Category Archives: John Webster

Finding Ourselves in Scripture’s Reality: With Reference to Dietrich

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John Webster is commenting on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s understanding of our relation to Scripture. It’s not as if we give scripture its ground through imbuing it with our exegetical prowess; no, it’s that our ground is given footing as we find ourselves related to God in Christ through the Scripture’s story. This fits with the point that Webster is driving at, over-all, throughout his little book, that Scripture should be seen as an aspect of soteriology—sanctification in particular. And that Scripture is a part of God’s triune communicative act, ‘for us’; caught up in His Self-revelation itself. In other words, for Webster, as for Bonhoeffer (per Webster), Scripture shouldn’t be framed as a component of our epistemological foundation (wherein we put Scripture in its place, in effect), but Scripture is a mode of God’s gracious speech that acts upon us by the Spirit. And it is through this divine speech, that is grace, that we find ourselves—outside ourselves—in Christ, and thus in the Story of Scripture. This should have the effect of placing us under Scripture (which Luther would call ministerial) versus over Scripture (magisterial)—to simplify. Here’s the quote (a little introduction by Webster, and then a full quote by Bonhoeffer [also, notice the idea of vicariousness that Bonhoeffer appeals to as well]):

More than anything else, it is listening or attention which is most important to Bonhoeffer, precisely because the self is not grounded in its own disposing of itself in the world, but grounded in the Word of Christ. Reading the Bible, as Bonhoeffer puts it in Life Together, is a matter of finding ourselves extra nos in the biblical history:

We are uprooted from our own existence and are taken back to the holy history of God on earth. There God has dealt with us, with our needs and our sins, by means of the divine wrath and grace. What is important is not that God is a spectator and participant in our life today, but that we are attentive listeners and participants in God’s action in the sacred story, the story of Christ on earth. God is with us today only as long as we are there.

Our salvation is ‘from outside ourselves’ (extra nos). I find salvation, not in my own life story, but only in the story of Jesus Christ . . . What we call our life, our troubles, and our guilt is by no means the whole of reality; our life, our need, our guilt, and our deliverance are there in the Scriptures.[1]

[1] John Webster, Holy Scripture, 83 citing Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 62.

*A post originally written in 2011.

On Reading Scripture as a Foreigner

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Reading Holy Scripture is an exceedingly dialogical event. That is to say, reading Scripture takes place in the relationship that co-inheres between the divinity and humanity of Jesus Christ for us; it is a con-versational happenstance that reposes in the context of God’s eternal and triune life. This entails that as the Christian reads the Bible they are engaging in an organic and inter-personal contact with the very author of said readings. As Jesus said: He would not leave us as orphans, but send us the Holy Spirit; the Comforter, the come-along-sider who will bring us into all truth; who will magnify the words of Jesus, as those are encountered afresh anew in the canonical spectacles of Holy Writ—in the prosopon (face) of Jesus Christ.

What I am intending to impress in this writing is the fact that reading Holy Scripture involves an exercise that comes from outside of us; that unilaterally encounters and confronts us; that brings us into the Heavenly fellowship of the Son of the Father by the Holy Spirit. It is an event, reading and living Scripture that is, that really only works as we read it within a confessional and relational frame wherein, we are given new life, from the vicarious life of God for us in Jesus Christ. This kicks against reading Scripture as an atomistic, scientific, moribund textbook that only the scholars, the intelligentsia can access. A genuinely Christian reading of Holy Scripture takes the Christian reader from the far country of this world, and places them into the home country of the new creation; and it is within this new creation that the adopted child of God comes to see this world for what it is—and more importantly, to see who in fact God is as disclosed and attested to in Scripture.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer offers the following insights as a way to think about the aforementioned further:

We are uprooted from our own existence and are taken back to the holy history of God on earth. There God has dealt with us, with our needs and our sins, by means of the divine wrath and grace. What is important is not that God is a spectator and participant in our life today, but that we are attentive listeners and participants in God’s action in the sacred story, the story of Christ on earth. God is with us today only as long as we are there.[1]

Our salvation is ‘from outside ourselves’ (extra nos). I find salvation, not in my life story, but only in the story of Jesus Christ . . . What we call our life, our troubles, and our guilt is by no means the whole of reality; our life, our need, our guilt, and our deliverance are there in the Scriptures.[2]

And more, on the necessary strangeness vis-Ă -vis this world relative to the new reality of the new creation encountered in the fertile and fresh landscape of the Bible:

Does this perspective somehow make it understandable to you that I do not want to give up the Bible as this strange Word of God at any point, that I intend with all my powers to ask what God wants to say to us here? Any other place outside the Bible has become too uncertain for me. I fear that I will only encounter some divine double of myself there. Does this somehow help you to understand why I am prepared for a sacrificium intellectus—just in these matters, and only in these matters, with respect to the one, true God? And who does not bring to some passages his sacrifice of the intellect, in the confession that he does not yet understand this or that passage in Scripture, but is certain that even they will be revealed one day as God’s own Word! I would rather make that confession than try to say according to my own opinion: this is divine, that is human.[3]

For Bonhoeffer, because of the location that the reading of Holy Scripture places him within, in the parousia (presence) of God, there comes a point, within this strange landscape, where regular human intellection loses all sense of gravity. But this is the miracle of the whole thing: Scripture isn’t predicated by the history of its own embeddedness within history; Scripture is predicated as the Holy and ordained place of God’s presence in the sense that its res (reality) is grounded in the free and gracious pre-destination of God to be for all of humanity in Jesus Christ, and all that entails (inclusive of the whole sweep of heilsgeschichte ‘redemptive-history’ as deposited in Holy Scripture). It is within this ‘strange Word of God’ that Bonhoeffer finds rest and relief in the new heavens and earth, as those graciously intrude upon the parameters set by this current world system. For Bonhoeffer, and I would suggest that we follow his lead, there is something about the Bible that transcends a facile and flat reading that might allow it to be subject to the whims and wits that a purported pure critical reading that the book of an abstract nature supposedly has the capacity to illumine (think higher critical readings of Scripture). These things are so, for Bonhoeffer, because the Bible’s antecedent reality is ultimately of an otherworldly reality; namely the triune life of God elect for the world in the humanity of Jesus Christ. That is to say, that Holy Scripture has an ontology; and it isn’t us.

[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, cited by John Webster, Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 2003), 83.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid., 85.

The Calvin Fund for Evangelical Calvinists: On Scripture as Prolegomena

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I have been asked many many times over the years how Evangelical Calvinism is different than classical Calvinism (i.e., Federal theology, 5-point Calvinism etc.). There are a few ways to try and answer that; but an important way is to signal the type of theological methodology we follow (contra the competing traditions out there). Us, Athanasian Reformed look directly to Calvin—unlike the Post Reformed orthodox, ironically—in order to distill the various themes that help fund what we are attempting with this project.

As Providence would have it (Christ conditioned Providence, that is), I am rereading John Webster’s little book (one of my faves) Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch. In the following he sketches the spirit of Calvin’s theologizing. In his sketching what ends up being revealed, to an extent, is what characterizes the way us Evangelical Calvinists intend to operate. Webster writes:

Calvin is, of course, a scriptural rather than a speculative or systematic theologian, fulfilling his office as doctor of the church primarily through his biblical lectures, commentaries and sermons. The Institutes is no exception, for its purpose is, as Calvin puts it in 1559, ‘to prepare and instruct candidates in sacred theology for the reading of the divine Word, in order that they may be able both to have easy access to it and to advance in it without stumbling’. But the principles which underlie Calvin’s intense engagement with Scripture are distinctly theological: Scripture is the lode-star of his work because of what he sees as its place in the divine work of salvation, above all, its functions of announcing the gospel, reproving idolatry and fostering true piety. And there is a direct consequence here for the reading of Scripture: what is required of the reader is not simply intellectual skill, but above all a certain brokenness, from which alone truly attentive reading can follow.[1]

So, us Evangelical Calvinists are, in fact, rather Calvinian (versus, Calvinist) when it comes to our ressourcement of Calvin’s teaching; we do so constructively. Calvin, surely, was a product of his time; but he was also trailblazer, in the sense that he was much more Christ concentrated in his approach than many of his contemporaries. Like Calvin, Evangelical Calvinists are radically committed to the Protestant ‘Scripture Principle,’ and a radical Theology of the Word, to boot. Like Calvin, we reject the “schoolmen’s” deployment of scholastic methodology.[2] We aren’t prone to Lombard’s Sentence-like theology. We think Thomas Aquinas was a deeply entrenched Roman Catholic with very little to nothing to glean from (the late Webster disagrees with us there). We aren’t fans of applying Aristotelian categories to the exegesis of Holy Scripture. And we, like Calvin, reject the intellectualist anthropology that funds the whole superstructure of Latin theology; whether in its Catholic or Protestant iterations.

Webster, rightly leaves off with a final note, with reference to Calvin: “what is required of the reader is not simply intellectual skill, but above all a certain brokenness, from which alone truly attentive reading can follow.” As Webster underscores, Calvin had a theology of the cross funding his approach to Scripture. Calvin understood that the true theologian must be one who is fully dependent on listening to the Redeemer’s voice; that is, if an intimate knowledge of God was ever going to obtain.

[1] John Webster, Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 2003), 74.

[2] To be sure: Calvin was still the son of late medieval categories, so those are apparent in his personal theological grammar. Yet again, this is what makes Calvin so special for his time: i.e., he wasn’t a slave to his own period—I’d argue because he was first and foremost a slave of Christ, to the point that this affected his theological prolegomenon in more “relational” or “personalist” ways.

On Christian Dogmatics versus evangelical-Reformed Apologetical Theology

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… dogmatics offers a means of producing a portrait of the economy of grace, and of humankind and its activities in that economy, free from anxieties about foundations and therefore at liberty to devote itself to the descriptive task with Christian alertness, charity and joy.[1]

Christian Dogmatics — the church’s orderly understanding of scripture and articulation of doctrine in the light of Christ and their coherence in him.[2]

If the Church is going to do Church theology, what both Webster and Torrance, respectively, are signaling above, is of the upmost importance to grasp. When Christians do theology, by definition, we aren’t first doing apologetics. That is to say, the Christian, as a disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ, is already assured of their Master’s reality; they aren’t trying to prove His existence and reality prior to speaking about Him. Indeed, the Christian, as Torrance rightly presses, is doing their theological work in ‘light of Christ.’

Too often in evangelical theology (inclusive of Post Reformed orthodox theology) apologetics becomes normative for the rest of the theological task. Following someone like Thomas Aquinas in the Prima Pars of his Summa Theologiae, evangelicals/Reformed get caught in the snare of reassuring their readers that God’s existence is a reality, and that His reality is given credence by the philosophical prolix they offer up through their respective wits and machinations. But as Webster rightly underscores this creates an anxiety, indeed it starts with an anxiety, that ostensibly can only be laid to rest after the respective theologian assuages it with their virtuoso capacity to essentially “speak God” for God; that is before Deus dixit, ‘God has spoken’ for Himself in His living Logos for the world, Jesus Christ.

We are to come boldly to the throne of God’s grace in time of need; this is the genuine Christian way of doing theology. One of moment-by-moment dependence on the Word of God. Waiting expectantly for God to speak, afresh anew, through the vibrant and glorified vocal cords of the risen Christ; the Father’s Son seated next to Him at His Right Hand by the Holy Spirit. The Christian theologian is in a constant dialogue with the living and triune God. They are praying without ceasing, as they encounter the risen and ascended Christ throughout the pages of canonical Scripture. The Christian’s existence, in this way, is one where they are “at liberty to devote itself to the descriptive task with Christian alertness, charity and joy.” Most evangelical theology, whether it be of the scholastic or analytic sort is not done within this type of organic frame of con-versation between God and her people in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. As such there is a failure to make genuine contact with the center of God’s life for the world; and thus, it becomes impossible to have a genuine knowledge of the living God as we don’t go directly to His exegesis for us in the bosom of the Father (cf. Jn 1.18).

Let’s be lively Christians rather than pedantic ones caught up in the web of our own abstract wits. Let’s be concrete theologians who do theology from the wood of the crucified and risen and ascended and coming, Jesus Christ. There is wisdom in this way; that is the way of the cross. There is God’s wisdom in this way, even if others consider this way foolish and weak. Be a theologian of the cross where we are nourished by the broken body and shed blood of Jesus Christ, rather than by empty platitudes by those genuflecting on Mt. Olympus to a god of actus purus (‘pure being’).

[1] John Webster, Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 2003).

[2] Thomas F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ.

The Church as Triune Event and not Religious Phenomena

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The Church. The Church’s reality is invisible, and only visible to those with eyes to see; with eyes offered by the faith of Christ. The Church doesn’t have a physical address, per se; it can’t be found at 777 Vatican Way or something. The Church’s only physical address is found in the ground of the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ; but we currently see Him, not with eyes of flesh, but with eyes of faith (just as sure as we love Him, even though we don’t currently “see” Him). The Church is not a result of so-called religious phenomena, but instead its reality comes to it, afresh anew, by its in-breaking reality in Jesus Christ in the triune life. This, among other things, means that purely sociological analysis of the Church is non-starting. The Church has no horizontal reality without first gaining reality from its vertical touchstone in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is not a valent to be handled and touched in the way that the Elks Club can be; not in the way that majestic cathedrals can be; not in the way that beer-stained pubs can be. Jesus Christ, clearly, is the Lamb of God slain before the foundations of the world; viz., clearly for those with eyes of faith. Indeed, the Church is as concrete and blood-saturated as the veins of Immanuel; the Church has concrete extension into the world, and into the lives of bruised reeds, insofar that God freely and graciously elected our humanity to be His in Jesus Christ. Even so, this is not a matter of profane cogitation, but a sacrosanct reality that comes to us even if we don’t want to come to it.

John Webster, offers these words on the reality of the Church:

As the hearing church, the Christian community is wholly referred to the Word of God by which it is established. The church’s being is characterised by externality: it is ‘ectopic’, because its ‘place’ is in the being and act of the creative and communicative God of the gospel. There is, therefore, a certain strangeness about the church as a form of human life. To live as part of the church is to live at a certain distance from other modes of human fellowship and action. Because it is the creature of the Word, the church is not simply an outgrowth of natural human sociality or religious common interest and fellow-feeling. Its fellowship is properly to be understood as common origination from and participation in the presence of the divine self-gift. And because of this, the church is not primarily a visible social quantity but the invisible new creation. Even in its visible social and historical extension, the church is the presence in history of the new humanity which can never be just one more order of human society. The church is what it is because of the word of the gospel, and so it is primarily spiritual event, and only secondarily visible natural history and structured form of common life. Negatively, this means that the church is ‘invisible’, that is, not simply identical with its tangible shape as a human social order. Positively, this means that the church has true form and visibility in so far as it receives the grace of God through the life-giving presence of Word and Spirit. Its visibility is therefore spiritual visibility.[1]

To be clear, Webster is not promoting a docetic notion of the Church; as if the Church is swallowed up by its divine ground in the triune life. But what he is emphasizing is that the Church herself is not to be understood as an end unto itself. What should be understood, is that the Church doesn’t gain its reality from a turn into herself. Just as the humanity of Jesus Christ is grounded from outside itself, in the person of the eternal Logos of God, so too, the Church has her ecstatic ground in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. This ought to keep the Church from thinking she has to do anything other than proclaim the Word of God who funds her. When the Church strays outside of her reality she attempts to create a reality based on her own immanent vision; or we might just speak more plainly: the Church, in this way, becomes an idol funded by its many idolaters.

There are many other implications we could tease out of Webster’s thoughts, but for space constraints the above should suffice.

[1] John Webster, Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 47-8.

John Webster on a Pre-modern/precritical Confessional Knowledge of God V a Modern/critical Naturalist Knowledge of God

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John Webster offers too good of a sketch on a theory of revelation for me to simply pass it by without sharing it for you (and I’ll be using it in my doctoral study as well—which my topic has changed already, I’ll share what it is in an addendum at the end of this post). He synopsizes what I have often been after in many of my posts on the same locus. Let’s read along with him, and then I’ll close with some concluding reflections (and that addendum).

The broadest outline of a diagnosis would be something like this: For a good deal of the history of Christian theology before the modern era, the concept of revelation (whether explicitly articulated or, more often, merely implied is usage and patterns of argument) has its place as a part of a larger framework of convictions about God and God’s relation to human persons. Although the concept is often associated with ideas of “veil-lifting,” it is primarily concerned not with the communication of esoteric information but with the disclosure by God of God’s character, purposes for, and requirements of humanity. So construed, the notion of revelation thus implies that knowledge of the being and ways of God is God’s own gift, not the fruit of human creativity or searching. Because it is revealed, knowledge of God is the gift of divine grace and participation in God’s self-knowledge. Further, in characterizing God as the giver of knowledge of God, the concept of revelation thereby also characterizes human persons as recipients (rather than producers) of such knowledge. Accordingly, revelation and faith are closely correlated: faith is the anthropological counterpart of revelation. “Faith” is here understood not as mental assent but as trustful, receptive disposition of the self toward the self-disclosure of an agent beyond the self. The loci of such self-disclosure are variously identified as, for example, inner illumination, Holy Scripture heard as God’s Word, or the authoritative tradition of church teaching. All such loci are, however, conceived as relative to God’s supreme self-disclosure in and as Jesus Christ, and to the activity of God the Holy Spirit in enabling perception of and response to God’s gracious gift of knowledge of God. Understood in this way, the concept of revelation, classically conceived, is more than an epistemological category, furnishing a foundation for subsequent Christian belief. Revelation does not just answer the question of how claims to knowledge of God can be authorized; rather, it is a consequence of prior convictions about the prevenience of God in all God’s relations with humanity.

With the rise of fundamental theology and philosophical prolegomena to theology in the early modern period, this coinherence of the conception of revelation with grace, Spirit, and faith began to disintegrate. The Enlightenment critique of revelation was prepared in some measure by Christian theology itself, when natural philosophy was granted the task of establishing on nontheological grounds the possibility and necessity of revelation. The effect of this development was to loosen the bonds which tie the concept of revelation to its home in the dogmatic structure of Christian theology or even to sever the bonds altogether. This happened as the notion of revelation was redeployed, being assigned a job in apologetics or foundations. This “shift from assumption to argument” is also associated in some measure with the rise of scholastic styles of theological systematization in both Protestant and Roman Catholic circles. More particularly, increasing reliance on Aristotelian methods of argumentation and the quasi-Cartesian search for indubitable certainty in theology did much to undermine the correlation of revelation and faith. In effect, revelation shifts from being an implication of Christian conviction to furnishing the grounds from which Christian conviction can be deduced.[1]

The difference as Webster slices it: premodern/precritical = confessional; modern (with certain scholastic incipient antecedents) = apologetical. I think this represents a nice concise synopsis of the general prolegomena present within the history vis-Ă -vis a theory of revelation. I will simply leave it for your edification.

 

Addendum: As I have consulted further with my doctoral guide I will be writing, most likely, on the theologies of Bruce McCormack juxtaposed with Eberhard Jüngel’s respective readings of Karl Barth’s Christology and the implications of that for Divine freedom in the trinitarian being. So, it will really be a post-Barthian endeavor, in fact. I have read in this area, as well, for many years. But I will have to bone up further on Jüngel, who I have read, but not fully like McCormack, and it has been some years since I broke a page on one of his books or essays. Anyway, this should be fun!

[1] John Webster, The Culture of Theology, edited by Ivor J. Davidson and Alden C. McCray (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2019), 119-20.

The Unprovable Faith Contra the Visible Religion

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Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. For by it the people of old received their commendation. By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible. -Hebrews 11:1-3 

For John Calvin biblical faith functions as knowledge of God. He develops this locus in his so-called duplex cognitio Dei (two-fold knowledge of God). Karl Barth and Thomas Torrance follow this notion of faith, respectively, in what can be called an analogia fidei, or analogy of faith. For Barth and Torrance this signifies the relationship that obtains between God and humanity in Jesus Christ. Christ comes, and by His Spirit anointed faith, He presents the only accurate way for a person to have knowledge of God. For Barth and Torrance, respectively, this is grounded in the bond of trust that the Son has always already had in the Father, and the trust that the Father has had in the Son by the Spirit. It is in this relationis (relation) of faith that as the person comes to participate in the life of God through the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ, that a person finally and truly comes to have a genuine knowledge of God. The key here is that this knowledge is the real deal, and not contingent upon anything or anyone else other than God. In this frame God reveals God, and that is the end of it.

John Webster, while not necessarily providing a full-throated explication of Calvin’s, Barth’s, or Torrance’s notion of faith, presents a development of faith that is in keeping with what we have been sketching thusly. He writes:

There’s no immediate vision; there’s no point, not even in faith itself, at which the barrier between us and God is dismantled and we are face to face with God. What there is now—all there is now—is hope, not sight.

Because of this, faith is contested. It’s contested by those who don’t share our faith, and we ourselves contest it. We often feel dismayed by the fact that what we have believed in is so frustratingly intangible, invisible, apparently so far out of our reach. So often it seems as if faith is hanging in mid-air, insecure, ungrounded, utterly perilous and exposed. Now, because faith it seems suspended in nothingness, we often try to replace it with something else. We look for tangible reassurances. Rather than hope, we want possession; rather than things glimpsed in the half-light of faith (1 Corinthians 13:12), we want something we can see clearly and unambiguously. And so we build up a great array of tangible substitutes for the God whom we encounter in faith. Sometimes we place a great deal of weight on arguments and ideas, looking to them to provide some sort of reliable, uncontested ground for faith. At other times, we look to experience of God; very often we’re tempted to think that experience will give us a sort of direct route to God which will shortcut all the ambiguities and hesitations of the life of faith.

Of course arguments and experiences have their place, but they are not gods. They may not substitute for the God who is known in faith. And the trouble with these tangible reassurances is that they threaten to do just that: They are a flight from faith. They seem, of course, to be quite the opposite—a way of confirming faith, a way of proving to ourselves that what we trust in faith really is real and trustworthy. But in fact they’re a spurning of God; they’re a refusal to have God on God’s terms. They turn their backs on the way in which God encounters us and instead look for something different, something better, something without the apparent fragility and vulnerability of faith. They don’t want to see something from afar; they want to see it clearly, here and now. They don’t want to live in the land of promise; they want to arrive, to be in the city.

To want those things is enmity with God. It’s to want God on our terms, and therefore not to want God. Or, we might say, it’s to want a different god from the God who really encounters us. It’s to replace God with an idol, and so to commit the great sin of religion. Religion is sin when it makes God into something which we can handle. Whether we handle God through graven images or theological ideas or liturgy and music or ecstatic experience doesn’t really matter. It’s all idolatry, all a flight from the city which God builds, all a way of saying that God as God isn’t good enough, and that if God is to be worth trusting he’ll have to conform to our expectations and needs. None of us is exempt; all of us have to realize that religion always carries with it the danger that we will make God into the likeness of something on earth, and in doing so we will lose faith, and lose God.1

Webster assumes on the faith as knowledge of God tradition, and applies that in a certain significant direction. Some might say this sounds like fideism (V so-called evidentialism), but that would miss precisely the point that Webster is pressing. Webster premises that the concrete ground of faith is extra nos (outside of us), and of course the ground is God Himself. As is clear from Webster, faith, genuinely Christian faith, is of the sort that is not self-generated or self-sustained; indeed, for the Christian, faith, according to Webster, is a reality that comes to us in the presence of Christ. This makes faith, as he emphasizes, both vulnerable and fragile; a reality that we cannot possess, but that possesses us instead. As Webster rightly notes, it is just at the point that we attempt to rip faith asunder from the heavens and take it for ourselves that we, like Micah, make an idol out of a reality that does not rightly belong to us (cf. Judges 17.1-6).

I think that what Webster is describing finds its best fund as we ground knowledge of God in the vicarious faith of Christ for us. It is only at this point that a notion of faith ceases from being an abstract floaty thing up yonder, and becomes grounded in the dusty flesh and deep red blood of Jesus Christ. When we come to realize, as the Apostle Paul did, that Jesus is the genuine ‘Mediator between God and humanity,’ it is just at this point that we will come to have a right understanding of faith’s concreteness; a concreteness not of our own assertion.

1 John Webster, Confronted by Grace: Meditations of a Theologian, edited by Daniel Bush and Brannon Ellis (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2014), 122-23 kindle. 

 

Holy Communion: Remembering that Human Life is in Christ’s Blood

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The late, John Webster, wasn’t just a Christian theologian par excellence; he was also a pastor. The following comes from part of a sermon he gave on Maundy Thursday. A major thrust of his sermon was to remind the parishioners that Holy Communion is not something that re-enacts or re-presents the death of Jesus Christ; indeed, as Webster presses, the Eucharist is a memorial event wherein we, as the Church, remember the already finished work (in the perfect tense: my insight) that Jesus alone accomplished once and for all in the givenness of His life for the world. As Webster presses this point, and rightfully so, he offers a beautiful description of what, in the history has been called: the mirifica commutatio (‘wonderful exchange’). Here Webster is underscoring the idea that what God in Christ has done, has been done; indeed, what has been done God alone could accomplish on our behalf. I found Webster’s rendition of the ‘wonderful exchange’ edifying, and so I want to share it with you now. 

What was done there and then? What is it about the Lord’s death that the Eucharist proclaims or testifies? Isaiah, whose Servant Song provides the bass line of our thoughts this Holy Week, tells us that the wounding and bruising and chastising of the Servant is “for our transgressions” (53:5). The cross of Jesus, celebrated in Holy Communion, is the climactic event in which God acts to win the world back from the darkness and misery of sin. In some way, the death of this one changes the entire course of human history; it intercepts and breaks the whole course of human wickedness; henceforth, because of what this man does and suffers, nothing can be the same. Why not? Because in this little scrap of an event one Friday afternoon, this unremarkable bit of human evil, God takes our place. He enters without reserve into the reality of our situation—into our situation, that is, as those who have damned ourselves, who have cut ourselves off from life and put ourselves into hell, all because we made up the lie that we can be human without God. 

But God does not leave us in the hell we have made for ourselves. In the person of Jesus his Son and Servant, he comes to us; he takes on his own back the full weight of our alienation and estrangement; he freely submits to the whole curse of our sin. He takes our sin upon him, and in so doing he takes it away, fully, finally, and conclusively. And of all that—of that miracle of grace on Good Friday—this evening is a memorial, the memorial of that his precious death. 

That was what was done. It was done not by us, but by God himself in the person of his Servant and Son. And it was done by God alone. Because reconciliation is thus God’s work, God’s exclusive work, then this sacrament in which we remember the cross of Christ is also God’s work. Here, in this assembly at this table, God is at work. And God’s work here is to present to us, to make present to us, what took place on Good Friday. We don’t make Good Friday real by re-enacting it, or by thinking and feeling about it. God in this sacrament declares to us what Good Friday made true: that he is our reconciler; that sin is finished business; that we can repent because God has forgiven; that the promise acted out in the death of Jesus stands for all time and for each human person. In this memorial, God turns us backward; but he also makes present to us the limitless power of what the Son of God suffered. The God who was at work there and then is at work here and now, proclaiming to us his promise of cleansing, acceptance and peace.1 

The Apostle Paul describes the ‘wonderful exchange’ this way: “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich” (II Cor. 8.9). Webster brings out so many rich insights in his telling of what in fact unfolded in the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The following clause, in particular stands out to me: “as those who have damned ourselves, who have cut ourselves off from life and put ourselves into hell, all because we made up the lie that we can be human without God.” This is the depth dimension of the Evangel. What it genuinely means to be human is to be human before (in and from) God. To declare that ‘we’ can be human devoid of God, devoid of a coram Deo life, is indeed: Hell!  

Holy Communion is to remind us, moment by moment, that we are not our own; and that if we persist, indeed, perdure in the lie that we can be our “own man or woman,” that we will only dissolve into an abyss of hell. But Christ has entered into that deep abyss, and by the life which is in His blood, we can truly experience what it means to be human before God; indeed, to be human is to be in union and fellowship with God. This is who Jesus is for us, and what the Eucharist is to continuously remind us of until it is finally consummated in the eschaton as that finally comes in the Eschatos of God’s life for us in Jesus Christ. Maranatha  

1 John Webster, Confronted by Grace: Meditations of a Theologian (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2014), 61-2, Kindle Edition.

American Folk Religion and Political Identity

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What I like to call American Folk Religion is a real thing. It transcends the socio-political demarcations and can be found on both sides and everywhere. It might be hidden behind facades of orthodoxy, or even heterodoxy; but it remains a pervasive reality. It is the religion of the American masses, one rooted in a history of ideas. John Webster describes this well as he sketches how pre-Nazi and Nazi Germany looked through Barth’s lights and theology:

A large part of Barth’s distaste is his sense that the ethics of liberal Protestantism could not be extricated from a certain kind of cultural confidence: ‘[H]ere was … a human culture building itself up in orderly fashion in politics, economics, and science, theoretical and applied, progressing steadily along its whole front, interpreted and ennobled by art, and through its morality and religion reaching well beyond itself toward yet better days.’ The ethical question, on such an account, is no longer disruptive; it has ‘an almost perfectly obvious answer’, so that, in effect, the moral life becomes too easy, a matter of the simple task of following Jesus.

Within this ethos, Barth also discerns a moral anthropology with which he is distinctly ill-at-ease. He unearths in the received Protestant moral culture a notion of moral subjectivity (ultimately Kantian in origin), according to which ‘[t]he moral personality is the author both of the conduct with which the ethical question is concerned and of the question itself. Barth’s point is not simply that such an anthropology lacks serious consideration of human corruption, but something more complex. He is beginning to unearth the way in which this picture of human subjectivity as it were projects the moral self into a neutral space, from which it can survey the ethical question ‘from the viewpoint of spectators’. This notion Barth reads as a kind of absolutizing of the self and its reflective consciousness, which come to assume ‘the dignity of ultimateness’. And it is precisely this — the image of moral reason as a secure centre of value, omnicompetent in its judgements — that the ethical question interrogates.[1]

While America (and the world) is in the midst of the current socio-political upheaval that we are I think what Webster is noting in regard to Barth’s understanding of the German mind (of his day) ought to serve as a cautionary tale for us today. No matter where we are situated in this moment, politically, and I’ve made it no secret about where I stand, it is always important to bear in mind that as Christians we ought to be under God’s Word; and importantly, we ought to avoid conflating God’s Word with the culture’s or our own—no matter how noble our perceived right might be. Remember, as Jesus said: ‘only God is good.’

But to press down further into how this sort of mode, that was present in Germany, has taken shape in our day, James Ungureanu offers a helpful sketch of what might be identified as American transcendentalism. You’ll notice, as you read Ungureanu how the American religion has roots in the German background (of the sort that Barth was critical of). James writes:

Rooted in European liberal Protestant ideas, American liberalism began as a distinctive movement in American thought with the emergence of Unitarianism and transcendentalism in the early nineteenth century. Theological Unitarianism, or the belief in the oneness of God, began in seventeenth-century England and was adopted by eighteenth-century American liberal theologians. But the rational religion advocated by the founders of the republic was eventually combined with such romantic movements as transcendentalism.

The transcendentalists had imbibed German idealism, avoided religious institutions, and preferred informal fellowship through intellectual and literary pursuits. They emphasized the presence of divinity within each human being. This divinity powered the self and was best fostered without the external control of religious institutions. Consequently, American transcendentalists encouraged individuals to pursue spiritual truth on their own. While seventeenth- and eighteenth-century liberal Protestants focused on the “inner light” of reason, liberal Protestants of the new theology looked to emotions as the final source of religious authority. Their primary religious focus was on the immanence of God, the notion that God’s presence pervaded all things.[2]

Some have identified this as a neo-Gnosticism, but whatever the designation of this American Folk Religion, it is pervasive and grounded in a turn-to-the-subject mode of being. My concern is that no matter how noble the cause, no matter how conservative or progressive, that people from all around, because of their socio-political identity, might presume that they are eternally justified before God as proven by their good [political and social] works. My concern is such adherents see themselves as ‘saved’ because of the measure of their passion for what they perceive to be the good and the beautiful. But only God is good. And insofar as people cannot discern God’s Word from their own, such people have been taken captive by Babylon rather than the Kingdom of Christ. Obtaining this sort of discernment requires much sweat and blood before the living God. Kyrie eleison

[1] John Webster, Barth’s Moral Theology: Human Action in Barth’s Thought, 35-6.

[2] James Ungureanu, Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition: Retracing the Origins of the Conflict (Pennsylvania: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), 154-55 kindle.  

Contra Good Ole’ Boy Hermeneutics in Response to Leighton Flowers: With Reference to John Webster and the Conciliar Age

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For some reason I continue to listen to this popular level voice, Leighton Flowers, as he attempts to critique and offer an alternative to classical Calvinism. I just listened to one of his newish videos (pertinent discussion starts in and around 28 minutes) where he interacts with a Calvinist friend of his. In this video he reveals his hermeneutical approach, which is pretty clear after you’ve listened to him for awhile. He sees the ecumenical church councils, for example, like Nicaea-Constantinople, Chalcedon, so on and so forth as ‘inspiring’ but not derivatively ‘authoritative,’ insofar as they aren’t scripture in themselves. In fact Flowers tells his friend that he sees the [Holy Spirit “inspired”] conversation he is having with his friend as potentially as ‘authoritative’ as these councils. So, as I have noted before, Flowers, in the name of sola Scriptura (but he is really solo Scriptura) has swallowed an Enlightenment rationalism ‘whole-hog,’ wherein he sees himself as the interpretive center in isolation from past doctors of the church. And yet, with this dissonance (that he doesn’t experience, as he should), he presumably affirms the definitive language of Trinitatis (Trinity), and the Christological grammar that developed in the conciliar age. For some reason he doesn’t have the capacity to make the connection between that grammar as fundamentum to everything he thinks about who God is in Christ, and how that implicates the way the Christian, historically and into the present, has interpreted Holy Scripture. He operates out of an anthropological ground like we might find in John Locke’s theory on tabula rasa.

In order to offer a correction, that Flowers himself will not take (he claims to be humble and teachable in a good ole’ boy sort of way, but he isn’t), let me offer up an excellent word on these things from theologian, par excellence, John Webster. You will note that what Webster says, following, stands in stark contraposition to what this chap, Flowers maintains. Here is how John Webster sums up his discussion on the relation of ‘The Word’ (Jesus) to biblical interpretation (hermeneutics). Webster has been arguing against the usual modes of hermeneutical consideration, as anthropology; and through a ressourcement of Barth, he is presenting a ‘way’ that provides for a thick dogmatically oriented mode of hermeneutical theory.

To sum up: because God in Jesus Christ speaks, because Jesus is God’s living Word, then the ‘hermeneutical situation’falls under the rule: ‘We do not know God against his will or behind his back, as it were, but in accordance with the way in which he has elected to disclose himself and communicate his truth’. Once this is grasped, then doctrines begin to do the work so frequently undertaken by anthropology or theories of historical consciousness in determining the nature of the hermeneutical situation, thereby making possible the ‘formed reference’ which is the basic mode of theological depiction.[1]

In other words, modern hermeneutical proposals that seek to propound a theory of biblical interpretation that aren’t first given shape by a direct encounter with the Word (Jesus), dogmatically, will always fail to encounter Jesus for who he actually is because the interpretive event is not dominated by him, but them. This hermeneutical error not only applies to Flowers, but many other so-called biblical exegetes who have swallowed the higher-critical mode of a naturalist biblical hermeneutic. As Barth underscored in his Göttingen Dogmatics, we can only rightly do biblical and Christian theology Deus dixit, after ‘God has spoken.’ This necessarily entails that we can only do theological exegesis of the biblical text from the grammar, or implicates of God’s life for us in the mysterium that is the Theanthropos, the Godman, Jesus Christ. This is the only genuine Christian way for reading Scripture; i.e. through the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. It is in this foundational and fertile ground wherein the Divine Meaning can be ascertained aright; “for no other foundation can anyone lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ” (I Cor 3.11).

If the Christian is going to be part of what has been called the communio sanctorum (‘communion of the saints’); if they are going to live in the vibrancy of the Church catholic; they will realize they are not a ‘clean-slate,’ that they are not a hermeneutical island with ‘me-and-my-Bible’ in hand. They will repudiate anthropologies that suffer from turn-to-the-subject[ivism], as the rationalist mode (like the one Flowers operates with) suffers from, and instead will recognize that as they were ‘born from above,’ they were born into a holy communion that is grounded in the very triune life of God Himself. The Christian will recognize that we all interpret Scripture from a particular tradition, one way or the other; since tradition making is as inevitable as being a creature with extension into time and space, and all that entails. A misguided Christian might think they are able to read Scripture de nuda (nakedly), but what they will really be doing is reading Scripture from a naturalist tradition that has no Christian confessional grounding whatsoever. When the Christian attempts to operate this way with Scripture, they are bound to come to exegetical conclusions that reflect their deepest and most innate (natural) desires. In other words, because of anthropological, and thus epistemological definition, they will really only be able to read Scripture homo in se incurvatus (from an incurvature upon themselves); they will only be able to read Scripture, from this vantage point, out of  categories that have been constructed from self-projection (see Feuerbach for this critique)—the history of higher criticism and Jesus Quest illustrates how this trajectory concludes. No amount of good ole’ boy piety or piousness can overcome this sort of hermeneutical dilemma. Sorry Leighton.

[1] John Webster, “Hermeneutics in Modern Theology: Some Doctrinal Reflections,” Scottish Journal of Theology, 328.