What is An/ -Enhypostasis? “It asserts then that true man is a predicate of God’s gracious action.”

Posted on December 27, 2022 by Bobby Grow

The Eunomians, following the Arians (and Arius) maintained that there was a time when the Son was not. In other words, they maintained that the Logos of God was a creature; an exalted creature, but a creature nonetheless. So, when we see Jesus, we don’t actually see the Father in the face of the Son, we only see an exalted emissary of the singular (monadic) God of pure being. In a similar line of heresy, known as adoptionism, the Ebionites maintained that Jesus was just a man, already existent, that God adopted for His purposes to be His prophet. TF Torrance provides definition: “Ebionism — the view that Jesus was not God but an ordinary man, adopted to become Son of God.”[1] Ultimately, adoptionism applies to most Christological heresies wherein, as the central feature, Jesus isn’t God, but simply adopted into God’s purposes as a Prophet (akin to an exalted version of an Old Testament prophet, or the final prophet in the line of the Prophetic school—ironically this is exactly the way Muslims see Jesus, as a mere man and prophet of God—also ironically Mohammed spent significant time with his uncle, an Ebionite “Christian”).

In contrast to this heresy of adoptionism, the orthodox Church fathers introduced an important dogmatic teaching with reference to the personhood of Jesus Christ. They argued, from the inner-logic of Scripture and its reality in the analogy of the incarnation, that Jesus had no personal independence from the second person of the Godhead in the eternal Son. So, they contended, the ground of the singular person of Jesus Christ, the personalizing, personating reality, was the person of the Son who has always already eternally been the Son of the Father, as the Father has been the Father of the Son in the eternal bond of koinonia and self-given love provided for by the unioning work of the Holy Spirit. Torrance explains the significance of this at length:

(i) The humanity of Jesus has no independent reality

The first thing we have to note here, is that, taken together with anhypostasia, for the two are not to be separated, the enhypostasia asserts that the incarnation is an act of pure grace alone, and repudiates any form of adoptionism, that is the adoption of a preexisting man to become Son of God. It asserts then that true man is a predicate of God’s gracious action. When the Word was made flesh, God and man were so related that Jesus came to exist as man only so far as he now exists as God. In other words, there is only one Christ, one mediator, one Lord, only one person in Jesus Christ the incarnate Son of God. This one person means that his human nature had no independent subsistence or hypostasis, no independent centre of personal being. If there had been a human person to whom a divine person was added, there would have been an independent centre of personal being in Jesus over against the person of the Son of God; but the human nature of Jesus never existed apart from the incarnation of God the Son. At the first moment of the existence of his human nature, it was in hypostatic union with his Godhead. That is, the human nature from the first moment of its existence had its hypostasis or personal subsistence in the personal subsistence of God the Son. That is the meaning of en-hypostasis.

(ii) The humanity of Jesus has full reality in the person of the Son

But when we have said that, we have to add that although there was no independent personal being called Jesus apart from the incarnation, that does not mean that in the incarnation there was no particular individual called Jesus existing as a particular human being, with a rational human mind and will and soul; and therefore it does not mean that he did not completely possess human nature. Jesus had a fully human mind and human soul and human will; he lived a fully human life in hypostatic union with his divine life, and in that union with his divine life, his human life had manifested the most singular and unique personality as man. That is the emphasis of enhypostasia. It preserves the acknowledgement of the full humanity of Jesus, and indeed of his historical person as a man among others, and as one of mankind, a true man. The anhypostasia stresses the general humanity of Jesus, the human nature assumed by the Son with its hypostasis in the Son, but enhypostasia stresses the particular humanity of the one man Jesus, whose person is not other than the person of the divine Son.

Therefore from the enhypostasis we have to go back again to the anhypostasis and say this: while the Son of God assumed our human nature, and became fully and really like us, nevertheless his full and complete human nature was united to God in a unique way (hypostatically in one person) as our human nature is not, and never will be. Therefore he is unlike us, not unlike us as to the humanity of his human nature, but in the unique union of his human nature to the divine nature in the one person of God the Son. (This is the baffling element in the virgin birth, which tells us that while it is our very human nature he assumed, he did not assume it in the way we share in it, because he took it in a unique relation with his deity). But it is upon the unique, hypostatic relation of his human nature to his divine nature, that the truth of our human nature depends, for it is as we share in his human nature, which is hypostatically united to God, that we are in union and communion with God.[2]

The next time you come across someone who denies the deity of Jesus just say: anhypostasia/ en-hypostasia! Then explain to them that Jesus has no independent existence as a human being apart from the personalizing personhood of the eternal Son of God. That Jesus’ singular person as both fully human and fully God is funded by, grounded in the eternal Logos’ person as the second person of the divine Monarxia (Godhead). Tell them further that to genuinely think biblically materially about these matters follows the lead of the patristics who posited this aesthetically pleasing doctrine of an/ -enhypostasis. That is to say, to attempt to think biblically about who Jesus was/is requires the conclusion that the Son enfleshed in the man from Nazareth, Jesus Christ; and that without this free and gracious action of the Son in concord with the indivisibility of the triune life, that there never would have been a man from the Galilee whose name was Jesus Christ. Tell them this is the unique sui generis reality of Jesus Christ: that is, that He is Theanthropos the Godman, or He isn’t at all. Tell them that the adoptionist notion, with reference to the man, Jesus, is driven by an over-reliance on a rationalistic philosophical maneuver wherein the miracle of the ineffable God become human is so domesticated, so gated-in by the dusty mind of little men and women, that it ends up being a fantasy of the human imagination; that it becomes a way to cope with the unfathomable, and make it fathomable—make it small enough to be generated by thinking from a sense of human pure nature (that is an independent human nature that is not contingent upon God’s Word, but theirs).

There are other significant implications of this doctrine, particularly when we get to a doctrine of pre-destination and election/reprobation. We won’t pursue those here. Further, and recently in his book The Humility of the Eternal Son: Reformed Kenoticism and the Repair of Chalcedon Bruce McCormack critiques the patristic, and Barth’s reception of the doctrine of an/ -enhypostasis as not adequate to the task of thinking the personhood of Jesus Christ. In its place McCormack constructively offers his alternative which he identifies as ontological receptivity. We will have to pursue that further at a later time as well (although I have broached BLM’s book here).

[1] T. F. Torrance, ed. Robert T. Walker, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2008).

[2] Ibid., 229-30.

On Orthodoxy and Heresy and a Theology of the Word of God

Posted on October 24, 2022 by Bobby Grow

It is unnecessary to jettison all of creedal Christianity in favor of a supposed ‘naked Scripture’ (scriptura nuda). And yet there are many, whether that be on the popular or academic sweep, who maintain that this is in fact what being a Protestant Christian ultimately entails. I have someone in particular in mind with this post (who will remain unnamed), but it has general application too. To be a creedal Christian doesn’t necessarily entail that you ascribe absolute ecclesiastical authority to the Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox churches; indeed, this runs exactly counter to what someone like Martin Luther would have maintained as the original, or at least the most infamous, Protestant reformer. Indeed, Luther, infamously, at the Diet of Worms exclaimed the following:

Unless I am convinced by the testimony of Scripture or by clear reason, for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves, I am bound by the Scriptures that I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. I cannot to do otherwise. Here I stand, God help me.

Some might take this as the naked Scripture mode I referenced previously, but that would be mistaken. Luther is simply identifying an order, an “ontology of authority” as that relates to his submission to the living Lord. His conscience is ultimately bound to Holy Scripture, and its reality in Jesus Christ. If Church councils or Popes or Metropolitans contradict the clear teaching (think Luther’s analogia fidei in contrast to the Catholic’s appropriation of the antique regula fidei) of Scripture, then as Luther exclaimed at Worms, he will go with Scripture every single time. Here Crisp indexes what I take to be something that Luther himself would affirm, in regard to a theory of authority vis-à-vis God:

Scripture is the norma normans, the principium theologiae. It is the final arbiter of matters theological for Christians as the particular place in which God reveals himself to his people. This is the first-order authority in all matters of Christian doctrine.
Catholic creeds, as defined by and ecumenical council of the Church, constitute a first tier of norma normata, which have second-order authority in matters touching Christian doctrine. Such norms derive their authority from Scripture to which they bear witness.
Confessional and conciliar statements of particular ecclesial bodies are a second tier of norma normata, which have third-order authority in matters touching Christian doctrine. They also derive their authority from Scripture to the extent that they faithfully reflect the teaching of Scripture.
The particular doctrines espoused by theologians including those individuals accorded the title Doctor of the Church which are not reiterations of matters that are de fide, or entailed by something de fide, constitute theologoumena, or theological opinions, which are not binding upon the Church, but which may be offered up for legitimate discussion within the Church.[1]

This seems like a rather straightforward ordering, or hierarchy, as that relates to understanding how a Protestant would think about authority. Scripture is the ‘norming norm’ which all following developments become, at best, normed norms. That is, Church councils, so on and so forth have a relative, we might say, “eschatological” value to them in the sense that they should never be taken absolutely, but only as proximate thinking as that relates to a proper understanding of Scripture’s teaching vis-à-vis its reality in Jesus Christ. Bruce McCormack helpfully states it this way as he reflects on Barth’s understanding on the development of Christian theology:

I say all of this to indicate that even the ecumenical creeds are only provisional statements. They are only relatively binding as definitions of what constitutes “orthodoxy.” Ultimately, orthodox teaching is that which conforms perfectly to the Word of God as attested in Holy Scripture. But given that such perfection is not attainable in this world, it is understandable that Karl Barth should have regarded “Dogma” as an eschatological concept. The “dogmas” (i.e., the teachings formally adopted and promulgated by individual churches) are witnesses to the Dogma and stand in a relation of greater or lesser approximation to it. But they do not attain to it perfectly—hence, the inherent reformability of all “dogmas.” Orthodoxy is not therefore a static, fixed reality; it is a body of teachings which have arisen out of, and belong to, a history which is as yet incomplete and constantly in need of reevaluation.[2]

Some might read this and think this militates against valuing a creedal Christianity, but just the opposite is the case. If we take McCormack’s identification in Barth’s understanding of Dogmatic development as a jumping-off point, what is being affirmed is the value, the ‘relative’ value of the catholic creeds of the Church. It isn’t an abandonment of the pronouncements and the rich theological grammar developed therein, au contraire!: it recognizes that the church then when confronted with certain internal and external pressures responded in a way that set a trajectory for the Church to think God, to think Christ in ways that would be ultimately definitive as a baseline for thinking God and Christ in ways that Christians everywhere might build upon, receive and develop in orders that might go beyond, but never leave behind at their base level. McCormack continues in a different but related context:

. . . Every period in the history of theology has had its basic questions and concerns that shaped the formulation of doctrines in all areas of reflection. In the early church, it was Trinity and Christology that captured the attention of the greatest minds. In the transition to the early Middle Ages, Augustinian anthropology played a large role—which would eventually effect a shift in attention from theories of redemption to the need to understand how God is reconciled with sinful human beings. The high Middle Ages were the heyday of sacramental development, in which definitions of sacraments were worked out with great care, the number of sacraments established, and so on. The Reformation period found its center of gravity in the doctrine of justification. In the modern period, the question of questions became the nature of God and his relation to the world. Basic decisions were thus made in the areas of creation, the being of God and his relation to the world, and revelation, which were to become foundational for further development in other areas of doctrinal concern….[3]

I think the above considerations from McCormack are helpful in regard to situating the way we think about the role of a creedal Christianity insofar that they frame a genuinely Protestant way into thinking about Church authority. As McCormack and Crisp, respectively, identify, the sole authority, or the ultimate authority by which all other iterations of subsequent ecclesiastical reflection take form comes from Holy Scripture and its reality in Jesus Christ (who indeed is the Church’s Head). It is helpful to think these things eschatologically, as both McCormack and Barth do, insofar that Scripture’s reality, just as creation’s in general, is found in and from Jesus Christ. But the way the Protestant, along with the Catholics and Orthodox, think who Jesus is, at a grammatical level, comes from what the early Church councils promulgated; viz. in regard to articulating the inner-theo-logic of thinking the natures of Jesus Christ as both fully God and fully human (the Theanthropos) etc.

Hopefully, at minimum what is gleaned from the above is that there is no reason whatsoever for the Protestant Christian, even if you consider yourself Post Protestant, to abandon a conciliar Christianity simply because you cannot imagine how that type of Christianity can be reconciled with being an adherent of a purported ‘naked Scripture.’ It was never the Protestant way to think away from its Catholic (and I even mean Roman in a sense) roots, it was simply an attempt to think from a deep theology of the Word of God as the authoritative basis for thinking God, and a God-world relation. Yes, there is space to develop further the grammar provided for by the creeds, indeed the conciliar grammar was merely negative language, something like minimal parameters set in order to protect the sheep of the Church from those wolves who would take Jesus and the triune God captive by overly relying upon pagan, and in that context, Hellenistic philosophies that were improperly evangelized that would not allow them to be put to use in retextualized ways, and thus within a kerygmatic frame. In other words, heresy has always been a thing, even now.

If you find yourself feeling genius, that what it means to be Protestant is to chart out in original and unconstrained (by any sense of reception from the past) ways is to develop your own original Christian Philosophy I’d ask you to reconsider. The history is littered with these attempts, and one thing is for sure: such contenders end up in the same cul-de-sac of isolation and disfellowship that such attempts of “originality” always lead to. What ends up almost always obtaining in these adventures of originality is the person inevitability ends up denying, or at least downgrading the divinity of Jesus Christ; which of course leads to a further denial of the Trinity itself. Being a genius or original thinker isn’t worth the pain and destruction of what being antiChrist ends up entailing. I would simply ask such contenders to repent, and be genuinely Protestant by affirming a robust theology of the Word with proper recognition of its explanation through the centuries under the concursus Dei of God’s providential working. Indeed, this shouldn’t stifle creativity and constructivity, in fact it ought to fuel it by providing fruitful and rich developments of Christological and Theologically Proper grammarization that the communio sanctorum (‘communion of saints’) have fellowshipped with, around, and from for millennia.

[1] Oliver Crisp, god incarnate, (New York: T&T Clark International, 2009), 17.

[2] Bruce L. McCormack, Orthodox and Modern: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008), 16.

[3] Bruce L. McCormack, “Introduction,” in Kelly M. Kapic and Bruce L. McCormack eds., Mapping Modern Theology: A Thematic and Historical Introduction (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2012), 11, 14 scribd edition.

Make Sure Christ is the Key: The Value of All Periods of Theological Development

Posted on August 20, 2022 by Bobby Grow

The Nicenes, those who affirmed the triune reality of the living God, and articulated it using grammar that we today take for granted as the orthodox coin, are elevated, as they ought to be, by those of us who, indeed, affirm the orthodox reality of who God is as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. These early Christian thinkers were primarily fixated on one thing, save two. I.e., Jesus and the ‘who’ of God as three in one/ one in three. This was the foundational piece, the fundamentum of what has developed latterly as the consensus fidelium in regard to who God is, and how central Christ is to knowing this reality. But something happened. The mediaeval period happened, the scholastic period happened, and Thomas Aquinas, above all else has seemingly triumphed as the bearer of all that is orthodox in the Latin church. And yet, Thomas’ theology, in the main, does not have the tenor, the character of the Nicenes. His is a speculative philosophy synthesized with mostly Augustinian categories as those were distilled through Lombard’s Sentences. When you read Thomas, you don’t come away with the same christological focus and longing that you do when you read the Nicenes. But many a Protestant today seems to think that Thomas just is the continuous succession of the Nicenes, only in Aristotelian and medieval dress. All I would ask you to do is read Thomas, and then read the Nicenes. What you’ll come to experience, at least I have, is that Thomas, and his ilk, are a disruption in the ostensible succession of church theologians; a disruption in the sense that the kataphaticism of the Nicenes is sublimated by a speculative apophaticism in the scholastic form of Thomas, indeed.

It isn’t that the Nicenes don’t have an apophaticism in the register, but that said register is only a precondition for recognizing that the only way it can be cashed out is by a slavish commitment to a brute kataphysicism, insofar as that is freely supplied by the living God Self-revealed and exegeted in Jesus Christ. ‘Christ is the key,’ as Tanner has so notably indicated, and the Nicenes understood this. Indeed, this is why Karl Barth is so exciting for me! It has nothing to do with his place or period in history, with him being “modern” or not, or whatever. Barth is unique on the historical theological plane insofar that he imbibes, he is redivivus of the Nicenes in the 20^th century theological development. Christ is his centraldogma; Christ reduces Barth’s apophatic register into the cash-money of God’s Self-revelation. This is Barth’s appeal over against Thomas and the rest of the scholastics (in the medieval and post reformed understanding of that), materially.

In the end I think people get way too caught up in thinking period[ically] about the sacra doctrina of the Church. Rather than being so tripped up by this era versus that era, so on and so forth, it is better to being open to finding Christ in all periods of the Church’s history. I think the Nicenes present the best basis upon which the Church in the 21^st century can think constructively and orthodoxly from. This is not to say that all medieval theology is rubbish; indeed, I love that period of theological development. But it is to say that what ought to guide the Christian’s spiritual and intellectual development as a Christian is in fact a commitment to love of Christ, and the desire to see Him as the key to EVERYTHING, in piercing and all-encompassing ways. When a theology fails to do that, it is hard for me to see how it is genuinely Christian in any meaningful way. This is why I say that Thomas is a disruption. In certain ways his theological methodology, based in a posteriori means, implicates even what Barth does. But in fact, Thomas ends up operating in the a priori of speculation that he inherited largely from Augustine through Lombard. These things are a complex, indeed, but if Christ is the key the complex can be opened in fruitful and constructive directions. Make sure Christ is your key.

Against ‘Penal Substitution’ and Transactional Models::For an Ontological Theory of Atonement

Posted on August 16, 2022 by Bobby Grow

Matthias Grebe continues in his trek of offering a critique of Barth through Barth in regard to the loci of election and atonement. In his task he offers up a description, here in summary form, of various atonement theories propounded by the church fathers. He points out, rightly, that the fathers, in the main, (barring Augustine) would have rejected the penal substitutionary atonement (PSA) theory, and instead operated with a Christus Victor model, generally. He argues that the ’victim theory’ (his language for PSA) would not have been countenanced by them, and that instead something like Thomas F. Torrance’s theory of an ‘ontological atonement’ would have been the consensus patrum among these primarily Eastern ancient theologians. I agree with Grebe’s treatment, and thus wanted to share it.

However, the ‘Victim’ theory fails to grasp the breadth of the atonement, especially the second aspect of Christ’s death bringing humanity back to God. This in itself is problematic and thus led to a legal/forensic and practical as well as a transactional understanding of the atonement in much Western thought, emphasizing the human act of Jesus’ appeasement of the Father’s wrath. There is no doubt that the New Testament presents the death of Christ as a sacrifice (an idea based on the Old Testament cult), but the idea of appeasement rests upon an interpretation of the Old Testament cult in chiefly transactional terms. In contrast, for much Eastern scholarship the “cultus is much less a matter of sacrificial transaction than of mystical transplantation,” highlighting the death of Christ as the rescue and the cure from sin and the conclusion in the filial fellowship with God. Thus the answer to Cur Deus Homo? is therefore not only ‘mori missus,’ but also involves Christ’s entire life, death, resurrection and the ascension of humanity to the right hand of God, as well as the sending of the Spirit of Pentecost. . .. We will argue in this chapter that the atonement is not simply a dealing with something or rescuing from something, but a bringing into something. The New Testament testifies to the fact that we are not only brought out of darkness into light but are made sons and co-heirs of Christ and thus partakers of the divine communion (see Rom 8:17; Gal 4:7; Titus 3:7).[1]

Based on the closing clauses of Grebe’s we can see the direction he will be arguing. What he describes as the Eastern orientation over against the Western, in generalities, is key to understanding the type of alternative that an Athanasian Reformed (or ‘Evangelical Calvinist’) theory of salvation presents. It isn’t that ‘substitution’ is rejected, but that its frame isn’t forensic or ‘penal,’ rather it is ontological and re-creational. As such, the nature of the atonement itself is intrinsically tied to the incarnation, insofar that it is the total Christ, from before the foundations of the world, to their re-creation, that the atonement is entailed by. This offers a depth, and thus ontological dimension to a theory of salvation that the Augustinianly hued theory, of the Latin West, generally fails to grasp. Thomas Torrance, as alluded to, thinks, of course!, from the Eastern orientation; even as a Scottish Reformed theologian. Note TFT:

It is above all in the Cross of Christ that evil is unmasked for what it actually is, in its inconceivable wickedness and malevolence, in its sheer contradiction of the love of God incarnate in Jesus Christ, in its undiluted enmity to God himself—not to mention the way in which it operates under the cover of the right and the good and the lawful. That the infinite God should take the way of the Cross to save mankind from the pit of evil which has engulfed it and deceived it, is the measure of the evil of evil: its depth is revealed to be ‘absymal’ (literally, ‘without bottom’). However, it is only from the vantage point of God’s victory over evil in the resurrection of Christ, from the bridge which in him God has overthrown across the chasm of evil that has opened up in our violence and death and guilt, that we may look into the full horror of it all and not be destroyed in the withering of our souls through misanthropy, pessimism, and despair. What hope could there ever be for a humanity that crucifies the incarnate love of God and sets itself implacably against the order of divine love even at the point of its atoning and healing operation? But the resurrection tells us that evil, even this abysmal evil, does not and cannot have the last word, for that belongs to the love of God which has negated evil once and for all and which through the Cross and resurrection is able to make all things work together for good, so that nothing in the end will ever separate us from the love of God. It is from the heart of that love in the resurrected Son of God that we may reflect on the radical nature of evil without suffering morbid mesmerization or resurrection and crucifixion events, which belong inseparably together, has behind it the incarnation, the staggering fact that God himself has come directly into our creaturely being to become one of us, for our sakes. Thus the incarnation, passion, and resurrection conjointly tell us that far from evil having to do only with human hearts and minds, it has become entrenched in the ontological depths of created existence and that it is only from within those ontological depths that God could get at the heart of evil in order to destroy it, and set about rebuilding what he had made to be good. (We have to think of that as the only way that God ‘could’ take, for the fact that he has as a matter of fact taken this way in the freedom of his grace excludes any other possibility from our consideration.) It is surely in the light of this ontological salvation that we are to understand the so-called ‘nature of miracles’, as well as the resurrection of Jesus from death, for they represent not a suspension of the natural or created order but the very reverse, the recreation of the natural order wherever it suffers from decay or damage or corruption or disorder through evil. God does not give up his claim that the creation is ‘good’, but insists on upholding that claim by incarnating within the creation the personal presence of his own Logos, the creative and ordering source of the creation, thereby pledging his own eternal constancy and rationality as the ground for the redemption and final establishment of all created reality.[2]

TFT’s long statement offers something of a magnum opus in summary, in regard to the entailments of what we might call an ‘Athanasian’ theory of salvation. But this extensive passage was offered up to help illustrate how it is that a Reformed theologian, of TFT’s stature, thinks along the lines that Grebe is describing for us vis-à-vis the consensus patrum of the Eastern church fathers. Salvation requires something more than, not less than a forensic frame. If the human condition is fallen, it isn’t simply a bail payment that is required, but an absolute resurrection and/or re-creation of all of reality; primary of which is humanity simpliciter. This is what Western or Latin notions of penal substitution fail to grasp, and what the Eastern fathers understood all too well. If the fallen human being is going to be ‘saved’ in the depths of their being, and the Western model is understood as the definitive theory of salvation, then salvation has not obtained, and we are of all people those to be pitied. It has not obtained because genuine salvation requires more than a legal payment, since this only has to do with external behavioral failures, it requires a depth ontological reorientation (and thus re-creation) insofar that this represents the relational breach between the triune God and us. Without this new creation of humanity in Christ’s humanity, in the ‘wonderful exchange,’ we cannot countenance God who is Holy.

[1] Matthias Grebe, Election, Atonement, and the Holy Spirit (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2014), Kindle ed. Loc., 5312, 5316, 5321, 5325.

[2] Thomas F. Torrance, Divine And Contingent Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 115-16.

Transitioning from a ‘Substance’ to a ‘Personal’ God: Confronting the Substance-Abusers

Posted on May 13, 2022 by Bobby Grow

There is a lot of talk about ‘substance theology’ these days, and in the past days. Indeed, substance language marks classical theism as the way to talk God at least since the days of Thomas [of Aquino], if not further back since the Greeks started using the language of ousia or ‘being’ for talking God (but that was a little different from the Thomist heritage in the sense that they often used ousia as synonymous with hypostases or ‘persons’ and vice versa). No matter what period past to think and talk God in terms of substance has become considered the orthodox way, the way of the consensus fidelium, the way of retrieving all that is holy and orthodox in regard to talking and thinking God. Any verging from substance metaphysics, especially as we have developed into Enlightenment and Post-Enlightenment ways, is considered heresy by the faithful. Indeed, if you scan various literature, and even online conjecture, what you will often find in such quadrants is that anyone who attempts to think God in overt ‘personalist’ or personal terms must be some sort of heterodox, at best, and heretic at worst. The label the faithful place on those who would attempt to think and talk God in overtly personalistic terms is: ‘theistic personalism.’ Such people want to claim that said theistic personalists, in regard to talking and thinking God, are nothing better than ‘social Trinitarians,’ thus operating from a panentheist view of God wherein God is thought purely from below to above. This is the charge made against those of us who would fit the so-called theistic personalist label, and yet it fails to recognize the argument of the beard it thinks from; it fails to make distinctions on a continuum; it fails to recognize that God Self-revealed is Father of the Son / Son of the Father by the Holy Spirit—these are ultimately personalizing personal terms and realities ‘revealed’ about who God is. Thusly, it is important to allow such revelation about God to determine the way we think and talk God. And if ‘substance’ language were to be used it would have to be reified by the pressures provided for by the Self-revelation of God, otherwise the “substance-abusers” (haha) would be the ones guilty of a social Trinitarianism; i.e. of importing concepts from below to the above, in regard to God (in fact this is exactly what obtains, I would argue, when such substance-abusers attempt to think God from His effects in the created order; to think God from the so-called analogia entis).

With the aforementioned noted I think it would be interesting to observe how things transitioned from thinking and talking God in terms of substance to subject (or in personalist terms). Eberhard Juengal offers a helpful sketch of how this transition took place in the ‘theology’ of Hegel (which of course post-Hegel would have far-reaching implications towards the development of a so-called ‘modern theology’). Juengal writes:

These distinctions between the three forms of religion are only apparently formal. They have their effect in the content of the religions. This can be shown in the statement about the death of God, which belongs to revealed religion, statement which formulates a precise step of the relationship of being and consciousness, a relationship which is so decisive and full of tension for the history of the spirit. That being which is independent of any other, “. . . that which is in itself, and is conceived through itself,” has been called “substance” ever since Aristotle. It is characteristic of substance that it does not exist in something else. According to Hegel, this distinguishes it from the subject. Whereas substance rests in itself, for Hegel the subject is “the process of positing itself, or in mediating with its own self its transitions from one state or position to the opposite. The subject comes to itself whereas substance has always been in itself. The essence of substance is autonomy, that of the subject is self-movement. Part of the self-movement of the subject is mediation by something else, which for its part is what it is through the subject. And the subject does not lose itself in that other thing, but rather together with that other thing, which exists because of it, it arrives at a freedom which surpasses the autonomy of substance, the freedom of self-consciousness. Therefore, in Hegel’s view, “. . . everything depends on grasping and expressing the ultimate truth not as Substance but as Subject as well.” Only a substance which has become absolute subject and which is understood as absolute subject can be regarded as God. From this point of view, the differentiation of the three forms of religion has taken place. They mark the pathway of the substance toward its being a subject.[1]

If you have ever heard the language Being in Becoming with reference to God, what Juengal describes above, with reference to Hegel, would be where such language and conceptuality comes from. It is this ‘turn’ to ‘Being in Becoming’ that many classical theists maintain results in collapsing God into the modalism of the economic, or the ‘world-being’ (my word), such that God becomes a predicate of His becoming. But even as noted in the sketch of Juengal, this would be wrong-think. For Hegel, according to Juengal, there would be no becoming without the prius of God’s life as “substance,” or antecedent-being. Of course, the type of dialectical inflections this takes in the Hegelian system is a thing of its own imagination, but his development, even as he has described this type of distinction between substance and subject, is not the only or necessary way to think and talk God as ‘Being in Becoming.’

A good reading of Barth’s theology, as Juengal offers in his book God’s Being Is in Becoming: The Trinitarian Being of God in the Theology of Karl Barth, identifies a way to think in potentially “Hegelian” terms without actually becoming (pun intended) Hegelian; just as Barth thinks in Kantian terms without actually becoming Kantian. It is possible to reify grammar, just as the Nicenes did with the Hellenic language (of substance or ousia) at their time, and end up with a linguistic and conceptual sitz im leben wherein the [Hellenic, or Hegelian et al.] ‘text’ simply becomes a pre-text awaiting the re-texting provided for it by an alien reality—in the case of Christian witness, the Kerygma—such that a non-correlationist Christian grammar is produced without the metaphysical baggage that originally gave rise to said grammars in their original (Hellenic, Hegelian, Kantian et al.) contexts. The question always remains: is there a better context-laden grammar out there, that is for thinking and talking God, than other alternatives might offer? This is the question that ought to drive all constructive and Church dogmatic theological endeavor, but it doesn’t. So, instead we end up with the substance-abusers calling the constructivists (which is what Thomas was during his day, by the way) that nastygram: “theistic personalists.”

The point in all of this, for me, and hopefully for you, is to recognize that theology has developments; some good, some bad. But what should be indicated here is that good theology is always already developing, and that it isn’t slavishly domiciled into one supposed ‘sacrosanct period’ of an ostensibly orthodox development of being. God still speaks, in other words: Deus dixit.

[1] Eberhard Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World (Eugune, OR: Wipf and Stock Reprint Mohr Sieback, 1983), 80-1.

Augustine and TF Torrance in Deified Rapprochement?

Posted on September 25, 2021 by Bobby Grow

His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire. -II Peter 1.3-4

The above passage is the locus classicus for many a Patristic theologian, in regard to articulating a doctrine of theosis vis-à-vis salvation. But typically, this articulation is only reserved for theologians of the ‘Eastern’ persuasion; the Westerners are often left out. Indeed, the primary Latin theologian, the progenitor of all that is holy in the West, St. Augustine himself, is painted as someone who suffered from this lacuna of theosis in his soteriological oeuvre. But as, David Vincent Meconi has iterated: “… Augustine far outpaces any other Latin patristic writer in his use of the technical term deificare and its cognates.”1 Meconi writes further,

Augustine was unique among the Church Fathers in arguing that the human person was the only creature brought into the world incompletely. Whereas the other days of creation receive an “and it was good,” Augustine’s very careful reading of Scripture alerted him to the fact that God does not stamp the sixth day with its own exclusive declaration, “esset bonum,” but instead on the sixth day God overlooks all things together and declares that all things together (cuncta) are very good (cf. Gen 1:31). As such, the day on which humans are created is still incomplete, pointing to something beyond itself. Adam is thus presented as “foreshadowing another something still to come” (Gn. litt. 3.24; CSEL 28.92). This is how Augustine accounts for the divine dynamism inherent in the human soul; although created naturally good, the imago Dei still longs to be like God, and in Adam’s very humanity, how that will be accomplished is foreshadowed.

This desire of a copy to be like its paradigmatic archetype was something Augustine had worked out very early on. In his Solilooquia (386–87) he famously admits to wanting to know nothing more than “God and the soul,” and the two meet in his subsequent discussion on the imago Dei where Augustine cleverly depicts himself [A] talking to reason personified [R]:

R: Does it not seem to you that your image in a mirror wants, in a way, to be you and is false because it is not?

A: That certainly seems so.

R: Do not all pictures and replicas of that kind and all artists’ works of that type strive to be that in whose likeness they are made?

A: I am completely convinced that they do

(sol. 2.9.17; Paffenroth 2000, 72-73; cf. c. Acad. 3.17.39).

This move is essential to understand. Deifying union with God for Augustine is not the abolishing of human nature but its only true fulfillment. The heart is inquietum outside the divine life for which it has been created. Sin depersonalizes and destroys. Growing in likeness with God restores the otherwise fragmented self. “I shudder inasmuch as I am unlike him, yet I am afire with longing because I am like him” . . . . The doctrine of the imago Dei allows Augustine to explain deification as the consummation of all human impulse and agency, the copy’s full share in its model, the final rest for which every human person is created.2

I wanted to point this up because, often, TF Torrance, my homeboy and teacher, is known for his critique of Augustine’s theology, in general, which he identifies with what he calls the Latin Heresy. This heresy, for Torrance, is simply the idea that Augustine suffered too much from his commitment to neo-Platonism, and the inherent dualism (between the eternal and the temporal / the spiritual-material) therein. But in relief, Meconi might help provide a constructive point of rapprochement between Torrance and Augustine; at least when it comes to thinking soteriologically about a God-human relation.

1 David Vincent Meconi, S.J., “Augustine’s doctrine of deification,” in David Vincent Meconi, S.J. and Eleonore Stump eds., The Cambridge Companion to Augustine (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 208.

2 Ibid., 212-13.

TF Torrance’s Copy-and-Paste of Barth’s Doctrine of Christ Concentrated Election

Posted on September 20, 2021 by Bobby Grow

I have had the following quote from Thomas Torrance up at the blog (in the sidebar) since at least 2009. It reads as follows:

God loves you so utterly and completely that he has given himself for you in Jesus Christ his beloved Son, and has thereby pledged his very being as God for your salvation. In Jesus Christ God has actualised his unconditional love for you in your human nature in such a once for all way, that he cannot go back upon it without undoing the Incarnation and the Cross and thereby denying himself. Jesus Christ died for you precisely because you are sinful and utterly unworthy of him, and has thereby already made you his own before and apart from your ever believing in him. He has bound you to himself by his love in a way that he will never let you go, for even if you refuse him and damn yourself in hell his love will never cease. Therefore, repent and believe in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Saviour.1

It is rich with ‘Chalcedonian pattern,’ and the homoousial reality of the eternal Logos, the Son of the Father become human pro nobis. Karl Barth writes something very similar—and so my guess is that he inspired TFT’s above statement—in regard to the election of God in Christ for the world:

§ 35

THE ELECTION OF THE INDIVIDUAL

The man who is isolated over against God is as such rejected by God. But to be this man can only be by the godless man’s own choice. The witness of the community of God to every individual man consists in this: that this choice of the godless man is void; that he belongs eternally to Jesus Christ and therefore is not rejected, but elected by God in Jesus Christ; that the rejection which he deserves on account of his perverse choice is borne and cancelled by Jesus Christ; and that he is appointed to eternal life with God on the basis of the righteous, divine decision. The promise of his election determines that as a member of the community he himself shall be a bearer of its witness to the whole world. And the revelation of his rejection can only determine him to believe in Jesus Christ as the One by whom it has been borne and cancelled.2

“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him will not perish, but have everlasting life.”

These two statements from these two men, respectively, is what has drawn me to their theologies like none other. In the past I was awash, as many still are, in the false binaries on offer, in regard to the classical doctrines of election and reprobation. I always knew there was something wrong with them, but really had no alternatives to satisfy my deepest christological inclinations and disposition. That is until I came across both Barth and Torrance, and the way they took the Chalcedonian Christology, and brought it to its rightful conclusion. These theologians, the both (Barth as the forerunner, following his friend Pierre Maury), constructively and canonically tied up the loose, and negative ends that Chalcedon leftover. Barth and Torrance, respectively, go beyond the conciliar theology, but they don’t leave it behind. Instead, in my view, they achieve a pro-level focus on the esse of what Chalcedon (among the other important Christological councils around that time) theology had only left in inchoate form.

The focus of a genuinely framed Christian theology is what we see in nuce in both of these statements. To know God, and to know ourselves before God (coram Deo) is to first know Christ by the Spirit. It is in this knowing that we come to have capacity and orientation to know the God who alone has freely chosen to reveal Himself to, for, and in us in the centraldogma of His life with us in, Jesus Christ. This is a unilateral move of God; ie His being in becoming in such a way that ‘He who knew no sin, became sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.’ This becoming has never been contingent on us in abstraction from God for us. This being has become for us prior to us, but not without us; since, as Barth emphasizes: God freely determined to not be God without us, but with us Immanuel.

This is the Evangel, the kerygmatic reality that is so precisely encapsulated by both Barth and TFT in the aforementioned statements. If pastors, theologians, and Christian witnesses in general could come to grasp the nut of these statements the Christian Church, and world, would be the better for it. As we observe in the above Barth and TFT reduce deep dimensional theology in a way that doesn’t leave us in the lurch of a reductionism. Instead, they both, respectively, present the Gospel reality—and its sum in the ‘election of God’—in a way that respects all of the creedal theology of the ecumenical past, while emphasizing the canonical and Scriptural reality that sees Jesus as the center of everything (cf. John 5:39). They think from the Protestant ‘Scripture Principle,’ but do so in ways that are church catholic and deeply Christologically conditioned.

1 T. F. Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 94.

2 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/2 §35 The Doctrine of God: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 111.

Niceno-Predestination: God’s Pre-destination for us in Jesus Christ

Posted on August 2, 2021 by Bobby Grow

If Christians knew Nicene theology, they could avoid the oft combatant atmosphere that typifies much of Western (and especially popular) theological discourse. When it comes to the locus of predestination / election-reprobation the divisiveness amplifies to an all-out battle cry. Because Christians, in the main, don’t realize that they can (and ought to) think all things from the grammar developed at the Niceno-Constantinopolitano-Chalcedony ecumenical Church councils, namely, the homoousios, the idea that the Son enfleshed in Jesus Christ is both fully God and fully human in His singular person, they devolve into an abstract and discursive mode of theological (or atheological) reasoning. When this mode of ‘theological reasoning’ is applied to the question of predestination we end up with a bi-polar malaise that results in something like the “Calvinists V the Arminians.” In other words, when people come to think that their only alternative for thinking about the complex of predestination is to defer to the philosophers, said thinkers end up thinking abstractly about God’s election (or not) of particular individual people. This is partly because the philosophers’ intellectual ambit is limited by their flatlander experience of the cosmos; that is, the philosopher, no matter how genius, can never gain the God-view vista required for accessing a reality that is purely grounded in Deus revelatus (God revealed). And so, the Christians operating out of this intellectual impoverishment end up thinking about an absolutely heavenly reality, grounded in God’s inner-triune-life, from non-heavenly categories. As such they don’t think of humanity from God’s pre-destined and elect humanity for them in Jesus Christ.

Karl Barth summarizes what I take to be the theo-logical outcome of taking Nicene theology to its reductive conclusion with reference to a doctrine of predestination:

The doctrine of election is the sum of the Gospel because of all words that can be said or heard it is the best: that God elects man; that God is for man too the One who loves in freedom. It is grounded in the knowledge of Jesus Christ because He is both the electing God and the elected man in One. It is part of the doctrine of God because originally God’s election of man is a predestination not merely of man but of Himself. Its function is to bear basic testimony to eternal, free and unchanging grace as the beginning of all the ways and works of God.1

For Barth, and for the implications of Nicene theology, when we think of predestination, the referent isn’t you and me, at a first order level; the referent is God’s life for us, as He freely elects our humanity for Himself in the Son. In this sense, a doctrine of predestination is radically re-oriented, such that the battle of “who is elect,” as if individual people were under consideration, is taken off the table; full stop. This is not to say that individual people aren’t entailed by God’s pre-destinating of Himself to be for us (pro nobis); indeed, it is to say, alternatively, that all of humanity has been invited to the ‘banqueting table of God.’ It is to say that all of humanity has a concrete place in the Kingdom of God in Christ just because God’s Kingdom is grounded in its lively center in Jesus Christ; who just so happens to be garbed with our humanity. The question remains open though, will a person repent and say yes from Christ’s Yes and amen for them, or not? In other words, a Nicene informed doctrine of predestination says that all of humanity is already elected for God, because God has already elected Himself for them in Jesus Christ.

The ‘classical’ retort to this, the one funded by a heavy-handed philosophical account, attended by its usual Aristotelian theory of causation and substance, might be that the Nicene account I am describing results in an undercut of God’s sovereignty; and thus, a notion of Divine double-jeopardy is injected into the mix. They might say this because they operate with what Barth calls the decretum absolutum (absolute decree) logic of what Thomas Torrance calls logico-causal necessitarian determinism. This is the idea that God has baked certain necessary features of causation, such as His primary and then secondary causation into the created order, which requires that certain outcomes obtain one way or the other per God’s unrevealed and arbitrary decree. On this account, this is all to make sure that God remains Sovereign, which entails His eternality, impassibility, immutability, and other characteristics.

When such thinking encounters my type of thinking on predestination it simply cannot countenance the idea that an individual human agent might have the means to “thwart” God’s predetermined predestination of all things. But of course, if this theory of causation is rejected from the get-go, as it should be, then that sort of dilemma never obtains. I clearly reject the decretum absolutum logic, and instead think from the filial-logic that funds the orthodox theology developed in the Nicene advancements.

Conclusion

A doctrine of Predestination ought to be thought from the consubstantial natures (both Divine and human) of the Theoanthropos Godman, Jesus Christ. If this is done predestination will not be thought of from an abstract center in ourselves, but instead from the concrete center of God’s free life for us in Jesus Christ. Pre-destination’s referent will be understood to be God, at a first order level, and our relationship to Him, as human beings, will only be thought from within the tremendum of the gracious movement of God for us, and us for God, as that is actualized in the One Man, Jesus Christ. This is the genuinely Christian confessional understanding of a doctrine of predestination. If you check it against Holy Scripture, as you always should—especially as good Protestant Christians—you will find that not only does the Christological and Trinitarian grammar, developed in the Nicene theology, coheres with the Scriptural witness, but that when that is applied to our current doctrine of predestination (and any other doctrine worth its Christian salt), that in corollary fashion, it also coheres with the biblical categories.

At the end: Jesus is God’s predestination for the world. This is the revelational doctrine of pre-destination. If this is accepted the typical theatrics that surrounds this doctrine dissipate into the inferno of God’s white-hot love for the world. We can get back to focusing on Jesus rather than ourselves this way. Oh, what a thought!

1 Barth, CD II/2:1.

This is the Way: The Nicene Way:: The Nicene Creed V The Westminster Confession of Faith

Posted on June 18, 2021 by Bobby Grow

Scholastic Reformed theologians claim to be in line with Nicene theology proper. But when you read scholastic Reformed theology, particularly their confessions, what becomes immediately apparent is that scholastic Reformed theology operates out of the apophatic ‘negative’ and/or speculative tradition for thinking a doctrine of God (and Christ); whereas Nicene theology thinks from cataphatic ‘positive’ and/or revealed theology for thinking God. By way of prolegomena or theological methodology this places Niceno-Constantinopolitano theology at loggerheads with something like we see in the scholastically Reformed Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF). Note the way the WCF articulates its doctrine of God:

Chapter 2 Of God, and of the Holy Trinity

1. There is but one only, living, and true God, who is infinite in being and perfection, a most pure spirit, invisible, without body parts, or passions; immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty, most wise, most holy, most free, most absolute; working all things according to the counsel of his own immutable and most righteous will, for his own glory; most loving, gracious, merciful, long-suffering, abundant in goodness and truth, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin; the rewarder of them that diligently seek him; and withal, most just, and terrible in his judgments, hating all sin, and who will by no means clear the guilty. 2. God hath all life, glory, goodness, blessedness, in and of himself; and is alone in and unto himself all-sufficient, not standing in need of any creatures which he hath made, nor deriving any glory from them, but only manifesting his own glory in, by, unto, and upon them. He is the alone fountain of all being, of whom, through whom, and to whom are all things; and hath most sovereign dominion over them, to do by them, for them, or upon them whatsoever himselfpleaseth. In his sight all things are open and manifest, his knowledge is infinite, infallible, and independent upon the creature, so as nothing is to him contingent, or uncertain. He is most holy in all his counsels, in all his works, and in all his commands. To him is due from angels and men, and every other creature, whatsoever worship, service, or obedience he is pleased to require of them. 3. In the unity of the Godhead there be three persons, of one substance, power, and eternity: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost:the Father is of none, neither begotten, nor proceeding; the Son is eternally begotten of the Father; the Holy Ghost eternally proceeding from the Father and the Son.

Notice the WCF’s entrée: it starts with ‘negative’ and or philosophical attributes of Godness, only to “get-to” the triune life of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in its last chapter, chapter 3. This is illustrative of the spirit and mode by which the scholastic Reformeds attempt to think God. Somehow, they maintain that this way is in keeping with the catholic theology we find articulated in Nicene theology. But you do see what they are doing, right? They start with a logico-deductive schematized notion of God’s singularity or oneness (actus purus) prior to ever getting to the revealed categories for God, and this only in the last paragraph of chapter 2.

With the aforementioned in mind, let’s now review the Nicene Creed. What the reader will see is that my original claim, in regard to the discontinuity between Nicene theology and scholastic Reformed theology, vis-à-vis a doctrine of God, bears out.

We believe in one God,
      the Father almighty,
      maker of heaven and earth,
      of all things visible and invisible.

And in one Lord Jesus Christ,
      the only Son of God,
      begotten from the Father before all ages,
           God from God,
           Light from Light,
           true God from true God,
      begotten, not made;
      of the same essence as the Father.
      Through him all things were made.
      For us and for our salvation
           he came down from heaven;
           he became incarnate by the Holy Spirit and the virgin Mary,
           and was made human.
           He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate;
           he suffered and was buried.
           The third day he rose again, according to the Scriptures.
           He ascended to heaven
           and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
           He will come again with glory
           to judge the living and the dead.
           His kingdom will never end.

And we believe in the Holy Spirit,
      the Lord, the giver of life.
      He proceeds from the Father and the Son,
      and with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified.
      He spoke through the prophets.
      We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic church.
      We affirm one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
      We look forward to the resurrection of the dead,
      and to life in the world to come. Amen.

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit condition and define the terms of the Nicene Creed itself. There is nothing speculative or discursive about Nicene theology, in regard to its doctrine of God. Nicene theology affirms the doctrine of Divine simplicity (the idea that God is non-composite), but it thinks simplicity from within the co-inhering relations of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; rather than thinking this doctrine from negations about what Godness must entail based on the sort of logico-deductive schematizing that we see funding the scholastic Reformed theology that is communicated in the Westminster Confession of Faith.

Athanasius was clear about the sort of Nicene theology he was a central proponent of when he wrote in his famed document Contra Arianos:

1. Therefore it is more pious and more accurate to signify God from the Son and call Him Father, than to name Him from His works only and call HimUnoriginate. For the latter title, as I have said, does nothing more than signify all the works, individually and collectively, which have come to be at the will of God through the Word; but the title Father has its significance and its bearing only from the Son. And, whereas the Word surpasses things originated, by so much and more does calling God Father surpass the calling Him Unoriginate. For the latter is unscriptural and suspicious, because it has various senses; so that, when a man is asked concerning it, his mind is carried about to many ideas; but the word Father is simple and scriptural, and more accurate, and only implies the Son. And ‘Unoriginate’ is a word of the Greeks, who know not the Son; but ‘Father’ has been acknowledged and vouchsafed by our Lord. For He, knowing Himself whose Son He was, said, ‘I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me;’ and, ‘He that has seen Me, has seen the Father,’ and ‘I and the Father are One ;’ but nowhere is He found to call the Father Unoriginate. Moreover, when He teaches us to pray, He says not, ‘When you pray, say, O God Unoriginate,’ but rather, ‘When you pray, say, Our Father, which art in heaven Luke 11:2.’ And it was His will that the Summary of our faith should have the same bearing, in bidding us be baptized, not into the name of Unoriginate and originate, nor into the name of Creator and creature, but into the Name of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. For with such an initiation we too, being numbered among works, are made sons, and using the name of the Father, acknowledge from that name the Word also in the Father Himself. A vain thing then is their argument about the term ‘Unoriginate,’ as is now proved, and nothing more than a fantasy.1

In context, of course, Athanasius is working against the Arians, and even aspects of the homoiousion sect (think Eusebius of Caesarea et al.) wherein what was meant with reference to ‘Unoriginate’ was that the Father alone owned this status, whereas the Son (and Holy Spirit) were originate (or ‘begotten’) lending to the idea that the Son was a creature and thus subordinate to God. But this is to our point: to think God from speculative philosophical notions, as the Arians and Homoiousions did, only leads to unbiblical conclusions, and thus grammar about who God is; indeed, it thinks of God in terms of whatness rather than whoness as a first-step. Athanasius, and the Nicene theology he helped develop, repudiated thinking God from Hellenic frames of reference, and instead allowed God’s Self-revelation in the Son, Jesus Christ, to shape the way he, and the other Nicenes, thought God. Indeed, Arius, and his homeboys would also assert that they were equally being faithful to Scripture; but in fact, what they were doing, instead, was allowing their a priori commitment to strict Hellenic thought-forms to shape the way they arrived at their biblical exegetical conclusions vis-à-vis God.

Are the scholastic Reformeds Arian with reference to God; or homoiousion with reference to Christology? No. But this isn’t because of their theological method; instead, it is because of their piety. If they were consistent with their respective commitment to their speculative (Aristotelian) theological methodology, as Arius et alia were, they would necessarily need to arrive at the conclusion that the Son and Holy Spirit were somehow subordinate to the Unoriginate Father (which would serve as a cipher for their concept of ‘oneness’).

I am Athanasian Reformed because I am slavishly committed to the Nicene theological way. This way only thinks God from within the concrete and revealed terms of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; it allows God’s triune life to serve as the ‘ground and grammar’ of all subsequent theologizing. The scholastic Reformeds, as much as they like to assert to the contrary, do not have these sorts of continuous connections to Nicene theology in the way they suppose. This discontinuity between scholastic Reformed theology and Nicene theology serves as the basis by which I as an Athanasian Reformed (or Evangelical Calvinist) negatively critique the scholastic Reformed. But you will note: the critique is made from a positive orientation insofar as my theology is grounded in God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ; this is the way, the Nicene way.

1 St. Athanasius, Contra Arianos 1.9.34, accessed 06-18-2021.

Reading the Bible Through the ‘Chalcedonian Pattern’ is the Only Genuinely Christian Way

Posted on September 22, 2020 by Bobby Grow

Orthodox (little ‘o’) Christians of all ages have affirmed the Chalcedonian grammar about the two-natures/singular person Christology. The Chalcedonian council was a council convened in 451 AD in order to mitigate a variety of heretical christologies that had been plaguing the patrological church.[1] Ever since, the grammar produced has been the standard, the regula (rule) by which all other christological efforts are measured. The grammar has become so pervasive, that at least among the orthodox, all Christians operate with even a tacit understanding of it (although recent polls suggest that more than 30% of so-called evangelical Christians do not affirm the deity of Christ; which is why I keep qualifying with ‘orthodox’). As any good theology does, Chalcedon, and in this case, in a catholic way, offers a theological grammar that finds its correspondence in conceptions presupposed in the inner-logic of Holy Scripture. With this noted, here is the Creed of Chalcedon:

We, then, following the holy fathers, all with one consent teach men to confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in Godhead and also perfect in manhood; truly God and truly man, of a rational soul and body; coessential with the Father according to the Godhead, and consubstantial with us according to the manhood; in all things like unto us, without sin; begotten before all ages of the Father according to the Godhead, and in these latter days, for us and for our salvation, born of the Virgin Mary, the mother of God, according to the manhood; one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, to be acknowledged in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation; the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one person and one subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son, and only begotten, God the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ; as the prophets from the beginning have declared concerning Him, and the Lord Jesus Christ Himself has taught us, and the creed of the holy fathers has handed down to us.[2]

The point of rehearsing these things is to get us somewhere else, in a related way. I contend that since all orthodox Christians, in every place, operate with these conciliar categories—two natures/singular person—with reference to Jesus Christ, that it is this fortification, these grammatical loci, that fundamentally give hermeneutical shape to the way that even the most low-church evangelicals think Christ. As a subsequent implication then, this tacit Chalcedonian grammar, is, or should be the explicit way Christians interpret all of Scripture (both Old and New Testaments). More crudely put: since the conciliar Christ is fundamental to how orthodox Christians think Christ, and if Scripture is, at a first-order level, intensively and principially in reference to Christ, if Scripture is the sign (signum) to its greater and ontological reality (res), Jesus Christ, then all Christian exegesis of Holy Scripture will be and must be regulated by this sort of catholic (universal) Christological standard. That is to say, if Christians are going to think who Christ is through the Chalcedonian grammar, in an essential, but proximate way (vis-à-vis eschatological reality), eo ipso they will interpret Scripture through this rule insofar that Scripture refers to Jesus and the triune God as its inherent and life-breathing reality.

With the aforementioned noted, we now turn to Karl Barth; and in particular, with noted attention to an interpretive mechanism George Hunsinger has identified as a helpful key in regard to understanding the way Barth (and after Barth exegetes and theologians) constructively applied the Chalcedonian grammar, as a pattern towards his exegesis of Scripture whilst paying close attention to Scripture’s inner-theologic (which is what theological exegetes do). In the following Hunsinger describes the way this pattern looks when applied to various theological loci, as those are identified in the under-bubbling of Holy Scripture’s witness:

The coherentist mode of testing, as it emerged in the survey of rationalism, also plays a decisive role in Barth’s justification of his position on double agency. Directly and indirectly, therefore, it serves to justify his reliance on the conceptions of miracle and mystery in that position. On the exegetical or hermeneutical premise that the terms of the Chalcedonian pattern are rooted in the biblical testimony regarding how divine and human agency are related, the mode of doctrinal testing proceeds as follows. The Chalcedonian pattern is used to specify counterpositions that would be doctrinally incoherent (and also incoherent with scripture). “Without separation or division” means that no independent human autonomy can be posited in relation to God. “Without confusion or change” means that not divine determinism or monism can be posited in relation to humanity. Finally, “complete in deity and complete in humanity” means that no symmetrical relationship can be posited between divine and human actions (or better, none that is not asymmetrical). It also means that the two cannot be posited as ultimately identical. Taken together, these considerations mean that, if the foregoing conditions are to be met, no nonmiraculous and nonmysterious conception is possible. The charge of incoherence (as previously defined) thereby reveals itself to be abstract, in the sense that it does not adequately take all the necessary factors into account. It does not work inductively from the subject matter (as attested by scripture)–as the motif of particularism would prescribe. Instead, it starts from general considerations such as formal logic and applies them to certain isolated aspects of the more “concrete” position. At the same time, the charge may well have implicated itself, wittingly or unwittingly, in one of the rejected couterpositions.[3]

We see, in Hunsinger’s description, the way Barth used the revealedness of the miracle of God become human in Jesus Christ as the standard by which Christian exegetes ought to approach the many paradoxes that emerge from a world that is shaped, and given purpose (telos) by the reality of its confrontation by God in Christ. In other words, if what Chalcedon has attempted to describe (albeit through a series of ‘without’ negations) about the mysterium incarnatio (mystery of the incarnation), is indeed of an otherworldly origin, then the Christian engagement with Scripture, and all of reality, will take its hermeneutical cue and shape from this miracle; viz. it will not allow thisworldly conceptions of God, and thus Jesus Christ as the Theanthropos (Godman), to be determinative: 1) of how they think of a God-world relation, and 2) (as a subsequent) towards the way they interpret Scripture—insofar that Jesus Christ is Scripture’s centraldogma.

The point of highlighting the so-called Chalcedonian pattern is to note, at a first-order level, the way that orthodox Christians consciously or sub-consciously (as the case may be) approach their thinking of who Jesus Christ is. And then, at a second-order level, as that is determinative for the way Christians think Jesus, particularly as that finds concrete reference within the evangelical character of the triune life, of whom he is integral, and insofar that Jesus Christ is indeed the warp and woof of Holy Scripture, it is this miracle that ought to regulate, in a categorical way, the mode by which Christians interpret the Bible. Insofar that this Chalcedonian pattern is diminished, either through lack of intentional education, or merely by lack of education, per se, the Christian’s interpretation of Holy Scripture will be lacking; if not totally deleterious to the Christian’s soul and Kingdomed way of life.

A secondary point: many evangelical Christians operate with a sort of “cancel-culture” when it comes to church history and the history of interpretation. They often suffer from the myopia and fall-out that turn-to-the-subject modernity has projected into the soul of postmodern humanity. As such, they will, again, tacitly affirm, if they are ever confronted with it, that they believe Jesus is both fully God and fully human (so Chalcedon). But they won’t intentionally or self-consciously apply the emergent pattern this should evince for them, in regard to the regulative role that the miracle of the incarnation ought to play for them in their interpretation of Holy Writ. So, because they are willfully (and thus woefully) ignorant of the history of interpretation; because they are often intentionally devoid of the spirit of Church History (and her ideas); they will simply interpret Scripture from their own rationalizing about things, rather than from the miracle of the incarnation (particularly as that is given intelligible grammar by the Chalcedonian creed and its constructive engagement).

The fall-out is that many (most) modern evangelicals, particularly in North America, and the West in general, will piously affirm Jesus as the Godman, and yet proceed ignorantly blissfully as if this affirmation does not have the sort of pressure and force it ought to have on everything else following. In other words, they will and do read Scripture as if it is solely about them, and the Jesus they have constructed from their own desires and projections therefrom, instead of reading it, as the Chalcedonian pattern requires; as if Scripture is about how God freely chose to become human in Christ for them, for the world. In short: evangelical Christians, because the Chalcedonian pattern is not the pattern of their thinking as Christians, live in a world of dissonance and self-manufacture, rather than the miraculous world given shape by the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. Evangelical Christians of this order, as such, live in a rationalist, positivist, individualistic, empiricist world that is not given shape by the faith of Christ (pistis Christou); but instead it is given shape by the limit of their own short and self-sighted vision—albeit, all in the name of Jesus Christ.[4]

An Addendum: Click Here

[1] See the following description provided by Protestant Reformed Churches in America, “The Creed of Chalcedon, A.D. 451, is not mentioned by name in any of our three forms of unity, but the doctrine set forth in it is clearly embodied in Article 19 of our Confession of Faith. It constitutes an important part of our ecumenical heritage. The Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon settled the controversies concerning the person and natures of our Lord Jesus Christ and established confessionally the truths of the unity of the divine person and the union and distinction of the divine and human natures of Christ. It condemned especially the error of Nestorianism, which denied the unity of the divine person in Christ; the error of Apollinarianism, which denied the completeness of Christ’s human nature; and the error known as Eutychianism, which denied the duality and distinction of the divine and human natures of our Lord Jesus Christ. What was confessionally established at Chalcedon concerning the person and natures of Christ has continued to be the confession of the church catholic ever since that time.”

[2] Ibid.

[3] George Hunsinger, How To Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology(New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 195-6 nook version.

[4] I have hit on many themes in this post. It is not as coherent as I’d like, but it represents a first draft of a possible essay on such things.

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Athanasian Reformed

𝑉𝑒𝑟𝑏𝑢𝑚 𝐷𝑒𝑖 𝑚𝑎𝑛𝑒𝑡 𝑖𝑛 𝑎𝑒𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑛𝑢𝑚. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐝 𝐨𝐟 𝐆𝐨𝐝 𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐥𝐚𝐬𝐭 𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫.

Category Archives: Patristic Theology