Category Archives: Helmut Thielicke

What is Love? Against the Cultural and Psychological Conceptions in the Church

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Helmut Thielicke makes an excellent observation as he engages with the “conscience” as that is distilled in the epistle to the Romans. He notes that there really is no such thing as an autonomous conscience. For Thielicke the conscience, as understood biblically, is either going to be “ridden” by a fallen broken human nature, or it is going to be ridden and shaped by God’s triune life; there is no via media or Swiss neutral ground. And it is within this understanding, which we might say is the Pauline understanding, wherein Thielicke will argue that the point of contact between God and humanity is not resident within a native (to an abstract person’s) conscience, but instead it is only as God in Christ circumscribes our humanity with His; it is only as Christ condemns sin in His body for us that we come to have the capaciousness to know and be for Him.

Thielicke writes:

We see here at the same time the consequences of Roman Catholic anthropology, which we have already discussed in some detail in connection with the doctrine of the imago Dei. If the human person is not understood in relationship, but instead is given ontic autonomy as the bearer of demonstrable components of nature and of ontic substances of grace, then loving with one’s whole heart can no longer be understood personally in terms of existence in fellowship with God. It has to be understood instead as the ontically demonstrable content of the heart, as a psychodynamic state of being filled with loving impulses. The ontology of man leads at once to psychology, and indeed to a theological-speculative kind of psychology. Once we enter upon this path, we cannot avoid the conclusion that in terms of psychical structure man’s “infirmity”—i.e., the fact that soul is necessarily filled with shifting contents, with varied impressions and desires as well as with tasks and duties which claim our attention and devotion—man’s “infirmity” is completely incompatible with his being totally filled with love for God. Love for God as a psychical “content” then enters at once into competition with other potential contents of the soul. In any case love’s claim to be total is wholly illusory—until these competing contents of the psyche are eliminated in the uninterrupted and undeflected vision of God in the life to come. Thus the command to love loses its unconditional character the moment we enter the ontological-psychological plane of thought. For on that level it is no longer possible to grasp the personal category of love.

It is precisely at this point that we can find help in the formulation of Luther whereby the subject of faith—in this context we may with equal propriety say: the subject of love—is a “mathematical point” [punctum mathematicum]. Luther uses this extreme formulation to combat the fatal psychologizing of faith and love. He refuses to regard the subject of faith and love as merely an extended psychical tract filled with diverse forces and aspirations. There is thus no place for such questions as whether we are supposed to believe or to love at every single moment of our lives, or how such permanence is to be understood psychologically. Faith and love are characterized by their object, not by the psychical accomplishment of believing and loving. I confess him who loved me, and I believe in him who has given me his promises.

Thus the life of piety has as its goal not that all our time should be filled up with “conscious” faith and love, i.e., with conscious acts of believing and loving, so that everything else is dismissed from our minds as we move to at least approximate that total filling of the psyche. On the contrary, Luther recommends periods of prayer and devotion merely as “signs” that my time is under God, not as devices for filling up my time—at least partially—with thoughts of love and faith. The object of my faith , God’s love and righteousness, is still effectively present even when I “feel” nothing, even when I am “empty” or terrorized by doubt.[1]

As Thielicke presciently identifies (along with Luther): as the root goes, so goes the tree. If the root is rotten, the tree will be rotten. If the root is healthy and vibrant, the tree will be healthy and vibrant. You will notice that Thielicke is really critiquing the Roman Aristotelian (and insofar as that is picked up in Post Reformed and Lutheran orthodox theology) categories of thinking of grace in terms of habitus (disposition and its habituizing), and as substance and qualities. In other words, he is critiquing the Thomist synthesis wherein grace becomes its own independent substance resident in an abstract self-possessing humanity. He is rightfully arguing that when such categories are deployed, in regard to thinking about an ostensible notion of God’s grace, that the person under such notion-izing is flittering about in an inward curved movement of the soul upon the soul in a striving attempt to make their innards, their ‘feelings’ somehow correspond with what they speculate, what they perceive to be God’s love, God’s affection, God’s feeling. But according to Thielicke, to use a Torrancean (TFT) phrase, “this is only to throw the person back upon themselves.”

What Thielicke is offering as the alternative to the aforementioned is the biblical reality wherein humanity, and its conscience therein, is understood to be grounded in an alien conscience; but one that has been brought into union with us, insofar that God in Christ has brought us into union with Him, and His vicarious humanity for us. The problem that Thielicke vis-à-vis Luther is identifying is that the human propensity is to constantly think itself as the prius to all else; so the ‘turn to the subject’ that modernity has sophisticated for human consumption.

There are multiples of implications to all of the aforementioned, particularly as we think about the state of the Christian church in the West (and elsewhere). We can immediately see the effects of what happens when the church ingests a psychologized self wherein people, Christians in their spirituality, are reduced to performing for themselves and others. When genuinely triune love is not what constrains us, as that is truly actualized for us in Christ, then all that we ultimately have is a love within the ‘accidents’ of our being that we can strive to produce and express in “sacrosanct” efforts to demonstrate that while we were yet sinners we died for Christ’s sake. That is to say, as Thielicke has: that when love is thought of in philosophical rather than personalist terms what we necessarily end up with is a self-driven and cultivated notion of love that is not necessarily at the core of our beings coram Deo (before God).

[1] Helmut Thielicke, Theological Ethics: Foundations (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966), 342–43.

The Hellenic, the Neo-Thomist Origins of Modernity

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When Divine grace is separated from its reality in God, when grace becomes a thing, a substance, a quality infused into the accidents of humanity, it is only one small step removed from being integrated into the essence of what it means to be human. If this step is taken, and it has been in the ‘modern-turn,’ the turn-to-the-subject, the Gifter of grace no longer remains necessary, in a transcendent sense, as grace becomes materialized, immanentized, horizontalized into an ‘immanent frame,’ as Charles Taylor grammarizes. Indeed, Taylor writes with reference to what it means to be human in a frame wherein grace has become the possession, the generative reality of what it means to be a self-determined, self-constructed modern person in the 21st century:

There is another facet of this narrative of secularity which it is worth mentioning here, because of its ubiquity and importance in the “closed” spin on immanence. The story line here is this: once human beings took their norms, their goods, their standards of ultimate value from an authority outside of themselves; from God, or the gods, or the nature of Being or the cosmos. But then they came to see that these higher authorities were their own fictions, and they realized that they had to establish their norms and values for themselves, on their own authority. This is a radicalization of the coming to adulthood story as it figures in the science-driven argument for materialism. It is not just that freed from illusion, humans come to establish true facts about the world. It is also that they come to dictate the ultimate values by which they live.1

Once the secular person came to imagine, through their new ‘social imaginary’ (cf. Taylor) that in fact the classical God was really just a projection of their own imagination, an inner to outer extrapolation of their best selves onto a cipher by which they might live and adjudicate life, they were able to bring diremption for themselves and determine that in fact they were God and thus gods after all. What secularism ultimately brings, this ostensible ‘come of age’ moment, is really just another expression of polytheism, a serpentine belief that humanity itself possesses godness, and thus are the creators of their own reality and existence (in a world where existence and essence have become a singular reality).

As I suggested at the beginning there is a theological origin story behind the secular-turn. Ironically, this turn has a Christian source, albeit as that source has been dressed down by a synthesis of Christian theology with speculative philosophical categories; such categories derived from the classical philosophers like Aristotle et al. The abstraction of grace from the giver or reality of grace, God, takes form most notably in the Catholic theology of Thomas Aquinas. Here we finally get a codification of a burgeoning philosophical frame baptized in the Holy water of the Church. It is the notion of ‘quality’ that takes decisive stage, or in fact ‘substance’ within an Aristotelian frame whereby Divine grace comes to lose its Divine character, at least in the sense that its reality is necessarily grounded in the triune being of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Once this move is made, as I asserted earlier, we are only a few small steps, a few small centuries away from ‘coming of age,’ among other contributing factors during and post-Enlightenment. But I find this abstraction of grace from the Divine life to be an interesting development towards modernity, ironically, even as that is given dye within the early mediaeval and Catholic sitz im leben of Thomas Aquinas (and those who received him, whether Catholic or Protestant Reformational). Helmut Thielicke describes the scenario this way:

We can see clearly at this point that what takes place in man, and not merely what happens to him, has become the object of theological observation. It is again evident, as was clear already with respect to the concept of the imago Dei in man’s original state, that the ontic element in the human ego pushes itself into the foreground. Then the theme of theology is not just the relation between God and man; on the contrary, theology then includes as an independent concern a treatment of “anthropology.” Here is where the fault lies.

The crack, or better, the cracks are themselves produced by the belt of tension which necessarily arises where men attempt to combine ontological and personalistic thinking. The greatest strain and the most evident rupture are undoubtedly to be found at the place where grace ceases to be a divine attribute and becomes an effect distinct from the divine attribute from which it emanates, ie, where grace ceases to be a personal relation to man (the “gracious God”) and becomes something which is ontically infused into man and which is thus present in man, demonstrably present. For it is precisely this distinction between the gracious God and the grace given [gratia data] which is the starting point of the distinctively “Roman” development of the doctrine of grace. To put it epigrammatically and therefore with tongue in cheek, what men want is not primarily God himself, but “divine powers which may become human virtues and qualities” (von Harnack). At this point where grace “visibly” passes into man in accordance with certain well defined practices, eg, sacramental operation, it ceases to be exclusively a subject and becomes a material object, “medicine.” This materialization expresses itself in a variety of ways . . . .2

It would surely be reductionistic to blame Thomas and Aristotle for the modern-turn to the self, and what Taylor identifies as ‘the coming of adulthood story.’ That is not my intention. I am simply noticing a Christian turn made at least within the lifetime of early mediaeval developments, that can plausibly help explain how this ‘enlightened-turn’ finally came to fruition. There are many other contributing ideational and socio-culture pressures that finally brought this turn to consummation, but I think it is notable that we already see these fault lines developing as far back as the Hellenic period of the classical philosophers; and then developed more Christianly with the arrival of Thomas and the Romans.

I am only minimally attempting to illustrate how secular ideas can be traced back to a Christian lineage. Charles Taylor, Michael Gillespie, my personal friend, Derrick Peterson, among others have done further work, more substantially, to demonstrate that my point is not ill founded. Christians have as much to do with the secularity of society as anyone else. Indeed, we might go so far as to say that what it means to be a secular-atheist in the 21st century is really just an expression of a Christian heresy that has attended the Church catholic by way of various expressions; whether those expressions be understood within the Church proper, or in society-at-large as the theater of humanity’s glory, albeit, devoid of the Spirit. Ultimately, when grace is abstracted from God and made a quality capable of being understood purely from the immanent frame of the ‘flatlander,’ it is at this point that Genesis 3 once again receives breath to breathe and make another attempt to elevate itself with zigguartic flare to the ‘high places’ of the living God.

 

1 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, 580 kindle.

2 Helmut Thielicke, Theological Ethics: Foundations (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966), 238.

 

 

The Depersonalization of God’s Grace by the Thomists Reformed and others

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What they aren’t telling you is that when you receive Aristotelian Christianity, when you recover Thomist theology, particularly in the Protestant Reformed scholastic flavor, for our purposes, you’re getting a doctrine of grace, and thus God, that thinks grace as a quality, a substance. Grace is depersonalized in this frame, as such the person of Christ is ruptured from the work of Christ allowing for a ‘natural’ space to obtain within a God-world relation. This is the combine of ‘grace perfecting nature’ ‘revelation perfecting reason.’ This is what the scholastic Reformed are pushing onto the “unbeknowing” masses, particularly the younger crowd out there (millennial and younger). I see this all day and all night long on theological social media. Young guys (mostly) and gals eating the doctors’ stuff up on the retrieval of Post Reformed orthodox theology, it is “Thomist,” it is unabashedly Aristotelian by way of formal and material categorization; in other words, it isn’t inherently or even incidentally ‘biblical’ in its offering—it is intentionally philosophical and speculative instead, exactly in contraposition from revelational reality. In this frame, God is a monad, actus purus (pure being), an unmoved substance who relates to the world through an impersonal decretum absolutum (absolute decree) within a substance metaphysical frame. When God is separated from His work in a God-world relation, when grace is no longer inherently God for the world in Christ, but a created quality, a created grace detached from God and located in the humanity’s ‘accidental’ life, whereby their ‘partially fallen’ bodies are ‘enabled’ to cooperate with God through this created grace, through this new habitus (disposition) ‘to be able’ to be for God, this does horrific things to a Christology (which I’ve written of elsewhere). Here is what Helmut Thielicke has to say on these matters:

We would turn now to the process of depersonalization which is initiated the moment grace is ontically separated from God, in order to set it forth with utter precision n the following propositions. In the first place, the grace of God in the Roman Catholic view is impersonal, not merely because as an effectus it has certain autonomy in respect of its author, and not only because as the bearer of a human or material habitus it can become the attribute of an entity which is not God, but primarily because in the theological system as a whole—we are thinking here of Thomas [Aquinas]—it is conceived as being in a measure present even “prior” to God. For the system of nature and supernature derives ultimately from the fact that Aristotelian ontology has taken over. Its antithesis between form and matter (εἶδος and ὕλη) precedes all Christian content. Indeed it provides the framework into which the Christian content is fitted. One might even say, it is discovered to be the most suitable container for that Christian content.

Only thus can we explain how it is possible to enunciate a doctrine of nature and supernature in the form of an ontological construction almost without making any reference to the fall. For it nature and supernature are already there as given factors, the fall can at most be only a disruption in the “inner workings” of this system. It can involve only a “dislocation,” a dislocation in the form of subtraction comparable to the dislocation in the form of addition which we noted in connection with redemption. With these given factors presupposed, theological thinking can never be constitutively determined by “events,” by the contingent historicity of the fall and of redemption in Jesus Christ. It can never be determined by events which, by virtue of their contingency, must always transcend any system we may devise for trying to grasp them. If the system itself is to some extent already given, then the events must be fitted into it. They can only be, as it were, illustrations of an ontic order, and of a history of the world, of salvation, and of judgment which is constituted by this ontic order, a history which may thus in its basic tendencies be understood a priori, in the manner in which the “pagan” Aristotle understood it.

Personalistic thinking rests on contingency. For it relates to personal “events,” eg, to man’s decision at the fall, or to God’s decision to give his only Son (John 3:16). Resolves of this kind are matters of the will. They cannot be postulated. They can be known only a posteriori. They can only be attested. Ontological thinking, on the contrary, rests on regularity, a regularity which is supposed to include personal events. This regularity, e.g., the mutual flowing together of pure form and matter which underlies Aristotelian ontology, is understandable a priori. This is why there has to be, and in fact is, a proof of God in Roman Catholic theology. A clear example of this ability to postulate is the typical ontological attempt of Anselm to answer with logical stringency the question: Cur Deus homo?1

I have been banging this same drum, the material engaged with in this post through Thielicke, since I started theoblogging in 2005. It has NEVER been engaged with in the literature, by those who have interacted with our books, or online in the theoblogosphere, or elsewhere. The only response, beyond crickets, that I have received is by way of assertion: i.e. “Post Reformed orthodoxy IS NOT based in an impersonal substance metaphysics.” The problem is that it is, and demonstrably so as Thielicke, Barth, Torrance[s], Ron Frost, myself and others have now shown over and over again! But we are up against a theological Deus ex machina known as Post Reformed orthodoxy. Its proponents keep reassuring its would-be elect that it represents the orthodox and genuine iteration of catholic Christianity; that it isn’t a variant, or even a duplication of Roman Catholic theology, that it is in fact the “golden chaine” of post-Nicene theological development.

But if God isn’t personally grace for us in Jesus Christ, and for the Thomists He is not, then there is ultimately no hope! Under this framework wherein grace is ruptured from God, Jesus enters the world under the conditions of a decree framed by a doctrine of grace that is definitionally disconnected from the giver of grace; as such, in the incarnation the Logos ensarkos the Son of God becomes a predicate of creation, and insofar that Chalcedonian Christology affirms the inseparably between God and humanity (without admixture) in the singular person of Jesus Christ, insofar as the an/ -enhypostasis is the case in regard to the personhood of Jesus, God becomes a predicate of His own creation in the incarnation. The decretum absolutum makes God’s life contingent upon His own creation even whilst it is attempting to keep Him ‘Simple’ and untouched by His creation; this is quite the conundrum!

 

1 Helmut Thielicke, Theological Ethics: Foundations (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966), 242-43.

Luther’s Personalist Grace Contra Scholastic (Catholic and Protestant) Created Grace

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Martin Luther’s doctrine of grace was of a personalist sort, contra the Thomist Catholic concept of grace as a ‘created grace’ or habitus (a disposition given by God to elect humanity in their “accidents” whereby they might habituate [cooperate] with God by way of gratia infusa [infused grace, which is created and thus derivative grace] and merit the possibility to ultimately be justified before God wherein the iustitia Christi finally consummates as the iustitia Dei [‘righteousness of Christ’ … ‘righteousness of God’]). This is significant to underscore, not just because it offers an alternative, “biblical,” account of grace, contra Roman Catholicism, but this implicates Reformed orthodoxy insofar that it received, and repristinated this doctrine of Grace, the Thomist doctrine, in the development and codification of its so-called “orthodox” Reformed theology. Here is Luther with some commentary by Helmut Thielicke:

‘I take grace in the proper sense,’ writes Luther in his treatise Against Latomus (1521), ‘as the favor of God—not a quality of the soul, as is taught by our more recent writers. This grace truly produces peace of heart until finally a man is healed from his corruption and feels he has a gracious God.’ LW 32, 227. In his 1519 commentary on Psalm 1:2 Luther says: ‘Here “delight” [in the Law of the Lord] stands, first of all, neither for ability [potentia] nor for the indolent habit [habitus] which was introduced from Aristotle by the new theologians in order to subvert the understanding of the Scriptures, nor for the action [actus] out of which, as they say, that ability or habit proceeds. All human nature does not have this delight, but it must necessarily come from heaven. For human nature is intent and inclined to evil, . . . The Law of the Lord is truly good, holy, and just. Then it follows that the desire of man is the opposite of the Law.” LW 14, 295.1

Thielicke develops Luther’s critique with greater depth, but for our purposes this quote will have to suffice. What should be understood though, as I highlighted previously, is that for the scholastics (Catholic or the Reformed orthodox latterly), what was most important was to recognize that ontologically nature retained its esse (essence), even post-fall; in other words, the intellect remained intact, retained a “point of contact” with God even after its rupture from God in the fall. In this frame, then, grace was only needed as an addition to the ‘accidents’ (not the essence) of humanity whereby the elect person might synergistically cooperate and perform ‘their’ salvation with God (in the Catholic frame this took place sacramentally through the Church; for the orthodox Reformed this was understood through Federal or Covenantal theology as that developed progressively along the way). But significantly, grace for the Aristotelian (as that was appropriated in various iterations of “Thomism”), was not, and would not be God himself, personally. The need, in the scholastic frame was not that desperate; that is, that God himself be grace for us (pro nobis). For the scholastic, as already noted, the fall did not plunge humanity into a rupture with God wherein the whole of what it means to be human was lost, just part, essentialistically, was lost. And it was ‘this part’ that a created grace, as a ‘medicine’ would make perfect (e.g. ‘grace perfects nature’). As the reader can see, though, Luther opposed this type of Aristotelian rambunctiousness.

For Luther, and others, even in the 16th and 17th century Reformed ambit, grace was in fact God for and with us. We of course see this theme picked up by people like Barth and TF Torrance in their contexts and under their own respective ideational periods of reference. Insofar that the Post Reformed orthodox have imbibed, retrieved, appropriated, repristinated the Thomist mantle, and they are doing that currently with exuberance, this is the doctrine of grace they are ingesting. There is a better way forward, and this is why I am so intent on introducing people to Karl Barth and Thomas Torrance. They are retrievers of the ‘Chalcedonian pattern,’ and the Athanasian frame wherein grace is indeed God for us in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. As such, salvation obtains for us, ‘in Christ,’ fully, and not through a synergistic frame of cooperating (or persevering) with God by way of ‘created grace’ wherein nature is perfected and not re-created through apocalyptic resurrection, ascension, and the Parousia.

There is a better way for the genuinely evangelical (historically understood) Christian, and it certainly isn’t by retrieving, whole hog, Post Reformed orthodoxy, or the type of mediaeval classical theism so many are attempting to “revive” the Protestant church with today. The biblical faith is intentionally trinitarian, relational, and thus personalistic. The ‘ground and grammar’ of any truly evangelical theology must be pollinated by biblical and revelational categories rather than philosophical and speculative ones (of the sort that we get through Aristotelian Christianity). Luther knew this, this was the basis of his reforming work. He understood God’s grace in personal, relational ways, and thus genuinely evangelical ways rather than in the philosophical categories that the schoolmen did.

 

1 Helmut Thielicke, Theological Ethics: Foundations (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966), 225 n. 3.

 

Without Grace Nature Cannot Be Perfect: Thoughts on an Irenaean Thomist Distinction

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Helmut Thielicke offers an important anthropological distinction, one that stems early on from someone as astute as Irenaeus, and then becomes appropriated and modified by someone as seismic, in the Latin church, as Thomas Aquinas. If this is not understood as a basic theological-anthropological datum vis-à-vis some form of classical theism, engaging with the theological past into the present will become immediately unintelligible—which I would suggest is why so much of popular apologetics and theologics that we see pervasive, particularly in the online theological world, ends up being an exercise in futility. I digress. Let’s hear from Thielicke on this all-important distinction, and yet complement, between ‘nature’ and ‘grace’ vis-à-vis the history of theological ideas: 

It is very important that we understand this distinction between natural endowment and supernatural destiny, whereby the former the former is something firmly given and in substance indestructible whereas the latter is something variable which can be won or lost. For it is through this distinction so basic for later Roman Catholicism between nature and supernature, between nature and grace, the distinction which allows for the imago’s having an explicitly ontological character which continues intact through its impairment by sin and its restoration by grace. For with this distinction two ontic spheres are marked off in man. One of these, the sphere of nature, is constant. It cannot be altered in substance. The other, however, the sphere of supernature, is variable, ie, it is added or not added, and it can be lost.1 

It is interesting that Thielicke draws this out of Irenaeus. Typically, this sort of distinction, between nature and grace, is attributed to Aquinas, indeed for good reason. But Thielicke makes a good case for this in Irenaeus as he notes the distinction Irenaeus made between the imago and similtudo; the former correspondent with ‘natural endowment,’ and the latter with ‘supernatural gift.’ But as this distinction is appropriated by someone like Thomas Aquinas what we get, as that is reified with Aristotelian categories, is what Norman Fiering, among others, identifies as Thomist Intellectualism. This is why, for Catholic theology, and scholastic Reformed theology, following, when the fall happens the imago cannot ultimately be plunged into a subhumanity, this is because the very nature of humanity is such that it retains its substantial point of contact with the samelike Godform it is given birth by. That is to say, the very integrity of humanity, on the ‘intellectualist’ account, is contingent upon its esse which it shares with God. If God is actus purus (pure being) defined by His Super intellect in monadic relief, then the very integrity of His imago in humanity must remain intact in order for humanity to retain its created integrity vis-à-vis God. Further, this integrity is such that it only has telos insofar that it finds its ‘elevation’ and supernatural completion as it cooperates with the ‘created grace’ that God gifts it, by eternal design, in the ‘accidents’ of its ‘essence’ as the image bearers of God. But key here, is that the fall didn’t actually “kill” the natural essence of what it means to be human, as such, in a sickness/remedy symmetry, salvation doesn’t require re-creation, but simply an ‘addition’ of medicine (created grace) into the accidents of the fallen human, such that said human can habituate (habitus) in the virtues of God, cooperate by way of gratia infusa, and finally actualize and experience what the human destiny always already has been by way of God’s supernatural complement to the natural way. So Thomas: 

In the original integrated state of man reason controlled our lower powers perfectly and God perfected the reason subordinated to him. This state was lost to us by Adam’s sin, and the resulting lack of order among the powers of our soul that incline us to virtue we call a wounding of nature. Ignorance is a wound in reason’s response to truth, wickedness in will’s response to good; weakness wounds the response of our aggressive emotions to challenge and difficulty, and disordered desire our affections’ reasonable and balanced response to pleasure. All sins inflict these four wounds blunting reason’s practical sense, hardening the will against good, increasing the difficulty of acting well and inflaming desire.2 

Sometimes however men willingly suffer minor impoverishments so as to gain a major enrichment, and then the sufferings are medicinal rather than punitive. As such no particular sin is their cause, unless one say that the very need for medicine is due to our damaged nature and so is a penalty for inherited sin.3 

Now this nature is disordered, however, man falls short even of the goodness natural to him, and cannot wholly achieve it by his own natural abilities. Particular good actions he can still perform in virtue of his nature (building houses, planting vineyards and the like); but he falls short of the total goodness suited to his nature. He is like a sick man able to make certain movements by himself, but unable to move like a man in perfect health until he has had medicine to heal him.4 

I have left many things undeveloped in this post; rather enthymemic, really. But maybe you will still be able to catch somewhat of the gist of things by what I have shared.

 

1 Helmut Thielicke, Theological Ethics: Foundations (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966), 203. 

2 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Concise Translation, 270-1.

3 Ibid., 273.

4 Ibid., 308.

On the Christological Exegesis of the Biblical Text: Christ the Centraldogma of Everything

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The Old Testament makes no sense without Jesus as its centraldogma. It was really only after the advent and development of a post-Enlightenment deconfessionalized naturalist biblical studies movement wherein my thesis statement would make no sense. For the Christian, the idea that the Old Testament has any meaning other than its witness to Jesus, and its fulfillment therein, in principle makes no sense. Jesus himself thought as much: “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; it is these that testify about Me . . . .” There is historical nuance, descriptions of historical narratives, development of historical characters, and much more in the Old Testament. But without their ultimate referent in Jesus Christ, they have no meaning, no context. They only remain a series of potentially inspiring, and variously interesting stories about a nation amongst the nations, but without Jesus Christ as its canonical-contextual ground, again, these stories remain largely aloof to anything relevant towards the meaning of life before God (coram Deo). Barth agrees:

But when they say that this subject is Jesus Christ, who according to the will of God was slain under Pontius Pilate and was raised from the dead by the power of God, we can only say again that the ultimate exegetical question in relation to these passages—the question of their subject—is identical with the question of faith: whether with the Synagogue both then and now we do not recognize Christ. This question obviously cannot be settled by the Old Testament passages as such. The final result of the passages as such is the difficulty. Again, it is naturally impermissible to accept the reply of the apostles solely because we cannot solve these difficulties in the exegesis of the text itself, or because, on the other hand, we share with them an idea that Jesus Christ is supremely fitted to occupy the place where we are pulled up short. The apostles themselves did not reach their answer as a possibility discovered and selected by themselves, or as a final triumph of Jewish biblical scholarship. They did so because the Old Testament (Lk. 24.27f) was opened up to them by its fulfilment in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and because in light of this fulfilment Old Testament prophecy could no longer be read by them in any other way than as an account of this subject. If we accept the decision of the apostles—for the same reasons as they did, compelled by the affirmation that the elect king, of whom they speak, is Jesus of Nazareth, will be not merely possible but necessary as the last word in the exegesis of these passages, the last word! So far we have mentioned His name in our investigation of these passages. We have remained within the Old Testament world and its possibilities. We have tried in this world to bring out and think through what is said there about the elect king. But we have been forced to the conclusion that the entity in question cannot be brought out or apprehended within the Old Testament world: whether we think of it in terms of the monarchy as willed by God, or of the person of the elect king; whether we think of the matter itself or of its unity. Therefore the decisive question: What is the will of God in this matter? and whom does He will for this purpose? is not a question which can be unambiguously answered from the passages themselves.1

Thomas Torrance summarizes what Barth is after this way:

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

Some people, like Helmut Thielicke, see Barth, and Torrance, respectively, as Christomonist. The idea being that Barth et al. so reduce the contours of Holy Scripture to Jesus, that nothing else is seemingly significant in itself. For the Lutheran, Thielicke, his critique largely stems from his desire to read the Bible through the Law/Gospel dialectic, but for others, the critique of Christomonism simply arises from the facile notion that Barth and company reductionistically reduces all of reality, including Scripture’s, to Jesus Christ. As a Christian, I am left scratching my head in regard to this critique. The Apostle Paul writes, “that their hearts may be encouraged, having been knit together in love, and attaining to all the wealth that comes from the full assurance of understanding, resulting in a true knowledge of God’s mystery, that is, Christ Himself, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” If Paul is right, and he is, then in what way is seeing Jesus everywhere, and in every way, monist and/or reductionistic? It seems to me that people who make such critiques have already posited a priori some other meaning of Scripture, constructed from some other place than Scripture, about Scripture’s principial meaning as that is found in Jesus Christ alone (Solo Christo).

In certain sectors, there is a lot of talk about theological interpretation of Scripture or theological exegesis these days. But for my money, the only game in the Kingdom, hermeneutically, should really be designated Christological exegesis; at least for the genuinely Christian approach to all things. Barth, and Torrance following, reflect the sort of Christological exegetical approach that I believe every Christian should be about. We see this, even radically so, in someone like Martin Luther, and John Calvin in lesser ways, and I think we ought to see this more today among the exegetes wherever and whenever (which is a huge ask these days) they might actually be found. To not be a Christological exegete only leads to the sort of impoverished biblical exegesis we see attending so much of the evangelical world in our contemporary culture. If all of reality is about Jesus, then this, at least, ought to imply that all of biblical exegesis is self-same. How this gets fleshed out can only happen insofar that the analogy of the Incarnation is allowed to inform our exegetical efforts. Some form of the Chalcedonian Pattern, as George Hunsinger would call this, needs to be the imprimatur of the exegete’s Christian existence. But will the Lord really find such biblical exegetes on earth?

 

1 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/2 §35: Study Edition Vol 11 (London/New York: T&T Clark, 2010), 196.

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

Ecce Homo, Jesus is the Man! He was First Human for Us that We Might Be Human in Him

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Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is in the lawof the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. —Psalm 1.1-2

I once read a biblical exegete, H. A. Ironside, ironically, identify ‘the man’ in Psalm 1 to be none other than, Jesus Christ. This interpretive tradition goes way back into theological history. Some might think this is just Barth, or Torrance, or maybe some Germans in the modern period, like Emil Brunner or Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who emphasized the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ; the Son of Man; the Son of David. But we see these emphases found in Calvin, Luther, Athanasius, Irenaeus, Augustine, Cyril of Alexandria, and Nicene theology in general. Here is a succinct statement on this interpretive tradition provided by a German, and teacher of mine, named, Helmut Thielicke:

This character of the imago Dei as an alienum, something alien, is supremely brought out by the fact that as a proprium, as a true ontic possession, an attribute in the strict sense, it is ascribed solely and exclusively to Jesus Christ. It is is ascribed to him as a proprium, not merely in the sense that in him alone it has remained intact, but above all in the sense that it is present in him. In the absolute sense Jesus Christ is the only man. More precisely, he is the only man who fulfills humanity; he does not possess humanity merely in the negative mode, as an unrealized possibility. We can say this, of course, only if we at once add the safeguard that “humanity” cannot here be understood as an a priori concept expressing a knowledge of man enjoyed prior to and apart from Jesus Christ. If it were so understood, then Jesus Christ would be understood as merely fulfilling, or having to fulfill, an idea of humanity deriving from our own sovereignly creative consciousness. Our thinking must take the very opposite course. We must first learn from Christ and perceive in him—ecce homo!—what man is. We must first learn from his divine likeness wherein the divine likeness of man consists. For man’s divine likeness is fulfilled only in Christ, in our participating in his divine likeness.1

This changes everything! There is no humanity prior to Christ’s humanity. There is no imago Dei outwith the Deus Incarnandus, the eternal Son, to be incarnate for us. He was not created in our image, but we His! When you encounter theologies that attempt to think of an abstract humanity, as we find in classical Calvinisms and Arminianisms, as that is provided for by their respective doctrines of election and reprobation, you ought to run. Jesus, the elect of God for us, the Anointed One, He is the Man, Christ Jesus, the mediator between God and humanity in his hypostatic unioned person. This is in fact, the Word of the Lord; in flesh and blood.

The Relational Imago Dei in Imago Christi

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Helmut Thielicke offers an excellent argument for thinking the imago Dei from the ad extra of human interrelations. He extrapolates from this, from the biblical witness, that if this is so, then speculative thinking about Godself ought to likewise be abandoned. In other words, as Thielicke intones, if this is how the biblical witness depicts the imago, then this, as a prius, ought to be the way that we develop a theology proper itself; that is as we think God from God in Christ. Let me share his argument, and then offer my own constructive adaptation of what Thielicke is after.

The divine likeness is thus a relational entity because it is manifested in man’s ruling position vis-à-vis the rest of creation, or better, because it consists in this manifestation, in this exercise of dominion and lordship. The attempt to differentiate the essence of the image from its manifestation, and therefore to understand man’s ruling position of lordship only as a result of the true properties of the image (reason, will, freedom, etc.), has no foundation in the Bible and betrays a Platonic mode of thinking. The image of God consists in the manifestation, for it is of the very essence of a picture—that is its point!—to “effect” something, for example, in the person who looks at it; it “consists” in this effect, not in the variety of colors. The imago Dei does not consist apart from its specific operation. Luther’s repeated insistence that God is always actuosus, in action, holds true also of God’s image. The same approach is to be seen in Melanchthon’s view that the nature of Christ is to be seen in hi benefits, in his operation in salvation history, rather than in his metaphysical attributes. It is an approach which opposes differentiation between capacity or ability on the one hand, i.e., an attribute which enables us to do something, and activity on the other, i.e., this attribute in operation. We have to see the nature of God, not in his attributes [Eigenschaften], but in his outward relations [Aussenschaften], in what he does with us, in his relation to us, in his being “Emmanuel” [God with us]. The image of God in man is to be similarly defined. It is not a constituent capacity inherent in man but a relational entity, namely, man’s ruling function vis-à-vis the other creatures.[1]

I think Thielicke offers a nice development on the entailments of a biblical conception of what the imago Dei is. But I don’t think this goes far enough. As someone who thinks After Barth and Thomas Torrance, who both thought After Athanasius, it is important to point out that in fact Scripture itself, beyond Thielicke’s helpful development, refers to Jesus Christ, who is both consubstantial God and humanity in His singular person, as the imago Dei (cf. Col. 1.15). Khaled Anatolios provides a really instructive treatment of this development as it occurs in an Athanasian frame, he writes:

A helpful way to synthesize the argument of Against the Greeks—On the Incarnationand to integrate it with Athanasius’s later and more explicitly polemical work is to focus on the trintarian-christological-anthropological nexus that forms the guiding motif of the work: only the One who is true Image can renew humanity’s being according to the image (kat’ eikona). The trinitarian ground of this nexus is the immediate relation (though we do not find the later technical vocabulary of “relation” in this treatise) whereby the Son is the Image of the Father. The soteriological consequence of this immediacy is that the Son is uniquely able to grant direct and immediate access to the Father. The statement that humanity was created according to the Image is simultaneously anthropological and christological: to be created according to the Image is to be granted a participation in the one who is the true and full Image of the Father. When humanity lost its stability, which depended on remaining in the state of being according to the Image, the incarnate Word repaired the image of God in humanity by reuniting it with his own divine imaging of the Father. Jesus Christ is therefore both eternal divine Image and restored human image. The saving union of divine and human image in Christ is characterized by immediacy. One foundational principle of Athanasius’s theological vision is this stress on the continuity of immediate connections between God and humanity and a corresponding abhorrence of obstacles and opaque mediations. As perfect Image, the Son is immediately united to the Father and transparently reflects knowledge of the Father; anything short of this immediate and transparent relation would deconstruct our immediate connection with the Father through the Son from the divine side. Through his incarnation, the Son repairs our human participation in his imaging of the Father from within the human constitution; anything short of a full incarnation would leave humans disconnected from both Father and Son. Thus, incarnation and the full divinity of the Son are both integral to the immediacy of our contact with the Father. Far from indicating inferior divinity, the human life and death of Jesus Christ extend the efficacy of is divine imaging of the Father in the face of humanity’s loss of the state of being according to the image. It is a wonderful display of the loving-kindness that belongs to the divine nature as such, the philanthrōpia that is equally shared by Father and Son.[2] 

I think this is the needed expansion that Thielicke’s treatment needs. In order to have a properly construed theological-anthropology, in my view it must be grounded in and from the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. If He is God’s image for us, then it only makes sense to think imago Dei as imago Christi; or that we are ‘images of the Image.’ In this Thielicke’s good insight can flourish in properly theological ways as those are constrained by the conciliar grammar provided for us in the Chalcedeno-Niceno-Constantinopolitan faith. But this is the point: we ought to think ourselves from God’s thinking and reality for us in Jesus Christ. If we do we will end up, necessarily so, with a relational understanding, first of God, and then of ourselves. We won’t think of ourselves as static quantities, but dynamic personalities as we are ‘personed’ in and from the life of God pro nobis in Jesus Christ.

[1] Helmut Thielicke, Theological Ethics: Foundations (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966), 157.

[2] Khaled Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine,(Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2011), 107-8.

How Helmut Thielicke’s Law/Gospel Gets Barth’s Judge/judged Wrong

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I like Helmut Thielicke for a variety of reasons. But as read his Theological Ethics what he is making more than clear to me is how I am Reformed and not Lutheran. I used to think I could be persuaded to hold Luther’s Law/Gospel (LG) hermeneutic; in other words, I was somewhat open to it. But over time it has become clear to me that I am not open to it; that I am in fact quite Reformed, and Calvinian even, on this locus classicus. The way someone parses this theological combine will impact, for example, the way the exegete approaches their respective theological development. Further, it will have implications towards the way they interact with other exegetes of import. This is the case when we see Thielicke in discussion, and in critique of Karl Barth. In the following Thielicke is offering a critique of Barth’s theology, in the main, by way of deploying the Lutheran Law/Gospel dialectic. Thielicke’s critique, in the name of Law/Gospel, takes an interesting, almost jolting turn as he deploys LG in a way that leads him to argue that Barth’s theology is largely idealistic; and even more pejoratively: Christomonistic. Let’s pick up with Thielicke,

Barth on Gospel and Law

It is thus understandable that the dissolution of this tension which undergirds our faith should necessarily lead to unhistorical thinking. It is understandable that where a theological system contains—however covertly—certain tendencies toward a lack of historicity, they will press for the removal of this tension, and thereby betray themselves.

This seems to us to be the case in Barth’s theology, where Gospel and Law are regarded as two sides of the same thing. When they are thus viewed as correlatives, the tension between them is eliminated. In the words of Barth’s famous definition, “Thus, we can certainly make the general and comprehensive statement that the Law is nothing else than the necessary form of the Gospel, whose content is grace.” As the form of the Gospel, the Law thus conceals the Gospel. The Law does not stand over against the Gospel as something which accuses and destroys us, before which we cannot stand. On the contrary, when we reach the point of confessing our failure, we are already raised up by that which the Law is really intended to be, namely, the promise that “you shall be” what is demanded. Hence judgment and destruction are no longer total. Carried to its extreme by Barth, this means, “The very fact that God speaks to us, that, under all circumstances, is, in itself grace.” But is this really so? Is it really grace when Adam is asked, “Where are you?” Out of the dreadful judgment, devoid of grace, which falls on Adam, salvation comes through the grace which God wrings from himself, painfully, as demonstrated at Golgotha. But is not the miracle precisely this? And is this not quite different from Barth’s correspondence of form and content in terms of conformity to Law? Otherwise, was not Adam’s hiding a case of blind panic? In other words, cannot God’s speech to man be something terrible, something that plunges us into a hopeless impasse? Who in that case may speak of “grace” without doing violence to God’s judgments, and without taking from grace the very thing which makes it grace, namely, the element of miracle, the inexplicable, that which conforms to no law? Who would dare to call judgment “grace,” and understand God’s speech in every case as grace? “If you were blind, you would have no guilt” (John 9:41); if you were deaf, you would likewise have not guilt. But now that you must in fact see, now that you must in fact hear the Law, you are without excuse and the judgments of God break upon you. What else is this but an indication that when our eyes encounter only night, and our ears only silence, this could be because God is graciously sparing us? How then can we ever describe God’s speech “in itself” as grace? We can do so only if we weaken the antithesis between Law and Gospel, for judgment then loses its dark aspect and whispers that we will have a happy ending.

Such a doctrine of Law and Gospel introduces an abstract monism into theology and makes it into a philosophical world view of grace: “The Word of God [is] . . . properly and ultimately grace: free, sovereign grace, God’s grace, which therefore can also mean being Law, which also means judgment, death, and hell, but grace and nothing else.” Even hell has its place in this philosophy of grace. When will the logical consequences of this monism be drawn, namely, the forthright confession and solemn proclamation of the universal consummation of all things, the ἀποκατάστασις pavntwn?[1]

Thielicke, later in his treatment on Barth, admits that what he is critiquing above is the early Barth, in his more dialectical phase, but then he simply asserts that Barth doesn’t really change in his more mature writings as reflected in the Church Dogmatics. This is a rather strange sleight of hand. Not to mention, the implications that Thielicke strains to draw out of Barth’s theology just aren’t there. Even if we grant the Law/Gospel matrix to guide the way we read all things biblically and theologically (which I don’t), Barth does not fall prey to this sort of monism that Thielicke claims for Barth simpliciter. For example (and this is one of many) here is Barth in his Church Dogmatics describing what he calls elsewhere the Judge/judged complex:

The meaning of the death of Jesus Christ is that there God’s condemning and punishing righteousness broke out, really smiting and piercing human sin, man as sinner, and sinful Israel. It did really fall on the sin of Israel, our sin and us sinners. It did so in such a way that in what happened there (not to Israel, or to us, but to Jesus Christ) the righteousness of God which we have offended was really revealed and satisfied. Yet it did so in such a way that it did not happen to Israel or to us, but for Israel, for us. What was suffered there on Israel’s account and ours, was suffered for Israel and for us. The wrath of God which we had merited, by which we must have been annihilated and would long since have been annihilated, was now in our place borne and suffered as though it had smitten us and yet in such a way that it did not smite us and can no more smite us. The reason why the No Spoken on Good Friday is so terrible, but why there is already concealed in it the Eastertide Yes of God’s righteousness, is that He who on the cross took upon Himself and suffered the wrath of God was no other than God’s own Son, and therefore the eternal God Himself in the unity with human nature which He freely accepted in His transcendent mercy.[2]

How can Thielicke simply assert that the earlier Barth, even if we grant Thielicke’s characterization of the early Barth, is present in the CDd Barth?

The thought occurred to me, as I was reflecting on Thielicke’s critique last night: Law/Gospel for the Lutherans is just as artificial to the text of Scripture as is Federal theology for the orthodox Reformed, as is Dispensationalism for the low-church evangelicals. What Barth (and Torrance following) offer is a genuinely catholic reading of Holy Scripture, and its res in Jesus Christ, insofar as they think from the christological pattern originally grammarized at the ecumenical church Council of Chalcedon. I think this is what has attracted me to Barth (and Torrance) so much. There is an authenticity to his theology, respectively, that goes beyond what seems like the contrived or artificial approaches just mentioned. This doesn’t mean that Barth might not have some sort of artificiality in his own ectypal sort of theological development. But it is to say that, thematically, he starts at the right place (in my humble estimation).

[1] Helmut Thielicke, Theological Ethics: Volume 1: Foundations, edited by William H. Lazarus(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966), 99-100.

[2] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1 §30 The Doctrine of God: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 145.

Law/Gospel Actualized as Gospel Alone in Contraposition to Thomistically Retreived Soteriologies

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Protestants of a certain stripe are all about retrieving classical theologies, particularly of a Thomistic[1] hue. These Protestants typically, and rightly, as the case may be, start by retrieving theology proper (doctrine of God) categories, and then work their way from there. They terminate in soteriology; and in the Protestant frame I’m thinking of, this termination looks most closely akin to Federal (Covenantal) theology.[2] Built into Federal theology is a notion of bi-lateral contract between God and humanity. God provides the grace and salvation, and the elect person (if they don’t have a temporary faith) co-operates with that grace thus meeting the conditions required for acquiring final justification (aka ‘glorification’).[3]

Lutheran theologian, and ethicist, Helmut Thielicke describes this theory of salvation in the following way. You will notice that his sketch is in discussion with the Augsburg Confession which stands in contraposition to the Catholic (and Thomistic) understanding of salvation. If you are familiar with Lutheran (and Reformed theology) you will immediately pick up on the Law/Gospel combine Thielicke and the Augsburg Confession are thinking through.

What happens when particular emphasis is laid on the imperative? The Apology draws attention to this problem in a polemical section of Article IV on “Love and the Keeping of the Law.” According to the Thomistic doctrine of justification the imperative, although not exactly isolated and absolutized, is nonetheless accorded an autonomous significance. For justification is linked with the “keeping of the Law,” and the imperative, i.e., the requirement of good and meritorious works, has the significance of co-operation in the attainment of justification. The Apology finds the reason for this primacy of the imperative, or at least for the high degree of emphasis laid upon it, in the Thomistic concept of prima gratia.

In opposition to this accentuating of “initial grace,” the Apology maintains that Christ does not cease to be the mediator after we are renewed. “All those err who maintain that he [Christ] has merited for us only the ‘initial grace’ and that we then subsequently attain acceptance and ear for ourselves eternal life by our keeping of the Law. Christ remains the mediator, and we must always maintain that on his account we have a reconciled God, even though we ourselves be unworthy.

By way of interpretation, it should be noted that the expression “Christ remains the mediator” is an exaggerated formulation which is to be taken with a grain of salt. For it goes without saying, as the Apology realizes well enough, that Thomism does not present the doctrine of justification in such crude and deistic fashion that Christ is, as it were, only the initiator of justification, and that then, having started the movement, he withdraws, after the manner of Deism, and leaves everything to the human action thus “cranked up” and released. Thomism cannot mean this, since it regards all the “merits” attained by man as merits only through grace, and hence only for the sake of Jesus Christ. Hence we must not allow this polemical formulation to give us too simple a view of Thomism.

Nevertheless, the Apology does use this polemical formulation; and if we cannot think that it is simply caricaturing its opponents in order to ease the task of refuting them, we must interpret it as follows. The concept of prima gratia involves a decisive infringement upon and restriction of the mediatorial significance of Christ. For when justification is linked with the prima gratia, this initial grace is regarded as the basis which makes possible our doing of the meritorious works necessary for salvation. Thus grace becomes merely the basis which makes possible the real thing. The real thing is the meritorious works; they are the key to the process of justification. For it is by works that we see whether the grace lent to us is actualized and put to good use, or whether it remains instead idle capital. In the strict sense, therefore, initiatory grace is really the basis of the possibility, the indispensable condition of the real event. In relation to the merits which are normative for salvation, justification has liberating and creative power. Its position is rather like that of a means to an end.

In thus characterizing Thomistic faith as a “means to an end,” we should not forget, of course, that this is an exaggerated formulation because in Thomism grace is in some sense final as well as primary. For what man merits is grace in its quality as an end, as ultimate “goal.” Between the two, however, merits have a decisive position, since they can challenge and even block the way from primary grace to ultimate grace.

In Rome’s assigning of a key position to works, the Apology sees not only an infringement upon the exclusiveness of Jesus Christ, but also a threatened perpetuation of the assaults of doubt [Anfechtung] which Luther sought to overcome. “If those who are regenerated are supposed later to believe that they will be accepted because they have kept the law, how can our conscience be sure that it pleases God, since we never satisfy the law?” If good works occupy the key process of justification, then the assurance of our being accepted and justified by God (the “sure conscience” [conscientia certa]) is continually threatened. For this assurance depends in turn on the assurance that we have fully kept the Law, an assurance that can never be definitive and unequivocal. To the degree that the decisive phase in the process of justification passes into the hands of men, there is always instability, and hence assaults of doubt.[4]

This, in a nutshell, is the stuff that Federal theology is made of. While it is all vouchsafed by the absolutum decretum, and God’s brute sovereignty therein, this is how the Divine pactum unfolds, in a loose way, in Federal theology. Is this by mistake, or is there a correlation between the doctrine of God and soteriology present in the Thomist (Aristotelian) frame? There is a correlation. In other words, the way a theological system thinks God, so goes the rest of its subsequent theologizing. If a system gets a doctrine of God wrong, everything following will be eschewed in orientation to the wrongness of who and what God is conceived to be.

In Evangelical Calvinism, even more expressly than we find in Thielicke’s Lutheran frame, the object of salvation is the subject. In other words, there is no discussion that takes place, about salvation (or anything else!), in abstraction from the concrete life of God in Jesus Christ. Both the person and work of Jesus Christ are thought together, never apart. As such, the ‘imperative’ (Law) of the Christian life is never thought in rupture from its indicative (Gospel), but only together. This is because, for the Evangelical Calvinist, as Thomas Torrance would emphasize, salvation is Grace all the way down; insofar that salvation is God become human in Christ for us (pro nobis). This means, simply, that insofar that the person is in union with the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ, that this person is justified, sanctified, and glorified, from head to toe, in the robe of Christ’s righteousness. Further, this means that the ‘eternal indicative’ is also the eternal imperative insofar that God freely elected to step into the gap between Himself and fallen humanity. As He stepped into this gap, which is Grace, all conditions, particular to the actualization of re-conciliation between God and humanity, were immediately realized. In other words, the dilemma that Thielicke and the Augsburg Confession are addressing, in regard to the Thomist categories, are never raised as real dilemmas.

For the Evangelical Calvinist there is no sunlight between God’s inner life for us and the human conscience and concrete lived existence we inhabit on a day-to-day basis. And all of this is because the Evangelical Calvinist does not think God from the speculative and Aristotelian categories that Thomism, and her Calvinist (and Lutheran orthodox) iterations do. We think concretely from the evangelical life of God for us revealed and exegeted in Jesus Christ. In other words, we think of God in relational and personalist ways which avoid thinking of Him in terms that are law-like, decretal, and juridical. As such, the dilemma Thielicke is rightly countering, as presented by the Thomist categories, are non-starters for the Evangelical Calvinist. Nevertheless, it is important to understand, contextually, why Evangelical Calvinism offers a positive way forward that does not fall prey to these sorts of dilemmas as given rise by speculative theologies like we find under the umbrella of the Thomisms.

[1] Thomas Aquinas’ theology, and its subsequent “neo-Thomist” receptions and developments.

[2] We get ‘poser’ versions of this in sub-set forms in lower iterations of Reformed or more accurately “Calvinist” theologies (think of Five-Point Calvinism, and other like versions; whether those be in direct correlation with, or in contraposition to Five-Pointism).

[3] See Myk Habets and Bobby Grow, “Theologia Reformata et Semper Reformanda: Towards an Evangelical Calvinism,” in Editors Myk Habets and Bobby Grow, Evangelical Calvinism: Volume 1: Essays Resourcing the Continuing Reformation of the Church (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2012), 1-19. Also see Bobby Grow, “Assurance is of the Essence of Saving Faith: Calvin, Barth, Torrance, and the ‘Faith of Christ,'” in Editors Myk Habets and Bobby Grow, Evangelical Calvinism: Volume 2: Dogmatics and Devotion (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2017), 30-57.

[4] Helmut Thielicke, Theological Ethics: Volume 1: Foundations, edited by William H. Lazarus (Philadelphia: Fortess Press, 1966), 74-6.