Category Archives: Doctrine Of Sin

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

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

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

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

Evil, The ‘Ancient Menace’: Christ is Victor!

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My recent readings in Barth’s Church Dogmatics have me engaging with his development on a doctrine of nothingness (i.e., sin and evil). The particular section I am reading has been exceedingly edifying. The passage I am going to share from him is a summarizing type of statement of what he has been treating heretofore. As I was reading this section it gave me great hope to ponder the present and forthcoming realities, as those relate to Christ’s victory over nothingness-sin-evil, and all that entails eschatologically. It is hopeful to ruminate on the concrete victory of Christ vis-à-vis the despair and delirium the current (seen) world order suffers under. Without this blessed hope, and the soon to come, glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, this world surely has no ultimate meaning or purpose. Without the Logos ensarkos all the world can do is to make an attempt at self-generating some type of existential meaning in the face of the absurdum of the abyss of darkness that enshrouds this world system. But Christ! Barth writes,

What is nothingness? In the knowledge and confession of the Christian faith, i.e., looking retrospectively to the resurrection of Jesus Christ and prospectively to His coming again, there is only one possible answer. Nothingness is the past, the ancient menace, danger and destruction, the ancient non-being which obscured and defaced the divine creation of God but which is consigned to the past in Jesus Christ, in whose death it has received its deserts, being destroyed with the consummation of the positive will of God which is as such the end of His non-willing. Because Jesus is Victor, nothingness is routed and extirpated. It is that which in this One who was both very God and very man has been absolutely set behind, not only by God, but in unity with Him by man and therefore the creature. It is that from whose influence, dominion and power the relationship between Creator and creature was absolutely set free in Jesus Christ, so that it is no longer involved in their relationship as a third factor. This is what happened to nothingness once and for all in Jesus Christ. This is its status and appearance now that God has made His own and carried through the conflict with it in His Son. It is no longer to be feared. It can no longer “nihilate.” But obviously we may make these undoubtedly audacious statements only on the ground of one single presupposition. The aspect of creaturely activity both as a whole and in detail, our consciousness both of the world and of self, certainly do not bear them out. But what do we really know of it as taught by this consciousness? How can this teach us the truth that it is really past and done with? The only valid presupposition is a backward look to the resurrection of Jesus Christ and a forward look to His coming in glory, i.e., the look of Christian faith as rooted in and constantly nourished by the Word of God. The knowledge and confession of Christian faith, however, inevitably entails the affirmation that by the divine intervention nothingness has lost the perpetuity which it could and must and indeed did have apart from this intervention. It can no longer be validly regarded as possessing any claim or right power in relation to the creature, as though it were still before and above us, as though the world created by God were still subject to and dominated by it, as though Christians must hold it in awe, as though it were particularly Christian to hold it in the utmost awe and to summon the world to share in this awe. It is no longer legitimate to think of it as if real deliverance and release from it were still an event of the future. It is obvious that in point of fact we do constantly think of it in this way, with anxious, legalistic, tragic, hesitant, doleful, and basically pessimistic thoughts, and this inevitably where we are neither able nor prepared to think from the standpoint of Christian faith. But it is surely evident than when we think in this way it is not from a Christian standpoint, but in spite of it, in breach of the command imposed with our Christian faith. If our thought is conditioned by the obedience of Christian faith, we have only one freedom, namely, to regard nothingness as finally destroyed and to make a new beginning in remembrance of the One who has destroyed it. Only if our thought is thus conditioned by the obedience of Christian faith is it possible to proclaim the Gospel to the world as it really is, as the message of freedom for the One who has already come and acted as the Liberator, and therefore of the freedom which precludes the anxiety, legalism and pessimism so prevalent in the world. We need hardly describe how throughout the centuries the Christian Church has failed to shape its thought in the obedience of Christian faith, to proclaim it to the world in this obedience, to live in this freedom and to summon the world to it. For this reason and contrary to its true nature, so-called Christianity has become a sorry affair both within and without. It is shameful enough to have to admit that many of the interpretations of nothingness which we are forced to reject as non-Christian derive their power and cogency from the fact that for all their weakness and erroneousness they attest a Christian insight to the extent that they do at least offer a cheerful view and describe and treat nothingness as having no perpetuity. It ought to be the main characteristic of the Christian view that it can demonstrate this more surely because on surer ground, more boldly because in the exercise and proclamation of the freedom granted to do so, and more logically because not in a venture but in simple obedience. We must not imagine that we serve the seriousness of Christian knowledge, life and proclamation by retreating at this point and refusing to realise and admit that the apparently audacious is the norm, the only true possibility. The true seriousness of the matter, and we may emphasise this point in retrospect of the whole discussion, does not finally depend upon pessimistic but upon optimistic thought and speech. From a Christian standpoint “to be serious” can only mean to take seriously the fact that Jesus is Victor, the last word must always be secretly the first, namely, that nothingness has no perpetuity.[1]

Years ago, I read a book by Donald Bloesch called, Jesus is Victor!: Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Salvation. Bloesch was treating the very themes we have been reading about in Barth directly. Barth’s primary point (he has more than one) is that nothingness or sin or evil cannot be rightly known, but through the One who first stands against it for us. That God alone in Christ has the capacity to see what evil is, in light of His positive life of righteousness and holiness. For Barth, the world has no access to the concrete non-reality of nothingness. As such, they have no way of battling it. As an implication, this would be one reason, among many, that there is Victory alone in Christ alone. The world is ensnared by a trap that might seem like the Stoic fate of fatalism; but as Barth opines, in light of Christ, things are much worse than that. Which is why it takes all of God to be for all of us in the face of Jesus Christ. As Barth rightly emphasizes, there is no release from the anxiety, the dread, the tragic, the doom&gloom apart from the Light of Light of God piercing the darkness that we might come to more accurately understand what darkness, what nothingness actually entails. Not that we can grasp the inner-anatomy of nothingness, per se, but in Christ, we can finally, at the very least, recognize the depth dimensional reality that ensconces us within the binding of a dread-nothingness that God alone has the ability to know the depths of; indeed, as the Theanthropos, “. . . He does not will to be faithful to Himself except as He is faithful to His creature, adopting its cause and therefore constantly making the alien problem of nothingness His own.”[2]

Marantha!

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3 §50–51 [364] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 74–5.

[2] Ibid., 68.

The Original Sin of Sex in Augustine, Ambrose, and Lombard

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It is no secret, for those whom it is no secret, that Augustine believed that original sin was a genetic material stuff that was propagated in and among the human mass through the lust of sexual intercourse. Indeed, some of this, no doubt, was developed in the context of his Manichean background; but also, Augustine believed that the passions themselves were ultimately representative of the very base of sin, or what he identified as concupiscence (self-love). He wasn’t the only one who believed this, there were many others, following, like Ambrose, and later Peter Lombard, who affirmed the same in regard to the relationship between post-fall sexual relationships and the propagation of original sin sired in that act. Here is Lombard in his Sentences giving his own view on this, followed by prooftexts from both Ambrose and Augustine.

Chapter 4 (209)

HE SHOWS THE CAUSE OF THE CORRUPTION OF THE FLESH, FROM WHICH SIN OCCURS IN THE SOUL. For the flesh became corrupt in Adam through sin. Before sin, a man and a woman could join together without the incentive of lust and the burning of concupiscence, and there was a marriage bed without stain; but after sin, there cannot be carnal joining without lustful concupiscence, which is always a flaw, and even a fault, unless it is excused by the goods of marriage. And so it is in concupiscence and lust that the flesh is conceived which is to be formed into the body of the offspring. And so the flesh itself, which is conceived in vicious concupiscence, is polluted and corrupted. From contact with such flesh, the soul, as it is infused, derives the stain by which it is polluted and becomes guilty, that is, the vice of concupiscence, which is original sin.

  1. THAT BECAUSE OF THE CORRUPTION OF THE FLESH, WHICH IS THE CAUSE OF SIN, SIN IS SAID TO BE IN THE FLESH. And that is why sin is said to be in the flesh. And so the flesh which is sown in the concupiscence of lust has neither guilt nor the action of guilt, but its cause. Therefore, in that which is sown, there is corruption; in that which is born by concupiscence, there is vice.
  2. Hence Ambrose, on the words of the Apostle, says as follows: “How does sin live in the flesh, since it is not a substance, but a privation of the good? In this way: the body of the first man was corrupted through sin, and that corruption remains in the body through the nature of the offense, preserving the force of the divine sentence promulgated against Adam, by association with whom the soul is stained by sin. And so it is because the cause of the deed remains that sin is said to live in the flesh.” This is the law of the flesh.—The same: “Sin does not live in the spirit, but in the flesh, because the cause of sin is from the flesh, not from the soul; because the flesh is, from its origin, of the flesh of sin, and through its transmission all flesh becomes [flesh] of sin.” But the soul is not transmitted and so it does not have the cause of sin in it.
  3. Augustine too, in a sermon On the Words of the Apostle, shows that the soul contracts sin from the flesh; he says: “The vice of concupiscence is what the soul contracted, but from the flesh. For human nature was not first established with vice by God’s work, but it was wounded by vice coming from the choice of the will of the first humans,” so that there is not good in the flesh, but vice, by which the soul is corrupted.[1]

A truly unbiblical development and accretion, but one that Augustine, and those following, felt needed to be pressed in order to keep the heretical teachings of Pelagius, and the Pelagians at bay. This is what happens when an imbalance is presented into the mix of theological development, particularly as that obtains in the heat of polemical relationships. Not to mention, by time the Augustinian and Pelagius disputation occurred, theological matters had also become a deeply political aggression.

Clearly, from Scripture, the Apostle encourages sexual intercourse (not to mention the epistle to the Hebrews) as a duty, and yet a pleasure, to be had in the marriage bond between a man and a woman.

Now concerning the things about which you wrote, it is good for a man not to touch a woman. 2 But because of immoralities, each man is to have his own wife, and each woman is to have her own husband. 3 The husband must fulfill his duty to his wife, and likewise also the wife to her husband. 4 The wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does; and likewise also the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. 5 Stop depriving one another, except by agreement for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer, and come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control. 6 But this I say by way of concession, not of command. 7 Yet I wish that all men were even as I myself am. However, each man has his own gift from God, one in this manner, and another in that.[2]

Not simply as an act for reproduction, as Augustine would press. But indeed, as an act of undefiled and pure intimacy; i.e., the two become one in the ‘flesh’ in the communal bond of the love of the Holy Spirit. Latterly, Bernard of Clairvaux, Martin Luther, Puritans like Richard Sibbes et al. would pick up on what came to be called ‘Marriage Mysticism,’ in regard to the relationship between Christ and His Bride, the Church. In other words, the intimacy envisaged by the act of sexual penetration in the bonds of holy matrimony were so (and are so) sanctified, that it could be the symbol of the intimacy that Christ and His Bride have within the bond of God’s Holy Life as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (whose life itself is known to be perichoretic and interpenetrative in a Subject-in-Being fellowshipping relationship) (see Eph. 5:18ff). All of this to underscore that sex within marriage coram Deo is a peak event in the human experience in regard to attesting to the very triune life of God itself; inclusive of God’s life with us (Immanuel) and in us in Christ.

Augustine, Ambrose, Lombard et al. couldn’t get everything right.

[1] Peter Lombard, The Sentences: Book 2 On Creation: Distinction XXXI, trans. by Giulio Silano (Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2012), 154–55.

[2] I Corinthians 7:1–7, NASB95.

‘Our end is not a tolerable evil’: On the Concrete Christian Death

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Death, just like life, in the secular and pagan realm, but even in the Christian realm, insofar as the latter mirrors the former—and it does at ubiquitous levels—is thought of in abstract and wondrous terms; indeed, in fearful terms. But for the Christian all things have been resurrected; including our dead bodies. We are now of the ‘firstborn from the dead,’ Jesus Christ. But this is to the point: when we contemplate our own mortality, which most of us attempt to hideaway from, most of us conjure some type of ethereal somethingness “out there,” that doesn’t seem real to us. That is to say, death is such a seemingly faceless enemy, bringing with it the abyss of the unknown, that we attempt to flee from it in whatever way we can; even if that way is, ironically, just living more fully and out of the death our bodies inhabit and participate in from this to that moment of every single day of our lives. When we think about death, in general, it seems so outlandish to us, at a personal level, that to contemplate it for too long either descends into the morbid or insanity. Personal death, as death in general, represents a limit that human beings were not constructed for, ultimately. And yet this is our status in this current time between now and not yet. And so, outside of Christ, we attempt to withdraw into other things, things that keep us from thinking too constantly about our transitory statuses. It is a scary thing, death that is, for a people who were ultimately created to be in eternal union and fellowship with our Creator, with our Father, in the Son, by the Holy Spirit, to not live and out of that bond of union that God has re-created for us (post-fall) in Christ, in order that He might elevate us to the heights and weight that He has always already shared with the Father in the bond of love wooed by the Holy Spirit. Barth says more:

What is the justification for this negative aspect of our being? What is the basis of the profound necessity of human fear in face of death? It is obviously to be found in the fact that death is an enemy with its own destructive purpose and power to which we have rightly fallen a prey in virtue of God’s right against us, and the wrong which we have done Him. This means, of course, that we are threatened in the frontier of our being by the negation which corresponds to the power and purpose of this enemy. But it also means that in death we are confronted not only with death itself but also with God; with the very God who is in the right against us and against whom we have done wrong. In death He demands that which we still owe Him. He threatens us with the payment which we have deserved. It is not any negation which threatens us in death. It is not a harmless, neutral and finally welcome negation as imagined by Buddha and his kindred. It is the very dangerous and painful negation of our nothingness before God. If this were not so, if death were a tyrant in its own right, we could await it with secret equanimity or even open defiance. But it is not a tyrant in its own right. It rules only but precisely at the point where God is in the right against His creature and His creature is in the wrong against Him. It reigns in the no man’s land where God is in conflict with man and man with God. It rules with the authority and power of the Law of God obtaining even in this no man’s land. In the rule of death we have to do with the rule of God. It is really our nothingness in His sight which is revealed in the destructive work of death. This is what makes this work so ineluctable, so bitter and terrible. Our end is not a tolerable evil, but the great and serious and intolerable evil, to the extent that in our opposition to God we draw upon ourselves God’s opposition to us. In its perhaps concealed but very real basis our fear of death is the well-grounded fear that we must have of God.[1]

In other words, as Barth rightly notices, death is really coming to terms with the fact that fallen humans harbor sweet kiss me nots for the ‘nothingness’ of their own lives; at least, as we perceive them to be: i.e., our own lives. Death is the comeuppance all of humanity has indeed deserved, before the Holy and living God. And yet, the Evangel, the Good News! is that Christ has faced and conquered this comeuppance for us. He has already entered into the ditch of death, faced it, accepted its ‘wandering star-ness as if in the darkness of space,’ and shone the bright light of the Sun of righteousness to it; thus, dispelling its wretched cursedness with the bounty of His life, the ever-eternal life-spring that flows upward into the bosom of the Father for the eternity of His life now with ours.

People feign a ‘no fear’ attitude, often, when the reality of death is brought up; even in the face of their own mortality (as I saw when I was being treated with others for cancer). And yet deep down ‘eternity has been set in our hearts,’ as such to be faced with the reality of a faceless non-eternity, such as a Christless death necessarily presents someone with, becomes such an assault on all that “appears” and “feels” real, that it is dashed on the rocks of the wishfulness of fallen humanity’s imaginaries. That is to say, as independent, self-possessed, and thus fallen human beings, we would rather die outside of Christ, and be able to hold onto our own “precious” selves, even into the depths of a nothingness we really have no possible knowledge of. A fallen humanity would rather die, with hopes of escaping the living God, if this only means that somehow, someway such humanity might finally achieve Übermensch status; indeed, transcending death itself, and finally ascending to the heights of divinity they always knew they possessed in themselves; as if a ‘spark.’

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/2 §47 [608] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 168.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Tale of Two Evils: One Greater the “Other Lesser”

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The lesser of two evils model is a mythology. Evil is simply evil. The mass murder of babies in the womb is the epitome of evil de jure. There is no “scale” or quantification of evil that can ever balance out sheer evil. One problem with committing oneself to a lesser-of-two-evils model is that it becomes a slippery slope; as this presidential election perfectly illustrates. It is a slippery slope because within the winds of the cultural mores we all become conditioned in ways that are increasingly beholden to comparing this level of evil to that level of evil; but when this is done, we can become persuaded that compared to this evil over there this evil right here isn’t so bad. In fact, after a while living in this type of pressure cooker, we easily become entwined and melded into the juices of the cultural wash. The only way out is to look at evil as evil, compared to God’s holiness Self-revealed in Jesus Christ, and make our decisions from this Holy Ground of God’s life. It is His alien righteousness for us that ought to be the frame we see the world, and the “choices” it offers us, through. When we move and breathe in this way, we come to have the capacity to simply say, No! And we live a life of continuous repose upon God’s Word rather than the culture’s word baked into God’s Word.

A pushback to this might be: “well, this is too idealic and pie-in-the-sky.” But the opposite is actually the case. In fact, trusting God’s Word, living as seeing the unseen as the seen, is the only way a Christian can truly move and breathe and have their being in this shifty and shadowy world of dissolution. This is not to say that we don’t have difficult decisions to make living as Christians in a fallen world; indeed, it is to say the inverse. It is much more difficult to live a life that the basic human senses cannot penetrate; to live by the faith of Christ. The fallacy of the lesser-of-two-evils model is that it presumes that a person has the capacity to weight this evil against that evil, this amount of evil against that amount of evil, and discern which side of the scale is the right side. But what if one evil is so being-shaking, what if one evil, in a basket of many evils, so utterly strikes at the being of God, the being of Life itself, that it becomes impossible to weed through to the point that we believe we can come to the conclusion of what weighted side is more acceptable than the other? What if there is an evil that like yeast becomes so intracule to the total loaf of bread that its pervasiveness becomes inescapable; to the point that it finally becomes absolutely necessary to simply trust God? To move beyond the supposed possibility to divine between the evils, and simply recognize the LORD has not given us a viable choice to choose.

Dark Heart-Inscrutable Sin Contra Natural Theology-Law

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“The heart is more deceitful than all else
And is desperately sick;
Who can understand it?
“I, the Lord, search the heart,
I test the mind,
Even to give to each man according to his ways,
According to the results of his deeds. –Jeremiah 17:9–10

This is going to be a very brief screed on the inscrutable reality of sin and evil. As the prophet Jeremiah speaks for Yahweh, or as Yahweh speaks directly through Jeremiah, something is quite clear about the human fallen heart: i.e., it is beyond our comprehension. The only commentary or explicator provided for its depths comes in the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. It was this that was required in order for the ‘desperately sick’ and ‘deceitful’ heart to be dealt with. Just as with the torture and evil happenings that befell Job, God never explained the background behind it all to Job. Via dramatic irony the reader understands that it was the devil who was given permission by Yahweh to “slay” Job, but Job didn’t know that while in the midst of it all. I bring Job up merely as an analogy for the depths of sin and evil, and the way God explains it to us; He doesn’t. Even so, what can be gleaned from this is that sin and evil have an inexplicable core-depth to it that the human mind could never grasp; God alone has real knowledge of good and evil; God alone is good, as Jesus said of His life in the triune Monarxia. Yahweh’s engagement with evil, with sin as a subset, is to become human, be put to death for all of humanity, and by so doing reverse the dissolving effects of evil and sin into the nothingness-reprobate status that it entails.

The above has many implications. One of those implications has to do with the impact that the dissolvent of sin and evil has upon the intellect. According to Scripture its effect is so far reaching that it kills humanity; that is, it kills humanity’s capacity to be in right relationship with Yahweh; to have a real knowledge of the triune God; to even have the capacity or desire to follow God. We know from Jesus, particularly in the Gospel of John, that the fallen heart loves the darkness rather than the light. That is to say, the human fallen heart is ensconced within the darkness and loves it that way. Without an outside “intervention” or intrusion we would stay captive to our greatest affections, even as those find their source in a heart always already inward curved.

The aforementioned is why I reject any form of a so-called natural theology. The noetic-ontic effects of sin in an evil world are so deep and dread that the fallen human’s knowledge of God is always and only contingent upon a person’s participation within God’s life as that is mediated through the vicarious-priestly humanity of Jesus Christ. This is a purely biblical theological account. When you have folks within Protestantism, especially those who claim to be the Reformed orthodox or Lutheran, claiming that a natural theology, natural law is in play for developing a Christian theology, you know that they are relying on an extrabiblical account of things. You know that they are relying on some type of intellectualist anthropology (typically, Thomist) wherein they maintain that while humanity is totally depraved, some small spark of the intellect, which is the essence of what it means to be human, just as it is the ultimate essence for God to be God (as the Big Brain in the Sky), has remained untouched. It is in this small space of a spark that they reason even a fallen humanity, through a naked reason, has enough inherent intellectual power to rightly think Godness; to think the categories of God’s life. But biblically this cannot be sustained. This, at its very reduction, is why Barth forever rejected natural theology, particularly as that was juxtaposed with his in-person and Roman Catholic correspondent, Erich Przywara.

Created Grace

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I have pressed the idea for decades now, after being alerted to these things by my former historical theology seminary professor (and still mentor), Dr. Ron Frost, in regard to Thomas Aquinas’ synthesis of Aristotelian categories with Christian [Augustinian] theology. I am referring to the Thomist thinking on created grace. There are many retrievers of scholastic Reformed theology these days, inclusive of Matthew Barrett, in his own idiosyncratic way. Richard Muller has identified the swath of Post Reformed orthodox theology as Christian Aristotelianism. This would be another way of simply saying (for the most part): Thomism or a neo-Thomism of sorts. This is why I have argued, along with others, that Tridentine Catholic theology, along with those who appropriated said theological categories, like the Reformed scholastic, have taken over a semi-Pelagian soteriology; or a cooperative theory of salvation vis-à-vis God and the human agent. Within the scholasticism Reformed frame, we see this type of cooperative model developed under the aegis of what is known as a Covenantal or Federal theology. The elect are provided with a created grace (distinct from the personal grace that is the Holy Spirit’s unction), by which, in the Federal scheme, they are able to cooperate with God in meeting the conditions of the promisso, or bilateral covenant betwixt God and man/woman, in regard to attesting to and appropriating their elect status.

There is more to be said about all of the aforementioned, but I wanted at least to provide a theological context or background for the points made by Gilles Emery, as created grace looked in the theology of Thomas Aquinas—as distinct and opposed to the personal grace of the Holy Spirit. The scholastics Reformed will often equate the personal grace of the Holy Spirit notion with created grace, with the point of downplaying the Thomistic/Aristotelian flare found in what can be called the habitus theology of Thomas Aquinas. Someone who doesn’t downplay these things though is indeed, Richard Muller. Emery writes,

Thomas actually emphasizes the necessity of a created grace. When the Holy Spirit is given to human beings, he does not enter into a synthesis with someone with whom he is ‘mixed’ or ‘fused’. Even in Christ, there is no mixture or conflation between the divine and the human nature. For a human being’s own nature to be raised into communion with God, it is necessary to recognize, from the moment of their participation in God onwards, a gift in her which will be the intrinsic principle of her sanctification, a reality which has a human size, and so is a created one, situated on the ontological plane of creatureliness: this is the grace which is called ‘created’. This gift comes from God alone, because it is God alone who divinizes, God alone who makes human beings participants in his own divine nature. But, even when he gives himself, God remains distinct from human beings. In the scholastic terminology, it is necessary to see that God is not the ‘formal cause’ of the life of grace, because he does not enter into formal composition with the human (both God’s simplicity and the created condition of human beings make this unthinkable, for we would then be faced with a conflation of the divine and human nature). In this light, grace is a created disposition which human beings receive from God. It is, so to speak, a gift from God which puts itself onto the ontological level of human nature, proportioning itself to the human in order to make it possible for men and women to be united to God from within their own human life. Such created grace disposes human beings to receiving the divine person. Thomas states,

the gift of sanctifying grace disposes the soul to possess the divine person; this is what the formula ‘the Holy Spirit is given through the gift of grace’ means. But the gift itself is the grace coming from the Holy Spirit; this is what Paul means when he says, The charity of God is poured forth in our hearts by the Holy Spirit.

The insistence on the necessity for a created gift (habitual grace with its gifts of wisdom and charity) must not make us forget that its aim is to make human beings capable of receiving the Holy Spirit himself, and, beside the Holy Spirit, the Father and the Son, who come to build their dwelling in the saints (‘to possess the divine person’). St Thomas is very clear on this:

through the gift of sanctifying grace, the reasonable creature is not only perfected in such a way as to be able to make use of the created gift, but also in such a way as to enjoy the divine person himself…. the grace of the Holy Spirit is given to human beings in such a way that the actual source of the grace is given, to wit, the Holy Spirit himself.[1]

It is important to understand what a Thomist Intellectualist anthropology is at this point (which I clumsily wrote about in a seminary paper back in 2002, my first real exposure to these things). Suffice it to say, when a theologian starts with an Augustinian conditioned doctrine of predestination and election—wherein the elect (and reprobate) is thought of in abstract and individualistic ways—it is possible to end up with the thinking we see evinced in the outworking of Thomas’ theology of anthropology/salvation. There is an utter need to think the human agent away from the divine, to the point that when the Christ comes as God enfleshed, we end up with a necessary rupture between God’s person and work; to the point that even Christ’s human nature would need a created grace to cooperate with God in the work of salvation. This, in a Thomistic frame, is why a created grace is constructed in the first place: i.e., in order to keep the pure nature of an independent humanity in tact vis-à-vis the Creator/creature distinction, distinct. But this move becomes unnecessary, that is, the move to think of God’s grace in dualistic ways; i.e., personal and created. It is unnecessary because God’s Grace is God’s being in becoming for us; God’s grace is an eternal act of triune felicity (relative to the Deus incarnandus ‘God to be incarnate’).

There are things that need further detailing in order to tie up the dangling definitional ends in this post. But as usual, this will have to suffice for a blog post. I haven’t strung all of the dots together for you, but that’s part of the fun; I’ll leave it to you to bring some of the implications of what I have been writing on together.

[1] Gilles Emery, OP, The Trinitarian Theology of Thomas Aquinas (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 253–54.

An Athanasian Reformed Reading of John 6:44-45: On Unconditional Election and the Effectual Call

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There was a debate, very recently, between Dr. James White and Dr. Leighton Flowers with reference to John 6:44-45. The theological locus under disputation was on the Calvinist doctrines of unconditional election and the effectual call. White argued the positive position, i.e., affirming unconditional election and the effectual call; whilst Flowers argued the negative, i.e., denying unconditional election and the effectual call. For the purposes of this post, I am just going to assume the reader understands the entailments of said doctrines, and cut right to the chase in offering the Athanasian Reformed (AR) (Evangelical Calvinist) reading of John 6:44-45. I believe it is the better more theologically acute way one must exegete John 6:44-45, among many other passages, in light of Christological orthodoxy. In other words, I will suggest (not argue here) that everyone reads the text of Scripture through theological lenses; and since that’s the case, it is best to exegete Scripture from good theological premises, rather than bad ones. I would simply assert here that both White and Flowers, respectively, offer a reading of John 6 that are based on bad theological premises.

Here is the passage in the English translation (NASB95):

44 No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up on the last day. 45 It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught of God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father, comes to Me.

White argues that all who are drawn of God will necessarily come to God (so, what he takes to be a prima facie argument for unconditional election vis-à-vis the effectual call). Flowers argues that the drawn ones who come to God are those who have not only heard, but have actively learned from the Father, and through this, said drawn ones freely choose to come to God based on their innate human freedom to do so (he believes the capacity comes, situationally, as people hear the call and learn from God of His way for them; but this based on an ontic capacity built into the human agent to accept or reject the call of God). So, in nuce, we can see how White clearly is thinking from the typical Calvinist emphasis on God’s sovereignty, and how Flowers, respectively, ends up emphasizing the human agents’ intact libertarian freewill to say yes or no to God’s offer of salvation.

The Athanasian Reformed alternative sees the eternal Son of God, as both the electing God and elected (archetypal) human for all of humanity. So, we can affirm unconditional election and the effectual call, but only under radically reified terms. So, for the AR, we maintain that what does the necessary work here, theologically, is a robust affirmation of a doctrine of the vicarious humanity of Christ (which is really just the Chalcedonian and Nicene understanding of the homoousious; i.e., that Jesus is both fully God and fully human in His singular person as the Christ). In this sense, the eternal Logos is both ‘unconditionally elect’ and ‘effectually called’ insofar that He freely chooses to become us that we might become Him by the grace of adoption (think of II Cor. 8:9 and the mirifica commutatio ‘wonderful exchange’). In this frame, Christ, God’s personal grace for the world, from within the triune Life, as the mediator between God and humanity, as our High Priest, enters into the sinful reprobate status all of humanity is born into; putting it to death at the cross; and rising anew as God’s humanity for the world, the second and greater Adam, the ‘firstborn from the dead,’ God’s ‘firstfruits,’ whereby humanity, in Christ’s humanity, the only genuine humanity coram Deo (before God) has been truly humanized in and from the humanizing humanity of Jesus Christ. As He, in His vicarious humanity said Yes to the Father for us, we by a correspondence of His faith, by the same Spirit’s breath now have the freedom of God to say yes and amen to God, acknowledging all that God has provided for us in His salvation for all of humanity (which is first His humanity for us).

So, for the AR, total depravity/total inability, to use those terms, is indeed a real problem for a humanity incurved upon itself (homo incurvatus in se). But what is different for AR is that on the one hand grace isn’t an abstract quality given to the elect, like created grace is, as maintained by the classical Calvinists (like White); on the other hand, grace, and being unilaterally placed into God’s grace is a necessity if fallen humanity is going to have the capacity to indeed seek God and receive His salvation for them. Further, contra the Arminian, or Flowers’ so-called provisionism, fallen humanity, again, is in need of God’s unilateral movement of placing us into His re-created and elect life in Christ, if in fact we are going to be able to speak of a genuine human freedom. So, against the Provisionists, AR maintains that in order to be truly human before God, that is to have genuine human freedom for God, that that must first be provided for all of humanity in and through God’s disruptive gracious humanity as that penetrates our dead humanity, giving us a new and real human life in His.

Hence, God’s unconditional election is inclusive of all of humanity, since the only humanity to be assumed in the incarnation was the fallen humanity. Jesus was “effectually called” (and I put that in quotes because AR does not affirm the Aristotelian causal theory that classical Calvinists do), freely coming for us, taking all of humanity with Him, as the second Adam, to the right hand of the Father. Why all of humanity does not finally affirm God’s election for us in Christ, seeing that all of the conditions for salvation have already been fully actualized in God’s humanity for the world, remains an aspect of the surd-like and inscrutable mystery of sin. All are elect in Christ, but not all finally come. We know why people do come, but sin keeps us in the dark in regard to why some don’t ultimately repent and acknowledge what God has already done, provided, and actualized for them in the real humanity of Christ.

In closing, with reference to John 6 and its grammar: verse 44 says, “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him.” Here, the doubly consubstantial life of Jesus, who is both the eternal Son, who is fully God, and who is also fully human, is theologically present in this clause. That is to say, in the analogy of the incarnation, the ‘Me’ and the ‘Father’ (insofar as the person and works of God are indivisible) are in reference to God’s life, and at the same time, in reference to God’s life of salvation actualized for the world in the man from Nazareth, Jesus Christ. Theologically the “draws him,” with reference to the ‘him,’ remains in the singular, insofar that the [hu]man who was first drawn of God, was God’s particular humanity for the world in Jesus Christ. He will indeed be “raised up on the last day” whereby every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord; and all of humanity, all of those who have repented, out of Christ’s repentance for us, will be exalted in consummate form with Him as the new creations we have become as participants in Christ’s new and resurrected humanity for us.

In a canonical way it is fitting then to close this post with reference to another Apostle, Paul:

May it never be! How shall we who died to sin still live in it? 3 Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? 4 Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. 5 For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection, 6 knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin; 7 for he who has died is freed from sin. -Romans 6:1-7

What we have been referring to as election and the vicarious humanity of Christ also finds biblical reference to Paul’s theological motif of ‘in Christ’ theology. It is really a doctrine of union with Christ that we are concerned with, and what is the entailment of a proper doctrine of pre-destination and election; insofar that what salvation involves first involves God’s choice to be for us in the humanity of Jesus Christ. And this free election of God’s becomes what we grammatically call the hypostatic union wherein God and humanity are united as God becomes humanity that we might become partakers of the divine nature in and through the person of Jesus Christ. But you see then how this involves a doctrine of unio cum Christo (union with Christ).

A Kerygmatic Anthropology

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Knowledge of ourselves first requires a genuine knowledge of the One who created us. Without that outer reference point, there can be no genuine knowledge of the self. This was a key axiom of Calvin’s, as he wrote in his Institutes; and it is key for Barth as he developed his theological anthropology in the Church Dogmatics. The following is an excerpt from Barth’s CD III/2, where he is, indeed, doing the yeoman’s work of developing what he takes to be a genuinely Christian understanding of what the entailments are of what it means to be human. You will notice, as is typical of Barth’s approach, he does not attempt to think about an anthropology as the secular, and even many other Christian theologies attempt to do, from an abstract point of contact found in a pure nature. Instead, Barth grounds his thinking about the entailments of a biblical anthropology by grounding it in the frame of a radical theology of the Word (which is, and ought to be, a very Protestant thing to do). Notice what Barth writes:

On the other hand we have to remember—and this is what makes our problem so difficult—that any tenable distinction between man as created by God and the sinful determination of his being is possible only if his sinful nature, his perversion and corruption, is minimised. But if we consider man truly and seriously in the light of the Word of God, this is just what may not be done. His corruption is radical and total. It there is no sin in which man is not also the creature of God (although in contradiction with God and himself), so also there is no creaturely essence in which man is not seen at strife with God and therefore sinful. Therefore we do not have in any case any direct vision of a sinless being of man fulfilling its original determination. There is no point at which we are not brought up against that corruption and depravity. We must be on our guard against any desire to illuminate the darkness in which the true nature of man is shrouded by taking into account what we suppose we know about man in general and as such from other sources. It must be our aim to view him clearly in the light of the Word of God, and therefore as the sinner which he is in his confrontation with God. If we ask concerning his true nature, we must never lose sight for a moment of his degeneracy.[1]

It is interesting, isn’t it? . . . When an anthropology is developed in the light of the Word of God what comes to the fore is that humanity simpliciter is sinful, degenerate, a depraved soul. Even so, this isn’t what humanity was ultimately created for; just the opposite. But we must first come to terms with our dire situation, and this is what obtains when the Logos incarnandus (the Word to be incarnate) becomes the Logos incarnatus (the Word incarnate) in the assumptio carnis (assumption of flesh/humanity). The Word of God forces those with eyes to see and ears to hear to recognize that the end of our humanity, as it is, is the cross of Jesus Christ; but that this isn’t its ultimate end. The cross of Jesus only becomes the soil that the seed of his broken life is thrown into, in order that it might rise and ascend again in its glorified and victorious status. This is what Barth, and the New Testament witness is getting at. I think instead of calling this a theological anthropology it would be more apropos to call it a kerygmatic anthropology; viz. an anthropology that is funded by the ground supplied for it by the Good News! that Christ is risen, that He is risen indeed!

Let the reader understand: while Barth’s theology is often mistakenly taken as academic theology, in fact what it really is is proclamation theology (a theology that will preach).

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/2 §43 The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 25.