Category Archives: Paul Molnar

The Relationship of Natural Science to Theological Science in the Thought of TF Torrance

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Here is some TF Torrance on the way he thinks the natural sciences and theological science might relate; might even complement each other from their own distinctive verities.

. . . theological science and natural science have their own proper and distinctive objectives to pursue, but their work inevitably overlaps, for they both respect and operate through the same rational structures of space and time, while each develops special modes of investigation, rationality, and verification in accordance with the nature and the direction of its distinctive field. But since each of them is the kind of thing it is as a human inquiry because of the profound correlation between human knowing and the space-time structures of creation, each is in its depth akin to the other . . . natural science and theological science are not opponents but partners before God, in a service of God in which each may learn from the other how better to pursue its own distinctive function . . ..[1]

But to be clear, TFT was not a proponent of a natural theology; just the opposite, he was a proponent of an analogy of faith, whereby theological knowledge is only available by evangelical encounter with the risen and ascended Christ by the Spirit. He maintained that knowledge of God was purely kataphysical (according to the nature of the revelation) in Christ’s coming and presencing among us. It is only as we come into union with Christ that a genuine knowledge of God can obtain; only from a center of God in Christ for us. This is an aspect of Jesus’ mediatorial and priestly role for us, as He mediates God’s life to us, through His divine life, and mediates humanity’s life before God, as the fully and archetypal human; firstborn from the dead.

[1] Paul Molnar citing Thomas Torrance’s, The Ground and Grammar of Theology, in, Thomas F. Torrance: Theologian of The Trinity, 24.

The Great Peace of the Barth Wars: McCormack’s Recanto to Hunsinger and Molnar

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Maybe you’ve heard of the ‘Companion Controversy,’ which later came to be called The Barth Wars, by some. I have been published, a wee bit, on this here; as far as some commentary. In nuce, it entails an embroilment within Anglophone Barth studies; that is, between, in particular, Bruce McCormack and George Hunsinger/Paul Molnar respectively. It has to do with the way McCormack reads Barth’s doctrine of election as a sort of organizing dogma for his doctrine of God; in a highly actualistic sense. Hunsinger/Molnar demur and claim that the ‘textual’ (Hunsinger’s word) Barth, and his doctrine of God, has an antecedent reality (which is the classical position), and as such the economic God cannot be fully read back into the immanent (in se) God, as McCormack proposes. That’s a very rough sketch of the matter.

In general, Hunsinger’s critique, in particular, has been that McCormack offers a revisionist Barth; and thus, doesn’t actually offer Barth’s theology at all—at least when it comes to a doctrine of God proper. McCormack has maintained that he has been offering something of the logic of Barth’s doctrine of election vis-à-vis God proper, even if Barth didn’t follow through with the logic itself. Even so, at the end of the day, McCormack has claimed to be reading the grain of Barth’s theology faithfully; more so than his ‘opponents,’ Hunsinger/Molnar. And now, in his most recent work,1 McCormack seems to finally admit that he is doing something different than Barth when it comes to Barth’s textual doctrine of election (although read me below, as I’ve been thinking this through, even as I write this, I’m developing). In other words, as I’ve been reading McCormack’s new book (which is excellent thus far), a rather striking thing gets communicated. He acknowledges that he disagrees with Barth, or that Barth’s doctrine of election represents “the limit of how far I [McCormack] can follow him.”2

Here is the full passage from McCormack:

Looking back at Barth’s early appropriation of Calvin’s exegesis of Phil. 2 in support of a Reformed Christology, which laid its emphasis upon the preservation of the “natures” of Christ in their original integrity subsequent to their union, Barth’s understanding of the divine kenosis in his later Christology clearly points in the direction of providing an explanation for the susceptibility of the eternal Son to the human experiences of suffering and death. His way of upholding divine immutability was to anchor the existence of the Logos “in the form of a servant” in the divine election — understood as a “primal decision” (Urentscheidung). Barth’s later Christology thus became the epistemological ground of our knowledge of election. Election then was posited as the ontological ground of Barth’s later Christology. Clearly, he wanted to understand the human experiences of suffering and death as essential to God in his second mode of being. Whether his doctrine of election was fully adequate to this task is debatable — which marks the limit of how far I can follow him.3

So, what is rather interesting about this development is that McCormack seems to be affirming his reading of Barth’s doctrine of election, the one that Hunsinger says is a revisionist reading, but then coming to the conclusion that he cannot follow Barth down this path; i.e. of reading human suffering and death into the second mode of being of the triune God into the essential or ‘eternal’ or in se being of God. As I reflect on this, even in this moment, it almost seems as if McCormack says he cannot follow Barth here; and yet on the other hand Hunsinger/Molnar are saying you don’t have to, because you never were to begin with. In other words, it’s almost as if McCormack is de facto agreeing with Hunsinger/Molnar, in the sense that if one were to follow through on McCormack’s “revisionist” Barth, that that theologian would be the pantheist, or panentheist that Hunsinger/Molnar have said “McCormack’s Barth” indeed reduces to. So instead of admitting that he has been misreading Barth’s doctrine of election, which would be a sort of recanto to Hunsinger/Molnar, he continues to maintain that he has indeed read Barth’s doctrine of election correctly, but that he cannot follow Barth in that direction. He seems to be making a “classical turn,” potentially, albeit one that seeks to repair Chalcedon’s Cyrillian misstep with the resources that he seems to have found in a burgeoning ‘Spirit Christology’ (I’m still reading, so we’ll see).

 

1 Bruce Lindley McCormack, The Humility of the Eternal Son: Reformed Kenoticism and the Repair of Chalcedon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). 

2 Ibid., 121. 

3 Ibid., 120-21. 

The classical Calvinist God Behind the Back of Jesus: And the Barthian-Torrancean Return to Nicaea

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Classical Calvinism has taken shape, by and large, by its appropriation of Aristotelian substance metaphysics. Their respective doctrine of God is based in the Hellenic actus purus tradition of philosophical conniving. Their understanding of a God-world relation is grounded in the decretum absolutum (‘absolute decree’ —double predestination). They think God, by and large, from an analogia entis (‘analogy of being’) speculative mode of reasoning that takes its seasoning not from God’s Self-revelation, as the preamble, but instead from the wily machinations of the philosophers. This produces a notion of godness that understands God in terms of a metaphysical jurist who engages with the created order, including with the apple of creation, human beings, via mechanistic and law-like precision. As a result, the classical Calvinists thinks salvation in terms of a Federal (covenantal) schema.

Here Paul Molnar explicates TF Torrance’s critique of Federal theology:

Torrance’s objections to aspects of the “Westminster theology” should be seen together with his objection to “Federal Theology”. His main objection to Federal theology is to the ideas that Christ died only for the elect and not for the whole human race and that salvation is conditional on our observance of the law. The ultimate difficulty here that one could “trace the ultimate ground of belief back to eternal divine decrees behind the back of the Incarnation of God’s beloved Son, as in a federal concept of pre-destination, [and this] tended to foster a hidden Nestorian dualism between the divine and human natures in the on Person of Jesus Christ, and thus even to provide ground for a dangerous form of Arian and Socinian heresy in which the atoning work of Christ regarded as an organ of God’s activity was separated from the intrinsic nature and character of God as Love” (Scottish Theology, p. 133). This then allowed people to read back into “God’s saving purpose” the idea that “in the end some people will not actually be saved”, thus limiting the scope of God’s grace (p. 134). And Torrance believed they reached their conclusions precisely because they allowed the law rather than the Gospel to shape their thinking about our covenant relations with God fulfilled in Christ’s atonement. Torrance noted that the framework of Westminster theology “derived from seventeenth-century federal theology formulated in sharp contrast to the highly rationalised conception of a sacramental universe of Roman theology, but combined with a similar way of thinking in terms of primary and secondary causes (reached through various stages of grace leading to union with Christ), which reversed the teaching of Calvin that it is through union with Christ first that we participate in all his benefits” (Scottish Theology, p. 128). This gave the Westminster Confession and Catechisms “a very legalistic and constitutional character in which theological statements were formalised at times with ‘almost frigidly logical definiton’” (pp. 128-9). Torrance’s main objection to the federal view of the covenant was that it allowed its theology to be dictated on grounds other than the grace of God attested in Scripture and was then allowed to dictate in a legalistic way God’s actions in his Word and Spirit, thus undermining ultimately the freedom of grace and the assurance of salvation that could only be had by seeing that our regenerated lives were hidden with Christ in God. Torrance thought of the Federal theologians as embracing a kind of “biblical nominalism” because “biblical sentences tend to be adduced out of their context and to be interpreted arbitrarily and singly in detachment from the spiritual ground and theological intention and content” (p. 129). Most importantly, they tended to give biblical statements, understood in this way, priority over “fundamental doctrines of the Gospel” with the result that “Westminster theology treats biblical statements as definitive propositions from which deductions are to be made, so that in their expression doctrines thus logically derived are given a categorical or canonical character” (p. 129). For Torrance, these statements should have been treated, as in the Scots Confession, in an “open-structured” way, “pointing away from themselves to divine truth which by its nature cannot be contained in finite forms of speech and thought, although it may be mediated through them” (pp. 129-30). Among other things, Torrance believed that the Westminster approach led them to weaken the importance of the Doctrine of the Trinity because their concept of God fored without reference to who God is in revelation led them ultimately to a different God than the God of classical Nicene theology (p. 131). For Barth’s assessment of Federal theology, which is quite similar to Torrance’s in a number of ways, see CD IV/1, pp. 54-66.1

Molnar, a Roman Catholic, ironically, but a TF Torrance scholar par excellence, offers a very nice precis of Torrance’s critique of what I call classical Calvinism. As Molnar intimates at the end of his sketch, Barth similar to Torrance sees Federal theology as an abstract framework thinking God, and a God-world relation, precisely because God’s ostensible relation to the world, in that system, is not thought from God’s second person in Jesus Christ, but instead from an ad hoc absolute decree that has nothing to do with God’s person. Instead, this ‘decree’ is purely formed out of a need to keep the classical Calvinist God of pure being impassible and immutable; in other words, it allows God to remain immovable, and at the same time ostensibly presents a way for this unmoved God to interact with the created order. This is why Torrance, in loud contest, makes his strong claim that ‘there is no God behind the back of Jesus.’ He is referring to the decretum absolutum of classical Calvinism. He is referring to the classical Calvinist nominalist like version of a potentia absoluta / potentia ordinata dualistic conception of God wherein there is no necessary correlation between the God of the economy ad extra, and the God of the ontology ad intra; that there is no necessary relation between the God of the eternal processions, and the temporal missions.

At the end of the day, classical Calvinism doesn’t offer a relational, and thus trinitarian notion of God. I contend that classical Calvinism has actually departed from the Nicene faith of someone like Athanasius, and instead has reverted back to an absolutely Hellenic conception of God like we might find with the some of the homoiousions like Eusebius of Caesarea. This is the fallout produced by redevising a philosophical conception of God rather than one that is principially grounded in God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ; the Son of the Father. Whey a system’s doctrine of God goes awry, when it strays from the reality of Holy Scripture, and imposes foreign categories upon Scripture’s res we end up with a less than desirable conception of God; not to mention how that impacts a doctrine of salvation, and the spirituality produced therefrom.

The classical Calvinists will continue on though; they are like a machine. They fear modernity, that is until it comes to socio-political theories; that’s another story for another day. But the irony is that modernity, for all the demon-possession classical Calvinists see therein, has, in the right hands, liberated scholasticism Reformed from its overly philosophical and Aristotelian romances, and allowed those with eyes to see and ears to here to return to Nicaea, Constantinople and Chalcedon. Solo Christo / Soli Deo Gloria

God’s being-in-election: How Divine Freedom Keeps Barth’s God From Modally Collapsing

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Does Barth’s conception of God fall prey to what theologians (and philosophers) call modal collapse, as some claim? Bruce McCormack, of Princeton Theological Seminary, in his contribution to the Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, entitled Grace and being: the role of God’s gracious election in Karl Barth’s theological ontology, he opened up a reading of Barth that people like George Hunsinger and Paul Molnar claim produces a modal collapse in God’s being. In other words, crudely, McCormack’s reading of Barth ostensibly makes God’s choice to be for us in Christ (election) contingent upon the pro nobis (for us); the contention is that for God to be God, in the way Hunsinger et al critique McCormack, is that God has chosen to not be God without the resurrected humanity that obtains as the result of the Son’s election to be human. Molnar claims (and argues) that McCormack’s understanding of Barth makes Barth’s God a God who no longer can distinguish between His inner-processions (immanent), and His outer-missions (economy); thus, for Molnar, McCormack’s (and Ben Myer’s following BLM) constructive reading of Barth ends up giving us a God who does indeed modally collapse (i.e. a God who necessarily makes His being contingent upon and predicated by the creation).

But I’m not necessarily persuaded that McCormack’s Barth must fall into a modal collapse. I realize that Hunsinger and Molnar will both be aware of the passage I am going to share from Barth directly (at the very least, they’ve read it). But as I read the following, it is something like this that McCormack could appeal to, and He does in His own way. It is the way Barth himself, as Hunsinger might call it, the ‘textual Barth,’ who explains how God’s election to be human in the Son could be so intrinsic to God’s being as God, and yet not become captive to the charge of ‘modal collapse.’ Here is the man, Barth:

Our emphasis in defining the concept must not in any circumstances fall upon this negative aspect. To be sure, this negative side is extremely significant not only for God’s relation to the world, but also for His being in itself. We cannot possibly grasp and expound the idea of divine creation and providence, nor even the ideas of divine omnipotence, omnipresence and eternity, without constantly referring to this negative aspect of His freedom. But we shall be able to do so properly only when we do so against the background of our realisation that God’s freedom constitutes the essential positive quality, not only of His action towards what is outside of Himself, but also of His own inner being. The biblical witness to God sees His transcendence of all that is distinct from Himself, not only in the distinction as such, which is supremely and decisively characterised as His freedom from all conditioning by that which is distinct from Himself, but furthermore and supremely in the fact that without sacrificing His distinction and freedom, but in the exercise of them, He enters into and faithfully maintains communion with this reality other than Himself in His activity as Creator, Reconciler and Redeemer. According to the biblical testimony, God has the prerogative to be free without being limited by His freedom from external conditioning, free also with regard to His freedom, free not to surrender Himself to it, but to use it to give Himself to this communion and to practise this faithfulness in it, in this way being really free, free in Himself. God must not only be unconditioned but, in the absoluteness in which He sets up this fellowship, He can and will also be conditioned. He who can and does do this is the God of Holy Scripture, the triune God known to us in His revelation. This ability, proved and manifested to us in His action, constitutes His freedom.[1]

It is the emboldened part that is most pertinent to our discussion on modal collapse. We see how Barth, even before he comes to his reformulation of election in CD II/2, has already developed a doctrine of divine freedom (and aseity, which is a related category, of which I have a dope quote from Barth on just a few pages later from the above; we will visit that in another post) which can allow for Barth’s God to be so with us, and yet remain distinct from us as the a se and triune God who He is in His inner life.

We see, in the above passage from Barth, also his various motifs of actualism and objectivism. It is important to bear in mind that Barth’s theology attempts to only think from God’s Self revelation in Christ; in case you didn’t known that already. As such, Barth is going to refer to ‘biblical testimony’ and the ‘acts’ of God quite frequently in the way he theologizes. He will not refer to philosophical apparatus in order to develop something like his doctrine of divine freedom or aseity, even if the philosophical tradition has a parallel grammar in these instances.

In conclusion, for the moment, I think McCormack actually does have a way out, in regard to the way that he thinks God’s being in the theology of Karl Barth. I don’t think even McCormack’s Barth must fall prey to the critique of modal collapse, precisely because of the material Barth himself supplies in the above quote. It is actually hard to see, as we read such conceptual matter from Barth, how people would conclude that McCormack’s Barth, of necessity, must militate against Barth the man. What should stand out most, in this regard, is that McCormack is right to emphasize divine freedom as the basis through which he can read Barth’s doctrine of God through a heavy lens of God’s being-in-election.

Next time we will visit a passage from Barth that is related to this one, as I mentioned. It is a magnificent passage where Barth describes God’s aseity; it is the sort of passage that reminds me why I like doing theology; a passage that makes me want to get lost in the inner life of God, and worship all the days of my weary life.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1 §28 The Doctrine of God: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 47 [emphasis mine].

T.F. Torrance Objects to Federal Theology, and So Do I!

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Here Paul Molnar gives a good summary overview of some of the reasons that T.F. Torrance objected to ‘Federal’ or ‘Westminster’ Calvinism:

Torrance’s objections to aspects of the “Westminster theology” should be seen together with his objection to “Federal Theology”. His main objection to Federal theology is to the ideas that Christ died only for the elect and not for the whole human race and that salvation is conditional on our observance of the law. The ultimate difficulty here that one could “trace the ultimate ground of belief back to eternal divine decrees behind the back of the Incarnation of God’s beloved Son, as in a federal concept of pre-destination, [and this] tended to foster a hidden Nestorian dualism between the divine and human natures in the on Person of Jesus Christ, and thus even to provide ground for a dangerous form of Arian and Socinian heresy in which the atoning work of Christ regarded as an organ of God’s activity was separated from the intrinsic nature and character of God as Love” (Scottish Theology, p. 133). This then allowed people to read back into “God’s saving purpose” the idea that “in the end some people will not actually be saved”, thus limiting the scope of God’s grace (p. 134). And Torrance believed they reached their conclusions precisely because they allowed the law rather than the Gospel to shape their thinking about our covenant relations with God fulfilled in Christ’s atonement. Torrance noted that the framework of Westminster theology “derived from seventeenth-century federal theology formulated in sharp contrast to the highly rationalised conception of a sacramental universe of Roman theology, but combined with a similar way of thinking in terms of primary and secondary causes (reached through various stages of grace leading to union with Christ), which reversed the teaching of Calvin that it is through union with Christ first that we participate in all his benefits” (Scottish Theology, p. 128). This gave the Westminster Confession and Catechisms “a very legalistic and constitutional character in which theological statements were formalised at times with ‘almost frigidly logical definiton'” (pp. 128-9). Torrance’s main objection to the federal view of the covenant was that it allowed its theology to be dictated on grounds other than the grace of God attested in Scripture and was then allowed to dictate in a legalistic way God’s actions in his Word and Spirit, thus undermining ultimately the freedom of grace and the assurance of salvation that could only be had by seeing that our regenerated lives were hidden with Christ in God. Torrance thought of the Federal theologians as embracing a kind of “biblical nominalism” because “biblical sentences tend to be adduced out of their context and to be interpreted arbitrarily and singly in detachment from the spiritual ground and theological intention and content” (p. 129). Most importantly, they tended to give biblical statements, understood in this way, priority over “fundamental doctrines of the Gospel” with the result that “Westminster theology treats biblical statements as definitive propositions from which deductions are to be made, so that in their expression doctrines thus logically derived are given a categorical or canonical character” (p. 129). For Torrance, these statements should have been treated, as in the Scots Confession, in an “open-structured” way, “pointing away from themselves to divine truth which by its nature cannot be contained in finite forms of speech and thought, although it may be mediated through them” (pp. 129-30). Among other things, Torrance believed that the Westminster approach led them to weaken the importance of the Doctrine of the Trinity because their concept of God fored without reference to who God is in revelation led them ultimately to a different God than the God of classical Nicene theology (p. 131). For Barth’s assessment of Federal theology, which is quite similar to Torrance’s in a number of ways, see CD IV/1, pp. 54-66. [Paul D. Molnar, Thomas F. Torrance: Theologian of the Trinity, 181-2, fn. 165]

I originally wrote this post years ago, but I wanted to reshare it because I am currently working on a book chapter that is attempting to engage with TFT’s thinking on Calvin and Calvinism. One reason I think many do not appreciate Torrance (and Barth) is because they do not fully grasp the theological context TFT was working against. Hopefully this overview, provided by Molnar, will prove helpful in providing further background context on the theological milieu Torrance was working within and against. Some take issue with the characterization that TFT (and his brother, James) provides on Federal or Covenantal theology. But I have read that theology, and its historical development, extensively, and I don’t see any mischaracterization whatsoever. Torrance might not state things, lexically, in the same way that Federal theologians do, or would like. But that doesn’t mean he is materially misrepresenting what that theology teaches or implies about God, salvation, and its mechanics. Evangelical Calvinism’s whole intention, at least from my perspective, is intended to offer an alternative ethos to Westminster styled Federal theology; an ethos that has been present all the way through Reformed theology’s development, and even prior in antecedent thinkers (like Staupitz, Luther, et al.).

The UnChristianity of ‘Jesus Studies’: He Constructs Us We Don’t Construct Him

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Jesus Studies attempts to think the Christ in ways that are necessarily non-Christian; they attempt to think Christ as a profane artifact of human history, and only after the fact ascribe to him his divine qualities (viz. that is if the practitioners are so inclined by way of religious disposition). How in any way is this a Christian exercise?! As Christians our very existence is determined by the confession that Jesus is Lord; the confession itself determined by the subject of God’s life for us in Christ breathed afresh into us by the spiration of the Holy Spirit. In other words, as Christians our existence is not an abstract existence, instead it is either grounded in the life of Jesus Christ’s vicarious humanity, and thus determined thereby, or it isn’t. And if it isn’t then we are not Christians, and thus might engage in the work that Jesus Studies engages in as a career of profane historiography.

Karl Barth rejects Jesus Studies, and as such is one more reason why my spirit continues to resonate with his in so many ways. Paul Molnar, in another context emphasizes these points in poignant ways.

.[1]

I think the Feuerbach link is very telling and important. Jesus Studies is a mostly Feuerbachian endeavor wherein the studier imposes his or her religious affection upon the Christ only after they have established by reconstructing him who he might have been. This is inane and absurd. We don’t prove God; we don’t prove Jesus Christ; he proves us. Without him we are nothing and this world dissolves in upon itself in an implosion of the sort that takes place in gardens, and in Adams and Eves.

[1] Paul D. Molnar, Faith, Freedom and the Spirit: The Economic Trinity in Barth, Torrance and Contemporary Theology (Downers Grove, Illinois: IVP Academic, 2015), 368-70.

*Please excuse the formatting of these quotes recently. I have found it to be much easier, when I have electronic copies of certain books, to simply use my snipping tool and place them into my posts this way; at least when I want to post long sections like these.

Is God Really Immutable? If He Is, How Is He? Muller, Molnar, Barth

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Divine immutability; it is sometimes thought of as a purely philosophical lens imposed upon the God revealed in Jesus Christ and Holy Scripture (think of people like Pinnock, Harnack, et al.). For some it has functioned very much so in this way. For others, like Richard Muller, he believes that the whence of immutability, from its classically Hellenic sources, has been transmogrophied by the Christian witness such that its good kernel has been retained while the flowery husk has been discarded. But what is a basic working definition of Divine immutability? The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it this way:

For one thing, the Scriptural witness is not really so clearly on the side of divine real intrinsic change. Much that Scripture says of God is clearly metaphor. And it is not hard to show that Old Testament texts which ascribe change to God could be speaking metaphorically. As I note later, one can parse even the Incarnation in ways which avoid divine real or intrinsic change. Standard Western theism clearly excludes many sorts of change in God. Western theists deny that God can begin or cease to be. If God cannot, He is immutable with respect to existence. Nothing can gain or lose an essential property, for nothing can fail to have such a property. For Western theists, God is by nature a spirit, without body. If he is, God cannot change physically — he is physically immutable. So the Western God could at most change mentally- in knowledge, will, or affect. Further, Scripture amply supports the claim that God is perfect in knowledge, will, and affect. This perfection seems to rule out many sorts of mental change.[1]

The primary thing that stands out is ‘change,’ or lack thereof. Another attending issue is that of ‘movement,’ which might imply change; i.e. if God is made to respond by something that is a predicate of his life (e.g. something that is contingent upon him rather than vice versa). Richard Muller cites Lutheran theologian Johannes Quenstedt, and provides further theological elaboration thereby:

We can see the attempt to recuperate immutability, or to appropriate it in such a way that it just is corollary with the prima facie teaching of Holy Writ. Interestingly, at one level, Muller himself places Barth on the side of the immutabilitists before he launches into critique of Barth. Muller writes,

While this is interesting, and to the point, I think I’d rather hear from a Barth scholar, like Paul Molnar, as he details just exactly upon what basis Barth thinks God’s immutability from. It indeed coheres with the basic contours of the intentions of classic immutability (that God cannot be moved by something external to him), but then reifies in such a way that the affections of God are not just understood as metaphors or anthropopathisms, but instead as reflective of who God actually is in himself (in se). Here Molnar is responding to the ‘Barth Wars,’ indeed he is contributing to it contra Bruce McCormack’s et al. idea that God’s electing work precedes who God is as triune thus allowing creation itself to determine who God chooses to be for us in the incarnation (Deus incarnandus). This is the context from which I take this quote from Molnar (for full disclosure). For our purposes what shouldn’t be lost is how Barth’s conception of immutability and mutability (or not) function in his theology; I would suggest this is the better way forward. While retaining the important node that God does not change, what is forwarded within that reality is that God does indeed genuinely love and feel; because he wants to; because this is how we know him to be from his Self-revelation in the Son (Deus incarnatus). Molnar writes:

Because it has been said that Barth’s view of God’s freedom changed after CD II/2, it is imperative to note here that Barth wanted to break the spell of an idea of God that was either mutable or immutable in the sense that God could not humble himself in Jesus Christ but that in the “supreme exercise” of his essence he could, as the immutable (constant) God, accomplish reconciliation for us. Nonetheless, Barth insists even here, “It is not that it is part of His divine essence, and therefore necessary, to become and be the God of man, Himself man. That He wills to be and becomes and is this God, and as such man, takes place in His freedom. It is His own decree and act. Nor is there anything in the essence of man to make necessary this divine decree or act” (IV/2, p. 85). What, then, is the divine essence that remains unchanged in all of this, Barth asks? He says, “It is the free love, the omnipotent mercy, the holy patience of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And it is the God of this divine essence who has and maintains the initiative in this event. He is not, therefore, subject to any higher force when He gives Himself up to the lowliness of the human being of the Son of God” (IV/2, p. 86).[2]

We see, according to Molnar, how Barth negotiates his way through the dilemma that has been set up between God’s so called immutability and mutability. For Barth this dilemma really is no dilemma, instead it represents an occasion to creatively construct a way through this apparent morass that recognizes the biblical significance that God does indeed not ‘change,’ but then pushes forward through the usually Ramist ways of negotiating with this, and instead attempts to think these issues through a personalist lens that starts with the hypostasis of the eternal Word of God, Jesus Christ. What bubbles up from this exercise is that God’s triune love grounds the way Barth thinks about ‘how’ God moves; he concludes that God’s movement is Self-determined and located in Divine freedom to be who graciously chooses to be for the other; all implicates of who God is eternally as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

 

[1] The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Accessed 04-23-2018.

[2] Paul D. Molnar, Faith, Freedom and the Spirit: The Economic Trinity in Barth, Torrance and Contemporary Theology (Downers Grove, Illinois: IVP Academic, 2015), 273 n. 14.

*The Muller quotes come from this essay.

The Prius of God’s Life IS God’s Life of Triune Personal Love: An Alternative Account of Predestination Referred to God’s Life

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Predestination that shibboleth of Reformed theology; it has been shibboleth to me as well. Predestination is the idea that God arbitrarily elects particular people to eternal life, and chooses that others either remain (passive) reprobate or are (active) reprobate with no actual hope for eternal life. This approach to a God-world relation relies upon a philosophical theory of causation of the sort that we find in Aristotle’s theology; a theory of causation that relegates God’s relation to the world to a set of necessary commitments—primary of which is that God is the Unmoved Mover (e.g. impassibility; immuatability). Without getting into the details of what this theory of causation entails specifically I will refer us instead to the Westminster Confession of Faith’s (WCF) chapter three where it confesses what it thinks about a God-world relation in the doctrine of Predestination:

Chapter III

Of God’s Eternal Decree

I. God from all eternity, did, by the most wise and holy counsel of His own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass; yet so, as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures; nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established. II. Although God knows whatsoever may or can come to pass upon all supposed conditions; yet has He not decreed anything because He foresaw it as future, or as that which would come to pass upon such conditions. III. By the decree of God, for the manifestation of His glory, some men and angels are predestinated unto everlasting life; and others foreordained to everlasting death. IV. These angels and men, thus predestinated, and foreordained, are particularly and unchangeably designed, and their number so certain and definite, that it cannot be either increased or diminished. V. Those of mankind that are predestinated unto life, God, before the foundation of the world was laid, according to His eternal and immutable purpose, and the secret counsel and good pleasure of His will, has chosen, in Christ, unto everlasting glory, out of His mere free grace and love, without any foresight of faith, or good works, or perseverance in either of them, or any other thing in the creature, as conditions, or causes moving Him thereunto; and all to the praise of His glorious grace. VI. As God has appointed the elect unto glory, so has He, by the eternal and most free purpose of His will, foreordained all the means thereunto. Wherefore, they who are elected, being fallen in Adam, are redeemed by Christ, are effectually called unto faith in Christ by His Spirit working in due season, are justified, adopted, sanctified, and kept by His power, through faith, unto salvation. Neither are any other redeemed by Christ, effectually called, justified, adopted, sanctified, and saved, but the elect only. VII. The rest of mankind God was pleased, according to the unsearchable counsel of His own will, whereby He extends or withholds mercy, as He pleases, for the glory of His sovereign power over His creatures, to pass by; and to ordain them to dishonor and wrath for their sin, to the praise of His glorious justice. VIII. The doctrine of this high mystery of predestination is to be handled with special prudence and care, that men, attending the will of God revealed in His Word, and yielding obedience thereunto, may, from the certainty of their effectual vocation, be assured of their eternal election. So shall this doctrine afford matter of praise, reverence, and admiration of God; and of humility, diligence, and abundant consolation to all that sincerely obey the Gospel.[1]

For its time and place this might have been the best the Westminster Divines could do; viz. with the theological categories they had available to them—although that is contestable, given the reality that there were counter voices within the Reformed world at that time who emphasized a God of immediate personal love (think, Richard Sibbes). But we live in the 21st century, and time has passed; reflection has been undertaken; theological categories have developed; and I would suggest that the Gospel can be better for it. Thomas Torrance under the influence of Athanasius and Karl Barth (and Michael Polyani, Clerk Maxwell, Einstein et al.) offers an alternative account of Predestination wherein the reference is not individual people scattered throughout the annals of created history, but instead the reference is God’s life in Christ. In other words, Pre-destination, in Torrance’s theology, and Evangelical Calvinist theology after, refers to God’s life in Christ, his choice to be for the world and not against it, his prothesis grounded in who he is as eternal Triune love. For Torrance God’s life of love just is the inner-factor that grounds his choice to be Immanuel, God with us. This is counter the ad hoc choice of God we see orienting the doctrine of predestination in the theology of the Westminsterians; a choice that he makes based upon his secret will hidden in the recesses of his remote life that remains inaccessible (Deus absconditus) even with the revelation (Deus revelatus) of Godself in Christ. In other words, again as both Barth and Torrance would say, there is a ‘god behind the back of Jesus’ in the Westminsterian schema such that we aren’t ultimately sure of why God does what he does; only that he indeed does it. But this isn’t concordant with Holy Scripture or the reality it attests to in Jesus Christ. What we know is that God does what he does because he is love, of the sort that shapes his response to the human predicament by electing to be human, and giving his life in Christ for the sheep. What we know is that God acts in personal and intimately driven ways, filial ways, of the sort that inhere eternally between the Father and the Son by the fellowshipping love of the Holy Spirit. Place this up against the Westminsterian conception of God in the doctrine of predestination and see if it coheres.

Paul Molnar, as he develops Thomas Torrance’s theology (and Barth’s) of predestination offers a wonderful account of all that we have just been sketching. Let me offer, at length, his considerations, and commend them to you. As Evangelical Calvinists, what follows, by way of description of Torrance’s theology, is what shapes our own approach to a doctrine of Pre-destination.

The second important thing to notice is that Torrance insists that in Jesus Christ we are confronted with “the eternal decision of God’s eternal love. In Jesus Christ, therefore, eternal election has become temporal event.” But that means that election is not “some static act in a still point of eternity.” Rather it is “eternal pre-destination, moving out of its eternal prius into time as living act that from moment to moment confronts people in Jesus Christ.” Hence, “the ‘pre’ in predestination refers neither to a temporal nor to a logical prius, but simply to God Himself, the Eternal.” This is a vital insight. For Torrance, while we tend to think of eternity “as strung out in an infinite line with past, present, and future though without beginning and without end, in the form of an elongated circular time,” this must not lead us to suppose that there is a “worldly prius” in God, because that would introduce immediately a “logical one” as well. If and when predestination is brought within the compass of created time, then it would be thought of within the “compass of the temporal-causal series” and “interpreted in terms of cause and effect,” and this would necessarily lead to determinism, which is the very opposite of what is actually affirmed in the “pre” of predestination. Torrance says the “pre” in predestination, when rightly understood, is “the most vigorous protest against determinism” known to Christian theology. Since the “pre” in predestination does not refer to a “prius to anything here in space and time,” it cannot be construed as “the result of an inference from effect to first cause, or from relative to absolute, or to any world-principle.” Rather, because election is “in Jesus Christ,” the “pre” does not take election “out of time” but “grounds it in an act of the Eternal which we can only describe as ‘per se’ or ‘a se.’” That means it is grounded “in the personal relations of the Trinity” so that “because we know God to be Father, Son and Holy Spirit, we know the Will of God to be supremely Personal—and it is to that Will that predestination tells us our salvation is to be referred.”

But we can make that reference only “if that Will has first come among us and been made personally known. That has happened (ἐγένετο) in Christ, and in Him the act of predestination is seen to be the act of creative Grace in the communion of the Holy Spirit.” Election thus refers to God’s “choice or decision” and “guarantees to us the freedom of God. His sovereignty, His omnipotence is not one that acts arbitrarily, nor by necessity, but by personal decision. God is therefore no blind fate, no immanent force acting under the compulsion of some prius or unknown law within His being.” The importance of emphasizing choice here concerns the fact that election cannot involve any necessity without becoming immediately a form of determinism. Instead, election refers to God’s freedom “to break the bondage of a sinful world, and to bring Himself into personal relations with man”; election refers to a personal action from God’s side and from the human side. Hence it is an act that creates personal relations. While God freely creates our human personal relations, human freedom is “essentially dependent freedom,” while “the divine freedom is independent, ‘a se’ freedom; the freedom of the Creator as distinguished from the freedom of the creature.” In this connection Torrance describes election as “an act of love.” It means that “God has chosen us because He loves us, and the He loves us because He loves us.”

That may sound a bit strange. But it is loaded comment, because what Torrance means is that if we try to get behind this act of God’s love toward us to find a reason beyond the simple fact that God loves us because he does, we will end up turning God’s free love of us into a necessity in one way or another and thus once again compromise both divine and human freedom in the process. So Torrance insists,

The reason why God loves us is love. To give any other reason for love than love itself, whether it be a reason in God Himself, such as an election according to some divine prius that precedes Grace, or whether it be in man, is to deny love, to disrupt the Christian apprehension of God and to condemn the world to chaos! [Torrance, “Predestination in Christ,” 117]

Election is Christ the beloved Son of the Father, and the act of election in him is once and for all, a perfectum praesens, an eternal decision that is ever present. God’s eternal decision does not halt or come to rest at any particular point or result, but is dynamic, and ever takes the field in its identity with the living person of Chirst. [Torrance, “Predestination in Christ,” 117]

Hence it is “contemporary with us” and summons us to decision as to who we say he is. Here we must confront more directly the relationship between time and eternity. How exactly can one maintain that election is an eternal decision without reducing the eternal love between the Father and Son to the love of God enacted in the history of Jesus Christ for us? How can one maintain the strength of Torrance’s insight that creation and incarnation are new acts even for God without obviating the power contained in the assertion that Jesus Christ is the ever-present act of God’s electing love?[2]

Molnar leaves off with some questions that alert us to the discussion and critique he has been making in regard to a McCormackian reading of Barth’s theology, in particular. But that does not currently concern us. I wanted to share this very lengthy quote (and thus risk losing blog readers who typically won’t go beyond 1500 words) in order to provide insight into theology that I rarely see shared online; at least not in the context of Reformed theology. People need to know that Reformed theology is expansive, but they also need to appreciate that Christian theology in general isn’t ultimately about being able to align with that interpretive tradition, or this; but instead what we should really care about is whether or not what is being communicated is most proximate with the Gospel itself.

What I hope you have come to see is that God loves us because he just is, LOVE! I hope you can see that there is a way to think of soteriological issues from within the concrete revelation of God’s life in Jesus Christ; and that from that vantage point how we conceive of the God-world relation ought to be thought of in personal rather than abstract terms. Theological systems are often averse to thinking in personal and relational terms because they are afraid that this reduces God-thought to an existentialist frame of reference (oh no, not that!), or that it so subjectivizes God that theology becomes a form of anthropology (the boogeyman, Schleiermacher). But within the theologies of Barth, Torrance et al. what becomes apparent is that none of those fears are true. If we want to think about Predestination properly then we ought to think it from God’s Self-revelation itself; where the Son of the Father is the primary means by which we understand God to be—in other words in personal terms.

[1]Westminster Confession of Faith.

[2] Paul D. Molnar, Faith, Freedom and the Spirit: The Economic Trinity in Barth, Torrance and Contemporary Theology (Downers Grove, Illinois: IVP Academic, 2015), 202-05.

The Athanasian God of Love: He Hasn’t Always Been the Creator; But He Has Always Been Father, Son, and Holy Spirit

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I think an important reality to grasp when thinking about God’s relationship to us is that there is nothing in that relationship that is contingent upon us; it is all contingent upon who God is in himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This kicks against our natural inclinations, inclinations that remain present even after we are made alive by the Spirit in union with Christ’s humanity; we are still sinners, as a result we will continue to attempt to introduce ourselves into the ground of the relationship that inheres between ourselves and God. Indeed, this attempt will work its way into our theologies, and into the praxis that follows. Paul Molnar has been working against what he discerns as an attempt to ground God’s inner life in his outer life in the economy; this attempt, according to Molnar, has been made by folks like Bruce McCormack, Ben Myers, Kevin Hector, Paul Nimmo, and Paul Dafyyd Jones as each of these theologians have attempted to read the implications of Barth’s theology in rather creative, or constructive ways. The verities of this particular discussion get rather technical, and so for this blog post we will avoid such weeds; but I wanted to note some background in order to make sense of what I will be sharing from Molnar with reference to who God is for us in Christ and what that means in regard to creation and recreation. Most importantly, I simply want to highlight how God is love, and how that love is inimical to whom God is.

Paul Molnar writes the following in regard to who God is, and what that looks like in an Athanasian–Torrancean frame. Maybe after you read the quote some of what I shared above will make a little more sense. After the quote I will reflect more personally on how knowing that God is love makes a difference for me; and hopefully this reality will make a difference for you too.

At this point it would helpful to point out that much of the difficulty surrounding the issues discussed in the last chapter centers on how to relate God’s external and internal activities and on the proper understanding of the relationship between time and eternity. Following Thomas F. Torrance and Karl Barth, I have argued that there is and must be a priority of the Father/Son relation over the creator/creature relation because what God is toward us he is eternally in himself; and in his sovereign actions of love for us in his Word and Spirit, the eternal generation of the Son and the procession of the Spirit cannot be confused with God’s actions as creator, reconciler, and redeemer. The ultimate indications of such a confusion would be any idea that the eternal generation of the Son and the eternal procession of the Spirit might be seen as the result of an act of will on God’s part. God freely willed to relate with us by creating us, reconciling us and redeeming us. But these actions are an overflow of his eternal love and glory, not in any emanationist sense, but as acts of will expressing God’s superabundance rather than any lack; thus they are not in any sense necessary to God. They are, as Torrance often said, acts of amazing grace.

Importantly, then, any idea that what God is toward us is in any sense constitutive of God’s eternal being as Father, Son and Holy Spirit would be a clear indication of the Origenist confusion of God’s internal and external relations. This is why, following Torrance especially, I have stressed that while God was eternally the Father he was not always creator, and that while God was always the Son he was not always incarnate. Hence, creation and incarnation must be seen as new actions, new even for God. There is a delicate balance that is required here because once the incarnation has taken place, it is impossible to disjoin Christ’s divinity and humanity; from then on he lives as the incarnate Word, and now he lives as the risen ascended Lord of history and interacts with us as the eternal high priest and as the Mediator in both his human and divine natures in virtue of the hypostatic union. It is just at this point in Christology where it is imperative, however, that one distinguish between God’s internal and external relations. Without this distinction in the eternal being of the Son will be thought to be changed or constituted in some sense by his human history. Yet, his human history is the history of God acting for us in the world as the reconciler without ceasing to be the Word through who God created the world and through whom God continues to uphold it in the power of his eternal Spirit. We have already seen that Athanasius insisted on the importance of this point by rejecting any idea that the Word came to exist by an act of will on the part of the Father.[1]

There is a lot going on here, but for our purposes what I want us to notice is that who God is, particularly as he is for us, is something that graciously flows from who he is first in his inner and eternal life. If we can grasp this we will find great stability, not in ourselves, but in who he is. Once we can accept this reality about God we can rest in his eternal life of triune love.

I think that we need to understand all of the above (and more!) so that we are not easily swayed by the winds of doctrine currently blowing around the church. We want to recognize as John does that ‘God is love,’ but we don’t want to work our ‘worldly’ conceptions of what that entails into God’s life; we want to allow God’s life to determine what his love looks like. It isn’t a sentimentalism or a God who is my teddy-bear that we after; instead we should want to submit ourselves to whatever and whomever God is. We can only accept this about who God is if we allow our thoughts to be shaped and reshaped by encounter with him in and through the humanity of Christ by the Holy Spirit; it is here where the type of ‘repentant thinking’ that Torrance was so concerned with will and can take place.

My broader concern is that God is not being presented to the evangelical churches this way; that God instead is being presented in a way where he comes with edges and performance based expectations that in fact he does not have. My concern is that a nomist (law) God, a Wyatt Earp God is who people are being introduced to, such that their understanding of him isn’t really based upon his Self-revelation itself, but instead upon a philosophical conception of God who operates in impersonal and decretive ways towards his creation, toward people.

So, on the one hand, we have the Progressive God, and on the other hand the Puritan God being given to the people. I want to suggest that this introduces conceptions of God into the mix that are not actually contingent upon who he actually is, but instead contingent upon who we have posited him to be; and this positing might be very organic and sophisticated in the way it attempts to imagine its way into how we think God, but in the end I do not believe these approaches, usually, are based upon God’s Self-determination of who he actually is for us from who he eternally and antecedently is in himself.

Once I realized this; once I realized that there was a way to think God from the way God has revealed himself to be in the Incarnation a real peace began to minister to my soul. I am well aware of the piety that many folks, both on the Progressive and Puritan sides have in regard to the way that they attempt to think God, but I don’t think piety is able to cover a multitude of sins; only God’s love can do that.

[1] Paul D. Molnar, Faith, Freedom and the Spirit: The Economic Trinity in Barth, Torrance and Contemporary Theology (Downers Grove, Illinois: IVP Academic, 2015), 187-88.

The Rock of Israel: The Self-Sustaining Triune Life of God

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There has been a controversy or ‘war’ even between George Hunsinger and Bruce McCormack—or that’s how the outside world has labeled it—in regard to how to receive Barth’s doctrine of God. The basic tension comes from the thesis that Barth’s doctrine of election, that came in his Church Dogmatics II/1, caused him to reify his earlier construed doctrine of God which is found in CD I/1. That is, after Barth had his aha moment in regard to reformulating the classical doctrine of double predestination, the argument goes that by time we get to CD IV/1 that Barth had Christified his doctrine of God to the point that he makes God’s being in history (ad extra), in the economy, constitutive of God’s being in his immanent (ad intra) life. The critique of that comes from folks like Hunsinger and Paul Molnar who argue that Barth stayed consistent in his rendering of a doctrine of God, and that, for Barth, there was always already a classical type of doctrine of aseity, and christologically, a Logos asarkos present; that there was no shift to the type of McCormackean and Jüngelian conception of God that ostensibly propounds that God’s eternal life is posited on his economic life.

In developing the just mentioned context, Molnar offers the following quote in order to help substantiate the case that Barth was actually quite ‘classical’, metaphysical, and thus not post-metaphysical in the ways that McCormack, Jüngel, Ben Myers, et al. have wanted to re-present Barth. Beyond the controversy, I think this quote is beautiful in regard to the way Barth speaks of God’s eternally triune love; it is beautiful to me precisely because it is a self-sustaining love (a se) that is contingent on nothing else but the triune persons in interpenetrative relation (perichoresis) one with the other as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

He reveals Himself as the One who, even though He did not love us and were not revealed to us, even though we did not exist at all, still loves in and for Himself as surely as He is and is God; who loves us by reason and in consequence of the fact that He is the One who loves in His freedom in and for Himself, and is God as such. It is only of God that it can be said that He is in the fact that He loves and loves in the fact that He is. . . . God loves, and to do so He does not need any being distinct from His own as the object of His love. If He loves the world and us, this is a free overflowing of the love in which He is and is God and with which he is not content, although He might be, since neither the world nor ourselves are indispensable to His love and therefore to His being. (IV/2, p. 755)[1]

Beyond helping to substantiate his thesis, Molnar’s thesis, more positively this quote in and of itself represents the type of aesthetic quality that was present in Barth’s thinking; a doxological quality.

Personally, I find great solace in the reality articulated by Barth. I like knowing that God doesn’t need me to be who He is; that God doesn’t need the world, or the creation to be who He is; God is God whether we want to acknowledge that or not. There is an objectivity about God’s life that is non-contingent upon my existence and only relates to His Self-existence. The comfort I draw from this, once God’s primary objectivity is identified, is what Barth calls God’s ‘secondary objectivity,’ an objectivity that God allows us to know Him, to participate in His life in and through the mediation of His life for us in Jesus Christ. There is comfort in knowing that nobody can pluck me out of the Hands of such a God; that this God freely loves out of the overflow and plenitude of His inner-love, and that this is precisely the type of love that typifies what Divine love actually is: a love that is Self-given and defined in and for and then from the other. It brings great joy to my heart knowing that I am included in the depth of this kind of love; a love that is genuinely free, and not consumed with the self (cor incurvatus ad se). A love that is immovable and always abounding in the resplendence of an eternal reality that was there before we ever were; no wonder the Apostle Paul (following Moses et al.) called Christ the Rock of Israel.

[1] Karl Barth, CD IV/2, 755 cited by Paul D. Molnar, Faith, Freedom and the Spirit: The Economic Trinity in Barth, Torrance and Contemporary Theology (Downers Grove, Illinois: IVP Academic, 2015), 134.