Self-worship as the Modern Form of Humanity: Both Cultural Christianity and Secular Paganism

Posted on March 17, 2022 by Bobby Grow

Self-made drama is corollary with worshipping a self-projected god; this is more antiquely known as idolatry. I just wrote that as a Tweet, yesterday. I had something like Romans 1:18ff in mind, but also Ludwig Feuerbach’s famous critique of religion in mind as well; which is the following in nuce: “God did not, as the Bible says, make man in His image; on the contrary man, as I have shown in The Essence of Christianity, made God in his image.”1 Thomas F. Torrance describes the inner-mechanics of this, as he details ‘the problem with modern theology,’ thusly:

The problem with modern theology, however, is that the second feature has to out of hand, for when the element of personal relation to God is not controlled by critical testing on the analogy of faith it degenerates into a gross personalism in which we obtrude ourselves into the place of God, making our relations with God the sole content of theological knowledge. That is the problem that faces us everywhere today in the so-called ‘new theology’ in which statements about God are reduced to anthropological statements. Whenever we try to transcend a subject-object relation or replace it by a ‘pure’ subject-subject relation, we are unable to distinguish God from ourselves, and lapse into irrationality, and then into the bitter futility of God-is-deadness.2

You will have to infer what TFT is referring to as the ‘second feature’ (I don’t feel like treating that now). But what should, at least, be clear is when Torrance refers to ‘subject-subject relation,’ this is the modern mode of immanentizing all reality to the absolutism of ‘self’; ie “turn-to-the-subject.” Modernity likes to think it has ‘come of age,’ that it has finally transcended the magics and mythologies of the superstitious past; its proof-of-transcendence is ostensibly revealed in our “scientific advancements,” primarily experienced concretely in technologies. Its nostra theologia (‘our theology’) is then only capable of worshipping the self as that is individualistically and collectivistically projected into the various and empirically visible achievements of the indomitable human spirit. “Our feelings” give pathos to the life and verve of the verity of tech we interact with day in and out; it has become the ‘subject-subject relation,’ the sacramental balm that modern humanity immerses itself into in self-actualistic orgasm.

The genuinely Christian response to this is to repent! Bow the knee to the risen Christ, humble yourself, through the humility of God in Christ for you, and know that He is God, and that we are not! It is only in this repentant affection that a person can truly think reality as it is, and thus operate as the type of theological realist that Christ is for us. We will come to recognize that there is an object over against us who turns out to be the subject for us; the humanizing reality that allows us to stand before the living God in His iustitia aliena (‘alien righteousness’), and come to understand what it genuinely means to be human from the ec-static life of God for us—a life constantly given to and for us in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ as that is gifted to us by the Holy Spirit.

1 Ludwig Feuerbach, Lectures on the Essence of Religion.

2 Thomas F. Torrance, Theological Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), x-xi.

Take Heart: The Role Affections Have in Our Thinking and Acting

Posted on December 17, 2019 by Bobby Grow

Affective thinking: we might have all the critical thinking skills in the world; we might be able to cross all our modal t’s and dot our logical I’s; we might be able to put together the tightest syllogisms and identify all the formal fallacies in the world; but if we have values or ‘loves’ that are awry our conclusions, no matter how sound they are per our leading premises, will ultimately be wrong. The Apostle Matthew writes of Jesus’s viva voce “¹⁹“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. ²⁰But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves do not break in or steal; ²¹for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” This is an illustration of how affective thinking will shape how we conclude; no matter what skill we have in deploying all the analytic tools at our disposal. In short: what we love will determine the values we operate with in all of our life choices on a daily basis; whether those are little choices and acts, or big paradigmatic types of choices and acts.

I simply want to register how important the ‘root’ is towards determining how we arrive at our conclusions about life and reality. As James writes (in echo of Jesus’s teaching): “¹¹Does a fountain send out from the same opening both fresh and bitter water? ¹²Can a fig tree, my brethren, produce olives, or a vine produce figs? Nor can salt water produce fresh.” A bad tree produces bad fruit, and a good tree good fruit; our aim ought to be to be good trees.” As Christians we know, because of Jesus’s teaching, that there is no one good but God. If this is so, if we want to be ‘good’ then it is clear that we must be attached to or participant in the life of God. As we are brought into union with God’s life through Christ’s life for us, it is at this point that God’s ‘affections’ or ‘values’ become our own (in a sanctifying way), and we are on the way to deploying all the analytic and other tools towards God’s aims and telos for our lives, in particular, and the world, in general. This is why holiness is so important; as the epistle of Hebrews writes: “¹⁴Pursue peace with all people, and holiness, without which no one will see the Lord.” Without holiness, without being joyfully participant in God’s Holy life, in His Good and Gracious Life, we will not have the means to see God; and if we can’t see God how will we be able to bear witness to God? But if we are participant in this life of holiness we will come to have the affections of God shaping our choices and determining our theological, ethical, political and a whole host of other conclusions that have meaning towards our place in God’s Kingdom in Christ.

I want to press this idea of affections, and the role they play in everything. This can be taken both positively and negatively. Negatively the Apostle Paul writes of affections this way:

¹⁷This I say, therefore, and testify in the Lord, that you should no longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles walk, in the futility of their mind, ¹⁸having their understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart; ¹⁹who, being past feeling, have given themselves over to lewdness, to work all uncleanness with greediness.

The pagan heart determines the conclusions that the world arrives at in their journey to exist in a meaningless world. It shapes the choices they make, and the acts they participate in through their daily lives. We all have affections, and without Christ they can only be for the self; this is what Luther was after in his language of the ‘bondage of the will’ (with riff on Augustine). We need an ‘alien righteousness’ an extra nos (outside of us) life to break through our self-possessed affections, and give us the affections from above. It is as Christ breaks through these ‘in bondage’ affections, and gives us His, as He ‘sheds His love abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit,’ that we have been brought into the center of God’s triune Love Live. It is herefrom that we have been given capacity to operate with an otherworldly approach, and have our lives ‘poured out as drink offerings on the sacrifice and faith of others.’ We need this ‘logic of Grace’ (cf. TF Torrance) to be the active ground of all that we do, say, and think.

The world does not have this transcendent ground, as such their values are skewed from God’s. They can have all the good intentions in the world; they can be philanthropic and compassionate towards others; but without the heart of Christ as their heart, at the end of the day, they are being philanthropic and compassionate from a heart that ultimately is seeking some sort of praise of the self rather than the other. If someone hasn’t been ‘transferred from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of the Son of His love’ then all this person can do is attempt to do the best they can do in mimicry of what they see in the lives of people who are genuinely bearing witness to the living Christ. The point is, is that a pagan can have all the analytic and other tools in the world, and without having the value center of Christ’s as theirs, they will only and ever seek their own end rather than God’s. Their choices will be conditioned not by love of Christ, but love of self; and this will have fallout in ways that we can only point to the broader world now and say “see.”

As a former professor and mentor (Ron Frost) of mine was wont to emphasize: “²³But he who doubts is condemned if he eats, because he does not eat from faith; for whatever is not from faith is sin.” It is the faith of Christ that serves as the ground of the new affections we will have once we have entered into the Kingdom of God. The pagan does not have this faith by definition; as such they are incapable of making choices and arriving at conclusions that are corollary with God’s values. As Christians we are to bear witness to others of God’s affections as those are present in our lives, and invite everyone else to the banqueting table of the living God. Once people take this invitation they have now entered into God’s affections, into God’s values; and the way they think will have the capaciousness to think God and the world rightly. They will be able to utilize all the analytic and other intellectual tools God has provided for in and from their proper orientation in Jesus Christ. This is not say, as Luther was quick to point up, that we aren’t simul justus et peccator (simultaneously justified and sinner); we are that still. But even though we still are sinners, we now have the new creation of God’s life for us in Jesus Christ as the primacy of our lives wherein we can put to death the sinner and walk with the affection of Christ as our affection for God and the world. May we live this way, and not the other way (the pagan way).

Beyond the Culture Wars: Christian Theology and the Hard Sciences in Communicatio

Posted on December 13, 2017 by Bobby Grow

We live in a period of history wherein scientism—the belief that modern scientific progression still has the inchoate capacity to unlock the mysteries of the universe one observation at a time/the belief that science has become the new magisteria, the new authority and foundation upon which human knowledge and progress will flourish—by and large underwrites the confidence of our age; the confidence in the indomitable human spirit to overcome and meta-narrativalize reality (although postmodernity seeks to deconstruct most of that mentality; nevertheless, it is still present, I would contend, in society at large). That said, I wanted to share a word from Thomas F Torrance on how he sees the relationship between the ‘hard’ sciences and Christian theology; it is rather illuminating relative to how the culture wars so often paint things in stark and competitive terms. Torrance writes:

It is towards the encouragement of that kind of dialogue that this book is offered, in the hope that it may help people who are interested in natural science as well as those interested in Christian theology. What is intended here is not that theology should take into its material content ideas that derive from natural scientific knowledge of the universe, any more than natural science should incorporate into its developing stock of ideas distinctly theological conceptions. That would be both unscientific and untheological, and could only bring theology and science into useless conflict with one another. What is envisaged here is an exercise in conjoint thinking where theological science and natural science have common ground with the rationalities and objectivities of the created order but where they each pursue a difference objective. So far as theology is concerned, the claim is advanced that theology cannot be pursued in any proper and rigorous way in detachment from the determinate framework of the spatio-temporal universe with which God addresses his Word to us and calls us to know and love and serve him. It is, I believe, indifference to that framework of objective rationality, or the isolation of theology from natural science, that lies behind the sense of lostness and bewilderment, as well as the sloppiness and ambiguity of thought, so often manifest in contemporary theological literature. On the other hand, it is through that framework seriously that we are enabled to hear the Word of God in such an objective way that we do not confuse it with the creaturely things we tell ourselves about one another and are tempted to project into God. It is through deep-going dialogue with science and submission of our own theological conceptions to the critical questions it addresses to us that we are helped to purge our minds of pseudo-theological as well as pseudo-scientific notions, and so are enabled to build up theological knowledge in a positive way on its own proper ground: God’s self-revelation and self-communication to us in the incarnation of his eternal Word in Jesus Christ.[1]

When you read Torrance, no matter what it is from him, you will always have this underlying sounding of the patristic voice therein. Even here we can get a sense of Torrance’s enjoyment of patristic thought on the logoi derivative of the Logos of God built into the fabric of intelligible reality (intelligible precisely because the order of the universe is contingent upon the living Word of God—creatio ex nihilo). And as is also typical with Torrance, no matter what he writes it will always be conditioned by his concentrated effort to see the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ as regulative of all things; that all reality has it teleology from and in the Alpha and Omega, Jesus Christ. Beyond that, and this is quite fruitful I think (in regard to opening vistas towards a protagonistic relationship between hard science and Christian theology), Torrance wants science and Christian theology to be framed in a harmonious dialogical combine; one which is not currently present for many a Christian and/or scientist. This book (from whence I take the quote), helps offer a way forward for thinking Christian theology and Science together; while at the same time honoring their proper distinctions relative to disciplinary realities and subject/object material.

[1] Thomas F. Torrance, Christian Theology&Scientific Culture (Belfast: Christian Journals Limited, 1980), 8-9.

Language About God’s Life: How Language Ought to Be Transformed By God’s Self-Revelation in Theological Discourse

Posted on May 14, 2017 by Bobby Grow

As Trinitarians Christians often, and rightly, refer to the inner reality of God’s singular life as his ousia or ‘being.’ The fear might be that Christians might be imposing Hellenistic (i.e. classical Greek philosophical) categories onto God thus morphing him into an tertium quid, or even worse something completely alien to who he actually is. This is the critique I often bring against classical Calvinists in their deployment of Aristotle to articulate their Pure Being theology relative to the Christian God;[1] I don’t think they are successful in allowing the Revelation to determine the language’s shape; I think they carry over too much of the Aristotelian philosophical implications in their endeavor to give grammar to articulating God for human understanding. As such, I think they eschew everything else downstream; i.e. whether that be in the area of doctrine of creation, theory of revelation, theory of history, doctrine of Scripture, soteriology, so on and so forth.

Us Evangelical Calvinists, like classical Calvinists (and other iterations of classical theists), also use the Hellenic language of ‘being’ and ‘persons’ (hypostases), among other expressions. But unlike—and here I’ll just keep picking on the classical Calvinists—the classical Calvinists, or as Richard Muller calls it, the “Christian Aristotelians,”[2] we follow Athanasius’s style and mode in regard to allowing the antecedent and ontological reality of God’s life to give shape and reify the Hellenic language of ‘being’ and ‘persons’; our intention is to allow God’s Self-revelation to retext the Hellenic language in such a way that the language’s meaning itself becomes brand new (recreated even) because of the new context it finds itself in (since context determines meaning anyway). Thomas Torrance explains how this worked out in the Athansian mode:

Athanasius much preferred to use verbs rather than nouns when speaking of God as the mighty living and acting God, for abstract terms or substantives seemed to him (as indeed to the biblical writers) to be inappropriate in speaking about the dynamic Nature of God, or in expressing who God is who makes himself known to us in his mighty acts of deliverance and salvation. For Athanasius, here as elsewhere, the precise meaning of theological terms is to be found in their actual use under the transforming impact of divine revelation. This is how he believed that the words ousia and hypostasis were used at the Council of Nicaea, not in the abstract Greek sense but in a concrete personal sense governed by God’s self-revelation in the incarnation. He preferred a functional and flexible use of language in which the meaning of words varied in accordance with the nature of the realities intended and with the general scope of thought or discourse at the time. Hence he retained the freedom to vary the sense of the words he used in different contexts, and declined to be committed to a fixed formalisation of any specific theological term for all context which might have violated his semantic principle that terms are not prior to realities but realities come first and terms second. This intention is nowhere more evident than in his cautious and differential use of human terms to speak of the Being of God or the Subsistence of Persons in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.[3]

Us Evangelical Calvinists go with TF Torrance and Athanasius; particularly when it comes to the idea that the reality precedes and thus should be allowed to control the terminology in its context and sense.

If you ever wonder how Evangelical Calvinists can use the language of ‘being’ and ‘persons’ and not fall prey to the same temptations as the Christian Aristotelians, refer to this post.

One more important point in closing: If we get our doctrine of God wrong (which includes very much so how we employ theological language), then everything else following will be eschewed. This is why Evangelical Calvinists place such emphasis on our Trinitarian Doctrine of God as the ground and grammar of everything.

[1] See this post.

[2] See Richard Muller, Post Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, Volume Three (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2003), 45, 62, 107, 121, 132, 140, 150, 367, 545, 553.

[3] Thomas F. Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God: One Being Three Persons (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016), 117-18.

The Reason ‘Human Reason’ Should Not Be Trusted: A Christian Dogmatic Account

Posted on April 5, 2016 by Bobby Grow

Here is a post I wrote just over a year ago. It did not get much notice the first time I posted it, so I am going to recycle it in lieu of my inability to write many blog posts at the moment (until I finish my personal chapter for our forthcoming EC book). I think what John Webster communicates here, as usual, is spot on. Apparently I was responding to another blogger with this post, the blogger’s name is John Shore. I don’t recall what he was writing upon, but it must have had something to do with the role reason has in the life of the human agent; particularly Christians.

In my last post I quickly and from the top sketched the problem that John Shore had in his appeal to reason as if it was a new form or mode
of revelation from God, and more importantly, about God and his ways within a God-world relation; particularly as that God-world relation applies to Christian ethics. Fortuitously I just happen to be reading theologian par excellence, John Webster’s little book Holiness; in this little book Webster is discussing, but of course: God’s holiness in its reach into various spheres within the Christian’s life. For the rest of this post I will be engaging a bit with Webster’s thinking about holiness, and in particular, and in dovetail with what I was inchoately talking about in regard to the elevation of reason by John Shore (and many others). That said, I don’t really want to get sidetracked by applying this discussion to closely to Shore, maybe only insofar as his approach serves as a contemporary and popular illustration of what Webster describes in regard to a modern understanding of reason and its elevation.

John Webster writes this of modernity’s understanding of reason:

… Modernity has characteristically regarded reason as a ‘natural’ faculty – a standard, unvarying and foundational feature of humankind, a basic human capacity or skill. As a natural faculty, reason is, crucially, not involved in the drama of God’s saving work; it is not fallen, and so requires neither to be judged nor to be reconciled nor to be sanctified. Reason simply is; it is humankind in its intellectual nature. Consequently, ‘natural’ reason has been regarded as ‘transcendent’ reason. Reason stands apart from or above all possible convictions, all particular, historical forms of life, observing them and judging them from a distance. Reason does not participate in history but makes judgments about history; it is a transcendent and sovereign intellectual legislator, and as such answerable to none but itself.

Such conceptions of reason have become so deeply embedded in modern culture and its most prestigious intellectual institutions that they are scarcely visible to us. But for the Christian confession, these conceptions are disordered. Above all, they are disordered because they extract reason and its operations from the economy of God’s dealings with his creatures. To think of reason as ‘natural’ and ‘transcendent’ in this way is, by the standard of the Christian confession, corrupt, because it isolates reason from the work of God as creator, reconciler and perfecter. Once reason is thought of as ‘natural’ rather than as ‘created’ (or, to put it differently, once the category of ‘the created’ is collapsed into that of ‘the natural’), then reason’s contingency is set aside, and its sufficiency is exalted in detachment from the divine gift of truth. Or again, when reason is expounded as a natural competency, then it is no longer understood as fallen and in need of reconciliation of God. Again, when reason is considered as a human capacity for transcendence, then reason’s continual dependence on the vivifying Spirit is laid to one side, for natural reason does not need to be made holy.

Christian theology, however, must beg to differ. It must beg to differ because the confession of the gospel by which theology governs its life requires it to say that humankind in its entirety, including reason, is enclosed within the history of sin and its overcoming by the grace of God concerns the remaking of humankind as a whole, not simply of what we identify restrictively as its ‘spiritual’ aspect. And so reason, no less than anything else, stands under the divine requirement that it be holy to the Lord its God.[1]

This could bring us into a discussion of how pure nature has functioned in Christian theology, or in secular theologies; or this could bring us into a discussion of Thomas Aquinas’ appropriation of Aristotle’s idea of an ‘active intellect’ and how that forms us as people anthropologically; we also could get into a discussion about how the Puritans, for example, spoke about such things in their appropriation of Aristotle’s tripartite faculty psychology—indeed all of these things are really correlative with and even fund, to extent, Webster’s insights on reason. But let’s not, and say we did, for time’s sake.

What is of import, at least to me, in what Webster is highlighting is how all of who human’s are needs redemption. We are noetically flawed, even in redemption we cry out to Jesus along with the man in the Gospel accounts “Lord I believe, help me in my unbelief!” It should be clear though: any appeal to human reason, any appeal to reason embedded in the image of God, as if that sanitizes reason in a way that keeps it untouched by sin is a non-starter for the Christian; as Thomas Torrance has said more than once: ‘We are sinners all the way down, so we need grace all the way down.’

[1] John Webster, Holiness, kindle loc. 122.

*Credit: Image of Aristotle taken from Matt Ryder’s collection here.

Jesus, the Ultimate Question and Questioner for Us: According to Thomas Torrance

Posted on February 18, 2016 by Bobby Grow

As modern and post-modern Christians we are plagued with an impulse, intellectually and socio-culturally, to place the questioner before the object or subject under “question.” In other words in rather Cartesian form we have placed our existence, and thus our rationality and wits before essence, before ‘being’ — as René Descartes was famous for intoning: cogito ergo sum ‘I think therefore I am.’ If we were to reduce modern man and woman to a modus operandi, in regard to a casual, and for some, even an intentional philosophy of life, I can’t think of a better way to frame it than what we find in Cartesianism. The person, in the modern way, is the standard-bearer for creating his or her own reality; once reality is constructed for oneself, then the inquiry process for what life means can begin. But of course this is circular isn’t it? The person serves as the ground of their own reality (even in collectivist and communitarian ways), and once that ground is established, once that context is construed, the modern person can begin the work of establishing their own reasons for being, they can even create a place for God; but of course that ‘place’ is determined to be what it is by the person’s own ‘being’ and not God’s. (sounds like existentialism and idealism in their own ways)

Thomas F. Torrance offers an alternative account for how Christians ought to think about reality in genuinely Christian ways. Contra the ‘modern man’ Torrance identifies the problem as modern people themselves. He would contend that there is no abstract human person, modern or otherwise, but would refer us back to the ancient truth once and for all delivered to the saints in Jesus Christ. He would ask modern persons to look at the cross of Jesus Christ as the indicative of what human beings left to themselves really are; at base. At base, Torrance would contend that persons are contingent beings, who are not only not the Ultimate in their own beings, but that they ecstatically ‘receive’ their being extra nos or from outside of themselves; i.e. that the ground for human ‘being’ is God’s ‘being’ for us in His Son, Jesus Christ, and in His vicarious humanity pro nobis (for us). As such Torrance would ask us to look at the cross of Jesus Christ and call modern and post-modern persons to ponder what God is saying about us through the wisdom of the cross (sofia staurou); that the ground of our ‘beings’ left to themselves in abstraction (i.e. in a ‘Fallen state’) only have one ultimate end: death! Torrance would ask us to repent (metanoia), and understand that God alone has the capacity to serve as the ground of ‘human being’ in the vicarious humanity of His Son, and as such has the capacity to provide the questions – His questions – that are right questions about Him. Torrance would ask us to abandon the Cartesian way, and any other more “sophisticated” ways that terminate upon our abstract selves rather than in God’s concrete self for us in Jesus Christ. Torrance would contend that once we come under the wisdom of the cross that we will finally be in a place to really start doing the work of a Christian disciple; we will be in a place to not only ask the right questions, in echo of God’s questions for us in the Son, but we will be in a place afresh and anew on a daily basis to be interrogated by the wisdom of the cross which reminds us that we are constantly being given over to Christ’s death that His life might also be made manifest in our mortal bodies (II Cor. 4.10). Here’s Torrance in his own words:

That is the way the God of Truth deals with us. He turns to us where we have closed ourselves in him and are imprisoned in our self-will and blindness; he penetrates into our existence and life as one of us in order to open us up from below to the Truth of God and to bring us to acquiesce in the Truth of God. That is Jesus—who stood in our place, the prisoner at the bar interrogated by man and by God, he who plumbed the deepest depth of our questioning of God in order to take it upon himself and receive the counter-questioning of God. Therefore that Man on the Cross, questioned down to the bottom of hell, for our sakes, is the ultimate question that God puts to us.

Unless we recognize that we too are called in question by the Cross, we can neither put our questions to God in truth nor truly hear the answer he provides. Jesus Christ stood in place: that is God’s answer to us. For Jesus stood in our place not to be questioned, but to ask the question in truth as we are unable to, and to give a true and faithful answer to God. He stood in our place and made our ultimate question his own, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ But in taking that question on his lips, he asked it as we cannot, for he altered it from the depths into the cry, ‘Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.’

What, then, is the nature of true questioning?

A genuine question is one properly open to the object of inquiry, but a question cannot be open to the object of inquiry if it is foreclosed from behind. Hence to be genuine, a question must allow itself to be called in question; it must be ready for reconstruction in the light of what the inquiry reveals. True questioning involves a backward movement of critical revision of its premises and a forward movement of reformulation of its questions. The further questioning, until real listening becomes possible and judgments are formed under the compulsive power of the objective reality. Genuine questioning is a strenuous form of repentance.

Moreover, behind the questions stands the questioner himself. Every question that is raised has behind it the being of the questioner, and it reacts upon him. Really to ask, we have to put ourselves into our questions. If so, then really to ask, we must allow ourselves to be called into question. The questioner must allow his questions to react critically upon himself, if he is to ask them relentlessly and scientifically.[1]

The modern person cannot go for this, since they are the possessor of their own being; or so they think. As a consequence genuine questions about God and life cannot be asked, only superficial ones can be asked. This all comes back to what the author of Hebrews was so keenly aware of when he wrote: “¹⁴Inasmuch then as the children have partaken of flesh and blood, He Himself likewise shared in the same, that through death He might destroy him who had the power of death, that is, the devil, ¹⁵and release those who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage.” At the very bottom of every modern person there is a fleeting knowledge that at ground ‘death’ is the ultimate for them; but they can’t accept that reality, as such they must continue to assert themselves in the face of that reality, and attempt to hang on to their personal existence, and to existence in general, as the ground of all being, of all reality. Even if said reality is ultimately non-reality, of the sort that can never ask real life questions, because the ground upon which it is situated is sandy-land of its own deluded making.

[1] T.F. Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1965), 122-23.

Natural Theology for the Post-Reformed orthodox, for Christians in General, and for Bobby Grow in Particular

Posted on October 19, 2015 by Bobby Grow

Staying on the recent theme we will continue to think about ‘natural theology’ ‘natural revelation’ ‘revealed theology’ etc. Full disclosure, the reason I’m focused on this at the moment is that I am currently reading through Richard Muller’s Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics Vol. 1. The section I have been in orbits around this particular issue; although I just finished that section and am moving on to other issues and developments within Post-Reformation orthodoxy. That said, let me close this consideration with this post. I will quote what Muller has to say in regard to a late Post-Reformed orthodox theologian, Cloppenburg, and then with a summary of how, in general all Post-Reformed orthodox thinkers approached natural theology (or maybe should have according to Muller). Here is Muller’s index on Cloppenburg’s ideas about knowledge of God from nature:

Indeed, comments Cloppenburg, the existence of God is known in five ways: (1) from the interconnectedness of all things (compages); (2) from their motion; (3) from the order of causes in the world; (4) from the governance of all things, which points toward the necessary existence of a prime Mover and first efficient cause; and equally so, (5) from the sole rule (monarchia) of the entire universe understood as “the procession of all causality, of secondary causes from the first efficient cause to the final and ultimate cause,” inasmuch as it indicates the existence of infinite being (ens infinitum). All of these conclusions, as Cloppenburg’s subsequent statements indicate, conform to the teachings of Scripture: the necessary existence of God, apart from a prior principle or cause is witnessed by Isaiah who identifies God as “the first and the last,” before whom there is no God” (Is. 44:6, 7; 43:10). Indeed Cloppenburg appears to understand the testimonies of Scripture to the existence and attributes of God as consistently mirroring the logic of the attributes that can be developed from the proofs, pointing positively to the existence and attributes where the proofs had indicated a more negative way, by the removal of imperfection.[1]

Cloppenburg sounds pretty standard fare if we are going to use Thomas Aquinas’ axiom of ‘grace perfecting nature.’ The idea of the interconnectivity of all things back to their Primary Cause, God for the Christian, is pure and unadulterated Thomas Aquinas. My guess is that most people, most Christians would read this and go: “well, yeah, duh!”

Here is how Richard Muller summarizes his development of how natural theology worked, or didn’t, in various prominent voices in Post-Reformation orthodox theology (i.e. there was a range of ways among them to engage with this topic):

The final paradox of the Reformed treatment of natural theology is that the theologia naturalis regenitorum, because it is not saving, can never become a locus of theological system. Although they argue pointedly that the regenerate can look to natural revelation and discern the true God, the Reformed orthodox recognize that this discernment so rests upon the grace of God and the clearer vision of the opera Dei made possible by the general revelation in Scripture that it can never become the basis even of the doctrine of creation. At very best, the theologian naturalis regenitorum belongs to the church’s exercise of praise and to the ancillary tools utilized by theology in its arguments. It can never serve as the basis of an argument or the reason for a conclusion. Therefore, natural theology stands at the edge of Christian thought or, to put the case positively, it exists as a result rather than as a basis for Christian doctrine. The truths of natural theology are not excluded from supernatural theology — they are included in the body of revealed doctrine — not because natural theology is the rational foundation of the system but because its truths belong to the higher truth — in Maresius’ words, “as a greater number includes the lesser.” Natural theology can, in its discussion of divine essence and attributes, gain some knowledge of what God may be (quid sit Deus). It cannot, however, learn who God may be (quis sit Deus), that is, the triune personal God. The system itself rests entirely upon scriptural revelation for its primary content.[2]

What this really can be reduced to is someone’s broader informing theory of revelation, and that is related to someone’s theological anthropology. For me, personally, I hold that the noetic effects of the Fall are total; as such, I hold that for the natural human there is no access to an accurate knowledge of God apart from God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ. The only way someone might hold that the natural human might have access to God in nature without the light of Christ is if they hold to an intellectualist anthropology wherein they further posit that at some level, even post-lapsum the imago Dei has retained some intellectual light that remains connected to God by its nature itself (and of course this presupposes something about what said person thinks about knowledge of God and imago Dei pre-lapsum or pre-Fall).

My view is that every aspect of humanity’s connection to God, pre-Fall, is dead; i.e. that there is no connection and that apart from Christ we live sub-image of God. I further hold that because creation is Christ conditioned proleptically (meaning that creation was created for Christ, not Christ was created for creation, or simply came to save creation), that even pre-lapsum knowledge of God was always already mediated through the One mediator between God and man, the Man, Christ Jesus (I Tim. 2:5-6). The implicate of this is that genuine knowledge of God in creation has always already been exclusively through Jesus Christ (who is the prototypical imago Dei cf. Col. 1:15ff); i.e. that creation itself has no reality or telos without Christ. As such it is a non-starter and non-sensical to try and gain any knowledge of God and His Divine attributes through reflection upon nature. In Christ I believe developing a theology of nature is possible, but this is different than what we see from Cloppenburg, but could have some corollary with some of the Post-Reformed orthodox thinking on ‘natural theology’ sub-revelation.

My view, of course, implicates how I approach the locus classicus for those who want to argue for a natural theology of the sort that Cloppenburg exemplifies (along with Thomas Aquinas and others through their theory of causality etc.). The locus classicus of course is Romans 1:18ff, and it is this pericope that I read theologically-exegetically; but so does everyone else. As I just noted Cloppenburg’s approach is heavily weighted by a sense of Aristotelian causality, with the Primary Mover etc. I think it remains post hoc (no necessary causal correlation between ideas) to assert (like Muller commentates on Cloppenburg) that just because we have ‘language’ in Scripture that seems to ‘sound’ like what we get from the classical Philosophers does not necessarily mean they are talking about the same things. At the most, I believe that the grammar the philosophers have developed can potentially be evangelized and retexted in non-correlative ways, such that the grammar itself (like ousia ‘being’ etc.) can be so weighted by the pressure of God’s Self-revelation that it can be used in fitting ways toward articulating a doctrine of God (i.e. what happened in the main at the so called ecumenical councils).

Okay, then.

[1] Richard A. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, ca. 1520 to ca. 1725. Volume One, Prolegomena to Theology (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2003), 304.

[2] Ibid., 307-08.

Knowing God: Martin Luther, Karl Barth, Thomas Torrance. Theologia Crucis against Analogia Entis

Posted on October 11, 2015 by Bobby Grow

Knowing God, it is what we as Christians all desire; we want to not only know Him, but know that we have a more sure way of knowing God. In the history of the church and ideas there have been multiple ways to try and tackle this. There have been mystical (Platonic) types of attempts at this; there have been chain-of-being attempts at this (Thomism) wherein humans are able to work themselves back to their final source of causation (God) and know God through the analogy and point of contact between Him as Infinite cause over against us as finite causes (indeed effects of His cause) [think analogia entis]; and another way was simply by understanding that words as symbols within a Covenant relation between God and humanity become the source for knowing God in an authoritative way (Nominalism).

It was this latter convention for knowing God that drove the thinking of the spitfire, the catalyst of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther. He repudiated the chain-of-being way, and yet was much more circumspect and concrete than the mystical way would allow for (although influences from this approach are present within the makeup of Luther’s overall attitude and approach to thinking God). As a result, Luther focused on what he called theologia crucis (theology of the cross) not analogia entis (analogy of being)—analogia entis was what gave the Roman Catholic church its authority in a hierarchical scheme for knowing God and mediating knowledge of God (as representative of Christ on earth [i.e. the Papal office] the medieval Roman Catholic church of Luther’s day was a step above [in the chain of being between God and humanity] the laity and regular people, as such they held the keys to knowledge of God). Luther’s appropriation of nominalism (theologically, not philosophically) is what allowed him to forward his idea on a theology of the cross over against the analogy of being (or also what Luther referred to as the theologia gloriae ‘theology of glory’); it cut the link between an analogy to be found in human beings vis-à-vis God. For Luther’s theology of the cross the only way for us to know God was to be found in God’s Self-revelation, which meant the words of Holy Scripture, and more radically the Word of God revealed in Jesus Christ on the cross (where Deus absconditus becomes Deus revelatus ‘the hiddeness of God becomes the revealedness of God’).

Richard Muller has written this of Luther:

One of the elements of late medieval Scotist and nominalist theology that had a profound impact on Luther was its denial of any analogy between God and man and its consequent recognition of the impossibility of formulating a rational metaphysic concerning God. All knowledge of God must rest on authoritative testimony, primarily on that of Scripture. Luther not only denied any recourse of theology to an analogia entis between God and man and insisted on the necessity of scriptural revelation, but also argued, in the light of his denial of human merit and his sense of the immediacy of Christ as revealer and savior, against any rational theologia gloriae that claimed to describe God as he is in himself and proposed that our earthly theology be a theologia crucis, conformed to the pattern of God’s revelation in Christ….[1]

Theology of the cross could later correlate to what some have called a theology of crisis (what we find in someone like Jurgen Möltmann, and even in the early Karl Barth). God is known as we meet Him at the cross over and again; as we are depleted of our resources and thrown on the mercy of His resources revealed to us as He freely and graciously met and meets with us through the cross of His dearly beloved Son. The cross is where God’s power and reality is revealed as: God humbled and humanity exalted in the unio personalis (the singular person), Jesus Christ. The Apostle Paul was one of the foremost and earliest theologians of the cross, this typifies the attitude that a theologian of the cross thinks and lives from:

⁸Brothers and sisters, we don’t want you to be unaware of the troubles that we went through in Asia. We were weighed down with a load of suffering that was so far beyond our strength that we were afraid we might not survive. ⁹It certainly seemed to us as if we had gotten the death penalty. This was so that we would have confidence in God, who raises the dead, instead of ourselves. ¹⁰God rescued us from a terrible death, and he will rescue us. We have set our hope on him that he will rescue us again, ¹¹since you are helping with your prayer for us. Then many people can thank God on our behalf for the gift that was given to us through the prayers of many people.[2]

Closing Remarks

It is interesting, because when we think of the nominalist/Scotist types of dispositions that Luther had it would seem at odds with the realist/Thomist ones that we find in the theologies of Karl Barth and Thomas Torrance. I think what brings them together constructively is their (i.e. Luther’s, Barth’s, Torrance’s) focuses on a theology of the Word. Barth and Torrance, it can be said, have an a posteriori approach to thinking God; i.e. from God’s Self-revelation in Christ back up to the ontological God (so a chain-of-being way of thinking, but instead of a this chain taking link from a general conception of human being back up to God’s being, it takes link from God’s being given and revealed in Jesus Christ as a center of God’s life). I think if Luther was around when Barth and Torrance came on the scene he would approve of this kind of christologically conditioned chain-of-being thinking, because it takes the christological focus of Luther’s theology of the cross and of the Word and understands that the Covenant between God and humanity that provides genuine knowledge of God is found nowhere else but in theanthropos, the Godman, Jesus Christ. Barth and Torrance actually take the insights that Martin Luther’s via positiva ‘positive way’ (kataphatic) of doing theology emphasizes while at the same time plundering the Thomist way of knowing God non-metaphysically (as it were) from God’s reality given in Jesus Christ. What Barth and Torrance don’t take over, and now in alignment with Luther, is the Thomist chain-of-being separation of cause and effect when it comes to the person and work of Jesus Christ. This might be where Luther, Barth, and Torrance are most closely aligned; for Luther, when we see Jesus, we see God / for Barth and Torrance when we see Jesus, we see God.

[1] Richard A. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, ca. 1520 to ca. 1725 (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2003), 223-24.

[2] II Corinthians 1:8-11, Common English Bible.

The Tradition of the Church and orthodoxy Need to be Tested by the Rule[r], Jesus: Hilary, Barth, and Bobby

Posted on September 7, 2015 by Bobby Grow

It is right to only attempt to do Christian theology after the recognition that Deus dixit (‘God has spoken’). Herman Bavinck, and Karl Barth after him, in their own ways recognized this reality and proceeded in their theologizing accordingly (if you would like to read where Barth develops this then tolle lege his Göttingen Dogmatics). George Hunsinger, as he is engaging with this theme in general (while sketching the thinking of Irenaeus and Hilary), and doing so while engaging with Barth’s theology in particular provides an excellent quote from Hilary,

Human feebleness cannot by any strength of its own attain to the knowledge of heavenly things; the faculties which deal with bodily matters can from no notion of the unseen world. Neither our created bodily substance, nor the reason given by God for the purposes of ordinary life, is capable of ascertaining and pronouncing upon the nature and work of God. Our wits cannot rise to the level of heavenly knowledge, our powers of perception lack the strength to apprehend that limitless might. We must believe God’s word concerning himself, and humbly accept such insight as he vouchsafes to give. We must make our choice between rejecting his witness, as the heathen do, or else believing in him as he is, and this in the only possible way, by thinking of him in the aspect in which he presents himself to us…. The meaning of words shall be ascertained by considering the circumstances under which they were spoken; words must be explained by circumstances not circumstances forced into conformity with words. (De Trin. IV.14)

For he whom we can know only through his own utterances is a fitting witness concerning himself. (De Trin. I.18)[1]

As Barth himself writes:

§3 Deus Dixit. Christian preachers dare to speak about God. The permission and requirement to do so can rest only on their adoption of the witness of the prophets and apostles that underlies the church, the witness which is to the effect that God himself has spoken and that for this reason, and with this reference, they too must speak about God. This assumption can arise only because they take it that God’s address is directed to them as well. It means that with fear and trembling they recognize God as the true subject of the biblical witness and their own proclamation.[2]

Don’t be fooled, this all sounds too normal and self evident; as a result you might well skim right by the radical nature of what both Barth and Hilary are asserting. It is a radical procedure to actually do what Barth says, and what Hilary speaks; radical because it usually is not done. Too often theological reflection is sublated by and conflated with philosophical theology; of the sort that conceptions about God are conceived of prior to hearing God speak. And then these philosophical conceptions are forced into a conversation with what ‘God has spoken’ about Himself in His Self revelation in Jesus Christ attested to by Holy Scripture. It becomes really hard for us, centuries removed from much of this style of theologizing to differentiate between what God has spoken to us and for us of Himself and what has been conflated with that.

We should be on guard then! If Hilary and Barth are correct then we need to really work at discerning what God has genuinely said about Himself and what the Tradition of the church says He has said of Himself. The trad, at least for Protestant Christians is not our rule of faith, Jesus Christ is (and Holy Scripture as it bears witness and finds its lively reality in Christ). This doesn’t mean that we ignore the Tradition of the church, or that it is all wrong (or wrong at all!); it simply means that like the Bereans we are to test all things by Scripture and hold fast to that which is good (to Jesus Christ). As we operate this way we must do so humbly lest we elevate ourselves over the wisdom and insight of the teachers that Christ has been bestowing on His church (Ephesians 4) ever since His ascension. We are well advised to be in conversation with the Tradition, all along understanding that what counts as the Tradition or as orthodox might well be a contrivance of philosophical conceiving with what God has spoken such that a differentiation needs to yet be made between the two. We need to be critical, and primarily in conversation with the Living Word as He intercedes for us, as He the Great Teacher teaches us. We need to operate as if we have a living moment by moment relationship with God in Christ, and realize that if we seek Him we will find Him because He is love, and because He has made Himself known to us as He has spoken His definitive word to us in His Son. This is radical even if it might not seem like it to some.

[1] Hilary cited by George Hunsinger, Evangelical Catholic And Reformed: Doctrinal Essays on Barth and Related Themes (Grand Rapids, Michigan/Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2015), 60-1 kindle.

[2] Karl Barth, The Göttingen Dogmatics: Instruction in the Christian Religion, Volume One (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1991), 45.

The Reason ‘Reason’ Should Not Function in Place of Revelation: Against Modernity

Posted on January 9, 2015 by Bobby Grow