Category Archives: J. Todd Billings

Reading the Bible Theologically with Todd Billings: An Antidote for folks like, Peter Enns, NT Wright, and John Dominick Crossan et al.

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I am doing some research for a writing project I am involved with. I am writing a chapter on theological exegesis, and so plan on getting jeromebiblesome of that issue through posts here at the blog. I am currently reading through Todd Billings’ book: The Word Of God For The People Of God: an entryway to the theological interpretation of scripture. Billings broaches something worth broaching. Throughout the rest of this post we will broach right along with Todd.

Something that continues to dog biblical exegesis, or interpretation, is the impact that the Enlightenment, and subsequently, higher criticism has had upon us modern exegetes. Whether it be more liberal (non-confessional-Christians) like John Dominick Crossan, Marcus Borg, Robert Funk,; or more progressive types like Pete Enns; or more conservative types like NT Wright, to one extreme or another, what dominates the interpretive task and shapes the respective methodology is a kind of historism. The outworking of this is that the text becomes, primarily, a place where historical reconstruction gives it its primary meaning, even theologically. True, because of confessional disposition, someone like NT Wright, is able to better negotiate the theological implications of his historical, text-critical work, but his primary mode still comes from historism (I think). Todd Billings, without throwing away the work done by historians of biblical reality, has a better, more critical approach, and critique to this dominant way of interpreting the Bible; dominant for evangelical scholarship in general. Billings writes:

How can critical and theological reasoning be held together, particularly in dealing with behind-text-issues? There is no single “global” answer to this question, for it depends on the particular biblical issue in question, as well as the critical and theological questions being posed to the text. In the same way, no single critical method always leads to a faithful interpretation of Scripture, and all methods must be “tamed in relation to the theological aims of Scripture and the ecclesial context within which the Bible is read as Scripture.” In other words, critical methods need to be recontextualized within a theological framework: that is, they need to be evaluated and used according to terms that refuse to treat the Bible as nothing more than an object of historical inquiry.

This recontexualization of biblical criticism within theology is necessary because some biblical scholars use historical-critical tools in a way that marginalizes theological thought altogether. In general, these approaches do not seek to expand their horizon by hearing the address of the text about the subject matter of God’s work in the lives of Joshua, David, Jesus, or Paul. Rather, they fixate on behind-the-text issue such as the date of the text’s origin and the circumstances that gave rise to it, as well as issues and problems related to manuscripts, redaction history, the original audience, and so forth. In the course of these explorations, they lose the subject matter of the text itself. Therefore, in interpreting the prologue of the Gospel of John, rather than allow themselves to enter into play with the possibility of Jesus being the “Word made flesh,” these approaches move that question to the sidelines in their preoccupation with behind-the-text issues. When they use their explorations in this way, these purveyors of historical-critical methods do not lead to a receptive reading of the text; they simply use texts as steppingstones for reconstructing a history behind the text.[1]

There is obviously a continuum going on here, especially in reference to the types of exegetes I listed above. NT Wright, for example, does a much better job of reigning his historical work back into a theological exegetical discussion than do some of the others. That notwithstanding, something that I have noticed among many of his students is that understanding Second Temple Judaism reigns supreme as THE cipher by which the rest of the New Testament, as well as all of biblical history as its climax ought to be understood through. It is hard to see how this fits well with a robust theological exegetical approach that appreciates the Spirit’s work through the interpretive activities of God’s people, in his Church, throughout the centuries and into the present.

But I don’t want this post to tail off into a discussion about NT Wright in particular. Do you see the problem that Todd is addressing? I do! It is addressing a personal tension I struggle with, continuously; I understand the value of literary theory, historical reconstruction, etc. when it comes to interpreting the Bible, and at the same time I understand that the primary regulative reality of meaning in the text is highly theological, indeed christological. So Todd’s points are well taken, primary of which is the process of ‘recontextualizing’ things.

[1] J. Todd Billings, The Word Of God For The People Of God: an entryway to the theological interpretation of scripture (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2010), 59-60.

Turning to Ourselves Instead of God: The Evangelicals and Herman Bavinck

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Victoria Osteen’s recent faux pas (well some think it was a faux pas, I do) about God being happy when we are happy is a helpful illustrator of what I want to address in this mini-albrechtritschlessay. For many North American evangelical Christians God has become our buddy in the sky, the God who snuggles up with us in our quiet times away from the hustle and bustle of everyday real life. For many evangelicals, God is more at our whim, he is meant to meet our psychological needs, and intended (by us) to make us feel normal in an otherwise abnormal world. For many an evangelical God is at our behest, and becomes who we make him to be rather than the other way around.

Theologian, J. Todd Billings, after sociologist, Christian Smith has labeled this type of movement, and evangelical making of God as Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD, hereafter). Here is how Smith defines the lineaments of MTD:

  1. A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth.
  2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
  3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
  4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.
  5. Good people go to heaven when they die.[1]

My guess is that this sounds very familiar to you, in fact it might hit closer to him than you would like to admit. Truth be told, this inclination has been around for centuries, but it is modern man and woman who have been plagued with this style of pedestrian religion, in the name of Christ, probably more than any other age. We are conditioned by an understanding of God that suits us, that is fits well with being an American, or living with the relative creature comforts the Western world has to offer us. But there is a history behind this.

Herman Bavinck, a Dutch Reformed theologian who lived and wrote during the latter half of the 19th century (in Amsterdam) gets into the theological history that has led to what Christian Smith and Todd Billings have labeled as moralistic therapeutic deism. Bavinck was working in the period just after much of the theology behind MTD was being developed by certain German theologians like Fredrich Schleiermacher, Wilhelm Hermann, et al. What he has written on the topic sounds eerily close to what we have now come to call MTD. Here Bavinck is commenting on how some of the theologians of his day were articulating this early form of what has now more popularly been labeled as moralistic therapeutic deism:

Revelation, he says [he is referring to one of these theologians, i.e. Ritschl], is not an external thing, but “man receives the revelation, which is the ground of his religion, because the depths of his own being are opened to him.” Religion is a new life, and rests upon an experience of the power of moral good, as Jesus has shown us. To trust in that power is to believe, to live, to be saved. And because religion is thus “the complete quickening of a man, there is no general religion, the same for every one, but there are only individuals in religion.” So we see that from the standpoint of religious psychology there is no longer a place for metaphysics, theology, or dogmatics, nor even for an “ethics of the religious personality.” For every standard fails here; there is no single law or rule; the individual  man is the measure of all things, also of religion; God does not say how he will be served, but man decides how he will serve him.[2]

I think Bavinck’s insight, from the late 19th century is penetrating and pertinent to our own 21st century context as North American evangelicals in particular. What becomes difficult for us, as evangelicals, to identify this type of self-serving religion in our midst, in our personal lives is that we have no real critical space to distinguish between this type of moralistic religion and the real Christian religion that we claim to inhabit; because we have conflated the two. As I have written elsewhere in regard to this very issue, and drawing off of Swiss theologian Karl Barth and his critique of the 20th century German Christianity that he was a part of during World War I and II: “It is this absolutized ‘Conservative Self’ that presumes that what it means to be moral, and Christian is to ask, simply, ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ This perfectly illustrates Barth’s critique of the German Liberal Protestant. For them, as for us, to be Christian, was to be nationalist, exceptional, and normal.” And so we end up worshipping a projection of God that looks more like ourselves, our better morally good self, than the God revealed in Jesus Christ.

I know this little essay has probably come off like something that makes you feel like you have been beaten around the head, but isn’t that what we need sometimes? I think the most dangerous thing about living the way we do, as moralistic therapeutic Deists who have absolutized ourselves, and adopted a morally good Gospel (as Bavinck described it) is that we really have no space to actually hear from God. We have no capacity to see that God is truly Lord who contradicts us at our every step, but who at the same time graciously nurtures us even as he rebukes us in our sinful mode of being. There is hope, just not in ourselves.

 

 

[1] Christian Smith, Soul Searching, 162-63 cited by J. Todd Billings in Union with Christ: Reframing Theology and Ministry for the Church, 22.

[2] Herman Bavinck, The Philosophy of Revelation, loc. 2853, 2862 kindle.

Pace J. Todd Billings: Picking at Calvin’s Wax Nose: Union or Forensic?–Atonement Theology, An Impasse

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**An important repost, must read!

Often here at The Evangelical Calvinist I refer to the language of union with Christ, and Calvin’s “mystical union” (unio mystica). This is the stuff that makes ‘EC’ go round; that is pressing this Pauline idea of ‘in Christ’ theology as the key of our soteriological framework. In line with Thomas Torrance, and through his development of Scottish Theology, in his book “Scottish Theology;” I often pick up on the way this was developed, contra the Westminster development of Calvin that takes hold of Calvin’s theology of the Law, and its relation to understanding salvation. J. Todd Billings says that either one of these streams misses Calvin’s theology as a whole, and thus distorts Calvin if we try to emphasize either his relational over and against his juridical (legal), or vice versa. Billings writes:

[T]here is an ‘Anti-Legal School’ in Calvin scholarship that tends to emphasize Calvin’s distance from scholasticism, his fluidity in the use of image and metaphor, and his rich Trinitarian theology. Language about forensic transaction is generally treated with suspicion, in preference for the more organic images of transformation. In reaction to this school, the ‘legal’ aspects of Calvin’s thought tend to be emphasized by others, particularly his distinctively Reformed concerns for the doctrines of justification and imputation. Accounts of one school of thought tend to either ignore or deny the other side. . . . I will argue that the place of the human is illuminated in Calvin’s theology of participation by seeing a Trinitarian account of the duplex gratia as the framework for participation. For Calvin, participation in Christ must emphasize the legal and the transformative language in the ‘double grace’ of justification and sanctification. In prayer, believers act in ascetic struggle to pray rightly, yet the foundation for their active struggle is a recognition of God’s free pardon. Likewise, in the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, believers act in response to God’s justifying act in a way that incorporates them into a Trinitarian soteriology: the Father is revealed as gracious and generous through his free pardon of believers in their union with Christ; this union also involves the activation of believers by the Spirit—toward a life of piety and love, requiring ascetic effort and activity. Believers are made active in the ecclesial and social community. A participatory, Trinitarian account of the duplex gratia plays an important role in Calvin’s theological account of the sacraments. ‘Participation’ in baptism is so real that it is almost biological. Celebrating the Lord’s Supper involves participating in Christ’s ascension to heaven to feed on his life giving flesh and blood. Calvin’s theology of prayer and the sacraments is a theology that is theocentric, but also participatory, activating believers in love of God and neighbour as the body of Christ. [J. Todd Billings, Calvin, Participation, and the Gift: The Activity of Believers in Union with Christ, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 105-06]

This serves instructive for noting a certain reality; one that Billings is not intending to address here, but one that I believe is constructively available through the present thesis that Billings will proceed to develop throughout the rest of his chapter. What I want to highlight is the fact that both lines of thought—union with Christ/relational and forensic—are present in Calvin. Consequently, all things being equal, both strands can be found developed and emphasized within the tradition that bears Calvin’s name. This is precisely what we seek to elucidate and alert folks to with our forthcoming book on Evangelical Calvinism, and what I, personally, have been doing here with my blog (at points). Calvin’s nose is very “waxy,” and thus it should be expected that given the various predispositions of people in general; that aspects of Calvin’s corpus will be developed over and against other aspects—and this shaped by various socio-cultural constraints present throughout Calvinism’s history and development.

Billings’ point is that to negate one aspect of Calvin from his other side is to misread and misunderstand Calvin’s full bodied theological thrust. Nevertheless, the reality is, is that Calvin has been read through various foci and lenses; the history bears this out. This takes us back to Richard Muller’s thesis that Calvin should not be seen as the touchstone of what it means to be a Calvinist. In some ways this is true, there is a difference between being Calvinian (which is what Billings is developing in his book—Calvin’s theology) and Calvinist; I would suggest though that a theologian could only ever be a Calvinist (Evangelical, Westminster, Spiritual Brethren, et al) if in fact she has a shred of Calvinian in her first. My point, Calvin’s nose is wax; and I would say that this is a good thing, precisely because we are as Reformed Christians, people who interpret and re-interpret Calvin and any teacher through Scripture. Those who appreciate Calvin, and try to appropriate him constructively through Scripture; will almost necessarily end up being a Calvinist (vs. Calvinian), and, of course, I would propose that the best of us will end up an Evangelical Calvinist! 😉

Why FreeWill Theism and Arminians’ ‘Choice’ is Theologically Aloof, pace Billings

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I haven’t addressed (for some time) some of the very things that originally gave this blog inception in the first place; i.e. things related to Calvinism and Arminianism. One of the more frequent points of departure between the two camps is the question about freedom of choice in regards to salvation. Arminians argue that we have free will, albeit aided by prevenient grace, and thus have the capacity to choose or reject God’s free offer of salvation. The Reformed, or Calvinists, believe that man’s ‘will is in bondage’ to itself; and thus the only choice man will make is for himself. Further, Calvinists argue that salvation must be all of God and all of grace, or man has room to boast that he had a part in his salvation; etc. These are some of the basics that keep the continued debate going (as an Evangelical Calvinist I have a unique way to side-step this whole apparent dilemma–fodder for another post). I, in principle, side with the Reformed (of course, since I am Reformed … and this is one of the things that makes me Reformed). J. Todd Billings sketches the Reformed position, and in the process critiques the Arminian position that shows why it is untenable, theologically.

[B]ut how can we receive or even have faith unless we are free to do so on our own? This frequent question assumes that true humanity is humanity autonomous from God rather than united to God. The Reformation doctrine of the bondage of the will to sin asserts that, apart from the Spirit’s regeneration, the fallen will is unable to do any good that could contribute to salvation. No part of the fallen human being is untainted by sin such that it could take the first step toward God—that is what total (extensive) depravity is. But this claim is not a new speculation born out of the Reformation. It is simply the consequence of a theology of salvation and communion that John’s Gospel and Paul’s letters are well aware of: in the words of Christ, “apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5).

One faces a similar issue in interpreting Paul’s imperatives, which, if taken out of context, may appear to make divine and human agency partitive and competitive: “Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were marked with a seal for the day of redemption” (Eph. 4:30). Is Paul postulating an autonomous way of speaking about the Christian will, such that Christians “grieve” God unless they obey him from an autonomous space? No. Once again, this is part of Paul’s eschatological way of speaking. “Do not grieve the Holy Spirit,” like “put on the Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom. 13:14), is an imperative to live into the God-given identity that Christians have already received in Christ. For example, in Ephesians, the neighbor-love imperatives of 4:25 through 5:1 are rooted in the indicative of union in Christ: “for we are members of one another” (4:25). Ephesians does not exhort us to make ourselves members of Christ’s body; rather, being a member of Christ’s body is the accomplished fact that leads to the exhortation to speak only what is “useful for building up,” avoiding the evil talk and bitterness that would “grieve the Holy Spirt” (4:29-30). Similarly, Paul roots the imperative of Romans 13:14 in the indicative of union with Christ, which is prominent in the book of Romans. Only by removing such imperatives from the eschatological “now” but “not yet” that conditions Paul’s theology of union with Christ can one use such passages to support the notion that Christian action has a space that is autonomous from the Spirit’s work. Why is it impossible for the fallen human to take the first step toward God? Because it would be a contradiction in terms, both scripturally and logically, when the scriptural framework outlined above is owned. To be human is to be in communion with God. Thus, it is impossible to act “in oneself” in taking a step toward God, because acting “in oneself” is part of the very definition of sin—the corollary to salvation as communion.

If we are to move the implications of this position to a post-Reformation era, we can see how it differs from a classic Arminian position. On the one hand, unlike Pelagius, Arminians affirm that fallen humans cannot choose God on their own. Yet, in contrast to the Reformed explanation, the Spirit’s prevenient grace lifts the sinner to a state of equilibrium in which the sinner can either choose or reject God’s gospel. But this explanation is impossible without assuming that true humanity is autonomous from God rather than in divinely enabled communion with God. Why? Because if one chooses God in that moment of equilibrium, the decisive movement toward God was empowered “by oneself,” rather than effected “by the Spirit.”

Yet Arminians could object that their view of prevenient grace affirms divine initiative and communion with God the Spirit in the moment of decision. That is true, in a certain sense. But Arminians don’t confess that divinely enabled communion goes “all the way down,” so to speak. There is divine initiative not just at the conception of Christ in Mary but throughout the incarnation. We do not abide in Christ the Vine at the beginning, only to be replanted after Christ has given us new life. No. We abide in Christ “all the way down.” Apart from this abiding, John says, we can do nothing. The Arminian denial of the effectual or causal dimension of the Spirit’s work occurs to preserve a certain type of autonomous space for the will. But if sin is acting “in ourselves” and obedience is acting in communion with God, then it is simply impossible to move toward God by acting “in ourselves.” Only by the Spirit’s effectual work can one move toward communion with God. Or, stated differently, only by communion with God can we move toward communion with God. That’s what the Reformed teaching of the bondage of the will affirms. —J. Todd Billings, Union With Christ: Reframing Theology and Ministry for the Church, 47-9

Still here 😉 ? With the obvious popularity of Arminian Evangelical Roger Olson, and others; it is apparent that Arminian Freewillism is popular amongst all sorts of Evangelical Christians (e.g. not just those who are self consciously Arminian in theology, like Olson). I think Billings throws down the Reformed gauntlet, and I am unaware of how what Billings has written can be defeated by an Arminian response. If you know of one, let me know; won’t you?

Billings Defends The Reformed Tradition on an Exalted Humanity

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In keeping with my work on the ‘Vicarious Humanity of Christ,’ in particular within Reformed theology—but also reaching back into PaleoChristianity—J. Todd Billings provides a great synopsis and call for word of caution relative to how Reformed theology has been so often caricatured. How many times have you said, or how many times have you heard others say that Calvinism presents us with a view of humanity that is hard, rigid, deterministic; and really with a view wherein there remains no longer a place for real humanity to be real humanity? Usually the premise behind this musing is that the definitive piece that defines what real humanity is, is the component of ‘free-will’. The conjecture is that if someone doesn’t have Libertarian deliberative individualistic free-will; then this demands that any such view (that articulates anything less) provides us with a sub-human view of humanity in general. This is the kind of stuff that J. Todd Billings seeks to correct (in the section that he is working through in his book) in the following quote:

Contrary to the frequent caricatures of Reformed theology in which God is seen as diametrically opposed to humanity, Calvin and the mainstream Reformed tradition follow this Augustinian line of thought in claiming that true humanity is humanity in communion with God. Therefore, as a consequence of the example from Augustine, emphasizing divine agency does not mean diminishing or demeaning the human. Saying that redemption is 100 percent empowered by God does not mean that humanity is belittled to nothingness. No. Instead, full deity and full humanity belong together in communion. Thus an action performed “by the Spirit” is an activation of our human faculties, not a diminishment of them. [J. Todd Billings, Union With Christ: Reframing Theology and Ministry for the Church, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2011), 43]

Do you still think that the Reformed tradition belittles humanity? In what sense? The obvious premise that the above flows from is one that the Scotist thesis (which Calvin was, ‘Scotist’) has articulated; viz. that the ‘purpose’ of creation, and humanity has always been to be in union and thus communion with God. And the purpose of the Father’s love has always already been for his Son and consummated by the Spirit. We participate and find our bearing for who we were created to be, in and only through the recreated humanity of the Son. If we are going to be truly human, then we must be inside the purposes of God for his creation. If the purposes of God for creation are only realized in the Son’s humanity for us; then we must be participants in the Son’s humanity if we are truly going to operate at a maximal human level. This seems to be an implication and exposition of what Billings is getting at in his opening statement (of which he will be developing as I read on) above.

Union with Christ: Reframing Theology and Ministry for the Church

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To my surprise, I just received a message from J. Todd Billings at my Facebook account (we are friends on FB 🙂 ). He is Associate Professor of Reformed Theology at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan. And his area of passion has to do with Union With Christ theology (or the Apostle Paul’s “in Christ” theology). Billings is a historical theologian, and a Calvin scholar. He has another book (which I am still supposed to do a review for here at the blog, since Oxford University Press kindly set me a review copy quite some time ago), which is his published ThD dissertation from Harvard Divinity entitled:Calvin, Participation, and the Gift: The Activity of Believers in Union with Christ. This book is outstanding, I will hopefully be able to put up a review of it within a weeks time here at the blog. But what Todd was alerting me to, and what I primarily want to feature through this post; is his newest book entitled: Union With Christ: Reframing Theology and Ministry for the Church. Lord willing I will be receiving a review copy of this book too; at which point I will promptly read, and provide a report to you all about its contents. Until that time, Todd pointed me to four promo videos that he did for his publisher (Baker Publishing); which provide a great sketch of what the book is about, and how Todd fleshes out this most awesome theme, Union With Christ. The first time I ever heard this phrase, ‘union with Christ’, was in seminary from my prof and mentor, Dr. Ron Frost (another historical theology guy, his guy was/is Sibbes). I had already been immersed in this concept for years (simply because I had been reading and memorizing so much scripture); but it was the introduction to this phraseology that revolutionized the way that I thought about intimacy with Jesus, and it drew me into the evocative reality of Paul’s mystical marriage language (cf. Eph. 5) like never before. Anyway, below are the four videos from Dr. J. Todd Billings on his new book “Union With Christ” (you can’t go wrong with a title like that!). Once I get the book I will be quoting from it as I read it, and finally writing a short review of it for the blog. Stay tuned. And thank you Todd Billings for alerting me and us to your most wonderful new title.

ht: J. Todd Billings

An Approach to Biblical Interpretation, ‘Evangelical Calvinist style’

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Evangelical Calvinists, in general, approach their method of biblical interpretation through a Calvinian ‘confessional’ style versus a Medieval-post Reformed orthodox ‘scholastic’ style. Let me explain, a bit, what the differences are between the two approaches (very brief sketches).

Medieval scholasticism was a methodology that someone like Thomas Aquinas (amongst others) made very popular in the 13th century. It entailed a very fine logical-deductive approach to things so that coherence becomes the hallmark. In other words, in this approach all of the rough edges of a particular theological concept, and/or an interpretation of a specific pericope (or passage-paragraph) of Scripture were varnished to a point that all of the gaps of thought were filled in (in other words, speculation became a primary mechanism for filling in the gaps). Here is how Steven Ozment describes this style of “dialectic” interpretation:

In its fully developed form it proceeded from questions (quaestio), to the views pro (videtur quod) and con (sed contra) of traditional authorities on a particular subject, to the author’s own conclusion (responsio). Because they subjected the articles of faith to tight logical analysis, . . . (Ozment, “The Age of Reform,” 6)

This methodology was re-appropriated by the latter reformers (i.e. post Calvin, etc.) into what Richard Muller calls the locus methodology (this also coincides with Agricola and Ramist). In brief, the method seeks to provide precision interpretation; at the point of erring on the side of making interpretive decisions for the sake of satisfying the methodology over and against fidelity to the material communicated in the Text itself.

In contrast to this approach Evangelical Calvinism is much happier with the method seen over and again in Calvin’s Institute of the Christian Religion. His approach is to stay faithful to the text in a way that honors the rough spots and tensions that the text presents (e.g. to avoid speculation). He sought, and Evangelical Calvinists seek to emulate, to simply state what Scriptures states (meaning to follow the contours of scripture wherever it leads, and stops) without also feeling the need to flatten out the text to satisfy the rigors demanded by a pre-commitment to a logical, tight, deductive methodology that the scholastic approach calls for. Here is how J. Todd Billings explains Calvin’s approach:

With this approach, Calvin’s theology in the Institutes is a ‘system’ of theology in a very particular sense. It is not a deductive theory of dogma, where one argues from a centre like ‘predestination’ or even ‘union with Christ’, with a particular dogma functioning as ‘first principles’. On the one hand, Calvin’s loci in the Institutes are drawn from his exegetical work. On the other hand, Calvin does seek to exposit the deep coherence among the loci, a coherence with a Pauline sharpness. But establishing this coherence does not give his theology a deductive logic, particularly on points like predestination, in which his argument is based directly upon his reading of scripture and tradition, tempered only by his doctrine of accommodation that functions in a roughly apophatic way. While Calvin’s loci method is distinctively Reformed in its practice of adopting a Pauline ordo from Romans, it also has continuity with the original construction of topics in Lombard’s twelfth-century Sententia, as Muller has pointed out. It is a system of ‘common places’ relevant to the reading of scripture, holding together the varied doctrinal content of scripture in a distinctively Pauline fashion. (J. Todd Billings, “Calvin, Participation, and the Gift,” 78-9)

This roughly captures an ‘EC’ style and approach to biblical interpretation.

Picking At Calvin’s Wax Nose: Forensic or Union, an Impasse

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Often here at The Evangelical Calvinist I refer to the language of union with Christ, and Calvin’s “mystical union” (unio mystica). This is the stuff that makes ‘EC’ go round; that is pressing this Pauline idea of ‘in Christ’ theology as the key of our soteriological framework. In line with Thomas Torrance, and through his development of Scottish Theology, in his book “Scottish Theology;” I often pick up on the way this was developed, contra the Westminster development of Calvin that takes hold of Calvin’s theology of the Law, and its relation to understanding salvation. J. Todd Billings says that either one of these streams misses Calvin’s theology as a whole, and thus distorts Calvin if we try to emphasize either his relational over and against his juridical (legal), or vice versa. Billings writes:

[T]here is an ‘Anti-Legal School’ in Calvin scholarship that tends to emphasize Calvin’s distance from scholasticism, his fluidity in the use of image and metaphor, and his rich Trinitarian theology. Language about forensic transaction is generally treated with suspicion, in preference for the more organic images of transformation. In reaction to this school, the ‘legal’ aspects of Calvin’s thought tend to be emphasized by others, particularly his distinctively Reformed concerns for the doctrines of justification and imputation. Accounts of one school of thought tend to either ignore or deny the other side. . . . I will argue that the place of the human is illuminated in Calvin’s theology of participation by seeing a Trinitarian account of the duplex gratia as the framework for participation. For Calvin, participation in Christ must emphasize the legal and the transformative language in the ‘double grace’ of justification and sanctification. In prayer, believers act in ascetic struggle to pray rightly, yet the foundation for their active struggle is a recognition of God’s free pardon. Likewise, in the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, believers act in response to God’s justifying act in a way that incorporates them into a Trinitarian soteriology: the Father is revealed as gracious and generous through his free pardon of believers in their union with Christ; this union also involves the activation of believers by the Spirit—toward a life of piety and love, requiring ascetic effort and activity. Believers are made active in the ecclesial and social community. A participatory, Trinitarian account of the duplex gratia plays an important role in Calvin’s theological account of the sacraments. ‘Participation’ in baptism is so real that it is almost biological. Celebrating the Lord’s Supper involves participating in Christ’s ascension to heaven to feed on his life giving flsh and blood. Calvin’s theology of prayer and the sacraments is a theology that is theocentric, but also participatory, activating believers in love of God and neighbour as the body of Christ. [J. Todd Billings, Calvin, Participation, and the Gift: The Activity of Believers in Union with Christ, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 105-06]

This serves instructive for noting a certain reality; one that Billings is not intending to address here, but one that I believe is constructively available through the present thesis that Billings will proceed to develop throughout the rest of his chapter. What I want to highlight is the fact that both lines of thought—union with Christ/relational and forensic—are present in Calvin. Consequently, all things being equal, both strands can be found developed and emphasized within the tradition that bears Calvin’s name. This is precisely what we seek to elucidate and alert folks to with our forthcoming book on Evangelical Calvinism, and what I, personally, have been doing here with my blog (at points). Calvin’s nose is very “waxy,” and thus it should be expected that given the various predispositions of people in general; that aspects of Calvin’s corpus will be developed over and against other aspects—and this shaped by various socio-cultural constraints present throughout Calvinism’s history and development.

Billings’ point is that to negate one aspect of Calvin from his other side is to misread and misunderstand Calvin’s full bodied theological thrust. Nevertheless, the reality is, is that Calvin has been read through various foci and lenses; the history bears this out. This takes us back to Richard Muller’s thesis that Calvin should not be seen as the touchstone of what it means to be a Calvinist. In some ways this is true, there is a difference between being Calvinian (which is what Billings is developing in his book—Calvin’s theology) and Calvinist; I would suggest though that a theologian could only ever be a Calvinist (Evangelical, Westminster, Spiritual Brethren, et al) if in fact she has a shred of Calvinian in her first. My point, Calvin’s nose is wax; and I would say that this is a good thing, precisely because we are as Reformed Christians, people who interpret and re-interpret Calvin and any teacher through Scripture. Those who appreciate Calvin, and try to appropriate him constructively through Scripture; will almost necessarily end up being a Calvinist (vs. Calvinian), and, of course, I would propose that the best of us will end up an Evangelical Calvinist! 😉

Picking at Calvin's Wax Nose: Union or Forensic? An Impasse . . .

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Often here at The Evangelical Calvinist I refer to the language of union with Christ, and Calvin’s “mystical union” (unio mystica). This is the stuff that makes ‘EC’ go round; that is pressing this Pauline idea of ‘in Christ’ theology as the key of our soteriological framework. In line with Thomas Torrance, and through his development of Scottish Theology, in his book “Scottish Theology;” I often pick up on the way this was developed, contra the Westminster development of Calvin that takes hold of Calvin’s theology of the Law, and its relation to understanding salvation. J. Todd Billings says that either one of these streams misses Calvin’s theology as a whole, and thus distorts Calvin if we try to emphasize either his relational over and against his juridical (legal), or vice versa. Billings writes:

[T]here is an ‘Anti-Legal School’ in Calvin scholarship that tends to emphasize Calvin’s distance from scholasticism, his fluidity in the use of image and metaphor, and his rich Trinitarian theology. Language about forensic transaction is generally treated with suspicion, in preference for the more organic images of transformation. In reaction to this school, the ‘legal’ aspects of Calvin’s thought tend to be emphasized by others, particularly his distinctively Reformed concerns for the doctrines of justification and imputation. Accounts of one school of thought tend to either ignore or deny the other side. . . . I will argue that the place of the human is illuminated in Calvin’s theology of participation by seeing a Trinitarian account of the duplex gratia as the framework for participation. For Calvin, participation in Christ must emphasize the legal and the transformative language in the ‘double grace’ of justification and sanctification. In prayer, believers act in ascetic struggle to pray rightly, yet the foundation for their active struggle is a recognition of God’s free pardon. Likewise, in the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, believers act in response to God’s justifying act in a way that incorporates them into a Trinitarian soteriology: the Father is revealed as gracious and generous through his free pardon of believers in their union with Christ; this union also involves the activation of believers by the Spirit—toward a life of piety and love, requiring ascetic effort and activity. Believers are made active in the ecclesial and social community. A participatory, Trinitarian account of the duplex gratia plays an important role in Calvin’s theological account of the sacraments. ‘Participation’ in baptism is so real that it is almost biological. Celebrating the Lord’s Supper involves participating in Christ’s ascension to heaven to feed on his life giving flsh and blood. Calvin’s theology of prayer and the sacraments is a theology that is theocentric, but also participatory, activating believers in love of God and neighbour as the body of Christ. [J. Todd Billings, Calvin, Participation, and the Gift: The Activity of Believers in Union with Christ, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 105-06]

This serves instructive for noting a certain reality; one that Billings is not intending to address here, but one that I believe is constructively available through the present thesis that Billings will proceed to develop throughout the rest of his chapter. What I want to highlight is the fact that both lines of thought—union with Christ/relational and forensic—are present in Calvin. Consequently, all things being equal, both strands can be found developed and emphasized within the tradition that bears Calvin’s name. This is precisely what we seek to elucidate and alert folks to with our forthcoming book on Evangelical Calvinism, and what I, personally, have been doing here with my blog (at points). Calvin’s nose is very “waxy,” and thus it should be expected that given the various predispositions of people in general; that aspects of Calvin’s corpus will be developed over and against other aspects—and this shaped by various socio-cultural constraints present throughout Calvinism’s history and development.

Billings’ point is that to negate one aspect of Calvin from his other side is to misread and misunderstand Calvin’s full bodied theological thrust. Nevertheless, the reality is, is that Calvin has been read through various foci and lenses; the history bears this out. This takes us back to Richard Muller’s thesis that Calvin should not be seen as the touchstone of what it means to be a Calvinist. In some ways this is true, there is a difference between being Calvinian (which is what Billings is developing in his book—Calvin’s theology) and Calvinist; I would suggest though that a theologian could only ever be a Calvinist (Evangelical, Westminster, Spiritual Brethren, et al) if in fact she has a shred of Calvinian in her first. My point, Calvin’s nose is wax; and I would say that this is a good thing, precisely because we are as Reformed Christians, people who interpret and re-interpret Calvin and any teacher through Scripture. Those who appreciate Calvin, and try to appropriate him constructively through Scripture; will almost necessarily end up being a Calvinist (vs. Calvinian), and, of course, I would propose that the best of us will end up an Evangelical Calvinist! 😉

An Approach to Biblical Interpretation, 'EC' Style

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Evangelical Calvinists, in general, approach their method of biblical interpretation through a Calvinian ‘confessional’ style versus a Medieval-post Reformed orthodox ‘scholastic’ style. Let me explain, a bit, what the differences are between the two approaches (very brief sketches).

Medieval scholasticism was a methodology that someone like Thomas Aquinas (amongst others) made very popular in the 13th century. It entailed a very fine logical-deductive approach to things so that coherence becomes the hallmark. In other words, in this approach all of the rough edges of a particular theological concept, and/or an interpretation of a specific pericope (or passage-paragraph) of Scripture were varnished to a point that all of the gaps of thought were filled in (in other words, speculation became a primary mechanism for filling in the gaps). Here is how Steven Ozment describes this style of “dialectic” interpretation:

In its fully developed form it proceeded from questions (quaestio), to the views pro (videtur quod) and con (sed contra) of traditional authorities on a particular subject, to the author’s own conclusion (responsio). Because they subjected the articles of faith to tight logical analysis, . . . (Ozment, “The Age of Reform,” 6)

This methodology was re-appropriated by the latter reformers (i.e. post Calvin, etc.) into what Richard Muller calls the locus methodology (this also coincides with Agricola and Ramist). In brief, the method seeks to provide precision interpretation; at the point of erring on the side of making interpretive decisions for the sake of satisfying the methodology over and against fidelity to the material communicated in the Text itself.

In contrast to this approach Evangelical Calvinism is much happier with the method seen over and again in Calvin’s Institute of the Christian Religion. His approach is to stay faithful to the text in a way that honors the rough spots and tensions that the text presents (e.g. to avoid speculation). He sought, and Evangelical Calvinists seek to emulate, to simply state what Scriptures states (meaning to follow the contours of scripture wherever it leads, and stops) without also feeling the need to flatten out the text to satisfy the rigors demanded by a pre-commitment to a logical, tight, deductive methodology that the scholastic approach calls for. Here is how J. Todd Billings explains Calvin’s approach:

With this approach, Calvin’s theology in the Institutes is a ‘system’ of theology in a very particular sense. It is not a deductive theory of dogma, where one argues from a centre like ‘predestination’ or even ‘union with Christ’, with a particular dogma functioning as ‘first principles’. On the one hand, Calvin’s loci in the Institutes are drawn from his exegetical work. On the other hand, Calvin does seek to exposit the deep coherence among the loci, a coherence with a Pauline sharpness. But establishing this coherence does not give his theology a deductive logic, particularly on points like predestination, in which his argument is based directly upon his reading of scripture and tradition, tempered only by his doctrine of accommodation that functions in a roughly apophatic way. While Calvin’s loci method is distinctively Reformed in its practice of adopting a Pauline ordo from Romans, it also has continuity with the original construction of topics in Lombard’s twelfth-century Sententia, as Muller has pointed out. It is a system of ‘common places’ relevant to the reading of scripture, holding together the varied doctrinal content of scripture in a distinctively Pauline fashion. (J. Todd Billings, “Calvin, Participation, and the Gift,” 78-9)

This roughly captures an ‘EC’ style and approach to biblical interpretation.