Learning to Think Critically Rather than Relativistically: Mein Kampf as a Case Study

Posted on August 5, 2020 by Bobby Grow

When man attempts to rebel against the iron logic of Nature, he comes into struggle with the principles to which he himself owes his existence as a man. And this attack must lead to his own doom. Here of course we encounter . . .: “Man’s role is to overcome Nature!” Millions thoughtlessly parrot this . . . nonsense and end up really imagining that they themselves represent a kind of conqueror of Nature; though in this the dispose of no other weapon than an idea . . . But quite aside from the fact that man has never yet conquered Nature in anything, but at most has caught hold of an tried to lift one or another corner of her immense gigantic veil of eternal riddles and secrets, that in reality he invents nothing but only discovers everything, that he does not dominate Nature, but has only reason on the basis of his knowledge of various laws and secrets of Nature to be lord over those other living things who lack this knowledge—quite aside from all this, an idea cannot overcome the preconditions for the development and being of humanity, because the idea itself depends on man. Without human beings there is no human idea in the world, the idea as such is always conditioned by the presence of human beings and hence of all laws which created the precondition for their existence. And not only that! . . . All these ideas, which have nothing to do with cold logic as such, but represent only pure expressions of feeling, ethical conceptions, etc., are chained to the existence of men, to whose intellectual imagination and creative power they owe their existence . . . At this point someone or another may laugh, but this planet once moved through the ether for millions of years without human beings and it can do so again someday if men forget that they owe their higher existence, not to the ideas of a few crazy ideologists, but to the knowledge and ruthless application of Nature’s stern and rigid laws. [redacted version of Mein Kampf]

The gross anti-Semitic slurs peppering the text as indicated by the ellipses would be a dead give-away. I have removed them from the text, not because they do not form part and parcel with Hitler’s thinking in the passage, but, as argued above, because they are the shadow side of his positive intuition, then, the slurs are omitted to force the reader to think through Hitler’s train of thought about the human place in the cosmos and the good to which it may and must aspire, later to see how it is that it comes to radical, racial, murderous anti-Semitism.[1]

The aforementioned is from Paul Hinlicky, and an exercise he undertakes with his bible college and seminary students when he is attempting to teach them the import of critical thinking in dogmatic theology. What it reveals, as he attests, is that many of his students operate with a relativistic or pragmatist understanding of just how ideas work, and are corollary with concrete actions. This is the point I want to press most: i.e. that Christians need to learn to think through things critically. Ideas aren’t merely relative ‘to the person.’ Ideas end up getting expressed in concrete action one way or the other and Christian people need to recognize this. If what is currently underway in the world does not illustrate how ideas are not some sort of ethereal reality that only impacts the one thinking them, then maybe this sort of person needs to think again. Hinlicky, in light of this exercise he uses with his students writes with further reflection:

The point of the exercise with my students is twofold. First, when it comes to intelligent analysis of religious or philosophical views, many contemporary students are wanting in critical thinking skills—that which I take theology as critical dogmatics to be, thinking critically in the cultural domain of philosophy about matters of that final and inclusive Good for which people live, wittingly or not, by some act of initial faith. Students will indeed fervently aver to me that it does not matter what you believe, so long as you are sincere. The very good idea of civil tolerance over differing beliefs about the final and inclusive Good has come to mean for them a kind of uncritical acceptance of any and all possible beliefs. Such beliefs themselves, they think, make no difference that reason can critically discern, nor is there any rational way of settling differences between us about such beliefs. As a result, students descend into a night in which all cats are grey. They cannot see the veiled threat in our text in which Indifferent, if not Cruel Nature with its stern laws is the operative deity and war for the survival of one’s genetic population is the moral imperative of life itself. In fact, however, such metaphysics are not strange to most of them. Remove the Nazi brand name and such reasonings seem familiar, even reasonable. What they do see is the author’s evident sincerity and resort to the cultural authority of natural science.[2]

I share the above because I think there is a dire need for people, particularly Christians, to awaken from their relativistic slumber and realize how important it is to learn how to think critically about ideas and their subsequent impacts as they hit the ground in the ‘real world.’ Just today I had someone tell me that my view on a contemporary hot-topic was an interesting ‘opinion,’ but I wasn’t offering an opinion; I was offering a reasoned reflection as I engaged with particular evidences. This is exactly the point that Hinlicky is developoing, there ultimately cannot be neutral ground with ideas. Ideas have real life and concrete consequences that do not stay relative to the person. Hitler, in the most heinous of ways, illustrates this. Hitler operated with No-theological ideas, just as he worshipped the No-God, but his ideas ended up getting millions upon millions of people killed. Why Christians currently cannot imagine that we live in just as dire of times as the Germans did under Hitler does not follow; not biblically it doesn’t. The human heart is just as desperately wicked now as it was in Nazi Germany or Nimrod’s Babylon. It is time for Christians to move out of ‘that’s an interesting opinion,’ and jump into the more vulnerable waters of taking a stand somewhere; as if that stand ultimately matters because the person has decided to finally think critically with conviction about things. The days of being pragmatic passive are over.

[1] Paul R. Hinlicky, Before Auschwitz: What Christian Theology Must Learn from the Rise of Nazism (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2013), 103-04.

[2] Ibid., 107-08.

If Peter Ramus is Your Homeboy When it Comes to Biblical Hermeneutics You Ought to Shudder: I’m Looking at You, Classical Calvinists

Posted on July 20, 2020 by Bobby Grow

Classical Calvinism, or Westminsterian Calvinism, or scholasticism Reformed, or Federal theology, so on and so forth has a particular way of exegeting Holy Scripture, and for me it is an absolute turn-off; it should be for you too. Have you ever heard of Peter Ramus? If you haven’t, you should look him up. His locus methodology was appropriated by Federal (Covenantal) theology, and used to abstract particular doctrinal topics (loci) from Scripture’s greater canonical whole, and then harmonize said topics through theological confessions like we find in the Westminster Confession of Faith. The problem with this approach, for my money, is that it propositionalizes teachings in Scripture that never intended to be read in the sort of haphazard or broken way that they are; that is relative to the canonical reading Scripture intended to be read from as that is ruled by the reality of Jesus Christ. Paul Hinlicky has this nice description of ‘Ramism’ as he contrasts its approach to Scripture, and how that is fleshed out in what he calls Protological Divine Simplicity (he uses James Dolezal as his example) versus what we find in a canonically oriented reading of Scripture (and he refers us to the post-liberal, George Lindbeck for that alternative—prior to this he refers to Brevard Childs, who I am a fan of, and was trained to read Scripture from in his canonical critical approach). So, Hinlicky:

The rule theory of Christian doctrine is above all credited in recent times to George Lindbeck’s seminal critique of propositionalism in theology, The Nature of Doctrine. Dolezal’s book is a textbook case, hermeneutically, for propositionalism in that the diverse testimonies of Scripture are ahistorically and uncritically torn from their context in God’s history with His people, principalized (i.e. turned into free-floating abstractions) and as such harmonized according to an agenda other than the revelation: “God consigned all to sin in order to have on all.” Lindbeck’s hermeneutical critique of propositionalism, however, does not amount to noncognitivism in theology; rather, it specifies the way in which cognitive claims regarding God are to be made—that is, in first order, directly Spirited discourse (“Be of good cheer, your sins are forgiven!” For “Jesus is Lord.” And Jesus is Lord because “God has highly exalted Him” who undertook your lot and bore your burden. And God exalted Jesus because God freely chose to surpass the wrath of His love by the mercy of His love).[1]

To help explicate what Ramism entails even further, let’s read along with Richard Muller as he describes the impact Peter Ramus had on the Post Reformed orthodox biblical hermeneutic:

In this era, the French and Dutch Reformed also developed, and did so under the pressure of intense persecution at the hands of Roman Catholics. In addition to the framing of the French Reformed faith by the Gallican Confession, the third quarter of the sixteenth century saw the development of a distinct French Reformed style that would be exported to other Reformed centres, notably to England, in the latter part of the century: specifically, the rhetorical and logical or dialectical models of Petrus Ramus (c. 1515-72), much debated in their time, had a vast impact on the structuring of Reformed theology in the early orthodox era. Ramus argued for the replacement of Aristotelian categories of predication with topics elicited from the materials of argument, at least in the organization and exposition of the major academic disciplines, including theology. This approach itself was not at all revolutionary: the use of a topical or place logic had been effectively advocated in the fifteenth century by Rudolf Agricola, and the Agricolan pattern had been developed by Melanchthon and, arguably, adopted by Calvin as well. Ramus’ importance stems instead from the pointedness of his advocacy of the topical method and, above all, from his connection of the topical model with a method of division of the topic into subtopics, all organized into the form of charts utilizing ‘French brackets’ as a visual tool.

The massive impact of this approach is seen in Reformed tracts, treatises, theological systems, and commentaries of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In brief, Ramus offered his age as an approach to organization and, indeed, architectonics, that proved eminently useful in the construction of well-argued systems of theology and in the production of clearly organized biblical commentaries. In the latter case, as evidenced in the works of Johannes Piscator (1546-1625) and Jean Diodati (1576-1649), the diagrams could be effectively conjoined with the rhetorical analysis of text. Ramus’ influence, however, must be fairly strictly limited to method: older scholarship has claimed an association between the advocacy of Ramist logic and non-predestinarian, a posteriori, salvation-historical and covenantal approach to theology. This claim, however, fails for lack of any solid historical documentation. There is, in the first place, a clear use of Ramist method by staunch predestinarians; in the second place, there is no ultimate separation in Reformed theology between covenantal and predestinarian thinking, and in the third place there is no clear association of Ramism with the foundations of Reformed covnenant thought.[2]

Muller helps us appreciate the sort of deep impact that Ramus had on the development of Post Reformed orthodox theology as it sought to exegete Holy Scripture. I mean, you know, if you’re into slicing and dicing Scripture up into bite-sized pieces without any real concern for its canonical whole as that finds its res (reality) in Jesus Christ; more power to ya! I’m just not a fan of reading Scripture this way. I really do prefer reading it as a contextual whole, and allowing its very composition and final canonical form, as that is regulated by its witness to Jesus Christ, to shape the way that I read and meditate on Holy Scripture.

Yes, I am being a little snarky, but that’s what Ramism does to me. I take my Bible reading rather seriously, so when I come across someone who has injected a methodology into its reading that abstracts its intended contextual flow to be broken down into pieces, per an a priori system of theological development, I find myself balking at such attenuations. I would say this is a fundamental flaw in the whole of classical Calvinist theology. If its biblical hermeneutic presents us with this sort of artificial apparatus for reading Scripture, and developing doctrine, just think of what it is doing to its whole theological presentation. I shudder at the thought of being submissive to such biblical gymnastics as we hope to develop the sacra doctrina of Holy Writ. Solo Christo

[1] Paul R. Hinlicky, Divine Simplicity: Christ the Crisis of Metaphysics (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2016), 202.

[2] Richard Muller, The Cambridge Companion To Reformation Theology, 136-37.

*I would have rather found a thug life picture of someone like Amandus Polanus or someone, but Edwards will have to do.

The Fracked PoMo Mind and How that Has Led to this Moment: The Cross of Christ Says, NEIN

Posted on July 10, 2020 by Bobby Grow

I am continuing to read through Paul Hinlicky’s book Divine Simplicity: Christ the Crisis of Metaphysics. In a discussion on the scandal of particularity, and how that problematizes, even wrecks the more ethereal complexes of how divine simplicity has often been thought in the Great Tradition. Hinlicky, offers a nice sketch on Gnosis, and how that applies to our postmodern relativistic moment. Indeed, relativism always is grounded in the polytheism of multitudinous turn-to-the-subjectivities running around claiming that their way, their ideological/ethereal way, is the way. The result: people become a confused ‘muddle’ not sure of who or what to believe; thus they evacuate even the possibility that there could be some scandalous particularous concrete reality that coheres or corresponds with extramental reality that stands beyond them, not from within them. Hinlicky writes:

The deep suspicion arises rather from the ever-mushrooming gnosticism of Euro-American civilization; the new gnosticism arises as a desperate strategy of psychic survival under an imperium of political sovereignty that has lost the canonical story that once constrained its worst excesses and sometimes guided it in more humane directions. We call it “postmodernity,” and it means the collapse of the metanarrative of Christendom with the decay of the classical Western synthesis of Christian Platonism into the pluralist cacophony of contending interests that cannot discover a common good in a demystified and pointless cosmos of matter in motion. This new doctrine of despair ironically funds with apathetic nonresistance (i.e., the “whatever” response) the juggernaut of the biopolitical regime, first manifest in National Socialism, but now recurring by the Satan who disguises itself as an angel of light (2 Cor. 11:14). In face of this monster with a charming face, liberal calls for secular unity or conservative calls for the restoration of Christendom are alike idle chatter. What is needed is the one Lord, Jesus Christ, who breaks into the strong man’s house and binds him (Mark 3:27). The deep battle for the future of humanity on this globe is one being fought along these lines within the hapless churches, ostensibly the representatives of the reign of God, though more often than not little more than funeral societies. Our situation is dire (Mark 4:9), and so the disputation undertaken in this book is a matter of some urgency.[1]

Another friend, who shall remain anonymous, but also a “PhD-maker,” shared the following with me today via private message:

I myself was to experience how easily one is taken in by a lying and censored press and radio in a totalitarian state. Though unlike most Germans I had daily access to foreign newspapers, especially those of London, Paris and Zurich, which arrived the day after publication, and though I listened regularly to the BBC and other foreign broadcasts, my job necessitated the spending of many hours a day in combing the German press, checking the German radio, conferring with Nazi officials and going to party meetings. It was surprising and sometimes consternating to find that notwithstanding the opportunities I had to learn the facts and despite one’s inherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi sources, a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one’s mind and often misled it. No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime’s calculated and incessant propaganda. Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a café, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but … one realized how useless it was even to try to make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were. – William Shirer (in Adolph Hitler’s Germany)

So, Hitler’s Germany was prior to the postmodern moment, simpliciter, but its seedlings had already been planted years prior (just read Nietzsche’s prophetic insights). When authority structures (like governments, elitist cabals, etc.) are intent on duping the people, a necessary condition for that is that the raza are sufficiently schooled in thinking in fragmented and normative relativistic ways. We are clearly at that moment in world history, and we can see it in the eyes (not the faces, since they’re covered by masks) of those embroiled in the confusion and the subsequent fear being pushed onto the postmodern mind that lives under the delusion that their truth is truth (and what we see in mob-mentality is just a collectivist expression of that). Hinlicky, wrote what he did in 2016, I’m afraid what he was warning against (and others before him) has not been heeded; not even in the churches. As such, we have been taken captive by a Babylonian cabal who seeks to steal, kill, and destroy the fracked minds of the masses; neither knowing here nor there when it comes to reality or how to think about it.

The cross of Jesus Christ is the wisdom the Christian mind needs. We ought to avoid submission to mainstream narratives that appeal to the vanity of our own subjectivities, and instead seek out reality that actually corresponds to the real data. I could say more on this front, but I’m sure you know what I’m getting at. Pax vobis

[1] Paul Hinlicky, Divine Simplicity: Christ the Crisis of Metaphysics (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2016), 99-100.

On Proctological, I Mean Protological Divine Simplicity and Its Eschatological Correction

Posted on July 1, 2020 by Bobby Grow

The Trinity never intended on being a ‘protological simplicity,’ but instead an eschatological dynamism of relational graciousness to be related to in koinonial blessedness of the sort that the Son has always already and eternally shared with the Father by the Holy Spirit. In sum, that’s what Paul Hinlicky is getting at here (in not so many words, but more):

Clarification of the problem—the ambiguity or instability—of the doctrine of protological simplicity in this Christian synthesis leads to a choice. The kataphatic function of simplicity as an articulation of God’s unity as the timeless identity of essence and existence must be abandoned for the sake of a more modest apophaticism. Simplicity should be affirmed, in the latter case, as a rule in Christian theology, respecting the incomprehensible unity of the Trinity, One of whom suffered at Another’s will, as decreed by the Fifth Ecumenical Council. In that case, to be sure, the tacit notion of time in the metaphysical affirmation of God’s timeless (and spaceless) self-identity will as well experience a corresponding revision. Our notion of God’s eternity and immensity will not be the abstract negation of creation but instead will be constructed out of the time-like begetting and spirating and the space-like perichoresis of the Triune life. In this way, divine eternity and immensity will be understood as providing the divine capacity for the creature, so that fittingly but not necessarily God creates in order to redeem and fulfill in the coming of the Beloved Community. The Creator/creature distinction, more broadly speaking, is gained not by negating God’s relation to the temporal world of becoming in a pseudo-insight but rather, positively, as Gunton required, by reflection on God’s revealed acts to redeem and fulfill all that He has made. The logic of a positive derivation of the divine attributes by which God is ontologically described as Creator is that what God has in fact done and promises to do, God must be thought of as capable of doing; in short: God is the ineffable harmony of power, wisdom, and love in infinite circulation.[1]

Here we have Hinlicky’s critique of what I like to call an essentialist ‘Pure Being theology,’ corrected by a strictly revelational personalist understanding of who God is as revealed in the economy (ad extra). What is of note here is that Hinlicky shows how a theologian can constructively work with the Great Tradition vis-à-vis a doctrine of God, and at the same time not abandon its core orthodox parameters. I really have no idea why so many younger theologians of retrieval feel so slavishly bound to a sort of repristinating mode in regard to retrieving the classical tradition; there seems to be a sense of security in it for them. I just refuse to think that anything ‘modern’ is from the devil; as far as I can remember the devil has been operative since at least the Fall.

[1] Paul R. Hinlicky, Divine Simplicity: Christ the Crisis of Metaphysics (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2016), 52.

Speaking of God Positively Rather Than Negatively: Simplicity in Multiplicity

Posted on June 21, 2020 by Bobby Grow

How do I, as an Evangelical Calvinist approach the doctrine of Divine Simplicity? Given the Evangelical Calvinists’ commitment to The Holy Trinity [as] the Absolute Ground and Grammar of All Epistemology, Theology, and Worship how would this impact the way that we would attempt to parse out a doctrine of simplicity from this multiplied commitment to thinking God from His threeness to His oneness / His oneness to His threeness? Contra Sonderegger, and the resurgence of monadic pure being theology, derived from the via negativa and apophatic tradition in the church, I as an Evangelical Calvinist repudiate that and can only affirm the via positiva and kataphatic tradition; the tradition that thinks God, without remainder, from His Self-exegesis and revelation in Jesus Christ. Paul Hinlicky in his book Divine Simplicity: Christ the Crisis of Metaphysics details how an Evangelical Calivinist might frame the way we articulate the way we think about simplicity, and how that is given shape from the multiplicity of God in and from the antecedent but revealed triune life. He writes:

Refining Jenson’s position, then, Gunton argues that a theological account of divine nature by a consideration of the attributes of the God of the gospel requires, not doing away with attribution, but what he calls a positive rather than a negative derivation of divine attributes. He is not simply preferring the philosophical way of eminence to the way of negation. The way of eminence in a “positive” account learns what God is from who God is; it is an exercise in revealed theology. By contrast, a “negative” account achieves by way of natural theology a definition of God by negation of worldly attributes (as also the philosophical way of eminence, by removing imperfections to come to God’s perfection, is also an eliminative—that is, a negative way—in natural theology). So if Christ is the power of God, and the wisdom of God, and the righteousness of God, and so on, the theological problem of attribution in a positive account becomes the question of how to conceive the relation of these multiple divine attributes to one another in view of the unity or simplicity of God as one subject. The problem is not now our earthly language attributes to God as in natural theology; it now becomes how various attributions to God cohere with one another as a single or at least unified subjectivity. Gunton comes to this formulation of the problem of positive attribution from statements of Karl Barth in the Church Dogmatics (CD II/1, 327–28), where Barth maintained that “the very unity of [God’s] being consists in the multiplicity, individuality and diversity of His perfections” (31). A via negativa that would regard the attributions as merely human ways of speaking corresponding to nothing real in God in “pure simplicity” is “rightly” rejected by Barth, so Gunton argues, in favor of a “positive” articulation of the God who gives and communicates Himself (32) in the unity of His multiple perfections.

The “real” problem is thus intensified. Indeed, if we wish to “hold on to a doctrine of the unity and coherence of the divine being, . . . our question remains, How are the various attributes related to one another, and to their common centre in the being of God?” (32). We do, Gunton presumes, want to hold on to the unity and coherence of the divine being. Divine simplicity, then, is to be affirmed. But it is to be affirmed positively rather than negatively—that is, not by the protological definition of perfect being as indivisible (by the “absence of composition”) but rather as the theological qualification of the revealed God as unified in the diversity of His attributions. Divine simplicity in this sense safeguards in principle the irreducibility of God not in spite of but in accounting for God’s relations to His creation.[1]

For the Evangelical Calvinist (of the sort inspired by folks like Karl Barth, Thomas Torrance et al.), God is never thought of in abstraction from His givenness for us in Christ. It is from Christ that attribution of God has the possibility and epistemic capacity to think who God is in Himself. It is the who (i.e. subject) of God that shapes our understanding of the what (i.e. object) of God, not vice versa. Classical Calvinism does its work on a doctrine of God, at fundamentum, from the speculative, discursive, philosophical and negative ground that Thomas Aquinas and a host of others prior to and following thought God from. We are a non-speculative, Scripture Principle based way of thinking, doing, and living theology. We major on a theology of the Word (as Luther, early on was doing), and allow the ministry of God’s Word to inform and shape how we attempt to think theologically. We find our raison d’être for theological life in Christ alone; and as we find our reason for existence in Christ alone, we just happen to find that this participation in His life brings us into the interior of God’s eternal and triune life as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Because of this we don’t have to posit mechanical decrees, or what TFT would call logical-causal necessitarian modes of thinking, when we attempt to understand how God relates to the world, to us. No, we have an immediate contact with the living God, through the personal agency of the Son of God made flesh for us. This is a constant, ongoing, ever afresh and anew contact that we are ministered in-to by the comforting work of the Holy Spirit. He makes sure that we are participatio Christi, not by our might, nor by our power, but, indeed, this contact with God is by the hovering work of the Spirit of the living God.

Hinlicky’s engagement with Gunton, Jenson, Barth is just the sort of engagement an Evangelical Calvinist is interested in making when attempting to think these things into the theologies on offer in the history of the church’s ideas. If Hinlicky wasn’t already a Lutheran he’d make a wonderful Evangelical Calvinist. His mode, and ours, is a constructive one that works catholicly with the good material that the Church of Jesus Christ has produced in the past, and into the present. We do not limit our theological work, except to the absolute delimitation that Jesus Christ presents the theologian with, insofar as He is exhaustively regulative of a genuinely Christian theological endeavor. We will leave with a word from TFT (a word I’ve shared before), as he summarizes Barth’s method; it encapsulates what we have been observing in this post quite well:

Because Jesus Christ is the Way, as well as the Truth and the Life, theological thought is limited and bounded and directed by this historical reality in whom we meet the Truth of God. That prohibits theological thought from wandering at will across open country, from straying over history in general or from occupying itself with some other history, rather than this concrete history in the centre of all history. Thus theological thought is distinguished from every empty conceptual thought, from every science of pure possibility, and from every kind of merely formal thinking, by being mastered and determined by the special history of Jesus Christ.[2]

[1] Paul R. Hinlicky, Divine Simplicity: Christ the Crisis of Metaphysics (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2016), 14.

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

God’s Wrath as Father Rather than Judge: The Judge judged in Supralapsarian Prothesis

Posted on October 5, 2019 by Bobby Grow

Following Barth (and Torrance) Evangelical Calvinists, such as myself, work from a Christ conditioned supralapsarian doctrine of election/predestination. That might sound abstract and technical, and it important ways it is; but more importantly it has real life theological and practical implications in regard to who God is in a God/world relation. Cashed out properly, what we can come to see through this is that God’s wrath against sin is not something that must be arbitrarily expiated in order for something to be extinguished in God towards us. Instead it is because of God’s great love and grace that His wrath is kindled, and thus He finds a way in Himself, in the Son, to kill what would threaten the love relationship He desires to have with us. This is the source of God’s wrath; that the ‘very good’ He created in His image, imago Christi, was thrust into a world of ‘disconciliation’ to the point that this relationship with us was lost. Not only was this fellowship lost, but it was ultimately destructive and eternally damning to those who God would have eternal relationship with in the participatio He originally intended for in the creation; one that He brought back in the new-creation of resurrection in Jesus Christ. But this is the sort of theological trajectory a healthy parsing of a supralapsarian election can result in if we are careful to think it through the analogy of Incarnation.

Paul Hinlicky, as he is setting the stage for further development in his own (Lutheran) work, writes the following:

if Jesus Christ is not God’s second thought, an improvisation, as it were, then the wrath of God which God overcomes in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ is anticipated in God’s eternal self-determination to create, redeem, and fulfill the world through the missions of Christ and His Spirit. This thesis agrees with Karl Barth’s Christocentric revision of the doctrine of election on the basis of the Lutheran teaching of the universality of the atonement, as I argued in Paths Not Taken.[1] Here I would add that this grounding of God’s becoming in time in the eternal Trinity’s self-determination issues in the kind of meditation on “God’s Lover for the World” that Bethge placed at the beginning of Bonhoeffer’s posthumous Ethics, taking the word “love” with the connotation of mercy, as laid out above. “Love is the reconciliation of man with God in Jesus Christ. The disunion of men with God, with other men, with the world and with themselves, is at an end. Man’s origin is given back to him. . . . And so love is something which happens to man, something passive, something over which he does not himself dispose. . . . Love means the understanding of the transformation of one’s entire existence by God; it means being drawn into the world as it lives and must live before God and in God. Love, therefore, is not man’s choice, but it is the election of man by God.” As election is election to membership in, and service (Eph. 2:10) on behalf of, the Beloved Community (Eph. 1:3-10), the eternal divine counsel is the starting point for a new kind of Christian “ethics” (before “good and evil”) which Bonhoeffer envisaged, i.e., concrete exploration of a qualitatively new form of life, “being drawn into the world as it lives and must live before God and in God.”[2]

As we read with Hinlicky, if we are attuned to such things, we can read apocalyptic theology between the lines of what he is writing. With his emphasis on ‘Man’s origin given back to him,’ and its passive reception vis-à-vis God, we sense how creational telos is all important in Hinlicky’s thinking; even as that is being riffed on from thinkers like Barth and Luther, not to mention, Bonhoeffer.

It is this reality that I find theologically rich: when we remove ourselves from the forensic frame, in regard to who God is towards and for us, what we end up with is a much richer conception of what in fact this whole plotline of life is about. We come to understand, if we adopt this evangelical framing of God, that God is not an angry despot with bloodlust electing to reprobate particular individuals throughout the annuls of history in order to find this sort of satisfaction. We realize through viewing God in His Self-revelation in Christ that God’s whole candor has always already been to be in deep koinonially-bonded union with us, us His counterpoints in whom He has desired to shower His love upon on in unconditional bounty. God is not first Judge, but Father; and when He is Judge He has freely elected to be the Judge judged in order to restore, but more, to recreate an eternally bountiful relationship wherein His Son is the forever God-human wherein all of creation’s purpose is grounded and actualized as God, in Christ, brings us into union with Him; indeed, as He has brought that union to Himself in the hypostatic union that coinhered and coinheres eternally in the Son. This is the good news, the Evangel that a properly delineated doctrine of election ought to provide for. The evangel requires a grammar, and I think what we have been engaging with in this post presents us with a hopeful grammar that helps us to better appreciate what in fact has been accomplished as we have focused on the Who of the Gospel based in its inner logic.

There is no doubt that God has wrath, and that He is just. But it is important to understand just what in fact defines or frames that. Indeed, it is the frame itself that allows us to comprehend, in intelligible ways, why God is angry to begin with. He isn’t angry because He is a Judge, or as a Judge; He is angry as a Father is angry when their child becomes wayward, when that child gets into a prodigal morass such that they end up in the coral of cob-eating swine. This is the alternative that we have sought to offer in Evangelical Calvinism. What counts as classical theistic or classical Calvinist theology these days offers the other alternative. It presents a view of God that is grounded in a mechanistic decretive understanding of a God who is juridical to the core. He might have love, but only a love that is purchased through a payment made. The view of God we offer, and the one Hinlicky has helpfully highlighted for us, sees God as loving us first that we might love Him.

[1] I finished this book, Paths Not Taken, by Hinlicky, a few months ago. I’d highly recommend it to you the reader. It represents an even more constructive engagement than does the current book by Hinlicky.

[2] Paul R. Hinlicky, Luther and the Beloved Community: A Path for Christian Theology after Christendom (Grand Rapids, Michigan/Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2010), 113-14.

Adolf von Harnack’s Influence on Me and 20th Century Dogmatics: On Evangelizing Metaphysics in the Name of Christ

Posted on September 9, 2019 by Bobby Grow

Adolf von Harnack, I think, has an underlying impact on me in ways that are greater than I’d like to admit. I came under this influence through my seminary training in an evangelical institution. I don’t think I’m the only one who has been subjected to this influence; indeed, most of the 20^th century Anglophone (and of course Europhone) theological landscape has been shaped, one way or the other by this influence. The basic premise of Harnack is that the Gospel, early on in the Patristic period, was Hellenized, to the point that the canonical God of Hebrew orientation was syncretized and lost to the ‘god of the philosophers.’ I would say at some level two of my ‘favoritist’ theologians, Karl Barth and TF Torrance, have operated under this influence; i.e. the influence we see in the modern period in the ‘mediating theologians’ that gives us post or anti-metaphysical theologies. I am prone towards these sorts of theologies; the narratival theologies of Barth, and to a degree, even Robert Jenson.

Paul Hinlicky in his book Luther and the Beloved Community, as he is attempting to see how William James’s thought maps onto Martin Luther’s, has some insightful treatment on Harnack’s ‘Hellenization thesis.’ He writes:

One reason for James’s confusion about Luther might be traced to his dependence on the scholarship of the contemporary giant of German liberal Protestantism, Adolph von Harnack. Harnack, the eminent German Lutheran scholar of his times, proclaimed doctrine defunct: “The history of dogma comes to a close with Luther.” In seven probing volumes, Harnack argued the influential thesis that creedal dogma (such as Royce lifted up) is the historically contingent product of what he famously characterized as “the hellenization of the gospel.” Hellenization is understandable, Harnack explained; it was even inevitable. But this creedal theology formulated the gospel in the thought forms of Greek substance metaphysics; as such, these ideas are unintelligible to the modern mind and constitute an actual obstacle to faith. As indicated, Harnack argued that it was none other than Martin Luther who in principle if not yet to full effect overcame the intellectualizing and reifying theology of the old church. Luther recovered Jesus’ simple gospel of trust in the fatherly love of God. Couple this insight with the rise since Luther’s time of the modern scientific understanding of the world — which threatens to crush the human spirit with knowledge of its insignificance and impotence in the vast and ancient cosmos — and Jesus’ message of the fatherly God, rediscovered in principle by Luther’s idea of trust, fiducia, is surely the “essence of Christianity” and the gospel for our times. Theology as belief, theory, intellectual grasping of the divine with antiquated, reifying concepts like “nature” or “substance,” gives way to historically-critically founded preaching of existential trust in the world of Heraclitus.

Little in Harnack’s analysis has stood up to critical scrutiny. For example, Jaroslav Pelikan’s five-volume history of doctrine tells the countertale to Harnack of the evangelization of Hellenism: it is, he writes, a “distortion when the dogma formulated by the catholic tradition is described as ‘in its conception and development a work of the Greek spirit on the soil of the gospel’ [Harnack]. Indeed, in some ways it is more accurate to speak of dogma as the ‘dehellenization’ of the theology that had preceded it and to argue that ‘by its dogma the church threw up a wall against an alien metaphysic’” [Elert]. Step by painful step, Pelikan methodically dismantles Harnack’s construction of dogma as hellenization by means of a simple but crucial move: he takes dogma hermeneutically not theoretically, that is to say, as “what we believe, teach and confess on the basis of the Word of God” — an expression of the Lutheran Formulators which Pelikan borrowed to define the subject matter of his study. “Without setting rigid boundaries, we shall identify what is ‘believed’ as the form of Christian doctrine present in the modalities of devotion, spirituality, and worship; what is ‘taught’ as the content of the word of God extracted by exegesis from the witness of the Bible and communicated to the people of the church through proclamation, instruction and churchly theology; and what is ‘confessed’ as the testimony of the church both against false teaching from within and against attacks from without, articulated in polemics and apologetics, in creed and dogma.” When dogma is taken this way, as the complex act of the church’s interpretation of the gospel word of God in (continuing!) history, Harnack’s influential claim about Luther overcoming dogma turns out to be real sleight of hand.[1]

Ironically, I would contend, that even though Barth and Torrance, in particular, have been influenced heavily by Harnack’s thesis, they are not unself-critical. In other words, while seemingly in line with the mediating theologians in the modern, Barth and Torrance work into Pelikan’s thesis of ‘evangelizing metaphysics’; Torrance probably more than Barth, on this score.

What I still maintain, is that in the best of ecumenical creedal or conciliar theology we do indeed get what Pelikan counter-proposes vis-à-vis Harnack; we get metaphysics “evangelized.” But just like with ‘the Spirit and the flesh,’ there is an ongoing battle between sliding too much towards whatever the reifying philosophy might be. In other words: there are periods of theological development, I’d contend, where there has indeed been slippage back into an ontotheology of the sorts that Harnack was so concerned with. I think we see this in some of the substance metaphysics synthesized with Christian theology in the mediaeval period. But then we also get this slippage in the modern period with the synthesizing of Hegel, Kant et al. with Christian theology. It is the theologian’s burden to prayerfully translate and interpret the kerygma in their particular period in such a way that ‘evangelization’ is always at the fore. The reality is, is that it is inescapable for the theologian to transcend his or her periodized location, such that the reigning philosophies of the day won’t have impact on the way they attempt to articulate a theological grammar for their peers.

Maybe at the end of this I think Harnack, at least at his first impulses, had the right ‘spirit.’ But it is clear, at least to me (and others), that Harnack over-corrected; which is always the case in the organicism of the theological task. If anything, Harnack, alerts us to the real reality that the theologian can sublimate the Gospel to the spirit of the age rather than to the Spirit of the Christ; in this light, Harnack’s critique, ought to at least alert us all to be constantly vigilant in the way we attempt to think and speak God. Harnack, while overbaked, underscores our need to be prayerfully rigorous and in need of God’s discernment as we attempt to bear witness to the ongoing and living reality of the risen Christ with us.

[1] Paul R. Hinlicky, Luther and the Beloved Community (Grand Rapids, Michigan/Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2010), 26-7.

The Gospel is Greater Than the History it Comes To Us Within: On Being a Constructive or ‘Critical’ Theologian

Posted on September 3, 2019 by Bobby Grow

As constructive theologians our primary aim is to provide edification for the Church by retrieving and constructively engaging with theological ideas from the past. This involves engagement with historical work, along with exegetical, and philosophical work; with a host of other engagements. One thing that the theologian will begin to encounter in this process, very often, is that the historian and biblical studies person they are working with will set up a dilemma wherein nothing really constructive can be engaged in. In other words, the historian becomes so focused on getting the “history right,” that any retrieval of it, in order to maintain the integrity of the history of ideas, must really only be an exercise in repristination. That is, the historian might say: ‘okay, you can have the history and its ideas, but you are restricted to re-presenting it in the way I as the historian have reconstructed it.’ In this vein there is no real way for the theologian to ‘constructively’ appropriate the past for the present. In other words, the theologian isn’t allowed to imaginatively redress certain historical ideas in con-versation with the Gospel for its new context in the 21^st century. For the historian, or biblical studies person for that matter, they so objectify the material aspect of their respective disciplines that they essentially hermetically seal it off, and disallow its inchoate ideas to blossom any further than its original givenness. This should not be!

I have written on this in the introduction to our last book, and so was happy to find Paul Hinlicky opining on the same issue. Hinlicky writes:

Today biblical scholars routinely dismantle the text’s claim as canonical and then proceed as experts to opinionate on traditional dogmatic questions without method or rigor. Constructive theologians, so-called, build the kinds of metaphysical systems that Kant long ago demolished for philosophers with a conscience — or with great flourish and fanfare deconstruct systems long since fallen from power — in discourses that few outside their shrinking guilds read or understand. Historical theologians jealously guard the historical particularity of what once was, anointing themselves gatekeepers who effectively block the process of critical appropriation in traditional discourses like doctrinal theology. So the hard work of critical dogmatics in testing of the church’s practice of faith in light of the aforementioned doctrinal norms freshly grasped and interpreted in every new generation has by and large given way to other models.

But theology is not philosophy, and the Holy Spirit is no skeptic. As a critical retrieval and fresh assertion of definite meaning, the “new language of the Spirit” is a hermeneutical process of appropriation that cannot proceed, to put it provocatively, without a certain measure of violence against the past. Not only does it take up the past selectively and then put these pieces to work in new ways, but it does so, as the critical historian sees things, from the uncontrolled perspective of the retriever. Of course, for critical dogmatics that uncontrolled perspective might be the fresh movement of the Holy Spirit. One cannot say in advance. It will be in any case some spirit! That must be discerned. The issue is less whether the appropriation repristinates any particular formation of the past than whether the new formulations are faithful to the gospel of the crucified and risen Christ in His ongoing history in the world. Historians are rightly concerned to focus on the development of theological ideas and the precise exposition of their contextual meaning. Theologians depend on this work, since Christianity is a historical religion that can go forward only by coming to terms with its past. If at the end of the day, however, historians want to take their stand and object categorically — Das ist aber nicht [that is not] Jesus! Paulus! Luther! — they may do so, but it begs the question — of Jesus, Paul, and Luther — whether we have found help moving forward on our pilgrim way.[1]

The Gospel is greater than the history it comes to us within. The Gospel is greater than Scripture itself; indeed, the Gospel is the context that gives Scripture meaning and canon. The Gospel is what gives history, the Bible, and all of reality its raison d’etre. This is what we should not lose sight of, no matter what our discipline of study. As Christians when we operate, we do so out of the power of God, out of the Gospel; this ought to impinge upon the way we function as human persons in the great theater of what is real and beautiful before and in the living God.

If the above is so, then the historian, biblical studies person, philosopher et al. ought to approach their craft with the humility that the Great Evangel of God injects into all He touches. This means that history, biblical studies, so on and so forth are to be, or ought to be in the service of the Gospel; not vice versa. Surely, as Hinlicky notes, we want to be as rigorous as possible in the historical work, in the biblical exegetical work etc., but that only goes so far. The Gospel itself breaks open new horizons of imagination about the grandeur of Who God not only was, but is for us in Christ. It is this imagination in combination with listening to the past that the Christian can grow beyond the past into the future of God’s life; indeed as God’s future life breaks into our present moment and rings true what only He can as He bears witness with our spirit about Who in fact He was, is, and is to come.

[1] Paul R. Hinlicky, Luther and the Beloved Community: A Path for Christian Theology after Christendom (Grand Rapids, Michigan/Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2010), xvii–xviii.

Living in the Utility of Faust in the Social Media Age: Cruciformed Doxology as the Antidote

Posted on October 31, 2018 by Bobby Grow

In our social media age, and even prior (of course), people have followed the adage that: ‘knowledge is power.’ When we think of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Blogs, and multiple other platforms we can see first hand what “knowledge” offers a variety demographics worldwide. We can see the sort of power that is fomented as a result of the unleashing of a superabundance of knowledges; knowledge of whatever we could imagine, and more. Some knowledge is seemingly pedestrian and general, but other knowledges have profound implications and consequences. Knowledge, particularly as we live in the information-social media age, does not have to be accurate knowledge to count as knowledge; it simply becomes knowledge for the one receiving and perceiving it. In other words, what counts as knowledge today does not have to be tethered to an external reality, it can instead simply be a reality that coheres within the ideological and paradigmatic frame we inhabit (so a coherentist account; a self-referentiality that requires nothing more than the points of contact that fund whatever frame we may be thinking from within). What we see in our moment of history is knowledge that has a utilitarian power which moves tribes of people groups to act in activist ways, potentially, or maybe to refrain and stand back in the cloisters of their own spatial location in society. Whatever the case may be, if we gain knowledge without some sort of limiting or regulative factor, in regard to what these knowledges can foment and produce; if we gain knowledge, and believe that my personal universe is enough to contain its power, then we will see things happen—we will see ‘power’ unleashed—but a power that is devoid of the Spirit—a power that is ultimately demonic and incurved upon the self.

Knowledge is power, but whose power; and knowledge of who or what? There are clearly differing powers operative in the world over. As Christians we know that there is the living God’s power, which looks christological, staurological, and cruciform; and then there is devilish-demonic power that looks self-possessed, self-assertive, and abrasive. The latter looks like this evil age. Without the Spirit, this ‘age’ looks to be the best of possible worlds; at least the best that we can make it as the human species abandoned on a rock in the nether regions of deep space. And if this age isn’t the best, “dangit we are going to strive to make it the best utopia we can.” But where does such incurved thinking, where does such knowledge get us? It gets us further and deeper into the chaos of the world we see all around us. Sure, we can attempt to manipulate nature, as if we’re gods, by deploying all of our technological advancements to accomplish our ‘noble’ efforts to create a “just” and wholesome society (based upon whatever society thinks that ought to be); but where does that really get us?

What if the human animal was created to be a worshipping animal? What if we were never intended to be self-reliant, but instead Theo-reliant? We clearly are worshipping animals, but in the Christian account things went terribly awry! The evidence that we are worshipful beings (a posteriori) is everywhere we look; all of society is built upon the premise that at one level of intensity to another we are intent on worshipping. Ultimately, if we aren’t worshipping the living God, the God who created and recreated us in His lively image in Christ (cf. Col. 1.15), then by the incurvature of sin we will worship ourselves. We might be the greatest philanthropist or the evilest monster in world history, but at the end of the ultimate day, by fallen-nature we are driven to do what we do by our greatest love interest: ourselves. The cure to this destructive waywardness is to come to the reconciliatory knowledge of the living God in Christ; where the hidden God Deus absconditus becomes the Revealed God Deus revelatus as we by the Spirit see the Man from Nazareth for who He really is (for us). In this knowledge genuine power, God’s power, the power that holds all of reality together by His Word, is realized, and we come to the moment we were primally designed for (by the eschatological life of the Triune God); we come to live into our vocation as creatures before our Creator; we start living the life of doxological reality God formed us for to begin with. We come to have the freedom that God has lived in for Himself for time in eternity; we come to find our ‘being’ in the other rather than attempting to construct that mondically in the self. We realize that the basis of our lives is an ec-static one that comes from the heavenlies rather than from the blood and soil of self-constructed citadels.

Paul Hinlicky brings what I’m getting at into further relief, and helps to tamp down what I’m attempting to articulate with more eloquence than I can muster. Here he is writing in the context of Melanchthon’s theology:

It is important to dwell a moment longer on this ultimately doxological nature of science for Melanchthon, and it is interesting to observe in this connection how he recorded one of the first versions of the Faust legend — a cautionary tale about knowledge sought instrumentally, only for power’s sake, as pure technology fulfilling infantile fantasies for magical power severed from God’s final purpose of doxology. Delight and praise in contemplation of the works of God are thus not decoration, so to say, but mark a deep rift between philosophical pragmatism and theological pragmatics: as the final cause of knowledge in the created human mind, the praise of God lends both ethical direction for and aesthetic motivation to reason’s patient inquiry into the efficient material causes of the world. The mandate is progressively to know the world as God the Creator knows it, who is not mere power but always power together with wisdom and love, who rests therefore and rejoices in all His works on the seventh day of creation, a type of the eternal sabbath. True knowledge is not merely power but power qualified by wisdom and love. The eschatological doxology of the redeemed and fulfilled creation now anticipated in turn forms a barrier wall against the purely instrumental, Faustian equation of knowledge with power.[1]

The world, under the sway of the Evil one, will continue to live out its deal with Faust; this is simply definitional reality for the ‘world.’ But as Christians we ought to buck this serpentine deal, and live into and from the doxological life of Jesus Christ who has graciously elected to live for us before the Father by the Spirit. It seems to me that the church, by and large, far too often falls into socio-culturo-politco slide wherein, even in the name of Christ, we end up cultivating a life of worship that is centered on the old-creation that indeed is dead and gone with Christ’s cross. Surely, we are simul et justus et peccator, but the church, particularly the Western church (the part of the church I inhabit) is in serious need of repentance. When the love of many grows cold in the communitas of Christ, we know that we have gotten some bad knowledge. We aren’t masters of the universe; Jesus is! We either live from his broken body, shed blood, and recreated humanity by the Holy Spirit, or we live in the utility of Faust.

[1] Paul R. Hinlicky, Paths Not Taken: Fates of Theology From Luther Through Leibniz (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009), 194-95.

‘Martin Luther’s Hedonism’: The Role of the Affections in the Blood of the Cross

Posted on October 30, 2018 by Bobby Grow

I often refer to Affective Theology (well I have sporadically over the years); affective theology is a way of theologizing I was first alerted to by my former seminary prof and mentor, Ron Frost. He primarily developed the themes, in his own constructive way, that make up his understanding of affective theology in his PhD work on Richard Sibbes; but he didn’t necessarily arrive at these themes through Sibbes (at least not alone). Frost found the affective modes in Luther’s theology as that reached back to Augustine himself. Affective Theology is a theological construct that we might think of as a soteriologically driven paradigm; and this would make sense given its reliance on Luther, the solifidian theologian. In other words, the concerns that affective theology is enamored with have to do with what makes a human being human; at a theological anthropological level. And further, it wonders about these things as that relates to who God is in his own inner-life (in se). As you might imagine, affective theology sees the affections as central in regard to what makes a human, human at a componential level. Interestingly, most of the Western tradition, when it comes to these issues, sees the intellect as the defining component of what it means to be human; at least in the trad (things have changed in some ways these days; as far as developing a theological-anthropology; but what hasn’t changed are the conceptual impulses at play in this discussion). In other words, the Aristotelian impact on Western Christianity, particularly as modulated through Thomas Aquinas, and modulated further through many of the Post Reformation Reformed orthodox theologians of the 16^th and 17^th centuries, continues to press upon the way many conservative evangelical and Reformed Christians think about what it means to be human. As an aside: Don’t lose sight of the fact that when we talk like this, about humans and their composition, that what we are ultimately going to do is get back to Who God is. As Calvin so insightfully helped us understand: We have no knowledge of ourselves without knowledge of God first. This is what I mean: who we think we are as human beings will first arise, at least for Christians, from who we think God is. Will we think of God as a Pure Being, a Pure Intellect in the heavens; or will we think of God primarily as filial love, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? This is what this whole discussion is about; this is what affective theology at its best is oriented by.

I noted earlier that Frost found these themes, that make up affective theology, by studying Martin Luther and Augustine’s theologies, respectively. I think it would be fitting then to think about this further with the help of a Lutheran theologian. Paul Hinlicky in his book Paths Not Taken, surprisingly to me, gets into the very loci that we’ve been noting in regard to Affective Theology. I want to share a quote from him that helps not only to illustrate what we’ve been covering (in this post), but helps to develop how ‘affective theology’ impacted Luther’s confidant and fellow-professor-theologian, Melanchthon. What I am going to share from Hinlicky in this regard has a greater context, as far as what he is developing as his argument in the book, but I wanted to lift some of his treatment out in order to help us see that Frost’s idea on affective theology is not something idiosyncratic to Frost; as some would have us believe (like Richard Muller). While Hinlicky’s own orientation is distinct from Frost, the themes they identify in Luther, Augustine et al. are convergent. Let us partake of some of Hinlicky’s writing now, and allow that to in-form (and maybe trans-form) the way we think about the dynamics at play in what it means to be human in a soterio-centric mode (so to speak). Hinlicky writes:

In any case, what actually gave Melanchthon pause in the course of the controversies of the 1520s was the criticism by papist opponents of the hedonism of Luther’s teaching on the will: “by equating the will (which directed reason) with the affections and by insisting that the highest affections were in bondage, [Melanchthon following Luther following Augustine had] made human beings no better than beasts.”

Wengert comes to Melanchthon’s defense: he “was not asking whether it is in a human being’s power to eat, drink, come, go, hear, and other natural matters. . . . The question was ‘whether without the Holy Spirit we can fear God and believe in God and love the cross, etc.’” This defense then is that Luther’s hedonism was that of a higher order. Yet the commonplace distinction here between things above us and things below rings hollow, in that apart from the Word and Spirit of God the self incurvatus in se fails to make this very distinction; it exchanges the glory of the immortal Creator for degrading images of creatures; it cannot find its way back unless someone comes and finds it. According to the “hedonist” psychology, the self is bound to do so in our race’s state of exile, where the creaturely will is spontaneously bound to love whatever object appears good to it, yet has little, if any, disposal over what appears to it as good. All such appearances are outside us, if not above us, and in any case not within our control. This is what is meant by servitude of the will. Thinking this way, the early Melanchthon had grasped Luther’s essential theological point: “why [is] the Holy Spirit necessary, if the human will by its powers could fear God, trust God, overcome concupiscence, and love the cross (in one’s own life),” i.e., if the human will could apprehend as good the God who spared not His own Son and displayed love for us in the repulsive form of the Crucified? It is the apprehension of God on a cross as our true good that is barred to fallen humanity, which naturally averts its eyes from the shame. It is the coming of the Spirit that makes the cross of Jesus appear as the supreme good it actually is by presenting the same Jesus alive and victorious. In this “objective” way the Holy Spirit alters perception of a sight that otherwise revolts the natural will by giving the same thing a new signification. This is “the work of the Holy Spirit, who moved the hearts of true hearers of the Word and helped them effect true virtues.” Note well: in the earlier Melanchthon the heart is moved from without, by the Word giving the Spirit and the Spirit illuminating the Word, not, as later in the scheme “imputative justification-effective sanctification,” from within, independently of the Word, as human feelings.[1]

We can see as Hinlicky tails off that he will be dealing with a shift in Melanchthon’s own views here. But for our purposes I wanted to introduce you, my readers, to this concept of the affections as a theological mode; and one that goes back to a primal Protestant emphasis as we find that located in the very heart of Luther’s theology itself.

What I find invigorating in Hinlicky’s treatment, brief as that is in my sharing of it, is the role that the Holy Spirit plays from without the would-be believer, and how that impacts what it means to be human; a human who sees God—is there any other sort of [real] humanity in the Kingdom of the Son of His love? What this gets at, more than defining component parts of what it means to be human, is how it is that us humans come to know who God is; because of who God is for us. He comes to us where we are, seemingly dead on the cross, and He takes our place on that wood, in gruesome display, and by the igniting of our affections, as those are first His for us in Jesus Christ, He gives us new spectacles through which we see the shed blood of the Lamb of God for what it is. It is through this ignition of our affections, as those are first His affections for us in Christ, it is as we participate in the vicarious-mediatorial-priestly humanity of the Son of Man that the broken flesh and spilt blood of the Christ comes to take on the actual significance and power it has in the economy of God’s life for us. You see, who we understand God to be will determine who we understand ourselves to be; and this will impact not only our relationship with God, but with our neighbors and enemies. This is an important issue that cannot be overstated. Theologia crucis.

[1] Paul R. Hinlicky, Paths Not Taken: Fates of Theology From Luther Through Leibniz (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009), 172-73.

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Athanasian Reformed

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

Category Archives: Paul Hinlicky