, and not die.

Many in the world falsely comfort themselves with the idea that: “I’m not that bad, I’m a good-hearted person etc.” But where does the notion of good even come from for such people; where do they derive their notion of goodness from? For people in the culture, writ large, goodness, as alluded to above, is largely derived from what counts as good in their own eyes. They look around at people who are “worse” than them, societally speaking, and conclude from their that they are a relatively good person. Even if that’s the case it still doesn’t explain where the notion of goodness comes from in the first place.

Some natural theologians would appeal to the idea of natural law, natural theology, general revelation, and conscience to explain how people seemingly just have some flickering notion of what goodness is. But I protest (surprise!) I would argue that the notion of goodness that Jesus has in mind is of another world, the world He came to mediate us into; as He came into the far country of His fallen creation as one of us. In other words, as we read above, Jesus’ interlocutors, as a matter of simple and seemingly self-evident engagement with Jesus, simply presumed to call Him ‘good.’ But He knew they were doing so based on superficial appearances, by what they could see with their own eyes. He knew that they couldn’t see the depth dimension of goodness, like He could as the Son of God. And it was this goodness that He was calling people to, a goodness that can only obtain as the heart of stone is replaced with the living heart of flesh that Christ alone formed for them, for us in His resurrected humanity. What Jesus was telling them, telling us, is that there is an alien (relative to us) goodness that can not be perceived by the human mind alone; that there must be an irruption, an in-breaking from the heavens if human beings are to experience goodness as it really is in the triune God.

Hence, there is nothing ‘natural’ about goodness according to Jesus. Goodness doesn’t underwrite this world system, nor any of its children. Goodness can only be encountered as a person is confronted by God’s goodness for them in Jesus Christ. So, the idea of a natural theology, a general revelation, or a conscience funding some sort of abstract or general notion of goodness is confounded. According to Jesus, God is good, and the only way this can be known is through Jesus. Even in the account we are looking at in Mark, ironically, it is Jesus telling his questioners that the goodness they thought they knew was more than flesh deep. That goodness is more than humanity alone can imagine; that goodness must break into this world afresh anew, each and every moment, by the Holy Spirit’s Christ conditioned ministry for the world; that goodness isn’t something any human being possesses, but can only become possessed by as the Holy Spirit comes to reside in them, and He unioning them, us to the goodness of God in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ (who is God for us enfleshed).

This is why Christian witness is so significant. The world has a sense of goodness not because it is something inherent to them, to the ‘natural’ universe. The world has a sense of goodness because God broke into this world in Jesus Christ, and revealed Himself to the world; even while ‘hidden’ in the flesh of a man of sorrow acquainted with grief. It is the Christian witness that serves as the Light to the world, that Christ is risen and God is good. But as is typical of the world, and those Christians who subscribe to natural knowledge of God, this reality of God’s goodness, as given in Christ, by the Holy Spirit, and in the Christian witness to Christ, is abstracted and collapsed into a notion of goodness that they discovered. And it is this notion of goodness that gets superimposed onto a natural construction of godness through which people come to have control over God; that they are then able to make Him a predicate of their wills, their desires, their suppositions about metaphysics, so on and so forth.

Jesus came to tell the world that this notion of goodness, one abstracted by the human mind (by whatever means, and under whatever conditions) is false. His interlocutors presumed to know what ‘good’ entails, but Jesus clearly confounded them by pointing them to God alone as the circumscription of what goodness is. He pointed away from Himself, only for the Father, by the Spirit, to point back to Him and say: “this is my dearly beloved Son, hear Him!” This is how the triune God operates, by finding their life in their relationship with the other; this is God’s oneness in action. Likewise, our life, and the goodness therein can only come to be known and lived as we look away from ourselves, and look upward to God, as He has made a way for that in and through Christ’s vicarious eyes for us. As we participate in this vision, in this life, we can bear witness to genuine goodness, to the living God, and provide the salt the world needs to come to have the flavor of heaven it needs to “taste and see that God is good.”