Category Archives: Douglas Campbell

On Barth’s and Paul’s Purported ‘Christian Universalism’ in Sachkritik

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Karl Barth is often said to be a proponent of Christian universalism. The logic is that Barth’s doctrine of election, whether he likes it or not, commits him to affirming some form of a Christian universalism (i.e., the notion that all people of all time will eventually freely submit to the reality that Jesus Christ is Lord; even if that finally only happens in hell itself). But Barth adamantly rejected this supposed necessity of his theological trajectory. As Douglas Campbell writes:

Barth has often been accused of universalism, but he steadfastly denied it (see the final paragraph of CD III/2), and we owe it to his intelligence and subtlety to at least examine his claims in this relation. One of his key points was a denial of any overriding of human freedom by God, although he defines that topic very carefully. This stance certainly excludes crude forms of universalism (and I myself endorse this exclusion). Another key point was his recognition of God’s freedom, which certainly seems fair as well. God acts freely, and so we cannot really circumscribe God’s activity in advance. Barth did point toward the legitimacy of hope, and even prayer, for universal salvation. However, he stopped short of predicting it. (Part of Barth’s repudiation is explicable in terms of his rejection of a form of universalism understood in a “hard” Origenist fashion, as seen also in Maximus the Confessor, which overrules divine agency. These theologians claim that salvation of all must follow on the successful theosis of all—a Pelagianizing account of universalism that Barth was quite right to reject.)

Having said this. [sic] I am not sure that his development of the notion of the ultimate victory of God at length in CD IV/3 did not lead him to a theological location where the denial of universalism would in fact lead to the denial of key christological warrants, even after taking human freedom fully into account. And his christological account of election can also be invoked here in relation to God’s freedom (II/2). God’s freedom is not freedom per se but his free love towards us, which is definitively enacted in the Son prior to the foundation of the world. So perhaps some Sachkritik in relation to Barth himself is in order at this moment.[1]

Before we engage further with the implications that Campbell draws out for us in regard to Barth’s rejection (or not) of Christian universalism, let us address a methodological matter. Maybe the reader has never heard of Sachkritik. In order to offer some insight into this (which has greater development here), I. Howard Marshall writes this on what Sachkritik entails:

I shall continue to refer to the method by this German name, but it will be helpful to note that the possible English equivalents for it include ‘content criticism’, ‘theological criticism’, ‘critical interpretation’, ‘material criticism’ and ‘critical study of the content’.7

It will not surprise you in the least that among the heroes of our tale, or, if you prefer it, the villains of the piece, we must mention R. Bultmann. Here is a comment on his Theology of the New Testament by Markus Barth, who asks how a conscientious exegete can develop a systematic exposition of Paul’s theology that contradicts part of the source material:

[He can do so] only when he feels himself called to Sachkritik on Paul, ‘just as Luther used it, for example, on the Epistle of James’. The victims of Bultmann’s Sachkritik include some Pauline statements on the Holy Spirit, the resurrection, the second Adam, original sin, knowledge. Naturally the hostile crumbs swept to one side by Sachkritik include the statements about creation, predestination and the incarnation of Jesus Christ which Bultmann has demythologized. In any case Bultmann is convinced that he is putting the ‘real intention’ of Paul over against the actual words of the text.… When Bultmann attributes the use of juridical, mythological, cosmological, mystical and idealistic concepts to a ‘superstitious understanding of God, the world and mankind’, he expresses as clearly and simply as possible the criteria for his Sachkritik.

Now we must be clear as to what is going on here. It is not quite the same as the attitude expressed in the words: ‘I want to be free to disagree with Paul.’ In that wish there is expressed a contrast between what Paul said and what I think, and if we disagree, so much the worse for Paul. That is a question of Paul’s authority over against my own authority. We’ll come back to that in a moment. Rather what has been expressed is a contrast between one part of Scripture and another which stands in contradiction to it, or between what a writer actually says and what he really means. According to Tom Wright, we find an example of this in the procedure adopted by proponents of universalism.

The proponents of universalism admit very readily that their doctrine conflicts with much biblical teaching. What they are attempting, however, is Sachkritik, the criticism (and rejection) of one part of Scripture on the basis of another.

That is to say, critics observe or search for places where there are doctrinal contradictions in Scripture and then have to decide which passage they are to follow in preference to the other.[2]

Essentially, as Marshall clarifies further, what the above reduces to is the following: “. . . The result of such analysis is inevitably to force a judgment as to which texts are to be taken as expressing the real intention of a writer or the main thrust of the scripture and how they are to be interpreted. . . .”[3]

All of the aforementioned to note that Sachkritik is a modern (German) development that took place in post-Enlightenment biblical studies. The quest, as it were, is for the exegete to properly identify what the total intention of the biblical author is in light of their whole corpus rather than simply focusing on various texts here and there. That is, there might be something in the thought of the author of Holy Scripture, that is in their respective teaching, that seems to contradict their broader teaching when their whole corpus is taken into account. It is the total teaching that then serves as determinative of how the exegete ought to understand the particular (potentially contradictory relative to the total), and place that into the total teaching of said biblical author. The criteria for this endeavor takes us too far afield to develop further for our purposes. Suffice it to say: What Campbell is referring to in Barth, and the Apostle Paul prior, is how we ought to understand these authors from within the ambit of their total teaching on a particular theological topic; in our current case that involves a doctrine of Christian universalism.

With the above noted let’s return to the question at hand: should Barth be understood to finally be teaching a doctrine of Christian universalism when his total oeuvre is considered? Campbell, seems to think that just maybe we ought to conclude that if Sachkritik is applied to the total theology of Barth, as developed his Church Dogmatics, that Barth’s theology must necessitate in the affirmation of a Christian universalism. But Campbell doesn’t finally take the step of absolutizing this for Barth, even by way of engaging in a Sachkritik.

Prior to Campbell’s thinking on Barth, he has been engaging in an exegesis on Paul’s theology with particular reference to his thinking on eschatological doctrina, such as annihilationism and Christian universalism. Campbell shows that in one sense Paul seems to teach a doctrine of annihilationism; at least as the inner-logic of his teaching is teased out. But when Paul is used to interpret Paul, as Campbell suggests ought to be an interpretive employment we ought to take seriously, as Campbell argues, what we end up with is a Paul who sounds a lot like Barth’s own ending; again, according to Campbell. For Campbell, the Apostle Paul’s total teaching ends up having a christological universalism latent to it. In other words, according to Campbell, Paul’s total theology, even when recognizing that he also has an apparent teaching of ‘annihilation’ present (when it comes to the final judgment), reduces to the notion that all of creation (cf. Rom. 8 etc.) will finally be redeemed. And yet, as with Barth, because of various other passages and teachings in Paul, Paul doesn’t end up with a decisive or absolute Christian universalism. Campbell sees this in a corollary with Barth’s own conclusions; that is, Campbell, I would suggest, sees Barth’s teaching and thinking on these things, largely reflective of the Apostle Paul’s own inner-theological teachings on a doctrine of last and final things in regard to salvation. But this is a sachkritik reading of the Apostle (if not of Barth as well). Some might sense in sachkritik an antecedent in what Luther called an analogy of faith, or what we might call an analogy of Scripture. That is, the deployment of the clearer teachings of Scripture as the means by which we interpret the less clear. I think it would be right to see this, in principle, as an antecedent to sachkritik even if sachkritik finally took shape under different (modern) pressures.

Conclusion

After all of the above is considered what do I think? I agree mostly with Campbell. I don’t think Barth ought to be understood as endorsing a dogmatic Christian universalism; at most I think we see a very hopeful and prayerful Christian universalism in Barth’s theology. I also tend to agree with Campbell on Paul’s teaching in this regard; even if we didn’t have time to directly deal with his development on that, per se. I would always fall back to the Barth of CD III (as Campbell reads him), and emphasize a doctrine of Divine freedom as determinative of all things; including the notion that it could be a possibility that it would be in keeping with God’s purview (and character) to have made a way for people, all people, post-mortem, even while in the gruel of hell, to finally, by the Spirit, bow the knee and confess Jesus as Lord. But I don’t take this dogmatically, and my hopefulness in this is only informed by the fact that God is God and I am not; as such He could surprise us this way, and not be found to have contradicted His Word to us now and then. But this is up to God, and as far as we know now, a doctrine of dogmatic Christian universalism imposes a determination upon God that God Himself has not committed Himself to, per se. If we are going to be ‘good’ sachkritiks the total canonical teaching of Holy Scripture teaches a final judgment of the (spiritually) dead that appears to be a final and unending judgment of the type that the devil and his minions will experience. Jesus taught this, and so I think it is best to temper any notion of a purported dogmatic Christian universalism by the reality that God is God, and thus the only free agent who finally determines these things. But as it stands now, based on the teaching of Scripture, unless of course we are going to step in and read Scripture from a canon within the canon, a dogmatic Christian universalism is not on the table. That is, unless the exegete has already decided a priori that the total teaching of Scripture does in fact presuppose a dogmatic Christian universalism, and then use that presupposition as regulative for how they arrive at their respective exegetical conclusions on these matters. I don’t think that is warranted; again, because of God’s freedom over against ours as His subjects.

 

[1] Douglas A. Campbell, Pauline Dogmatics: The Triumph of God’s Love (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2020), 440.

[2] I. Howard Marshall, “An Evangelical Approach to Theological Criticism,” Themelios (Vol. 13:3): na.  

[3] Ibid.

The Hyper-Augustinians and Pelagians: Juxtaposed with the Pauline Christ Relation

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Douglas Campbell in his book The Triumph of God’s Love: Pauline Dogmatics offers a nice sketch of a theological continuum; what he identifies as ‘Hyper-Augustinianism’ and ‘Pelagianism.’ He concisely shows how both fail to do justice to Paul’s theology proper, and subsequently, his soteriology. But both of these loci have continued to plague the church from Augustine/Pelagius; Luther/Erasmus; Calvin/Pighius; Dort/Arminius; classical Calvinists/- Arminians; MacArthur’s Lordship Salvation/Hodges’ Free Grace; James White/Provisionists; so on and so forth. This frame of reference, or this binary is rather false when we examine, with a critical eye, what we find in the teaching of the New Testament in general, and the Pauline corpus in particular. It is from within this frame of reference that Campbell offers up the aforementioned sketches with reference to Augustinianism/Pelagianism. In this post we will work through Campbell’s sketch on Hyper-Augustianism, and in a post following we will visit what he has to say on Pelagianism juxtaposed with the Pauline theology. After we read Campbell’s sketch on Hyper-Augustinianism, I will attempt to tease out some further applications, and show how they might impinge on some current soteriological wanderings among the crowds ‘out there.’

Campbell writes at some length:

Hyper-Augustinianism

If election is understood mechanistically, someone might attach this notion to grace and argue that God has given us everything we need in the act of electing us. God simply acts decisively upon us, albeit generously. This gift would then operate in spite of anything we do, and anything we might do should be excluded. Indeed, if we had to act, we would to that degree undermine what God has given us. Grace and human activity operate here in a zero-sum relationship, so, if we take the side of God, we would go on to attack any endorsements of a need for human activity in the name of grace.

A particular reading of Augustine can cause readers of Paul trouble in this respect, so that the assertion of any need for agency or even learning in response to grace is dubbed “Pelagianism”! I don’t think this is a complete reading of Augustine, who was a complex thinker and shifted significantly in his thinking over time. But an extreme account of some of his positions can be advocated in this way and in his name, and at this moment his influence—however misrepresented—must be resisted. We can speak of a hyper-Augustinian view, then, that eliminates any role for human agency in discipleship, the long-term results of which are serious. The whole process of formation is neglected if not opposed by hyper-Augustinians, and the end result is a church without discipleship. How good is this church likely to be? And how Pauline will it look?

Fortunately, we have already exposed the error at work in this view and corrected it. God’s election is certainly unconditional, but in the sense that a covenantal relationship is. It will never be withdrawn and will ultimately prevail. In the meantime, however, it respects human agency carefully, as seen most clearly in God’s incarnation to meet us. Moreover, as we will see in much more detail shortly, among those who respond to it, it enhances human freedom. Those who learn actively and wholeheartedly to live out of their new location in Christ can grow dramatically in their capacity to act in good ways. Relational election nurtures human agency and freedom; it does not stifle it. It summons us to ongoing and deeper responsiveness, which is to say, to learning, and many of Augustine’s writings contain a great deal of wisdom about this process. Nevertheless, any exclusion of human activity in response to God’s initiative in his name, in a type of hyper-Augustinianism, must be vigilantly opposed and rejected. This type of unconditionality undermines the heart of the life of discipleship.

However, a further mistake is, as is often the case, a swing to the opposite and complementary error. Whereas hyper-Augustinians emphasize election and grace to the exclusion of human agency, misconceiving both divine and human agency in the process. Pelagians share the same basic misunderstanding but emphasize human agency on the other side of the supposed divide, and so go on to override divine election, with equally destructive results.[1]

If you are familiar with the history, you’ll agree that Campbell’s sketch captures the ground quite well; viz. in regard to understanding the binary, or divide between what we know today, and more popularly, as the ‘Calvinists versus the Arminians.’ What shouldn’t be lost, and often is when considering something like Campbell’s points, is the alternative he is working into this mix. That is the ‘relational election’ he mentions, and the covenantal relationship, as Campbell contends, that is central to Paul’s understanding of a God-world relation. What he doesn’t tease out so explicitly in his sketch, but that is because it implicitly underwrites what he is developing, is the objective/subjective status that the Pauline soteriology operates from, insofar that God acts, within a covenantal relationship, unilaterally for the world in Jesus Christ. This is his, or the Apostle Paul’s alternative to both Hyper-Augustinianism and Pelagianism.

Hyper-Augustinianism and Pelagianism both operate, respectively, from an abstract non-relational-covenantal frame when they attempt to think salvation. That is to say, anyone who operates on this continuum, and they are legion, thinks salvation from an abstract humanity (rather than from Christ’s vicarious humanity), and think in terms of individualism insofar as the cosmic Christ does not ground the way they think God’s election for the world in Jesus Christ. In other words, both Hyper-Augustinians and Pelagians, on a continuum, think salvation is contingent upon the elect’s response/decision to be for God. Paul’s alternative thinks salvation is contingent upon God’s election to be for humanity in Jesus Christ; that salvation is Christ-focused, and that within this as the inner-covenantal ground of the God-world relation, humanity comes to have the capaciousness to say Yes to God from God’s Yes and Amen for them in Jesus Christ. But you will notice that for the Apostle Paul, particularly as Campbell tells it, humanity comes to have this capacity from the elect and vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. It is by this signification of God for humanity in Christ that humans come to have genuine liberty or freedom for God, ‘for where the Spirit of the Lord is there is liberty.’ This undercuts the emphases that both the Hyper-Augustinians and Pelagians give us in regard to their foreclosure of God’s grace by placing God into a competitive relationship with humanity; whether that be from the Augustinian side, which emphasizes God’s brute determination and sovereignty to be for the world through a series of decrees, particularly the decretum absolutum; or from the Pelagian side which emphasizes the freedom of an abstract human agency to respond to God, insofar as they posit that said freedom has been an inherent given from since the beginning of creation. Both fail to think from Paul’s relational conception of election, and the corresponding relational-covenantalism that funds the Pauline Christ concentrated conception of a God-world relation.

Contemporary examples of Hyper-Augustinians and Pelagians: Classical Calvinists, classical Arminians / John Piper, Leighton Flowers (and his Provisionism).

[1] Douglas A. Campbell, The Triumph Of God’s Love: Pauline Dogmatics (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2020), 180-81.

The ‘Golden Calf’ of Foundationalism and Natural Theology: No Other Foundation Laid, But Christ

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“For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ.” I Corinthians 3.11

How seriously do Christians take the above Pauline reality when applied to the ‘discipline’ of epistemology, or the discipline that engages with ‘how we know what we know?’ Often, theologians will speak of general revelation and special revelation, as if the former is an adjunct and even a foundation of the latter. They will assert (as a basic belief) something like: ‘all truth is God’s truth.’ This axiom, as far as it goes, may be true. But, from the Christian perspective it doesn’t necessarily take into account the damage that the ‘fall’ of humanity in the garden has done to the noetic (knowing) capacities in human beings. In other words, it presupposes upon a certain intellectualist anthropology (typically Thomist, or more generally: Aristotelian) that believes that humanity, in order to remain humanity, even after the fall, had to retain some intellectual equipment that would allow it to still see the good God in the created order.[1] This is the intellectual, and intellecualist basis that theologians are presupposing upon in order to presume that such a thing as ‘general revelation’ is actually discoverable in the created order; revelation that is anterior, logically, to being confronted by God’s special revelation revealed in Jesus Christ. So, from this framework, theologians and thinkers who follow this line of thinking, have an external basis that comes as a prius to Christ, that serves as the baseline for supplementing and even identifying the Christ as the eternal Son of God. It is this framework that believes utilizing the god of the philosophers is a legitimate practice, as far as ‘grammarizing’ (providing tools for God-speak) God goes.

I, as an Evangelical Calvinist, am thoroughly opposed to the above practice. If we were to label this practice philosophically it would be called ‘foundationalism.’ I reject such a practice because I believe that no matter how it is qualified it always ends up imposing foreign and prior categories and criterion onto God that are not themselves predicated by God, per se. In short: this is why I reject natural theology so vociferously; along with Karl Barth I consider natural theology, and foundationalism, as a sub-set, as anti-Christ—and I mean this! If we claim to have some prior “general” knowledge of God ever before being confronted by God in His own Self-asserted Self-revelation in Jesus Christ (cf. Jn 1.18), in my estimation, along with Douglas Campbell’s, we are idolaters feasting at the banqueting table of the pagans. I just mentioned Campbell, he follows in line with what TF Torrance calls theological science, kataphysin, and epistemological inversion; or in line with what Karl Barth identifies as analogia fidei (analogy of faith), or as Eberhard Jüngel refines this further in Barth’s theology, as analogia relationis (analogy of relation). At base, all mentioned, along with others (including myself), maintain that the only ground or ‘foundation’ for knowing the eternal and triune God is strictly and exhaustively found in the revelation of God in Jesus Christ! If this Self-attested revelation is not the foundation and parameter for knowing who God is then we have no basis for genuinely claiming or maintaining that we have met the real and living God; that is if we base it on prior self-developed constructs that we claim to have discovered in the natural order (taxis) about the attributes of God. As Torrance presses this, as he describes Barth’s theological approach:

Because Jesus Christ is the Way, as well as the Truth and the Life, theological thought is limited and bounded and directed by this historical reality in whom we meet the Truth of God. That prohibits theological thought from wandering at will across open country, from straying over history in general or from occupying itself with some other history, rather than this concrete history in the centre of all history. Thus theological thought is distinguished from every empty conceptual thought, from every science of pure possibility, and from every kind of merely formal thinking, by being mastered and determined by the special history of Jesus Christ.[2]

As corollary with Torrance’s helpful description of these things in Barth’s theology (as well as a helpful summary of TFT’s own approach after Barth), Douglas Campbell writes the following in critique of what he simply identifies as ‘foundationalism’:

A more technical name for the procedure whereby we elevate our own truth criteria over the truth that is God, ultimately to judge God’s truth or falsity, is “foundationalism,” which denotes here our provision of a different foundation for truth from the one that God has laid for us in Jesus, and hence a structure that we ultimately build for ourselves. Foundationalism has a more technical, although related, meaning in modern philosophical discussion, referring primarily to the desire of many thinkers post-Descartes to construct an indubitable basis for knowledge—a foundation in this specific sense. So clearly there is some overlap here. Any such philosophical attempt to construct a perfect foundation for all thought and knowledge is indeed a form of foundationalism. In the light of the revelation of the Trinity, however, we can see this exercise in human hubris exists in many more forms than philosophical foundationalism alone, and each of these needs to be identified and resisted. Especially since the Enlightenment, Christians have often themselves employed this way of reasoning—for example, by trying to prove the truthfulness of the Bible on the basis of historical records, reason, appeal to universal moral intuitions, or the like, before explaining what the Bible teaches (an effort labeled “evidentialist apologetics”). Yet, every such effort is also, at bottom, an exercise in idolatry. To build a foundation for the truth ourselves is to reject the truth and to build our own version of the truth, which we then make the judge of all truth, and so the lord of truth, at which moment in effect we bow down before it and proclaim it as our new lord. So epistemological foundationalism, however sophisticated, is, at bottom, nothing more than another golden calf.[3]

If you have been a reader here for any length, these are not strange teachings to you. In fact, this has been the bread and butter of much of what I’ve written over the years. The problem we are identifying touches upon primal realities when attempting to engage in the theological task. We are seeking to know how it is that we might delimit the ways, or way, for claiming that we have a genuine ‘point of contact’ with the living and triune God. As should be clear, by now, I maintain, with gusto, that the only foundation for knowing God has been laid by God Himself; not in some sort of ‘general’ fashion, but in a scandalous and overt manner wherein the ‘hidden God’ (Deus absconditus) becomes the revealed God (Deus revelatus) for us in Christ.

If we are keen to think God from an ostensibly formed general conception of God, prior to the special understanding of God provided for in Christ, then this will impact the way we do the rest of our theological thinking and living; since who we think God is impacts all subsequent theological developments. Likewise, if we think God, at a slavish level, from a special conception, as revealed in Christ, this will affect the way we theologize and live out our daily Christian lives. The former (general) way will, by programmatic form and definition, be contingent upon our savvy to continuously reflect upon the self-discovered attributes of God as those who have supposedly been left on display, at a foundational level, in the natural or created order. The latter (special) way will, by design, be dependent upon a continuous diaological, doxological, and prayerful reliance upon the Word of God who we afresh and anew encounter, through the medium of the written and God-spirated Word of God known as Holy Scripture.

An important and related theme, particularly as this relates to Protestant and Reformed theological loci, is the theme of: election. In fact, I would contest that the doctrine of election is the radix or ‘root’ aspect for understanding how these disparate ways for knowing God (or theories of revelation) take shape within the variant theological systems. I will try to develop this suggestion in a later post; maybe you’ll figure that out on your own. Blessings in Christ.

[1] See this post on Thomist intellectualism and anthropology.

[2] Thomas F. Torrance, Karl Barth: An Introduction to His Early Theology 1910-1931, 196.

[3] Douglas A. Campbell, Pauline Dogmatics: The Triumph of God’s Love (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2020), 37-8.

Paul’s Doctrine of Sin from a Doctrine of Christ: With Reference to Douglas Campbell

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Sin. A word that has various understandings within the church; particularly the church of the 21st century. I would imagine that most in the churches have a rather elementary grasp on what sin entails. For those who have thought about it more deeply, even they would have variance on the way they understand sin’s impact upon the human being. Some might think of its affect in terms of a disease that might need to be cured; others as utter death that leaves the human being in a totally incapacitated state left to themselves; and maybe for others, somewhere in between the two poles just mentioned. No matter what someone’s position on sin is it often seems that, even in the best of cases, they attempt to define what sin is in rather abstract, or I suppose, literary ways alone. Indeed, appealing to Scripture seems like the best way to come to an understanding of what sin entails, but literary studies, I would argue, will not give us the depth dimension of sin and its impact. We clearly must engage with Holy Scripture’s teaching on what sin is and does, but I would contest that if we simply attempt to define sin’s heft in that way alone, that we will not arrive at a proper understanding of sin’s reality. The Apostle Paul doesn’t actually think sin from abstraction; can you guess where he thinks it from?

Paul, as with everything, defines sin’s height and depth from, you guessed it: Jesus Christ.[1] If we think sin and σάρξ (transliterated: sarx), or Paul’s frequent usage of ‘flesh’ together, what we quickly come to realize is that sin has penetrated into the very depths of what it means to be human; it has devolved us from beings capable of having a right relationship and fellowship with the living God (which is what it means to be human for us), to a status that has become sub-human, or out of koinonia/fellowship with Yahweh, the triune God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. If we think sin, as Paul does, from what it took for God to re-concile us unto Himself, through the enfleshment of the Son, His death, burial and resurrection, then we will come to have a greater appreciation of what God has accomplished for us; and just how utterly wicked and evil our hearts actually are. Douglas Campbell explains it this way as he is describing how the Apostle Paul thinks on these things:

The seriousness of Paul’s account of human wrongdoing here needs to be noted. If sin is just a series of bad choices that proceed from a fundamentally healthy nature, then Jesus needs to provide only a clear example of how to behave, along with some additional teaching about right acting. That he had to die, executing our condition, then resurrecting human nature in a new form, suggests that there was something irredeemably corrupt and contaminated in the old one. As some scholars would put it, our problem is radical (from the Latin radix, meaning “root”), suggesting that our problem goes down into the very roots of our nature.[2]

In other words, sin does something ontological to human nature. As Athanasius and even Maximus the Confessor argue, human beings, apart from the redeemed humanity of Jesus Christ are sub-human. This does not mean that the mass of humanity has no value; it simply notes that without Christ for us we are not living out what it means to be creationally human. It presupposes that humanity has an anchor outside of itself; that it has an image it was originally created in, and then recreated in. To be human in the economy of God’s Kingdom in Christ is to be ‘lifted up’ and seated at the Right Hand of the Father in participation with the humanity of Jesus Christ.

As Campbell’s explanation should make clear: For the Apostle Paul, if it required God to become human, and be executed in our stead, then humanity apart from this gracious work is in a status that is inconceivably mal (bad) before God (coram Deo). We are in a place where our ontology is jacked up; which means that our epistemology is jacked up; which means that our practice and function as homo sapiens is going to be utterly jacked up all the way down. If nothing else, there is more empirical evidence for this truth, about sin and the human condition, than any other field of inquiry. True, from within this ‘fallen’ state humanity will attempt to say that the crooked is straight / the straight is crooked, but even in this state we can see how destructive (even by just looking at the stats) living this way actually is.

The cross of Jesus Christ executes this sinful status, and raises up a glorified Christ in whom God’s Kingdom is rightly framed. A Kingdom wherein “there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.”[3] Jesus Christ lives that Kingdom for us now, and He breaks into our lives moment by moment letting us know that His Kingdom has come, and is coming; a Kingdom that, at a root level, has reversed the human nature unto the status that the Living and Holy God has always envisioned for it; a status that finds its very lifeblood in Immanuel’s veins; a status, that is exalted and highly lifted up participating in the eternal and triune life of God; a status that this world system, left to its own fallen devices, has no place within—but Christ.

I will be writing more on this topic in days to come. I want to talk about how ‘sin’ impacts salvation theories (soteriology), and its related theme: theological-anthropology. There are, of course, constant debates about what is called total depravity and total inability, so on and so forth. But I think those debates are given orientation by too much of an abstract (from Christ) notion of what sin actually is and does. If we think sin from Christ, and all its organic lineaments, we will arrive, I think, at very different theological categories and ways of thinking than the so called classical discussions have given us in this regard. But we will visit this discussion later. In this post I simply wanted to clear my throat a bit, and let Campbell provide a brief and precise explanation of how sin functions in the theology of Paul the Apostle. This throat clearing exercise will be instructive for later discussions on sin.

[1] Karl Barth is famously known for thinking sin from Christ.

[2] Douglas A. Campbell, Pauline Dogmatics: The Triumph of God’s Love (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2020), 116, n.7.

[3] Revelation 21:4, KJV.

Thinking God After God Not Before: A Critique Towards Apologetics Culture and Natural Theology

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I recently wrote the following on Facebook: “When we argue for the existence of God apart from Christ, we end up with a God without Christ.” Let me unpack that a bit further by appealing to Douglas Campbell as he articulates this in his own way:

If Christians think that they can prove the existence of God acting in Jesus independently of God’s revelation of Godself, using some higher truth or argument or position that everyone acknowledges, they pay a heavy price. These attempts might be convincing to the faithful, but they tend to collapse under the withering scrutiny of modern philosophers.[1] And a culture that has been told loudly that God can be proved but has found that God cannot be proved then feels justified in turning decisively away from God. The only thing that seems to have been proved is that God does not exist. God is rejected as an unproved hypothesis without anyone confronting the place where that God has in fact chosen to become known, which is personally, in Jesus. A key result flowing from the pretension that we can judge the truth about God for ourselves has consequently been the creation of a culture that confidently affirms God’s impossibility and hard-heartedly resists the good news. We have reaped here what we have sown, and it is a bitter harvest.[2]

I think Campbell overstates things a bit, almost to the point of contradiction. He seems to declare that God cannot be proven, but then presumes that He may have been without proper grounding in Jesus Christ. In other words, he seems to be saying that philosophers might be able to prove a ‘god-concept,’ but that without principially grounding God’s reality in His Self-revelation in Jesus Christ, that the god-concept proven remains so abstract that in the end it has no real capacity to personally confront the people it is intended to touch most: i.e. skeptics. So, I think Campbell is saying: that even if God could be proven, that outwith its personal reality in the face of Jesus Christ, it goes nowhere, and thus, to use the language of Barth, gives us a No-God.

That said, in the main, I agree with Campbell in regard to the primary point he is attempting to drive home. He wants God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ, and nothing else, to be the exclusive place where people meet God; since this is the only place the triune God has chosen to show Himself to the world (and for the world). In order to develop this theme further, Campbell writes:

If we press on boldly with our foundationalist project, anxious that if our system collapses, then our faith does as well, we tend to end up—and arguably necessarily only ever end up—with “the god of the philosophers.” This is because when we construct our foundation, we are invariably deriving some universal principle or dynamic from our own reality as our truth criterion and extrapolating or developing it in a way that will hopefully lead us to God. This key principle will have to be something very broad and universal and abstract. It must be known by everyone. So we will be reflecting on the inner nature of all reality in terms of an essence, or on the sense that we often judge things to be beautiful or not, or on the inner logic of history, or some such. But our conclusions will then a long way away from the recognition that God was fully present in a Jewish person who was shamefully executed around 30 CE. We find and worship the God who is the essence of all reality or beauty or history or whatever else we managed to infer from, which is clearly rather different. And the further critical problem emerges.

By supposing that this is the way to the church’s truth, we then, in all good conscience, oppose those who try to approach it in other ways, including, and perhaps especially opposing, the poor people who simply claim that the crucified Jesus is Lord and attribute that claim to the Lord. (There is something offensive about this foolish claim to the fundamentally learned and intelligent approach of our alternative system.) We are defending the way to the truth, which is perforce the only way. Are we not in the last remaining lifeboat on a stormy secular sea? Moreover, we have probably invested so much time and effort in developing our magnificent system that we will be reluctant to abandon it, and if we think that our belief in God depends on this system, we will be very reluctant to abandon it. Perhaps our impressive careers within the institutions advocating this system even depend on our not abandoning it. But the end result of all this investment will be the determined obstruction of the very truth that we are supposed to be reaching—that God was fully present in Jesus and speaks this truth to the church in whatever way God wants to. Not only will our magnificent systems fail us then by proving untrue and generating atheism; they will block the way to the very objective that they are supposedly trying to establish. They will stand guard as authentic theologies barring the way to Jesus himself—a block that we have called the second horseman.[3]

If you know Barth, if you know TF Torrance, then what Campbell is iterating will sound very familiar to you. He is referring us to the so called ‘scandal of particularity.’ Philosophers prefer universal truths, a priori realities that they can discover, prior to attempting to get into particularities. Christian theologians, I will suggest strongly, ought to be about just the opposite. We are people of the Christ, as such we ought to prefer the particular reality of God’s Self-exegesis in Jesus Christ; we ought to prefer a posteriori reality as we are confronted with the flesh and blood of God in Christ on the cursed cross.

Christians are not those who are about building foundations, God does that for us in Christ (I Cor 3.11). We are a people who rest on the foundation God has given us in Him, and build and cultivate upon that gifted ground for us in Christ. So, we bear witness to the given reality of God’s free election to be for and with us in Jesus Christ. We aren’t about ‘proving’ God’s existence; we are about confessing His reality as that comes for us and the whole world in the incarnation. This doesn’t seem very “theological” to many in the guilds of the theological class, I’m sure. They have been trained to think analytically, scholastically, technically, and speculatively about God’s essence and reality. As such, given their vesting, it becomes indomitably difficult to engage in the sort of ‘repentant thinking’ that the Gospel itself requires. It may well sound much too pedestrian and uneducated to think God in the terms Campbell is describing, that is if you’ve spent ten years earning a PhD learning to think just the opposite about the ways of God.

In the end, if we follow the procedure that Campbell lays out, we will not end up ever thinking God apart from Christ; we will only think Him directly from Christ. This is the way of what I take to be a genuinely Christian mode for doing the theological work that the churches are in such dire need of. Youth are walking away from Christ, after spending years in youth groups, by the droves. They are often exposed to the apologetics culture in these churches, and yet this doesn’t hold up. If they are unable to confound their antagonist professor in the classroom, if they cannot sustain the arguments for God’s existence they have learned from their learned apologetics teachers (via the curriculum they may have been exposed to), then God may well be dead indeed for them. These are pressing and real life matters.

[1] Let me just say that I don’t fully agree with Campbell on this point. I think that in the realm of the philosophical theism can be proven versus atheism in regard to the existence of ‘godness.’ Even Campbell acknowledges this in a footnote, so his articulation up to this point can sound a little misleading. I don’t think God can be proven (in fact I think we need to be proven by Him), but I do think that as far as the philosophical realm goes, that generic theism, even on philosophical terms is more “provable” than is atheism; many philosophers agree with that these days.

[2] Douglas A. Campbell, Pauline Dogmatics: The Triumph of God’s Love (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2020), 40-1.

[3] Ibid., 41-2.

Theology on The Way to Damascus: Revealed Theology is Personal / Natural Theology is Impersonal

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I take the following from the Apostle Paul to be the methodological sine qua non of how Christian theology ought to be done:

11 For I would have you know, brethren, that the gospel which was preached by me is not according to man. 12 For I neither received it from man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ. Galatians 1:11-12

Surprisingly, many (even most) Christian theologians these days, at least on the conservative side, reject this sort of ‘apocalyptic’ understanding of God’s Self-revelation, and the theologizing that can be achieved from this vista. Most theologians interested in the so called ‘theology of retrieval’ believe that we must slavishly repristinate, even if in ‘constructive’ dress, classical theism; particularly of the mediaeval and Thomist sort. As such, they reject the sort of Pauline existential model that Paul himself declares about his encounter with the living God in Christ; and instead they opt for the pedigree of school theology that definitionally works from the via negativa or negative way of discursively thinking God from what finitude is not.

I contend, and have for years, that Barth’s so called ‘analogy of faith’ or ‘analogy of relation’ is much more in line with the Pauline way of thinking and doing theology versus what has become the common mode for doing theology “classically” (which has become code and synonymous with doing theology “catholically”). I think this is so just for the reason that Paul presupposes upon in his Galatia correspondence; that is, that because Jesus Christ is so utterly unique, and without analogy, that his knowledge of the true and living God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob came not with philosophical buttress, but only through a mind-independent revelation of God Himself. For Paul, to know God, is something not discovered but ‘received’ through a revelation that comes without contingency upon humanity’s ability to conjure an image of godness from their own powers of observation and inference. Douglas Campbell agrees as he writes:

Without affirming the absolute oneness of Jesus with God—his complete unity—we lose our grip on where God has chosen to be revealed fully and completely: namely, in Jesus. If Jesus is not God “all the way down,” then we are still lost in our own world with all its fantasies and illusions; we have no direct contact with God. We are hemmed in by our limited creaturely existence, now further corrupted by sin, and we do not know what God is really like. We are reduced, the theologians would say, to analogies, which means to inevitable and largely uncontrolled gaps in our understanding of what God is really like. God is like a sunset, but in what sense? Is he warm? or glowing? or fading? Clearly, none of this is quite right. God is like a mother, but in what exact sense again? Does he wear my mother’s distinctive clothes or directly biologically breast-feed us or speak in a southern drawl about picking us up from soccer? Again, clearly none of this is directly applicable [sic], although we sense that something insightful is going on. But if we want to press on these claims and be really precise, we don’t know quite how to do so. This limitation arises because we are trying to understand a transcendent being who is fundamentally different from us, as creator to our createdness, by way of limited, emphatically nontranscendent things that this being has made, which are by the nature of the case different from him. There is a gap here that we just can’t bridge unless God has graciously bridged it from his side of the divide and become one of us and lived among us. What a gift! So we should really avoid mitigating or avoiding this gift or watering if down in any way, which means to avoid adding other potential candidates alongside in any sort of equality. God is definitively known only in Jesus. This is where God is present with us fully, and nowhere else—not in a book, a tradition, a piece of land, a building, or even in a particular people (unless, that is, he has taken up residence in one of them fully). We worship and pray to none of these things; we worship and pray to Jesus because Jesus is God, and so we know God fully and completely only as we know Jesus.[1]

If you have read Karl Barth or Thomas Torrance at any length (even my blog for awhile) what Campbell just iterated will be very familiar to you. I think though that Campbell elevates an important aspect of revealed theology (versus natural theology) in the sense that he emphasizes how important it is to realize what understanding Jesus as God ought to do to our understanding of what ‘doing’ theology entails. In other words, it is precisely because of the uniqueness of the hidden God (Deus absconditus) made revealed in Christ (Deus revelatus) that the human condition is FULLY reliant upon this God revealing Himself to us. Any other theological models, particularly ones that portend of classical pedigree, need to be willing to be corrected by the fact that unless God reveals Himself personally, then all the theologian is left with are non-personal ways for thinking God. This is the point that is so often lost on those who are slavishly committed to natural theology. They don’t seem capable, or at least willing to consider that if God’s revelation is discoverable in nature that such revelation, in abstraction from God’s triune Self-revelation in Christ, will necessarily give a hue of God that ends up being ‘natural’ and impersonal. But this flies in the face of the God that the Apostle Paul encountered on the way to Damascus. Maranatha

[1] Douglas A. Campbell, Pauline Dogmatics: The Triumph of God’s Love (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2020), 15-16.

Being ‘Lived-Out’ Rather than ‘Conference Christians’: Engaging with Douglas Campbell’s Apostle Paul

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Is there a place for all the theological and pastoral conferences that happen annually? Sure, at some level I think they are healthy insofar as they bring people together for networking and fellowshipping purposes. But when that becomes the reduction of what the Christian life is, particularly for ‘professional’ Christians, there might be something wrong. I think this has become the case with much of what’s going on in evangelical Christianity. We might think of The Gospel Coalition, Together 4 the Gospel, Shepherd’s Conference, and a host of many others (inclusive of all the academic conferences). It is in these places that many find their Christian identity. Some of the ‘elite’ in these settings are elevated to rock-star status, with autographs and book signings as the hallmark. Indeed, some of these folks are on a conference tour almost year-round; to the point that if they are pastors, they pretty much become guest speakers in their home churches.

I just picked up Douglas Campbell’s new tome: Pauline Dogmatics: The Triumph of God’s Love. I am just starting to dig in, and in the introduction he speaks to what we were just thinking about. He is starting to detail the way he thinks the Apostle Paul would operate, and how he would think of what characterizes much of Christianity in America today. He writes:

I sometimes wonder what Paul would make of the conferences at which scores of highly learned people sit around and debate for hours tiny semantic nuances preserved in his writings. I expect he might be patient with this exercise for a while, but then at some point I’m pretty sure that he would jump up—possibly wielding a whip—and shout: “For goodness sake! Haven’t you read what my writings actually say? You’re not meant to be sitting around debating them. You are meant to be out there doing what they tell you to do—meeting people and fostering Christian communities in service to our Lord. Get off your backsides and get moving!” Doubtless this challenge would be accompanied by the sounds of tables being overturned and piles of pristine books crashing to the floor.

There is such a thing as a scholar-activist, and I venture to suggest that scholars of Paul should by and large be scholar-activists. If we are not, then we are royally missing the point, and I suspect that our interpretations of Paul will suffer as well. . . .[1]

I remember being a fresh student at Multnomah Bible College, just off the streets of living out the faith in the workplace and elsewhere. By time I had arrived I’d read through the whole Bible four times, and the NT tens of times; having memorized three books of the NT as well. I was in the midst of spiritual warfare, and relying on Scripture not as an academic piece of literature to be debated, but the living Word of God burning as fire in my bones. I remember towards the end of my first semester we had a schoolwide barbeque on a beautiful Spring Pacific Northwest day. I’d learned that there was a group of guys (fellow students ahead of me by a year or two) who were really well versed in Scripture, and even learned. So, that day I thought I would at least go and stand by them, and attempt to participate in their discussion about the biblical text. What I quickly learned, sadly, was that the text, for them (at that point at least) was more about its critical and academic content more than it was the living bread by which a Christian might find daily sustenance and life. This discouraged, saddened, and angered me all at once.

I share this anecdote not to declare myself ‘holier than thou,’ but to illustrate how Holy Scripture can become one thing to this group of people, and something solely different to another. If we extrapolate out from my anecdote, I think we might recognize how my co-students’ attitude back then is indeed what Campbell is taking aim at now. This sort of attitude about Scripture, in general, and Paul’s epistles, in particular, is exactly the attitude that Scripture, and the Lord of Scripture desires to contradict. We do indeed, as Campbell rightly notes, see in certain heady circles that Scripture is only ‘talked about,’ as if the act itself is effectual in itself. Indeed, we do need to have understanding of Scripture, but at some point, it is time to act it out in the faith of Christ. We are called to be ‘living sacrifices’ by the Apostle, ‘smoked out like burnt offerings’ in the way we live before God. Conference Christianity does not foster this sort of ‘drink offering’ faith; instead it cultivates a posture of sitting back and talking in theoretical and abstract terms about what the Bible might be saying here or there. This is neither Pauline nor Dominical Christianity, as such I think Campbell is right about what Paul might have thought about the sort of conference Christianity we see dominating much of the Christian landscape in America. May we not be ‘conference Christians,’ but instead ‘lived-out Christians.’

 

[1] Douglas A. Campbell, Pauline Dogmatics: The Triumph of God’s Love (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2020), 4-5.

An Evangelical Calvinist Response to the Westminster Confession of Faith’s Covenant of Works/Grace: Douglas Campbell at Thomas Schreiner

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The Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter VII, Article II states:

westminsterconfessionII. The first covenant made with man was a covenant of work, wherein life was promised to Adam; and in him to his posterity, upon condition of perfect and personal obedience.[1]

This is God’s primal relationship to humanity for the Westminster Confession of Faith style of Calvinism; a style that has been replicated and re-iterated by many theologians and biblical exegetes since its inception. The primary implication of this is not an anthropological one (although that is present), but an implication that reposes in a doctrine of God. What this article implies about God’s primal nature reflected in his relating to humanity is that it is a forensic legal relationship; as such, in order for relationship with God to be sustained humanity must keep God’s Law (i.e. covenant of works). Since humanity did not keep God’s Law they must suffer the penalty of their Law-breaking. But since God is a gracious God, he steps into his legal punitive arrangement with humanity and establishes what the Westminsters called the Covenant of Grace, note Articles III and IV:

III. Man, by his fall, having made himself incapable of life by that covenant, the Lord was pleased to make a second, commonly called the covenant of grace; wherein He freely offers unto sinners life and salvation by Jesus Christ; requiring of them faith in Him, that they may be saved, and promising to give unto all those that are ordained unto eternal life His Holy Spirit, to make them willing, and able to believe.

IV. This covenant of grace is frequently set forth in scripture by the name of a testament, in reference to the death of Jesus Christ the Testator, and to the everlasting inheritance, with all things belonging to it, therein bequeathed.[2]

In this scenario God graciously steps in and provides himself, in the Son, as the Law-keeper who will not only keep the Law (active obedience) but bear its consequences in the elect’s stead (passive obedience).

What I want us to notice though is how this all gets framed, and how discordant it is with the biblical account and Self revelation of Jesus Christ. God’s primary reason for establishing a Covenant of Grace is in order to sustain and meet the conditions of his relationship to humanity. His relationship, in this framework, to humanity is not based upon his love for them, but instead it is based upon the condition of humanity keeping his Law; it is based upon a legal-forensic-juridical relationship. And God comes in Christ under these conditions, because his people have become sinners. God, in this scenario, does not come simply because he loves his creatures; instead he comes to uphold his justice and legal character as God.

This picture looks something like what Douglas Campbell calls Thomas Schreiner’s approach to reading Paul; except Campbell labels Schreiner’s position as Melanchthonian (which we will have to explain later). Here is how Campbell responds to Schreiner’s view on God’s relationship to humanity in salvation, and as corollary, his response to the Westminster Confession of Faith’s Covenant of Works/Grace approach (Campbell would make a fine Evangelical Calvinist); he writes:

The trouble starts, as we have already seen, when Schreiner states, “Before we can speak of salvation … we must discern why salvation is needed.” And it just needs to be said here clearly that this is not true, and his other material tells us why. God acts electively, before humans know anything (a strong Reformed claim). He does so, moreover, not because people are sinful, but because he loves them. Indeed, Ephesians says this clearly, the key text–which is often overlooked–reading “… in love he predestined us for adoption through Jesus Christ [and for him]” (Eph. 1:4b-5a). Ephesians then goes on to tell us at some length that God desires to create people and to have fellowship with them from and for eternity. Because he loves them, he will intervene to rescue them when they have fallen into trouble, and the order of his actions here is crucial.

There is not impossible “plan A” followed by a remedial “plan B” in this Reformed elective understanding of God as Melanchthonians suggest, and mercifully so! This would suggest that God was lacking in foreknowledge, or fundamentally inconsistent and fickle, or perhaps powerless – all appalling theological options. There was only ever plan A, which was and is elective, rooted in the positive divine purposes, and this will stay on track and ultimately triumph despite human corruption, stupidity, and sinfulness – something Calvin appreciated better than most. In short, a proper understanding of God’s election in Christ entails that Schreiner does not need to ask the question that launches the secondary discordant system that disorders his broader description of Paul. But a proper respect for human sinful depravity reinforces this judgment to refrain from asking an anthropocentric question and beginning theology there as Melanchthon does.[3]

Campbell’s response makes clear what the primary reason for God’s incarnating in Christ was. For the Apostle Paul the motivation was not to keep the integrity of God’s legal character upheld in relation to his creation; instead, according to Campbell, the reason God came was the reason he was always going to incarnate, because he loves humanity and desires to have an intimate Father-Son by the Holy Spirit relationship with them.[4] His coming certainly dealt with the pollution of humanity; but his primary motivation for coming always came from his always already reality of Triune love, the same reality which motivated God to create in the first place.

The conclusion from this brief sketch of things is that there have been whole systems of theology and biblical exegesis created to sustain a paradigm about God that is not consonant with who God is, and has revealed himself to be. The reality is, is that ever before he created the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil, he created; and this fact alone demonstrates that God’s primal relationship to creatures is primarily grounded in his life of love and grace not Law. Is obedience an important expression of love for the other? Indeed! But obedience to the Law was never intended to be the bases for our relationship with God, just as a loving relationship between spouses in marriage is not based upon obedience to house-hold codes.

 

 

[1] Source.

[2] Source.

[3] Douglas A. Campbell, “Response To Thomas R. Schreiner,” in Four Views On the Apostle Paul: Thomas R. Schreiner, Luke Timothy Johnson, Douglas A. Campbell, and Mark D. Nanos (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2012), eds. Stanley N. Gundry and Michael F. Bird, Loc. 848, 855, 861 kindle.

[4] This idea of a singular plan “A” and the idea that God was always planning on incarnating even without the Fall is called the Scotist thesis in medieval theology, and I’ve written more about that here.

What Hath Biblical Exegesis to do with Theology?

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We must make a case for our theological constructs from sound exegesis of Scripture, but we must dialectically come to sound exegesis of Scripture within Scripture’s own context and ontology. In other words, sometimes what appears to be ‘self-evident’ to the exegete from Scripture might not be if the exegete has not first critically attended to prior theological and/or hermeneutical issues that either are plaguing or enhancing their exegetical projects. In other words, to simply appeal to ‘straightforward’ exegesis in support of one’s theological conclusions usually ends up being an exercise in tautologous circularity. Douglas Campbell helps establish my point when he writes this in regard to interpreting the Pauline corpus in particular (but de jure it applies to interpreting Scripture in general):

[M]oreover, we can all now also be more presuppositionally self-aware, and our conversation more hermeneutically sophisticated, confident in the realization that this does not entail interpretive relativism. We must be more honest at times about what we are bringing to the text — our hopes and fears. But we also need to trust the text to resist any false impositions (and our interpretive traditions and communities will of course assist us at this point). A broader and more complex interpretative conversation should ensue, involving theology, hermeneutics, church history, and modern philosophical and political history, in addition to the standard New Testament discussions of provenance and meaning. And the latter should also be a more integrated conversation. Reading Romans involves more than mere exegesis; it must included distinguishable issues of argumentation, theological coherence, and presuppositional influence as well. Only when these are included does our interpretative process hold out the prospects of genuine insight and progress. [Douglas A. Campbell, The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009), 936.]

In other words in order to discount certain theological conclusions or formal positions, we must do more than simply appeal to facile exegesis or readings of the text of Scripture. On the face of things, depending on the rhetoric used, our exegesis might ‘sound’ sophisticated and strident (even incorrigible); but, in principle, on further review, it may well not be.

I know this post is speaking in generalities, but I have something specific in mind; something that I will have to detail at a later date.