Category Archives: Hugh Binning

Inhabitatio Dei: Living in God’s Triune Life Now and Forever as Co-heirs

Posted on by

Scottish theologian, Hugh Binning, writes the following in regard to God as love:

Our salvation is not the business of Christ alone but the whole Godhead is interested in it deeply, so deeply, that you cannot say, who loves it most, or likes it most. The Father is the very fountain of it, his love is the spring of all—“God so loved the world that he hath sent his Son.” Christ hath not purchased that eternal love to us, but it is rather the gift of eternal love . . . Whoever thou be that wouldst flee to God for mercy, do it in confidence. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, are ready to welcome thee, all of one mind to shut out none, to cast out none. But to speak properly, it is but one love, one will, one council, and purpose in the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, for these Three are One, and not only agree in One, they are One, and what one loves and purposes, all love and purpose.[1]

God is three-in-one (de Deo trino / de Deo uno), as such God is love. There is no competition in the Monarxia of God for God’s threeness is His oneness and His oneness is His threeness. What One does Three do, and what Three do One does. This is not to say that they, as hypostaseis do not have distinct modes of being in their operations; but it is to say that their operations are indivisible, even as they carry them out in the mode of being distinct to them as a person in the Divine Monarxia.

What astounds me about this deep and mysterious reality (mysterium Trinitatis) at the moment is that my Dad, Ron Grow, inhabits this reality in a beatific and actualized way. He went from living in utter brokenness and sickness to inhabitatio Dei in the twinkling of an eye. He knows no more sickness, loneliness, or despair; He only knows the majesty of this triadic reality of Divine bliss and interpenetrative love of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He went from his hospice bed in Menifee, California to the everlasting Kingdom where the intensity of God’s shekinah glory expresses in all its plenitudinous Oneness in Threeness. My Dad left this world in poverty, and entered the riches of the heavenly Kingdom in an instant. He entered into the joy of His Lord; a joy that is Love indeed, in all purity and serenity. God the Father welcomed my Dad into His life; just as He did on the day my Dad repented and gave His life to Christ in Lake Elsinore, CA back in the late 60s, in the fullness of His Grace as given revelation in the Son, Jesus Christ. My Dad now dwells in the heavenlies at the Right Hand of the Father in Christ by the bond of the Holy Spirit. He no longer wonders what love is, He knows it in its fullness unabated as He feels the nail pierced hands of the Lamb slain before the foundations of the world, as he touches the sword plunged side of the Lion of the tribe of Judah. This is the reality my Dad inhabits now; the glory that the Son has shared with the Father in the koinonia of the Holy Spirit from time-in-eternity.

What a genuine and steady hope we have in Christ. My Dad experiences this hope in the pleroma of God now; we can experience this same fullness in Christ now, even by the faith of Christ. We are participatio Christi, participants with Christ, in and through the adoption of Grace; we share in the same indestructible Life that He has always already freely had for us as the resurrection power of God that He is. Even when we are weak He is strong. Even when our faith fails us, His faith is for us. Even when we are too feeble to repent, He repents for us. This is the triune God we serve; this is the triune God my Dad inhabits in unimaginable ways. Maranatha       

[1] Binning, The Works of Hugh Binning (1735 edn.), as cited in Torrance, Scottish Theology, 78–79.

The Instrumentality of Holy Scripture for Hugh Binning: The Intersection of Ink and Paper/Flesh and Blood

Posted on by

Hugh Binning (1627–1653) a Scottish theologian who died at the tender age of 26 produced such an output of theological work you’d think he’d lived well into his senior years. I am currently (and slowly) reading through his Works (which by the way are public domain and therefore available for free electronically via kindle), and I’m just upon his doctrine of Scripture. His Works are lectures which have a sermonic feel which come with a depth of spiritual learnedness that only a mind and heart infatuated with the love of Christ could generate.

What I want to highlight is the way he connects the res or reality of Scripture to its writtenness and symbols (signum). If you read Binning you will see that he holds to a traditional Reformed understanding on a doctrine of inspiration, but that like Calvin he places an emphasis upon Scripture’s instrumentality (think of Calvin’s metaphor ‘spectacles’). Here he writes with a piety of language that we are wont to find in the modern tongue; with an economy of language that drips with the didacticism of Paul’s letters; and a heart clearly enflamed with a love of Christ and the Triune life.

I wish that souls would read the scriptures as profitable scriptures with the intention to profit. If you do not read with such a purpose, you read not the scriptures of God, the become another book unto you. But what are they profitable for? For doctrine, and a divine doctrine, a doctrine of life and happiness. It is the great promise of the new covenant, “You shall be all taught of God.” The scriptures can make a man learned and wise, learned to salvation, it is foolishness to the world, “but the world through wisdom know not God.” Alas! what then do they know? Is there any besides God? And is there any knowledge besides the knowledge of God? You have a poor petty wisdom among you to gather riches and manage your business. Others have a poor imaginary wisdom that they call learning, and generally people think, to pray to God is but a paper-skill, a little book-craft, they think the knowledge of God is nothing else but to learn to read the Bible. Alas! mistake not, it is another thing to know God. The doctrine of Jesus Christ written on the heart is a deep profound learning and the poor, simple, rudest people, may by the Spirit’s teaching become wiser than their ancients, than their ministers. O, it is excellent point of learning, to know how to be saved. What is it, I pray you to know the course of the heavens,—to number the orbs, and the stars in them—to measure their circumference,—to reckon their motions,—and yet not to know him that sits on the circle of them, and not know how to inhabit and dwell there? If you would seek unto God, and seek eyes opened to behold the mystery of the word, you would become wiser than your pastors, you would learn from the Spirit to pray better, you would find the way to heaven better than they can teach you, or walk in it.[1]

For Binning there is a greater point to Holy Scripture, it points beyond itself to its reality in God in Jesus Christ. That said he does not want people to move beyond focus on the written Word, instead he wants them to read it as if the viva vox Dei (living voice of God) is present, winsomely inviting them into a knowledge of and encounter with the living Christ that befuddles them where they stand.

This intention of Binning’s is no different than what we find in Luther, Calvin, or Barth. The goal of Scripture for all of them is to mediate us to the Mediator, as the Mediator mediates himself to us in the mediate by the Spirit’s blissful breath of fire and call for constant mortification and recantation before a Holy God of Triune love and white-hot holiness. Ultimately, for Binning, Scripture is the place where the wisdom of God becomes translucent for us in the face of Jesus Christ; a place outwith the Christian is as good as dead afloat in a world breaming with human witting that likes to masquerade as genuine light.

[1] Hugh Binning, The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning (A Public Domain Book), Loc 1519, 1526, 1533 Kindle Version [emphasis mine].

God’s Number, His Threeness-in-Oneness: Hugh Binning, Gregory Nazianzen, Thomas Torrance and Bruce McCormack respond to Katherine Sonderegger

Posted on by

Here is Hugh Binning (1627-1653), young Scottish theologian, speaking of the primacy of God’s life as the ground of salvation; speaking of the primacy of God’s love as the foundation of salvation:

. . . our salvation is not the business of Christ alone but the whole Godhead is interested in it deeply, so deeply, that you cannot say, who loves it most, or likes it most. The Father is the
trinityvery fountain of it, his love is the spring of all — “God so loved the world that he hath sent his Son”. Christ hath not purchased that eternal love to us, but it is rather the gift of eternal love . . . Whoever thou be that wouldst flee to God for mercy, do it in confidence. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, are ready to welcome thee, all of one mind to shut out none, to cast out none. But to speak properly, it is but one love, one will, one council, and purpose in the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, for these Three are One, and not only agree in One, they are One, and what one loves and purposes, all love and purpose.[1]

As Thomas Torrance notes further, after Binning wrote what we just read from him, he cited Gregory Nazianzen thusly: “I cannot think upon one, but by and by I am compassed about with the brightness of three, and I cannot distinguish three, but I am suddenly driven back unto one.”[2] What a beautiful way to think of the One in Three/Three in One, the Triunity of Godself when considering the depth reality of what has taken place in salvation.

And I would like to suggest to Katherine Sonderegger, who is concerned about the De Deo Trino (Threeness of God) crowding out the De Deo Uno (Oneness of God), and who attributes a Trinitarian emphasis to doing theology in the 20th and 21st centuries to the impact of the modern theological move primarily made by Karl Barth, that there is evidence to the contrary. I.e. This example from Binning helps to illustrate how Oneness and Threeness were not only thought together for the pre-moderns in the post-Reformation period, but it also underscores how Threeness was a prominent reality for the patristics, as Binning himself appeals to Nazianzen. Note Sonderegger’s concern:

… Perhaps nothing so marks out the modern in systematic theology as the aversion to the scholastic treatise, De Deo Uno. It belongs not the preface but rather the body of the dogmatic work to lay out the broad movement in present day dogmatics that has pressed the treatise De Deo Trino to the fore; indeed, it crowds out and supplants the exposition of the One God. But even here we must say that the doctrine of the Trinity, however central to the Christian mystery, must not be allowed to replace or silence the Oneness of God. God is supremely, gloriously One; surpassingly, uniquely One. Nothing is more fundamental to the Reality of God that this utter Unicity. Such is God’s Nature; such His Person: One. Oneness governs the Divine Perfections: all in the doctrine of God must serve, set forth, and conform to the transcendent Unity of God….[3]

I would submit that Sonderegger creates a false disjunction by speaking of Oneness over against Threeness, and vice versa. We see Binning creatively think Oneness into Threeness and vice versa in a way that I should think would be instructive for Sonderegger. She also uses numbers for God in a way that actually flattens out the mystery she is claiming to enhance and magnify by emphasizing God’s Oneness; Bruce McCormack drives this home when he writes:

… The doctrine of the Trinity is not one doctrine among others but the presupposition of all other Christian doctrines.  It is this because triunity is not something added to “oneness” but is a description of what God is essentially.  Put another way: the trinitarian relations are not laid on top of a divine essence which has been “established” metaphysically (i.e. in abstraction from those relations as a “fourth” beneath or behind the “persons”).  The relations simply are what God is essentially.  For that reason, as Karl Barth argued, it will not do to treat the “one God” before treating the “triunity” of God because everything that needs to be said about the “one God” needs to be conditioned by what is said about the Trinity….[4]

And further,

… Suffice it here to say that the logic of numbers, as applied to God, is employed responsibly only where it is recognized that numbers too never rise above the level of analogical predication. Used univocally of divine “persons’ and “human” persons, they are bound to mislead.  Seen in this light, to speak of the “one” God is not merely to refer to the metaphysical concepts of singularity or uniqueness.  The “unity” of Jesus Christ with His Father is a relation that includes (even if it is not exhaustively described by) the love each has for the other.[5]

For a Christian conception of God it is not possible or recommended to try and think of God as One or Three outwith the other; there is no Oneness of God without His Threeness, and no Threeness without His Oneness. Binning understood this, pre-modern that he was, and indeed helps to uplift the mysterious wonder of who God is, and who this God is with us and for us.

 

 

[1] Hugh Binning, Works, 89 cited by Thomas F. Torrance, Scottish Theology: From John Knox to John McLeod Campbell (Edinburgh, Scotland: T&T Clark, 1996), 79.

[2] Ibid., 79.

[3] Katherine Sonderegger, Systematic Theology, Volume One: The Doctrine of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), XIV.

[4] Bruce L. McCormack, Reflections on the Same God Thesis (Wheaton, IL: Noah Toly’s Blog, accessed 01-27-2016).

[5] Ibid.

An Evangelical Calvinist ‘Father’ on God as Love and Triune Savior

Posted on by

Scottish theologian, Hugh Binning (1627–1653), a young guy who died too soon, is one of our Evangelical Calvinist theological fathers. scottish-theologyWe have included some of what he had to say in regard to the Trinitarian nature of the ‘Good News’, and its Christward focus in one of our Evangelical Calvinist theological theses that you will find in chapter fifteen in our Evangelical Calvinism book. Let me quote him, and you will see why we think he is such a rich and edifying thinker. He writes of the Triune reality, and God as love and Savior in this way:

. . . our salvation is not the business of Christ alone but the whole Godhead is interested in it deeply, so deeply, that you cannot say, who loves it most, or likes it most. The Father is the very fountain of it, his love is the spring of all — “God so loved the world that he hath sent his Son”. Christ hath not purchased that eternal love to us, but it is rather the gift of eternal love . . . Whoever thou be that wouldst flee to God for mercy, do it in confidence. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, are ready to welcome thee, all of one mind to shut out none, to cast out none. But to speak properly, it is but one love, one will, one council, and purpose in the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, for these Three are One, and not only agree in One, they are One, and what one loves and purposes, all love and purpose. [Hugh Binning cited by Thomas F. Torrance, Scottish Theology, 79.]

Refreshing Stuff.