Category Archives: Philip Ziegler

Spitting Out the Caricature-Water: An Anatomy Lesson on Pelagianism

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In my last two posts I have made reference to the theological heresy known, historically, as Pelagianism. In an effort to provide further theological development and engagement with this locus I want to refer us to a description of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s understanding of the cor curvum in se (heart turned in on itself) provided for by Philip Ziegler. There is a facile understanding of so-called Pelagianism, by some (of my interlocutors), wherein they seem to think that the conceptuality that the language of Pelagianism signifies is theologically unproblematic. In other words, some of my interlocutors believe that if they can exonerate Pelagius himself from the ‘heretic-label’ that his teachings have gained via the councils of 2nd Orange, Ephesus, and Carthage, that they can espouse his teachings, in the main, and avoid the heretical label altogether (since in their view Pelagius wasn’t really a heretic anyway, particularly, because according to them Pelagius didn’t teach what the whole history of the Church believed he taught). But this naively misses the whole point: whether or not Pelagius taught the idea of a neutral morality and human-will, indeed in need of an aide of grace, is not the point of critique in regard to Pelagianism simpliciter. What is at stake is, oriented by biblical faithfulness vis-à-vis whether or not someone’s theological anthropology in fact coheres with the teaching of Scripture in toto. In other words, does Scripture teach that humanity simpliciter is born with a freewill that has the capaciousness to respond to the offer of the Gospel on its own strength or not? This is what some of my interlocutors have attempted to argue, all the while either by way of acquitting Pelagius himself, or by suggesting that they aren’t corollary with the historic tenets of Pelagianism proper; particularly as understood by almost ALL within Church history.

Bonhoeffer, according to Ziegler’s accounting, maintained the common notion that Luther et al. have maintained in regard to the biblical anthropology of homo incurvatus in se. That is, “and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil” (Jn 3.19); further, “None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God” (Rom 3.11). The case can be made further, from Scripture, that the human problem is unsurpassable save someone extra nos (outside of us) entering into our incurved and sinful situation, and redeeming us from the inside out; guts and all. According to Ziegler this is what Bonhoeffer maintained; here is how Ziegler illumines that for us:

Whatever else will be meant by divine freedom and transcendence, in the first instance they mean that God is not at the disposal of fallen human reason, neither ‘to hand’ or ‘in hand’ to be deployed in schemes of metaphysical and existential explanation. Bonhoeffer conceives of human reason as such to be verkrümmten—warped and turned in upon itself—fully conformed to sin’s distortion of humanity…. As such it is ‘imprisoned in itself, it sees only itself, even when it sees another, even when it wants to see God (DBWE 2: 45). To the extent that such reason does think and speak of ‘God’ it can only do so as an epiphenomenon of its own religious ambitions, as an idea firmly resident in and subservient to its own self-reflection (DBWE 2: 44, 50, 51). Since, as Bonhoeffer explains, ‘thinking is as little able as good works to deliver the cor corvum in se from itself’ (DBWE 2: 80), the truth of God must come upon reason ‘from beyond and break in upon it in such a way that one is placed ‘into the truth by Christ in judgment and grace’ (DBWE 2: 96). Thus the axiom ‘deus non potest apprehendi nisis per verbum’ (it is impossible to apprehend God apart from the word), which Bonhoeffer approvingly cites from the Confessio Augustana (DBWE 2: 53, 67). The saving address of the Word has the form of God’s transcendent freedom: it is God giving himself ‘without precondition’ (DBWE 2: 89) to be known across the otherwise unbridgeable chasm of unlikeness, most concretely the unlikeness of human sin and divine righteousness (DBWE 2:54, 79).[1]

For Bonhoeffer, according to Ziegler, and I would maintain for the teaching of Scripture itself, the human condition is so enslaved to sin that it has no hope in itself to surpass its condition. In other words, the fallen human being, which is what all human beings apart from Jesus Christ’s vicarious humanity are, is so trodden down by the effects of sin that there isn’t one part of it, not its affections, intellect, or will, that hasn’t become constrained by its own weight of ineptitude; that isn’t only always for the self rather than for God. And this is precisely why ‘He who knew no sin, assumed sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.’ The fact that it took God to become Theanthropos (Godman) ought to illumine the minds and hearts of those who would be tempted to think that they have anything in them (even if claimed to be from a God -givenness), that could say Yes or No to God; that this is utterly and biblically fallacious. And yet this is what some of my interlocutors want to maintain; and to do so with a straight (and even smug, at points) face.

The heresy of Pelagianism, in the history, apart from debates surrounding the man Pelagius, is what Bonhoeffer, according to Ziegler maintained in the aforementioned. Some of my interlocutors will assert that Bonhoeffer is just a good Augustinian; but that reply is simply an attempt to poison the well with caricature-water. What Pelagianism, the doctrine, has come to signify is: that people have a God-given and grace aided capacity in themselves to respond positively or negatively to the Gospel offer; that is Pelagianism. Some of my interlocutors believe that this teaching is in fact the biblical teaching, eo ipso they are Pelagians, by any historic standard for understanding that terminology and the conceptuality it signifies. But the biblical teaching, as we have just been noticing, with help from Bonhoeffer, is that humanity requires resurrection and the new creation of Christ’s human body in order to have capacity to say Yes to God. Some of my interlocutors, though, have an anemic understanding of what the atonement entails (and this ironically is where they are in lockstep with the Calvinists they claim to be in critique of). The atonement involves ontological depth, as TF Torrance rightfully emphasizes; along with the Apostle Paul. This implies that the Gospel isn’t simply about whether or not someone gets to go to heaven or not; the Gospel, under this pressure, involves what it in fact means to be fully human coram Deo (before God) in the prosopon Christi (face of Christ). Some of my interlocutors don’t understand the depth dimension of the Gospel implications in regard to what it actually did; i.e. it fully recreated humanity by the resurrection humanity of Jesus Christ. This ought to enlighten some of my interlocutors; they ought to be able to infer that if the Gospel goes this deep, then it went this deep for a reason. The reach of sin has a primal orientation such that its effects denude the human capacity in itself, even if so-called God-given and aided by grace, in such a way that it takes God Himself to stoop down and recreate the capacity for us to be for God and not against Him in and through the Yes and Amen of His life for us (pro nobis) in Jesus Christ!

My next post, or some post in the near future will be in reference to the Apostle Paul against Pelagianism and its contemporary proponents. I’m afraid some of my interlocutors believe they have the scriptural teaching on their side, but they really don’t!

[1] Philip G. Ziegler, “God,” in Michael Mawson and Philip G. Ziegler eds., The Oxford Handbook of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 140.

The Church’s Freedom is Not Politically, But Christ Grounded

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You might get the impression that I think the Christian church is a highly political institution that ought to engage in activist politics in order to ensure its freedom to move and breathe about in the world. But I don’t think this. As I noted in my response to pastor Dave Rolph, I do think that based on the analogy of the incarnation the church has space to be politically active; and that the Gospel itself, in its highly disruptive reality (as God invading the world in Christ, and making known that His Son, Jesus is King) has inescapable political implications for both the church and the world. But I think this all from the fact that the church is, as the metaphor states, the body of Christ. As such, the church, and this also has serious political implications, along with the fact that Jesus is King, is an organism that derives its freedom neither from the state nor any sort of ideology. The church is a slave to righteousness, and Christ is God’s righteousness for us; therefore the church is a slave to Christ. It is in this righteousness wherein Christian freedom is actualized and rooted for the church. This implies that the church’s ear is slavishly bounded to hear Christ’s voice alone. The church is not subject to magistrates, governors, mayors, kings, queens, presidents, or gestapos. The church finds its freedom from Christ alone, because there is only one ontology of freedom around; and that is God’s Triune Life for us in Jesus Christ. The church cannot afford to capitulate, then, to any sort of worldly voices, whether, again, those be given expression in various ideologies, or as those might be enfleshed in respective personas we are confronted by in this world system.

Wolf Krötke helps develop these points further. Remember Krötke is the GDR (German Democratic Republic) theologian who worked in a very toxic and dangerous (he was jailed) political situation in his East German context. He writes:

So the church, by virtue of its commission, is “free with respect to the church’s situation in the former GDR, it is with genuine candor that Krötke remarks:

perhaps today especially, th[e] emphasis upon the ‘independent’ character of the church will have to be taken seriously. A church which is dependent upon political power and the presuppositions of worldviews, cannot fulfill its task in the world. It then loses its freedom to listen to Jesus Christ alone. With this, it also loses its freedom to proclaim him unreservedly in both his word of assurance and of claim.

An apostolic church knows that any form of political or ideological Gleichschaltung is impossible, as it “may not allow itself to be dictated to or told by anyone in the world how it must be the church. Its binding to Jesus Christ alone decides this.” And the freedom of this binding always outstrips whatever freedom the church might attain from elsewhere. He writes, “we also do not receive our freedom as the church, as a community, from the world or from society. Our freedom in the task of Jesus Christ already anticipates every possible freedom with which we can be blessed by the society.” The church’s context cannot furnish it with any genuine freedom which it has not already received from the hand of the One who commissions it to its task of witness. Indeed, to the extent that the church actually manifests its “freedom from ideology,” it does so solely as the result of having actually taken up the freedom its commission affords, i.e., to its “freedom for service.”[1]

As perceptive readers we can feel the presence of Barth’s anti-natural theology informing Krötke’s conception of a church who has ‘freedom from ideology.’ In Krötke’s understanding the church’s freedom is clearly derived by her raison d’etre, her contingency upon Jesus Christ as her flesh and blood reality.

I find much encouragement here. We live in a time where this couldn’t be more prescient. If there was ever a time when the church needs to understand her ontology, or her being from God in Christ, it is now. We are being pressed from every side with winds of information that would seek to blow the church to the right, the left, or into the moderate middle. But the church does not gain its orientation by the swells of popular opinion, or critical theories; the church’s sails are driven by the Holy Ruach of God, as He presses us into the rudder of Christ’s life who directs us to the sure shores of God’s ineffable and triune life as that is the very beachhead wherein the church finds safe haven and direction. As we bear witness to God’s life from the freedom we have in Christ, the church can point the tempest of this chaotic and rudderless world order to an extra reality that is beyond it, but for it. The church ought to use her freedom in Christ to her advantage. Let’s not fear man, but God; and in this fear, let the freedom of God reign in our lives as we bear witness to each other in Christian fellowship, and bear witness to the world that the Lord Jesus is King.

[1] Philip G. Ziegler, Doing Theology When God Is Forgotten: The Theological Achievement of Wolf Krötke (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 183.

Be the Listening Church / Be the Witnessing Church

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I contend that a properly Protestant way for understanding the church is to think it in a Christ concentration. This means that the church’s esse (or being) is not grounded in herself, or within a liturgy of various practices accrued over the centuries. Instead the church, I contend, can only be properly understood within and from the object and subject of God’s life for us in Jesus Christ. It is within this space, of His gracious election of humanity pro nobis, that the church finds location (and locution), as God freely mediates Himself to us, that we might freely be mediated to Him through the priestly and vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ; as both the Godward to human/humanward to God movement kiss in the hypostatic union and singular person of God and humanity in Jesus Christ. If the church finds its being there, rather than in the accidents of history (providentially caused, as my critics would assert) as those who have been given concretion in the historical developments of ecclesial history, then the church can no longer claim to be God’s means of grace for salvation. Once the church is identified as the God ordained location wherein salvific grace is mediated alone, the church takes on the attributes that belong to Christ alone; the church takes on an authoritative role wherein bruised reeds must find refuge, and the salvation that can alone relieve them of their downtrodden souls. But what if the church herself needs all of these divinely given resources, ever afresh and anew? What if the church isn’t supposed to bear the burden that only God alone in Jesus Christ could bear for the sins of the world? What if the church isn’t supposed to speak in absolute ways for God; what if the church is only supposed to bear witness to this otherworldy reality that became thisworldly through the invasion of God’s life into our humanity in Christ? What if all the things that the church, especially high-churches often assign to itself, are only attributions that belong to Christ alone; what if He alone is ‘the mediator between God and humanity?’ What if the church isn’t the means of God’s grace, and instead just a witness of how all of this has already happened in the humanity of Christ for us?

In line with the sentiment I have been sketching above, East German theologian, Wolf Krötke writes something in the same vein. He emphasizes how the church can only be the church by being a listening church. For Krötke, as he writes in referral to the Barmen Declaration, the church isn’t a possessor of God, but a recipient of God’s voice as He speaks to her afresh through the vox Christi (voice of Christ). Krötke’s notion is very closely aligned with Barth’s understanding of the church. One significant point, in regard to this understanding of the church, is that it emphasizes that the church’s locus ought to be understood solely in the actualized reality of incarnation and atonement as that has always already been in concurrence in God’s choice to be for us in Christ. In other words, Krötke, I believe, is intent on making sure that people in the church understand that there is no room wherein the Christian can or should make the inward turn back to an abstract subject, such that the church returns to the natural ‘idol factory’ that God in Christ came to save her from. If we remain in the posture of a ‘listening church,’ we will always be looking away from ourselves, and in doxological mode, be looking to the voice of the church as it is allowed to confront and contravene us afresh and anew. In this way the church will avoid a stultifying stasis of always needing to re-invent herself, per the pressures of the respective cultures she finds herself within. And instead she will be able to live in an anticipatory mode wherein the apocalyptic life of God, a life beyond but, by grace, freely within her by the Spirit, is finding her ‘times of refreshment’ from a place that is not self-generated but Christ-generated. Philip Ziegler writes of Krötke’s ecclesiological understanding thusly:

Because “successful listening” will always occur as a “breach in our own incapacity to listen,” the church’s hearing the Word of God’s free grace is only possible as a “community of the Holy Spirit.” This orientation toward renewed listening is revolutionary, giving the church an essentially open and forward looking posture. Since the Word of God’s free grace cannot be understood as anything other than “a Word that the Holy Spirit makes living for us,” Krötke contends, “the community lives in the vivid expectation of being surpassed by all those who listen afresh to Jesus Christ.” the church’s speaking to others aims not merely to allow them “to participate in the community’s own listening,” but to see “the community surpassed in listening by them.”

The Spirit thus acts to bring about an appropriate and primary passivity in the community, for the church is first and foremost in receipt of God’s address and activity. As Krötke would have it, “the spiritual character of the community,” and so its basic reality, “consists in just such listening.” In opposition to those who would read in Barmen the elevation of Jesus Christ “into the principle of a religious Weltanschauung, Krötke asserts that far from being “a principle administered by some,” Christ is “the life that comes to us and addresses us” such that “one cannot merely have listened to him once. One can only ever listen to him anew.” A church not oriented toward listening for the Word of Christ in the witness of scripture would somehow have “left what God is doing behind” and would fail to hold God’s activity “continually before and over against itself.” It would be a church whose profile was no longer decisively determined by the free grace of God made effective by the Spirit, a church chasing an idealized image of itself rather than following the living God who goes before it.[1]

For Krötke, according to Ziegler, and for Barth, insofar that Krötke riffs Barth, the church ought to have a decidedly eschatological character to her. She ought to be a church that understands that she is just as much of a sinner as the world who is constantly in need of the evangel of God. She ought to be in recognition that her only hope for real ‘churchly’ existence comes from her daily reception of God’s voice for her in Jesus Christ. If she sees herself this way, she will not see herself in institutional terms, but in the terms she ought to: as simul justus et peccator (simultaneously justified and sinner)—which are personal terms. And in this seeing, by her listening, made effective by the Holy Spirit, the church, as she participates in and from Christ’s life, will find a correspondence with the work of God, and the finished work of Christ, as that life becomes hers in afresh and anew iterations. In this the church can rightly bear witness to the world that she is not her own, that she has ‘been bought with a price; with the blood of Jesus Christ.’

It is in this witness that the world can come to see another world, not of their making, that they are being invited into along with the rest of the redeemed sinners who inhabit the churches. But this is the point: the church, in this way, will not attempt to own possessions that alone belong to God; the church will only bear witness to that reality insofar as she hears the life giving voice of God breathe new life into her every moment of every day. If this is the way of the church’s being she will cease attempting to pro-longate the incarnation, and instead recognize that her being as a communio sanctorum (communion of the saints), is gifted to her moment by moment by the unceasing and ever active mediation of God’s life for the world, for the church in particular, in Jesus Christ. In this way the church will no longer understand itself as a possessor of God, but as ones possessed by God; and in this way ‘he who the Son sets free will be free indeed,’ because this person, this community (those who populate the churches) will not feel compelled to bear a burden that only God Himself could bear for the world in His freely elected humanity in Jesus Christ.

[1] Philip G. Ziegler, Doing Theology When God Is Forgotten: The Theological Achievement of Wolf Krötke (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 172.

‘Mixing Manure with Ice Cream’, A Response to Pastor Dave Rolph: The Theopolitical Gospel

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This in response to Pastor Dave Rolph; he is pastor of Pacific Hills Calvary Chapel in Aliso Viejo, CA. He was once principle of Calvary Chapel High School at Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa, an Associate Pastor at Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa, and a very close associate and confidant of Pastor Chuck Smith’s (founder of the Calvary Chapel movement). I grew up the son of a Conservative Baptist pastor, but in a very formative time of my Christian walk, I attended Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa (about 5 services a week), for approximately 5 years; I attended Calvary Chapel Bible College for a year; was accepted into Calvary Chapel School of Ministry (but did not attend, went to Multnomah instead); and got into part of the ‘inner circle’ (on the fringes of that part) of Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa leadership because of a friend of mine who lived with the director of the Calvary Chapel School of Ministry. All this to say: I have background and context with Calvary Chapel, which is why I continue to pay attention to it and its leadership.

So, in light of the aforementioned, as I started, let me respond to something that Dave Rolph just posted on his Facebook feed. He is responding to those who have apparently been pressing him on his apparent lack of engagement with all the politics of the day. He wrote in full:

Mixing Manure With Ice Cream

I have stated many times that mixing politics with Christianity is like mixing manure with ice cream. It doesn’t hurt the manure, but it ruins the ice cream. In this divided age it is more and more challenging to avoid mixing Christianity with politics. In fact, I find that nowadays one’s Christianity is generally assessed based on his or her politics. This certainly brings much-needed passion into politics, making it today’s leading spectator sport, but it is devastating to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

I once asked Pastor Chuck Smith what would’ve happened if he had endorsed Richard Nixon in 1968 or 1971. He shook his head and said, “Oh man! Calvary would’ve been emptied out and the Jesus Movement would’ve been over.”

But it isn’t only the politics of the Right that threatens the gospel. History is replete with examples of an emphasis on social justice degrading the work of the Spirit as well. How many examples are there of great social work in the name of Christianity that now do good social work without a hint of the gospel, other than a cross as a logo or the name Christian hidden in an acronym somewhere.

Now, I hear the cries from both sides of the spectrum. “We still believe the Bible and support conservative political causes.” Or, “We don’t compromise doctrinally at all when we also advocate for progressive ideals and against systemic evil.” And I believe you. For now. But history either teaches us well, or we are doomed to repeat it.

The real question should be, “Is there one person out there who might not hear the gospel because my politics turns them off?” There are many points on the political right with which I agree. There are also many points coming from the newly woke crowd with which I agree. If you don’t think the slaughter of innocent unborn children is horrible you are a moron, and certainly not a Christian. If you are a racist then you are a moron and certainly not a Christian. But those issues are not the gospel.

I hear from people everyday who are frustrated that I won’t “take a side.” I’ve taken a side. That side is the pure, unadulterated gospel. That’s the ice cream for me.[1]

My off the cuff stream of consciousness response to him was this:

The Gospel is scandalous because it won’t allow for a Swiss neutrality. It is disruptive because it forces the Christian into a scandalous particularity that even on points of political theory must say a loud no or yes. The Christian bears witness to the Kingdom of Christ, which makes it inimically political; with *sides*. The sides may overlap one way or the other, in regard to the horizontal politik we are all ensconced within, whether we like it or not. Wisdom says that to take a particular side, to say yes to a side that has more proximity to the values of the Kingdom, must occur for the Christian. Unfortunately the Gospel is ultimately political, and in this in-between time, it does call us to make the hard decisions of taking a particular side. The side transcends the party or the person, but because of particularity, the side will ultimately, of necessity, collapse into one party or person over another. If the values of the Kingdom, on a grade, are more embodied by one party or person, then the grade slides that direction more than the other. IOW, to remain politically neutral, in my view, is not a corollary of the Gospel. And to attempt an appeal to a *pure Gospel* as the antidote to this dilemma misunderstands just how the Gospel has come to us, and comes afresh and anew, in the timber and blood of the cross of Jesus Christ. The Gospel is this-worldly, just as it is God for us in Christ. As such, while the Gospel gives us an external transcendence to think and live from, it does so immanently in a man from a particular place called Nazareth. If the Gospel is not neutral, than neither can we be. If the Gospel freely stooped down, and took the low-road, then this is our mode of theological existence in the world. To be the fool in Christ, is not to seek a docetic high-road untrammeled by the goings on of this world, but it is to take the byway of Chalcedon wherein the Christian finds standing in what might appear to be foolish and weak vis-à-vis the *civilized* world. This implicates how we take stands politically; or it should. Signed, 2 cents.

And his response to me was this: “Dave Rolph Bobby Grow You’d really hate Jesus. And Paul. And Peter. And John.” This wasn’t really the response I was expecting; but we can chalk it up to him being in the heat of the moment.

Let me attempt to unpack what I wrote to him a little bit more. All that I was doing was pointing out that the analogy of the Gospel itself does not allow for an apolitical, and neutral approach to any of these things. The Gospel reality itself, starting with the Gospel Hisself, who is the Christ, is stridently political through and through. That is how my comment to Rolph can be boiled down, and should be. I was noting a principled point that is an implicate of the disruptive nature of the Gospel; i.e. that the Christian way can neither be apolitical nor neutral in any way. If the Gospel is the very ground of all reality, if there are no spheres in reality untouched by the reality of the Gospel, as the Gospel is all of creation’s telos (purpose), then it is inconceivable, indeed more, it is incoherent to imagine a world of “pure Gospel” wherein the Christian can Platonically stand aloof from the concretions of this worldly reality. This is the ground and grammar my reply to Rolph was working from.

While the Gospel re-creates, it doesn’t ignore what is confronting this present evil age; indeed, it contradicts it! If the Gospel confronts and contradicts this current world system, then it does so in highly explicit ways that cannot, by definition, remain aloof or “unmixed.” Indeed, the analogy of the incarnation itself says this: that the eternal and triune God, in the second person of that life, in the Son, “mixed” Himself with humanity that humanity, by the Grace of Adoption might be mixed into God’s very inner life. That is a disrupting reality that brings with it a holy confrontation to this world order that is highly political, and full of choices of whether a person will stand with God’s way in Christ, or their way. Attempting to discern what that way is, in the muddle of all the evils in the world, is exactly what the Christian has been called to. This isn’t a “mixing,” or better, collapsing of the Gospel into this world order; instead it is recognizing that because God has mixed Himself into this order, by becoming human in Christ, that it is no longer possible to not be ‘worldly’ Christians (as Bonhoeffer might note).

Conclusion

To close let me refer us to a definition of apocalyptic theology and what I take to be very important towards how we ought to think of the Christian’s engagement with the world; and what that implies towards developing a genuinely theopolitical approach that does not attempt to hide behind the name of Jesus in retreat from this world system. Philip Ziegler writes:

As Gaventa concisely puts it, “Paul’s apocalyptic theology has to do with the conviction that in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God has invaded the world as it is, thereby revealing the world’s utter distortion and foolishness, reclaiming the world, and inaugurating a battle that will doubtless culminate in the triumph of God over all God’s enemies (including the captors Sin and Death). This means that the Gospel is first, last, and always about God’s powerful and gracious initiative.” Inasmuch as it is an expression of specifically Christian faith, “apocalyptic theology always and everywhere denotes a theology of liberation in an earth that is dying and plagued by evil powers.

In the words of Donald MacKinnon, its subject matters in nothing less than “God’s own protest against the world He has made, by which at the same time that world is renewed and reborn.”[2]

And:

For my own part, I am certainly drawn to the task of envisaging an apocalyptic theology for “ardently Protestant” reasons. For it seems to me that, understood as it is here, apocalyptic is a discursive idiom uniquely suited to articulate the radicality, sovereignty, and militancy of adventitious divine grace; just so it is of real import to the dogmatic work of testing the continued viability of Protestant Christian faith. . . . The apocalyptic idiom starkly illumines at one and the same time both the drastic and virulent reality of human captivity and complicity in sin, and the extraordinary power of saving divine grace that outbids it, reminding us that things are at once much worse yet also paradoxically far, far better than we could possibly imagine them to be.[3]

You will note the reference to ‘liberation theology,’ which I repudiate. But the theologian doesn’t have to adopt liberation theology (and its latent Marxism) in order to appreciate the point about God’s invasion into this world, and what that implies about the Christian’s engagement with the world. I agree with Rolph that we don’t want a non-Gospel issue to become a stumbling block that stands in the way of a person coming to Christ (which is a very ‘conversionist’ and I would say, Pelagian way to think), but to say that we ought to find a neutral ground for the Gospel, in order to achieve that, fundamentally misunderstands just what the radical implications of the Gospel are. Christians don’t live in abstraction from this world, we live in it as witnesses to the order of God’s life and kingdom that has transected, contradicted, and re-created this world system in such a way that to remain abstract from that reality misrepresents exactly what this world needs! The Gospel is the Good News of God to the world precisely because it is the most political statement ever announced: i.e. that Jesus is King!!

 

[1] Dave Rolph, Facebook Post, accessed 08-16-2020.

[2] Philip G. Ziegler, Militant Grace: The Apocalyptic Turn and the Future of Christian Theology (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2018), loc 162, 171 kindle.

[3] Ibid., loc 214, 224.

Ceasing to be Human::Being Made Human from God’s Humanity For Us

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‘For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.’ At a theological level what does this imply as we think about the effects of the fall as that impacts, in particular, anthropology—or what it means to be human coram Deo (before God). We might be tempted to think along with the Great Tradition, when we think sin, in terms of a forensic relationship with God; God who is Lawgiver and Judge—emphasis on Law. But what if we go another direction, a direction that has been in the church’s tradition for just as long or longer than the Western Great Tradition; what if we think sin from within the [onto] relational or filial reality that co-inheres in the triune life of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? In other words, what if we think, in a God-world relation, that sin represents a disjunction or rupture, for the creature, from being participant in the triune life of eternal fellowship as God has desired from before the foundations of the world? If we think sin under this pressure, what we might end up with is the idea that what it means to be genuinely human, a fulsome creature before God, is that we must be in right relationship with this life; God’s triune Life. We get this sense, as we think what it means to be human from God’s imago Dei pro nobis; as we think humanity from God’s elected humanity to be for us in the image of God, who is the Christ (cf. Col. 1.15). Because God is gracious we find our esse as humans by way of being grounded and created in the image of Christ, who is the image of God for us. When the fall occurred this image was necessarily shattered insofar as God is Holy, thus our image bearing could no longer obtain; as such, it was no longer possible for those created in the image of Christ to be considered human in the sense of what that means in God’s economy and telos.

Philip Ziegler offers a nice script on this discussion as he continues to treat Wolf Krötke’ theology. In this instance it is with reference to theanthropology, and what it means to be human before and from God in Christ. You will note that Krötke’s perspective is both deeply Barthian and Athanasian; you’ll notice this when we see him using language like annihilation (not to be confused with soteriological annihilationism or with what some call ‘evangelical annihilationism’). So Ziegler and Krötke:

Further, the close association of reconciliation with the determination of humans as creatures reflects Krötke’s judgment that the denial of this status is close to the heart of sin. Concurring with Bonhoeffer’s remark that “God became human so that the human might become human,” Krötke admits that the situation into which God comes to save is one in which the human has ceased to be human. Sin is “an absurd destruction of creatureliness” which occurs “without meaning and which culminates in on other achievement than the nothingness of annihilation.” Human beings actively cease to be human, in Krötke’s view, by disregarding the limit God himself represents for the creature, i.e., in struggling variously to make good on the hollow promise of eristis sicut dei (Gn 3:5) and so to “accrue to itself unlimited value or limitless power.” Sin is the “tendency towards and idolatrization of human beings which destroys the humanity of the human in the most wicked way: for a human being is a ‘good god’ neither for himself, nor for others.” Krötke here takes up an important theme from Luther, who identified the root of human sin as the inhuman desire “that [one] should be God, and that God should not be God,” the fruit of which is the dissolution of true creatureliness and the transformation of human society into a collection of “unholy and arrogant gods.” Pursuit of self-deification results  in “the human destruction of the relation with God,” since a human being without limits is also thereby without relations. For Krötke the basic form of sin is the inhuman effort variously to lord it over others—including God himself—in absurd parody of divine lordship. As Jüngel has summarized this view, in active denial of our humanity, “we assume the role of lupus (man is a wolf to man).” This characterization of sin trenchantly affirms Luther’s own anthropological axiom, “we ought to be humans and not God—this is the summa.”[1]

If there was ever a time that being human needed to be fully lived into, it is our current moment. None of being human is shaped by cultural mores, or societal movements, it is shaped, sui generis, by what it means to be human in participation with God’s life, as we are participant in that life through the grace of God’s humanity for us in Jesus Christ. It is out of this vacuum—lack of participation in God’s life—that inhumanity flourishes in the broader world and society; indeed, in our own lives even as Christians (simul justus et peccator). Christians are called, at such a time as this, to bear witness to what it means to be human from the alien life of God, as that has been concretized in the flesh of Jesus Christ pro nobis. Humanity, in God’s economy, has never been an abstract sociological category; it has always already and only been a properly theological category insofar as what it means to be human, indeed, comes through an christological conditioning that has been actualized for us, from before the foundation of the world, in the elected humanity of Jesus Christ. This is the Evangel.

 

[1] Philip G. Ziegler, Doing Theology When God Is Forgotten: The Theological Achievement Of Wolf Krötke (New York: Peter Lang, 2007),

Apophatic Theology and a Protestant Theology of the Word Don’t Mix: With Reference to Wolf Krötke

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The most common form of theologizing these days, among evangelical Reformed types, is to engage in what historically has been identified as the via negativa (negative way) or apophatic theology. This approach is in contrast to what, in the history has been called the via positiva (positive way) or kataphatic theology. Some believe that these two approaches can be complementary rather than disparaging of each other, but I reject that proposal. I am a proponent of kataphatic or positive theology, of the sort that rests completely in the Self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ; this is an a posteriori approach to thinking God from God. Apophatic theology negates creaturely attributes like finity, time, mutability, passibility, so on and so forth, and out of this negation thinks God. But it lives in this negation in a mode that ultimately leaves the theologian in a place of total stupor and silence. The apophatic God is not characterized by being a speaking God, but a silent God aloof and locked into his inner aseity. The theologian, in this tradition, attempts to salvage God from this silence by arguing that this ‘sort’ of transcendence simply invites the Christian to a life of worship, and equally being silent before what seemingly becomes an unknown God.

East German theologian Wolf Krötke describes and critiques apophatic theology this way, and this according to Philip Ziegler’s description:

Krötke maintains that much of traditional Christian theology engages the question of the speakability of God crippled by a basic aporia owed to longstanding entanglement in the logic of a metaphysical discourse that thinks and speaks of God within a complex of functions and necessities arising from analysis of human existence and of the world around it. Such metaphysical discourse is generally self-conscious of the fact that in thinking of God on the basis of inference and deduction from the human situation it threatens improperly to anthropomorphize God or even to muddle God with worldly functions and necessities. For this reason, it works to defend itself from these perils by way of rigorous abstraction and negation. Any and all positive, i.e., analogous, talk of God is always accompanied by a strict and overriding negatio that seeks to preserve the transcendence of God from any false identification with anything that “is.” And so it stands under the proviso of actually saying far less of God than it would wish.

Thus, if positive predications are made of God, this can only be done figuratively and indirectly, since “negations. . . must be applied to all statements about God if we want to speak in an approximate way of the God who does not belong to the world.” Suspicious that what is said of God either per eminentium or by causal inference from experience of the world is ultimately inappropriate, classical Christian theology has consistently held that God is finally both unknowable and unspeakable. Indeed, negative statements about God have generally been regarded as more appropriate, precisely because they aim to pare away what is “not divine” from God. The apophatic tradition stemming from the Cappadocians, John of Damascus, and Psuedo-Dionysius the Areopagite most clearly reflects this posture, also finding influential expression in the deep logic of Aquinas’ Summa. As Jüngel—with whose diagnosis Krötke agrees—observes: “the ontological transcending even beyond the superlative of being can find its counterpart only in a language which sets it apart to a point beyind which nothing can be thought further: i.e., the negation,” thereby avowing that in language, as in being, “we correspond to God only from the most extreme distance.” All talk of God is thus subject to a kind of double abstraction by which it becomes profoundly equivocal: first, by virtue of an abstraction per eminentiam or per negativam from worldly or human analogues; and then again when even these analogous predicates are denied any genuine propriety with respect to the divine, whose transcendence is “superlative even beyond being.” Christians are thus encouraged to ascend, in Gregory of Nyssa’s mystical idiom, into “the knowledge of God in the darkness,” having become aware that “our goal transcends all knowledge and is everywhere cut off from us by the darkness of incomprehensibility.”

The aporia to which Krötke believes this process leads theology is this: “the God who is known on the basis of his works in the world must be understood in his essence not only as unknowable, but also as unspeakable.” And this results in the traditional doctrine of God oscillating between “want[ing] to speak concretely of God, and the fact that it is not possible to do so.” Krötke sees this aporia, and the deep misgivings regarding the reliability of talk of God that attend it, as ultimately leading the tradition to privilege silence over speech. Again, Gregory of Nyssa is representative when he concludes that, given the ultimate transcendence of divine reality, “we have learnt to honor in silence what transcends speech and thought.” The classical theological solution to the problem of talk of God has a definite tendency to fall into silence, for only “in silence [do] we allow ourselves to approach the unspeakable God.” When speech itself is suspected of never being anything other than “unreal speech” in relation to God, then for the sake of the reality of God, all speech ought to finally to be abandoned. The end result of apophatic logic is that the final goal of any all talk of God is, in fact, “speechless doxology.”

When Krötke reflects upon the consequences of this apophatic logic, he detects something deeply problematic for Christian theological discourse. He writes:

Our language is the capacity to find and to hold ourselves in relations which allow reality to encounter us. If words die in particular relations, then reality falls away for us in these relations. It is not true that falling silent as such signifies an intensification of the experience of reality. This is only the case as long as this falling silent is still a way of speaking. In total silence, emptiness and the end of what is real prevails.

When, in theology, “words die” at the hands of discursive strategies designed to protect God from the concreteness of human language, then God’s reality itself becomes questionable. Krötke goes on to say: “where the word is lacking, reality is lacking. Even God’s reality is not exempt from this fate among us. Where language for God falls silent, God himself falls silent.”[1]

No wonder so much of Protestant orthodox theology, and its current recovery, has such a hard time cohering its theological discourse with a genuinely grounded theology of the Word. When your prolegomenon or theological methodology (apophaticism) is at polar odds with the so called Protestant ‘Scripture principle,’ it makes it really hard to make theological discourse meaningful, particularly as that starts with God. And this is why I, as a Protestant, find Barth et al. theology so significant. He understands how the apophatic tradition is incommensurate with being Protestant, in spirit, and thus, as he writes his Göttingen Dogmatics, he emphasizes a theology of Deus dixit (God has spoken). He maintains, that for the Christian, it is only after we acknowledge that fact alone, as our basis for theologizing alone, that the Christian can actually say anything meaningful about God; viz. only after God has first spoken Himself for us.

This critique, made by way of Krötke’s theology, has all sorts of contemporary and even ethical implications; ones I would like to hash out in later posts. For now what I have written will have to suffice. But again, you can see why I, as a Protestant simpliciter, must reject the apophatic tradition. I think it is the Protestant thing to do, and as such it is also the Protestant thing to do by affirming kataphatic theology alone. Only an absolute theology of the Word coheres in absolute ways with the ‘Scripture principle.’

 

[1] Philip G. Ziegler, Doing Theology When God is Forgotten: The Theological Achievement of Wolf Krötke (New York/Berlin: Peter Lang, 2007), 64-6.

How Dialogical Theology is the Better Protestant Way for Doing Christian Theology: With Reference to Wolf Krötke

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Back in the day, when me and Myk were working on our Evangelical Calvinism books, one of our Evangelical Calvinist theses (found in chapter 15 of our first volume [2012]) was that we work from a Dialogical Theology. If anyone knows Thomas Torrance or Karl Barth this will immediately be familiar to them. At base, this approach to theology inhabits the reality, in concentrated form, of God’s triunity; it works from the premise that theology is and only can be done in and from an ongoing dialogue between the would-be theologian and God. This means, 1) that God has first spoken and speaks (Deus dixit); and 2) that after God speaks the theologian begins to know what they might speak back to God in and from participating in His life through Christ by the Spirit; so 3) this theological endeavor is grounded on the premise that the theologian knows God through the dynamic of filial relationship and worship, as the theologian participates in and is brought into the inter-cessions of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This places a primacy on speech and doxology as the form the theology takes, and the formation the theologian is transformed into from glory to glory (II Cor. 3.18). On the negative, and contra the speculative theological tradition that we find largely in the so called Great Tradition of the Church, and more pointedly, in what has come to be called classical theism, dialogical theology avoids speculation about God and thinks a posteriorily from the concreto givenness of God for us in Jesus Christ. It isn’t that we think metaphysics are wrong, per se, but that the whole point of Christian theology is to know God as God has freely elected to be known by us in His pro nobis (for us) in Jesus Christ. So, the dialogical theologian believes that while God has an antecedent life in His a se and immanent life as eternal Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, that He has decisively decided to come down to us by becoming us in the economy of His life for us in the humanity of the Son. This entails that the dialogical theologian isn’t attempting to think about God in abstract discursive terms that muddy things up, but that we are always already happy to think God from His concrete givenness in the face of Jesus Christ; from the timber of the cross, the rock hardness of his tomb, and warmth of His flesh and blood risen humanity.

I am currently working my way through Philip Ziegler’s published PhD dissertation on Wolf Krötke, entitled: Doing Theology When God Is Forgotten: The Theological Achievement of Wolf Krötke. In this wonderfully written book Ziegler describes what we might call the dialogical form of Krötke’s theology. I want to share a passage on this, from Ziegler, as I think it helps explicate further just what is going on in the dialogical theologian’s modus operandi:

The question of the speakability of God is an important aspect of the pursuit of concreteness in theology as Krötke understands it. In fact, as should be apparent by now, Krötke’s account of the reality of god makes consistent and direct reference to what and how the Christian community actually speaks of God. His theology proceeds by asking not so much how and what we are to think of God, as how and what we are to say of God. This persistent emphasis reflects Krötke’s conviction that theology stands in the service of Christiana witness: proclamation and not cogitation is the telos of Christian theological discourse. Theology serves proclamation by heightening its concreteness, orienting and re-orienting it time and again to is whence and its whither, to its warrant for speaking of God at all, as well as to the particularities of those for whom it is so warranted. We have noted that, for Krötke, this means discerning how testimony can come about that can be heard by ears long-stopped by pervasive Gottesvergessenheit. Responsibility for the gospel in this situation enjoins theology “not to become ever more diffuse, more prolix and more general, but rather to become ever more concrete when speaking of God.” This reflects also “the pre-eminent task of proclamation and the whole praxis of the Christian community” itself. Since “God has not shown himself to be God in abstractions, but rather in real life,” theology must provide an account of the speakability of God that stands by this concreteness, insists upon it, and is sharply critical of past and present theological discourse for the sake of it. Only thus will it “encourage preaching instead of religious talk, and dialogue instead of unreliable banter.”[1].

This kicks against the goads of classical theology. Even so, as the Apostle Paul writes: “So then faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.”[2] Knowledge of God for the Christian, as Krötke is keen to emphasize, comes from its kerygmatic or proclaimed character. It doesn’t come from joining hands with the philosophers and speculating about an outer-regioned pure being; but instead from being in contact with the living voice of God for us as revealed and spoken to us from the lips and assumed humanity of Jesus Christ. Some classical theologians like to see this as the ‘modern’ turn to a post-metaphysical approach to theological endeavor. To me it pretty much looks like, instead, a turn back to focusing on the contours of Holy Scripture, and allowing the concreteness of its disclosure and witness to Jesus Christ to shape the way the theologian comes to think God; particularly as they are in an ongoing, ever afresh and anew, con-versation or dialogue with the triune God we encounter therein.

Maybe you’ve noticed a theme in my last three posts, all posted between yesterday and today. They all, one way or another, are calling the theologian (Christian) to simply look to the Christ of Scripture as the ground-bed for how the theologian thinks and speaks to God theologically. I hope that this point is coming across loud and clear; it is what distinguishes my approach from much of the theology being presented as the only orthodox theology available for the conservative (often Reformed) evangelical Christian. The theology being presented to most evangelicals today, if it is offered at all, is culled from the history of what is called Post Reformation Protestant orthodoxy. It is a theology steeped in speculative, propositional (non-relational), and scholastic means for thinking God. It majors on talk of God that can cause consternation for the regular church goer, and even the trained theologian for that matter. But doesn’t this seem precisely at odds with the God we encounter in Jesus Christ as we prayerfully read Holy Scripture?

I am a conservative (Reformed) evangelical Christian, and I think that the dialogical theology I am presenting you with is much more commensurate with the Protestant Scripture Principle Protestants like to tout as their mode for doing theology. Along with Krötke, the dialogical theologian, for doxological and concrete purposes, will be willing to be critical of so called ‘classical’ theologies that major on speculative talk of God that invites the Christian into confusion rather than clarification as they attempt to approach the living God. The dialogical theologian is keen on listening to the ‘Shepherd’s voice’ as the ‘sheep know His voice, and He theirs’ (Jn 10) as He has taken theirs’ as His by the Spirit and made our crooked talk of Him straight (Rom 8.26) in such a way that God rightly hears us and we rightly hear Him; indeed as it is all mediated from the Godward to humanward and humanward to Godward sides in the hypostatic unioned life of Jesus Christ for us. Classical theology will balk at this, but the dialogical theologian would wonder why. It’s not as if we are Catholic Christians slavishly bound to the so-called Great Tradition and Thomistic wonderland of the church; we are Protestants bound to the esse, the very warp and woof of Scripture’s res (reality) as that is found in the Mediator-God for us in Jesus Christ. We can certainly sack the riches, as those might or might not be present, in the Great Trad, but always and only as those can comport with and be modulated through the filter of God’s prosopon (face) in Jesus Christ. amen, amen

[1] Philip G. Ziegler, Doing Theology When God is Forgotten: The Theological Achievement of Wolf Krötke (New York/Berlin: Peter Lang, 2007), 63-4.

[2] Romans 10.17

The Genuinely Protestant Way For Thinking God: From the ‘spirit’ of the Protestant ‘Scripture Principle’

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I have eschewed what many call classical theism for years. Classical theism is modern nomenclature used to symbolize or capture conceptual matter about God that was developed via antiqua (or in the antique or ancient way); primarily, in the mediaeval period. The Protestant side of this equation, well the contemporary mainstream of Reformed theology side, believes that the Protestant Reformation was about re-iterating the grammar for speaking God that was developed in Nicene theology. One of these proponents recently asserted the following on Twitter: “Classical theism is Nicene theism. Classical theism is Reformed catholic theism.”[1] What this sloppily does, though, is keep people from recognizing that ‘Reformed catholicism’ is actually a species, not of Patristic theology, but Mediaeval. Late mediaveal theology was infused with Thomist or Scotist categories (mostly Thomist in the mainstream) for thinking God. This is typically what classical theism, as nomenclature, is in reference to: i.e. Thomas Aquinas’s synthesis of Catholic Christian theology with Aristotelian speculative categories about infinity, immutability, impassibility, eternality, so on and so forth. Nicene theism did not have these categories available, per se (and I mean in the Aristotelian form that Thomas did); if anything, they deployed Platonic categories and grammar for attempting to speak rightly about God and Jesus Christ. And Nicene theism worked hard at ‘evangelizing the metaphysic’ they were using, whereas Thomas’ theology ostensibly gives way to speculating and thinking discursively/philosophically about God. These so called “theisms” are not univocal realities; they are equivocal when we think more critically than the above tweet allows for.

Karl Barth, in my view, rightly grounds all knowledge of God in Jesus Christ; as anybody who reads here knows by now. Whatever aspect of God we are attempting to think into, whether that be immanently or economically, as Barth rightly emphasizes, this must be radically done from Jesus Christ. If we are going to think biblically about God, we are limited to what the canonical Scriptures disclose about God. As TF Torrance rightly notes of Barth’s approach:

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]

It is this approach that Nicene theism sought to honor, more so than did Mediaeval theism in my view. By time we get to Mediaeval or ‘Reformed catholicism’ theism, there have been accretions about God that have developed, not from revelation, but from the speculative philosophical tradition that the mediaeval theology was enmeshed within. Barth repudiates this sort of intertwining of thinking God from discursion, and attempts to think God, instead, only as God has revealed Himself for us in Jesus Christ. Here is how this cashes out when Barth is thinking God’s immanent frame and freedom to be God:

If the freedom of divine immanence is sought and supposedly found apart from Jesus Christ, it can signify in practice only our enslavement to a false god. For this reason Jesus Christ alone must be preached to the heathen as the immanent God, and the Church must be severely vigilant to see that it expects everything from Jesus Christ, and from Jesus Christ everything, that He is unceasingly recognised as the way, the truth, and the life (Jn. 14.6). This attitude does not imply Christian absolutism or ecclesiastical narrowmindedness, because it is precisely in Jesus Christ, but also exclusively in Him, that the abundance and plenitude of divine immanence is included and revealed. If we do not have Christ, we do not have at all, but utterly lack, the fulness of God’s presence. If we separate ourselves from Him, we are not even on the way to this richness, but are slipping back into an impoverishment in which the omnipresent God is not known. The freedom of God must be recognised as His own freedom and this means—as it consists in God and as God has exercised it. But in God it consists in His Son Jesus Christ, and it is in Him that God has exercised it. In all its possibilities and shapes it remains the freedom which consists and is exercised in Jesus Christ. If we recognise and magnify it, we cannot come from any other starting-point but Him or move any other goal.[3]

This is a great example of how, thematically, Barth attempts to think God all the way up, and back down, from Christ alone. For him, to attempt to think God under the pressures present in ‘Reformed catholic theism’ is to think of an idol rather than God. It isn’t that I think that Barth doesn’t think that these mediaeval Christians weren’t in contact with God, or that they didn’t have good intentions; or that they weren’t working with the crumbs they had to work with. It is just that, in my view, I think Barth was critiquing what ended up being materially produced by the philosophical crumbs these ancient theologians had to work with. I agree with Barth, of course. Even in Barth, though, we do see traces of an Aristotelian, or even a Thomist aspect, towards thinking God, insofar as these traces, at a methodological level were grounded in an a posteriori mode of thinking God rather than a priori. So, even in Barth, and the mediaeval tradition, there are needles that need to be picked through in order to recognize that there is oft fluidity from one period of theological development to another. Even so, Barth’s approach ends up being radically Christ concentrated in a way, that at the end of the day, is massively divergent from the mediaevals; even if there seems to be incorporations here and there, from them, in his who theological oeuvre.

I don’t think the Tweeter, from above, is right. Indeed, I think that what the spirit of Protestantism entails, is that we are slavishly tied to doing theology from the categories and impulses disclosed and borne witness to in Holy Scripture (contra the Great Tradition, when that tradition slips into speculative theology, which it does frequently). I think Jesus Christ is God without remainder for us (pro nobis). Philip Ziegler, refers to Luther for us: “such considerations which inquire into something still higher, above and beyond the revealed God, are of the devil through and through; nothing is attained through them, save that we plunge ourselves into unhappiness because they present us with an unfathomable object, namely the non-revealed God.”[4] This is the spirit Barth operates within; within the proto-Protestant’s, Luther’s. This is the spirit that I believe Reformed theology ought to operate within; not the letter we see the Tweeter operating within. As a Protestant Christian, as Barth was, I too am radically committed to following the narrative disclosure and reality of Scripture; some have called this ‘the Scripture Principle,’ but then immediately erred from that principle by allowing discursive thinking about God to displace this principle.

The aforementioned is my style of Christianity. It is how I live my daily walk as a Christian. I don’t think God by speculative means. When I look up at the stars and moon, I don’t think of an abstract Creator God; I think of the God who would be known as Father of the Son, rather than by His works (to paraphrase, Athanasius). I think the person and works of God at once in the singular person of Jesus Christ. When my mind wants to wander off into the far country, and think God from there, I meet Jesus there instead; and He brings me back home to think God from His Right Hand. Nicene theism might be ‘classical theism,’ but it isn’t ‘Reformed catholic theism’ that is its re-iteration; nein, if anything, it is the genuinely Protestant theology of Barth that stays economically grounded in the text of Holy Writ. This is the Protestant way, and I commend it to you.

[1] Anonymous Tweeter, accessed 04-14-2020 @0219.

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

[3] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1 §28 The Doctrine of God: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 64.

[4] Martin Luther, 1535 Lectures on Genesis, cited by Philip G. Ziegler, Doing Theology When God is Forgotten: The Theological Achievement of Wolf Krötke (New York/Berlin: Peter Lang, 2007), 45.

East German Practical Atheism and Its Corollary in 21st Century North America: With Reference to Wolf Krötke

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I have noticed a shift over the last two decades of my life; both in the broader culture at large, and in the church—insofar as the church imbibes and reflects the broader culture. I’m an evangelist at heart, and would attempt to strike up evangelistic conversations anytime I could in the past. When I did this, I would expectedly receive a variety of responses. Some people were defensive and antagonistic; some were genuinely searching and interested; some simply liked to joust, so we would; and the smaller percentage of people I came across were indifferent. That has all changed. We might point to the flowering of a Post Modern (PoMo) normative relativism as that took root in the culture, say thirty to twenty years ago, as the culprit. Indeed, I’d say this sort of absolutization of the turn-to-the-subject, spawned a couple of centuries ago through rationalism, romanticism, and subjectivism, while only at its infantile stages back then, has come to fruition as modernity ran its course, and people began to take it to its logical conclusion. But you will note what I just did: I brought modernity and postmodernity together in a sort of mutually related and implicating combine; such that one lives off of the other at any given time. This means, that on a continuum, during any given time over the last couple of centuries, based on a variety of socio-cultural variables, the übermensch of modernity can and will show up; whether that be among the moderns or postmoderns.

I note all of the above as segue into a discussion about God’s Absence, with particular reference to an east German theologian named, Wolf Krötke. He did his work as a theology professor in the middle-late 20th century, up until his retirement from Humboldt University, Berlin in 2004 (as I recall off the top). As a college student he was imprisoned for two years because of some anti-socialist/Marxist drawings he did in class, and forgot to take with when class was out. Someone found the drawings, reported him, and he was arrested. This was the east German, ‘behind the wall,’ context Krötke worked in as a Christian theologian. I am currently reading Philip Ziegler’s published PhD dissertation, which he wrote on Krötke’s theology; it is entitled: Doing Theology When God is Forgotten: The Theological Achievement of Wolf Krötke.

I am just starting; but something immediately stopped me, and required that I write this blog post. Ziegler, with heavy reference to a smattering of quotes from Krötke, offers a picture of the context Krötke was working in. What is striking to me, interestingly, is that the sort of atheism present in his German socialist context, has great parallel to my own context in North America; and I’d say the Western, even global world in general. We often hear of militant atheists these days, but they aren’t the majority; they just have the biggest mouths. What is more pertinent is the creep that practical atheism has made into almost all sectors of human life; even among professing evangelical Christians. This is what I was referring to earlier, the impact that an absolutized form of normative relativism can have on the psychology of a whole society, at a global level. Everything is formed by a ‘pure’ subjectivism. When this is the mood, people become highly indifferent about anything “religious.” For this mood of people, ‘hey, if it works for you: great!’ As long as what you believe doesn’t impinge on the other’s sense of self-worth, they really don’t get why the belief that ‘Jesus is the only Way’ is all that significant, or even threatening. For this mood such exclusivity is just another form of self-inclusivity and identification among the plurality of options available in the big world out there. Ultimately this represents a ‘practical’ or as Krötke also calls it a, “tired atheism,” that doesn’t much care if there is a God or not; for them it is so far off the radar that it has no teeth. This attitude towards God’s reality, and anyone who believes in it, might be summed up this way: “Good for you!” Ziegler brings us into this type of world through developing Krötke’s thought this way for us:

The question as to whether God exists or not has, thus, already been left far behind and need never return, since “God Is not necessary to shape everyday life or to resolve the problems of life. What faith once ascribed to God, the human person is now able to take into his or her own hands.” Here “God” has become a superfluous hypothesis, a “possibility from the past that has had its time,” but which has long since “simply ceased to apply.” In this situation, it is fair to say that “God’s absence is even more total and uncompromised than is the case in the most violently self-assertive atheism.” For Krötke, this God-forgoteness is the predominating climate in which Christian proclamation occurred and still occurs in eastern Germany. It is a climate that simply “balks at any talk of God whatsoever.”

In this situation, Christian discourse meets little or no active argument, little or no critique or debate, but merely a people characterized by their “utter disinterest in faith in God,” for whom “there is no need whatsoever to form an opinion in relation to God.” Here is found an indifference that is “neither articulate at the level of doctrinal formulation, nor aggressive at the level of practical action.” In a memorable passage, Krötke writes: “the fact that atheism is, in fact a movement for social freedom and emancipation was forgotten here long ago. Rather, godlessness put on carpet slippers and donned a nightcap. It wanted to be left in peace and not to get tangled up in difficulties of one kind or another. . . .” Gottesvergessenheit, for Krötke, is a tired atheism, an “atheistic sleep,” void of any sort of “deeply reflected theoretical basis,” and characterized by “an absolute indifference toward faith in God and toward the themes of the church.” Eberhard Jüngel has described this phenomenon as the “elementary absence of any need for religion” [elementare religiose Bedürfnislosigkeit] and has characterized it as “a frankly barbarous—though as such fascinating—religious cluelessness. . . . a religious ignorance of a hitherto unknown degree.”

Life lived in perfect indifference to both God and church, Krötke writes, “has become a self-evident habit in which not belonging to the church is not felt to be a deficiency, and in which the loss of faith in God is not felt to be a loss at all.” Belief in God is rarely contested in such a climate of “habitual atheism” because it is simply considered (when considered at all) to be “merely a garnish on the life of society,” something totally unimportant and insignificant, the sort of thing one might entertain in private life as a kind of antiquarian hobby, but only as such. Simply by virtue of its massive scale, this Gottesvergessenheit now finds constant de facto reinforcement in social and cultural life, with the result that increasingly—and characteristically—“the majority of people know absolutely nothing about that which they reject in practice.”[1]

In our Western culture this sort of attitude has passingly been identified as the Nones. Increasingly, this is becoming the normal mode you’ll come across in our secularized world. It is very hard for me to engage in evangelistic conversation anymore; people are almost totally indifferent. They just don’t care; to the point that even being antagonistic towards you as a Christian doesn’t even cross their mind. So, how does a Christian, a theologian, a church member, do theology in a context like this? We might just have to start writing for the ‘elect angels.’ Answering this question is what the rest of Ziegler’s book is about. I’ll be reporting back, I’m sure. I find this exceedingly interesting, and something I face on a daily basis; as I’m sure you do as well, as a Christian person.

[1] Philip G. Ziegler, Doing Theology When God is Forgotten: The Theological Achievement of Wolf Krötke (New York/Berlin: Peter Lang, 2007), 25-6.

Elevation and Apocalyptic Theologies in Con-versation: Reflecting on the Practicality of Grace in the Christian’s Pursuit to Know God

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I wanted to, in a bloggy fashion, briefly introduce and touch upon what my friend Myk Habets has called elevation theology. I have written on this before at the blog, but more pointedly, in those instances, I emphasized the related doctrine of the primacy of Jesus Christ over and for all creation. Since I am finally just now reading Edwin Chr. van Driel’s book Incarnation Anyway, I thought it timely to write something up on this theological locus. I will be referring to an essay Myk wrote years ago, and then to Philip Ziegler’s amazing book Militant Grace (2018). What I want to do is bring together a simple point of contact between elevation theology, and the apocalyptic theology that Ziegler alerts people to through his writings. I sort of had one of those aha moments while at work the other night; as I was reflecting on the implications of elevation theology, ‘incarnation anyway,’ and the logic of grace attendant to so called apocalyptic theology. What I put down in this post might not be that meaningful to you, but to me it represents a light-bulb.

Habets introduces his essay On Getting First Things First: Assessing Claims for the Primacy of Christ, this way:

According to Christian tradition Jesus Christ is pre-eminent over all creation as the Alpha and the Omega, the ‘beginning and the end’ (Rev 1.8, 21.6; 22.13). This belief, when theologically considered, is known as the primacy of Christ. The specific issue this doctrine addresses is the question: Was sin the efficient or the primary cause of the incarnation? This essay seeks to model the practice of modal logic in relation to the primacy of Christ, not to satisfy the cravings of speculative theologians but to reverently penetrate the evangelical mystery of the incarnation, specifically, the two alternatives: either ‘God became man independently of sin,’ or its contradiction, ‘God became man because of sin’. Examining historical responses to the primacy of Christ will lead to a consideration of how some recent theologians have taken up these themes and sought to develop them. This in turn provides resources that contribute towards an understanding of the incarnation assuming that the efficient cause was human sin. Finally, an argument will be presented defending the primacy of Christ and a justification for the hypothesis that there would have been an incarnation of the Son irrespective of the fall.[1]

The thought that hit me had to do with the idea that creation, if the ‘primacy of Christ’ doctrine is true, has an inherently extraneous source to its ‘being.’ If so, creation itself, as a contingent reality (creatio ex nihilo) only has a taxis or order to it as that is supplied to it by the gift of God’s grace in Jesus Christ. As corollary, Apocalyptic theology maintains a disruptive notion in regard to creation vis-à-vis the recreation that takes place in the resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ. Ziegler cites Gaventa in this regard:

As Gaventa concisely puts it, “Paul’s apocalyptic theology has to do with the conviction that in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God has invaded the world as it is, thereby revealing the world’s utter distortion and foolishness, reclaiming the world, and inaugurating a battle that will doubtless culminate in the triumph of God over all God’s enemies (including the captors Sin and Death). This means that the Gospel is first, last, and always about God’s powerful and gracious initiative.” Inasmuch as it is an expression of specifically Christian faith, “apocalyptic theology always and everywhere denotes a theology of liberation in an earth that is dying and plagued by evil powers.

In the words of Donald MacKinnon, its subject matters in nothing less than “God’s own protest against the world He has made, by which at the same time that world is renewed and reborn.”[2]

Following, Ziegler expands further this way:

For my own part, I am certainly drawn to the task of envisaging an apocalyptic theology for “ardently Protestant” reasons. For it seems to me that, understood as it is here, apocalyptic is a discursive idiom uniquely suited to articulate the radicality, sovereignty, and militancy of adventitious divine grace; just so it is of real import to the dogmatic work of testing the continued viability of Protestant Christian faith. . . . The apocalyptic idiom starkly illumines at one and the same time both the drastic and virulent reality of human captivity and complicity in sin, and the extraordinary power of saving divine grace that outbids it, reminding us that things are at once much worse yet also paradoxically far, far better than we could possibly imagine them to be.[3]

Now, I’m leaving many moving parts out of this (because of space constraints), but when you allow elevation theology and apocalyptic theology to implicate each other, what stands out, at least to me, is how if creation itself is fully determined to be what it is, always already in God’s eternal and pre-destined life to be for us, for creation rather than against it, then attempting to find logics and ratio inherent within the created order—like natural law and natural theology do—in an attempt to discover a theological epistemology prior encountering God in Christ leads to a dead end.

What I’m tortuously attempting to draw out is the idea that: If creation never had an absolute or ‘pure’ ground in herself, but instead only finds that ground in the grace of God in creation/recreation as that is conditioned by Christ, then a genuine basis for a theological ontology/epistemology is only given in and through God’s Self-revelation and exegesis in Jesus Christ. Do you see what I’m attempting to highlight? If God’s proton is inextricably bound up in the eschaton of his life revealed in Christ, if his first Word of creation is grounded in his choice to be for the world in the grace of Christ, just as his last Word is indeed His first in the resurrection of Christ, then the only ground for knowledge of God can be found in that grace; in that relation that Jesus is for us as the eternal Logos made flesh. In other words, there is no general or profane logic embedded in the created order awaiting discovery as the bases for doing theological work; there is only theo-logic as that is grounded in the Christo-logic as that serves as the basis for the reality of the world—the world first and last, created and recreated.

What I am simply attempting to say is: if the incarnation was always the plan of God for the world, with or without sin entering the picture, then this at least suggests that there has always been a higher plane, an unattainable plane for achieving a genuine knowledge of God; outwith Christ. Apocalyptic theology helps to reinforce this sort of ‘primacy of Christ’ doctrine insofar as it emphasizes the disruptive nature of the incarnation and resurrection as that has to do with this present world order (in its in-between and anticipatory status). More practically I think it offers the Christian with a theology that fits better with the experience of the Christian life, as that is understood in the light of the cross of Christ itself. In other words, there is a ‘logic’ available to the Christian that reposes in the fact that they, by the Spirit, have become able to call ‘Jesus, Lord.’ It is in this practicality of the Christian life that the normal Christian can live a life steeped in the revelatory reality of Holy Scripture and its reality as that is given in Jesus Christ.

The proposal, if you hadn’t noticed, is a uniquely Protestant one that majors on a theology of the Word as the basis for thinking and living the Christian life. It doesn’t elide the tradition or history of the church’s mind, but it recognizes that the warp and woof of the Christian life is one that is ultimately grounded in a theological reality (ontology) that is always already contingent upon creation’s reality as that is given newness and freshness in the recreation realized in the resurrection and ascension of Christ. It keeps the Christian looking up, and allows God’s grace to supply the sort of optics that it only it/He can as the Christian seeks to know God in ever increasing ways. Theologies, of the absolutely ‘classical’ sort, sneer at this sort of grace only conception of creation, and its impact on a theological ontology/epistemology. But I think such sneer should be repented of precisely at the point that Christians aren’t ultimately or slavishly beholden to the ‘tradition’ of the church, per se, but instead we are captivated by the life of God for us as we come into union with that reality in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ.

I fear I have failed to really capture the gist I wanted to go after and articulate in this post, but hopefully something coherent made it through. There is a profound idea going on here between what we are given by so called elevation and apocalyptic theologies, and I think further thought needs to be given to this.

 

[1] Myk Habets, “On Getting First Things First: Assessing Claims for the Primacy of Christ,” Journal compilation C _ The Dominican Council/Blackwell Publishing Ltd, (2008): 343-44.

[2] Philip G. Ziegler, Militant Grace: The Apocalyptic Turn and the Future of Christian Theology (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2018), loc 162, 171 kindle.

[3] Ibid., loc 214, 224.