Category Archives: Probing

A Psalm for the Dark Night

Posted on by

Where is God? Why doesnā€™t he care? Why does he let me go through these dark shadows of existence? There is a deep waning in what appears to be his absence. As if ā€˜greater are the circumstances of life, than he who is at the right hand of the Father.ā€™ This is what the serpent whispers into the ear-gate as I continue to sputter in what seems to be the darkness of the abyss. Where are you, O Lord? Why have you abandoned me? It seems like your cross, rather than bringing light, only brings darkness in the torment of my soul. Why do the evil seem to flourish, whilst those in Christ are left to wax and wane in the midnight hours. Indeed, the dark soul of the night seems to circumscribe and eclipse even the sunshine of the noon day. Where art thou, O Lord? My body shivers with a crippling anxiety, an angst that pulsates through my very being. And yet am I not a child of the living God? Why have you forsaken me, O Lord? While your Word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path, it seems as if a bushel has been placed over your Word, such that all I can do is trip and fall over my own two feet. My soul is in despair, O Lord! How much longer until you roll the heavens of bronze back like a scroll; how much longer till you release me from these black hours of my daily life? My breath is scorched by the pain of my own agony. My fleeting thoughts seem to be what life has become. Please, Lord, never leave me or forsake me. You promised you wouldnā€™t, but then where are you now? In my greatest hour of need it is as if you are hidden behind a horrible decree that keeps you from understanding that my frame is but dust. Where art thou, O Lord? If this anguish continues to consume me, I am sure my everlasting bed will be with the earth worms of the blighted soil. Why is this happening to me, O Lord?

Take heart, little child, I have overcome this world. Your momentary anguish now, shall be and has been swallowed up by the very ardor of my Holy life. I remember your frame is as dust, as is mine now; even glorified at the Right hand of our Father. I am your hope, in the midst of the darkness; I am your power in the midst of your greatest weakness. I am carrying you now in the bosom of our Father. You feel absence, but in the economy of my life for you, that is what me holding you ever more tightly comes to feel like. Your feelings might betray you this night, this day, this season of time, but I will never leave or forsake you. I see you trembling, even now. I trembled and quaked in the manger, in the garden, on that old rugged cross, even for you; even as I had you with me in those dire moments of the parched life. But just as I had you with me in those moments, just as I was you and for you in those moments of despair, even now I am with you as the risen One. I have not forgotten you; au contraire! I have brought you up with me, in the ascension into the heavenly places. Whilst you continue to inhabit the body of death, I inhabit the body of everlasting life and eternal life for you; I have reversed the curse, and the very body you experience as death now, will finally be raised in consummate exaltation, just as my body of death was for you. And this resurrected life, this recreated life I bring to you even now, even in the midst of your waning moments, by the Holy Spirit. I am closer to you than you are to yourself. Be not afraid, little child.

Pierre Maury on Imagining a World Without Christmas

Posted on by

What if Christ had never come? A rather counterfactual thought experiment, given the fact that He did. And yet Pierre Maury runs with this line for a moment in a Christmas sermon he gave in 1952 in his home country of France.

Thinking of our odd habit of making a distinction between the things we may have with Jesus Christ and in him, and the things we think we can think we can have without him, it occurred to me to imagine a world without Christmas, a world into which Jesus Christ had never and would never come, where we lived but had nothing with him. Imagine all the things we should haveā€”and perhaps we should still have them all: all the things coveted by our greed, all the things which bring us remorseā€”everything.

Let each of us imagine his life, and the lives of others, the life of the world and its history, without the coming of Jesus Christ. That means, in the end of the day, without forgiveness; for ever irremediably guilty, bearing for ever the indelible mark of the evil we have done. It would be a life without the prayer of Jesus Christ; that is to say, one in which our prayer could not lean upon his, in which we could not say ā€˜I beseech thee, O God, in the name of Jesus Christā€™; a life, therefore, lived in constant terror of God, because of unanswered prayer. It would be a life without Godā€™s wordā€”all those wonderful sayings which the Gospels report, so generous that even the complete unbeliever marvels at them: the words of the Sermon on the Mount, St Paulā€™s hymns to charity, the words of St John on love. Just imagine a life for ever walled up in the egoism of others and of ourselves; a life without the Cross. A life with no place on earth to flee to where we could be ashamed and not despair. Lastly, imagine what such a life would be like, whatever riches it might have contained, when the great poverty of deathā€”oneā€™s own and that of othersā€”came to make all riches quite useless. Such a world, without Jesus Christ, would be just hell.[1]

Grievously, this counterfactual thought experiment isnā€™t counterfactual at all for the masses; those who travel on the highways and byways of the broad way, day in and out. The Christian, full of the living and risen and ascended hope of the living Christ, is surrounded by people who live in a world of self-possession, and the attending strife that produces. Maury is right, such a world, without Christ is in fact what hell is; the absence of Godā€™s gracious intervention and disruption of such a world. This is the world that people inhabit all around who attempt to chop their life through the wane and woe of a Christless existence wherein all that is left in the end is the lonely incurved self.

Christ has sent us as His emissaries to the world, to let it, them know that the dissolving world they inhabit all their waning lives has been resurrected, re-created in the ground of all of reality, the Firstborn from the dead, Jesus Christ. They need to be told that ā€˜it is finished,ā€™ and all they need to do now is acknowledge that Christ is indeed Lord and King. That when they look at the dusty family Bibles on their grandparentsā€™ coffee tables, that in fact it represents a Holy ground place wherein within its pages, by the Spiritā€™s vivification, they might in fact encounter the face of God in Jesus Christ; and that He will be smiling at them, with open arms of eternal embrace. ā€˜Faith comes by hearing, hearing the Word of God.ā€™

[1] Pierre Maury,Ā Predestination and Other PapersĀ (Richmond, Virginia: John Knox Press, 1960), 99ā€“100.

In Offense to Theological Polemics: With Reference to Calvinism and Jargon

Posted on by

The polemics surrounding the age-old Calvinist-Arminian debate are putrid. I was just involved in such antics, once again, on Twitter. It reminded me, actually of the (now) old theoblogosphere. Much of the blogosphere was populated by the same people who now populate theological Twitter. There is a lot of noise made, but without understanding. As such said debate[s] end up being interminable, and soul-rotting. There is an endless exchange of uninformed, unresearched, and unread jousting that never leads to light, only heat. I have participated, over the decades, in untold exchanges like this. They are never edifying, and always reduce to name-calling.

The Apostle Paul engaged with the pseudo-Apostles in Corinth, and at a certain point, in order to counter them, he went down to their level, and said: if I must speak as a fool, here are my accolades; top that! Did this ultimately shut the pseudos up? No, it probably enflamed them even more. But it made an important point: actual knowledge, experience, and even training do in fact matter; even if such training is not an end, but only an instrument. Even so, it is an instrument to be used for the edification, and not the tearing down of the saints. Thatā€™s why Paul was willing to speak as a fool: he had his opponents ā€œbeatā€ at the lowest common denominator; the denominator that his would-be opponents had elevated to the sine-qua-none of their relative chops. Paul was not phased by that, in fact, at that level, ā€œthe intellectual chops level,ā€ he had no challengers. But Paul wasnā€™t compelled by that, he was compelled by the love of Christ.

Paul was so Christ concentrated that he wouldnā€™t be sidetracked by the pedantics surrounding him. He would engage, for a moment, for a reason, and then keep moving as he was energized by the resurrection power of Christ. He knew what the goal was, and he consummately pressed onward, forward to the high and heavenly goal of the prize and reward in Christ Jesus. I want to imitate Paul as he imitates Christ. There is foolishness, en masse, out there in the interweb. Iā€™m not immune to such foolishness; Iā€™m not ā€œsmarterā€ than said foolishness; Iā€™m not on the outside looking in at the foolishness. Iā€™m just as much a participant as anyone else. But by the Spirit I pray to have some semblance of perspective, even while in the heat of the foolishness. That I have enough Spirit induced wherewithal to repent, afresh anew, from Christā€™s repentance for me, and keep moving forward to that final reward of consummate beatific vision.

As an aside though, let me press something I have pressed many times prior: the usage of so-called theological jargon is not inherently wicked. That is to say, that jargon, or precision language, when used contextually and meaningfully, is a help to the task of theological communication. Jargon is pregnant language waiting to be unpacked for various audiences. Jargon is like the handle on a drawer. Those who can recognize what a particular handle opens donā€™t necessarily need all of its contents exhaustively explicated. But in other audiences maybe they have never even seen the room where the chested drawers are. Maybe they need to become acquainted with the room, before they ever get to the chested drawers, and its various handles. That said, some people actually live in those rooms; they are familiar with its parts; they know what is in each drawer. Being sensitive to audiences is important, indeed. But the internet has a way of equalizing everything, such that the teachers and students look exactly the same. As such, Iā€™ve found, at least in open metas, it is not ideal to try and be a teacher. A person can selectively be a student, if they have the proper critical apparatus in place. But often there is so much unchecked anonymity online that an actual pedagogical environment is not fostered, it is really nowhere to be found. Everybody is an expert online, especially on Twitter.

But this is kind of why I have always operated the way I have, even here at the blog. I used to have other blogs (like actual sites, not posts) where I was attempting to speak and write as a teacher. But that takes a lot of effort, time, and energy, that unless Iā€™m getting paid to do it, I donā€™t have the wherewithal to in fact do that. Plus, the audiences are all over the place. I have scholars, students, lay people, and everyone in-between reading here. I ultimately, and this years ago, decided to just write the way I process things at an initial or raw level. That is to say, I write, typically, here at the blog in a way that is intended to help ME learn. I understand I am writing for the ā€œpublic,ā€ but I donā€™t actually let that curtail the way I am engaging with whatever topic or theologian that I am. So, I do have the jargon in my posts; but the jargon is used contextually, and in a way that makes sense to me (usually). If I had more time and energy, I would like to break things down further; actually, open the drawers and talk about its contents in more detailed and accessible ways. And sometimes I think I achieve that, even here at the blog. But if I do, it isnā€™t necessarily intentional. Iā€™m typically trying to break things down in a way that make sense to me. Hopefully, in so doing, they, over time, begin to make sense to others as well.

Anyway, just some streamy thinking on polemics, jargon, and rationale, once again, with reference to the philosophy of my blogging. Iā€™m really no longer interested in jousting within the never-ending Calvinist-Arminian debates (but that doesnā€™t mean I wonā€™t use that debate as a springboard to go deeper with it, and behind it). I genuinely seek to be Christ concentrated in all that I do. Even if I get sidetracked, I always seek to get back on the Christ concentrated road, all the way to glory. And Iā€™m sure the jargon will continue in my posts, but hopefully in such a way that will challenge others to expand their own lexicons, and learn along with me as I write.

The Hellenic, the Neo-Thomist Origins of Modernity

Posted on by

When Divine grace is separated from its reality in God, when grace becomes a thing, a substance, a quality infused into the accidents of humanity, it is only one small step removed from being integrated into the essence of what it means to be human. If this step is taken, and it has been in the ā€˜modern-turn,ā€™ the turn-to-the-subject, the Gifter of grace no longer remains necessary, in a transcendent sense, as graceĀ becomes materialized, immanentized, horizontalized into an ā€˜immanent frame,ā€™ as Charles Taylor grammarizes. Indeed, Taylor writes with reference to what it means to be human in a frame wherein grace has become the possession, the generative reality of what it means to be a self-determined, self-constructed modern person in the 21st century:

There is another facet of this narrative of secularity which it is worth mentioning here, because of its ubiquity and importance in the ā€œclosedā€ spin on immanence. The story line here is this: once human beings took their norms, their goods, their standards of ultimate value from an authority outside of themselves; from God, or the gods, or the nature of Being or the cosmos. But then they came to see thatĀ these higherĀ authorities were their own fictions, and they realized that they had to establish their norms and values for themselves, on their own authority. This is a radicalization of the coming to adulthood story as it figures in the science-driven argument for materialism. It is not just that freed from illusion, humans come to establish true facts about the world. It is also that they come to dictate the ultimate values by which they live.1

Once the secular person came to imagine, through their new ā€˜social imaginaryā€™ (cf. Taylor) that in fact the classical God was really just a projection of their own imagination, an inner to outer extrapolation of their best selves onto a cipher by which they might live and adjudicate life, they were able to bring diremption for themselves and determine that in fact they were God and thus gods after all. What secularism ultimately brings, this ostensible ā€˜come of ageā€™ moment, is really just another expression of polytheism, a serpentine belief that humanity itself possesses godness, and thus are the creators of their own reality and existence (in a world where existence and essence have become a singular reality).

As I suggested at the beginning there is a theological origin story behind the secular-turn. Ironically, this turn has a Christian source, albeit as that source has been dressed down by a synthesis of Christian theology with speculative philosophical categories; such categories derived from the classical philosophers like Aristotle et al. The abstraction of grace from the giver or reality of grace, God, takes form most notably in the Catholic theology of Thomas Aquinas. Here we finally get a codification of a burgeoningĀ philosophical frame baptized in the Holy water of the Church. It is the notion of ā€˜qualityā€™ that takes decisive stage, or in fact ā€˜substanceā€™ within an Aristotelian frame whereby Divine grace comes to lose its Divine character, at least in the sense that its reality is necessarily grounded in the triune being of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Once this move is made, as I asserted earlier, we are only a few small steps, a few small centuries away from ā€˜coming of age,ā€™ among other contributing factors during and post-Enlightenment. But I find this abstraction of grace from the Divine life to be an interesting development towards modernity, ironically, even as that is given dye within the early mediaeval and Catholic sitz im leben of Thomas Aquinas (and those who received him, whether Catholic or Protestant Reformational). Helmut Thielicke describes the scenario this way:

We can see clearly at this point that what takes place in man, and not merely what happens to him, has become the object of theological observation. It is again evident, as was clear already with respect to the concept of the imago Dei in manā€™s original state, that the ontic element in the human ego pushes itself into the foreground. Then the theme of theology is not just the relation between God and man; on the contrary, theology then includes as an independent concern a treatment of ā€œanthropology.ā€ Here is where the fault lies.

The crack, or better, the cracks are themselves produced by the belt of tension which necessarily arises where men attempt to combine ontological and personalistic thinking. The greatest strain and the most evident rupture are undoubtedly to be found at the place where grace ceases to be a divine attribute and becomes an effect distinct from the divine attribute from which it emanates, ie, where grace ceases to be a personal relation to man (the ā€œgracious Godā€) and becomes something which is ontically infused into man and which is thus present in man, demonstrably present. For it is precisely this distinction between the gracious God and the grace given [gratia data] which is the starting point of the distinctively ā€œRomanā€ development of the doctrine of grace. To put it epigrammatically and therefore with tongue in cheek, what men want is not primarily God himself, but ā€œdivine powers which may become human virtues and qualitiesā€ (von Harnack). At this point where grace ā€œvisiblyā€ passes into man in accordance with certain well defined practices, eg, sacramental operation, it ceases to be exclusively a subject and becomes a material object, ā€œmedicine.ā€ This materialization expresses itself in a variety of ways . . . .2

It would surely be reductionistic to blame Thomas and Aristotle for the modern-turn to the self, and what Taylor identifies as ā€˜the coming of adulthood story.ā€™ That is not my intention. I am simply noticing a Christian turn made at least within the lifetime of early mediaeval developments, that can plausibly help explain how this ā€˜enlightened-turnā€™ finally came to fruition. There are many other contributing ideational and socio-culture pressures that finally brought this turn to consummation, but I think it is notable that we already see these fault lines developing as far back as the Hellenic period of the classical philosophers; and then developed more Christianly with the arrival of Thomas and the Romans.

I am only minimally attempting to illustrate how secular ideas can be traced back to a Christian lineage. Charles Taylor, Michael Gillespie, my personal friend, Derrick Peterson, among others have done further work, more substantially, to demonstrate that my point is not ill founded. Christians have as much to do with the secularity of society as anyone else. Indeed, we might go so far as to say that what it means to be a secular-atheist in the 21st century is really just an expression of a Christian heresy that has attended the Church catholic by way of various expressions; whether those expressions be understood within the Church proper, or in society-at-large as the theater of humanityā€™s glory, albeit, devoid of the Spirit. Ultimately, when grace is abstracted from God and made a quality capable of being understood purely from the immanent frame of the ā€˜flatlander,ā€™ it is at this point that Genesis 3 once again receives breath to breathe and make another attempt to elevate itself with zigguartic flare to the ā€˜high placesā€™ of the living God.

 

1 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, 580 kindle.

2 Helmut Thielicke, Theological Ethics: Foundations (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966), 238.

 

 

A Response to the Mystics and Pluralists: From a Reformed Theology of the Word

Posted on by

I just listened to a podcast where both presenters are former Calvinists (one Baptist the other Presbyterian). Now one of them has converted to Eastern Orthodoxy, while the other is a ā€˜Christian Mysticā€™ (whatever that entails). One is now a Christian universalist, who sounds like he approves of aĀ RahnerianĀ anonymous Christian mode and transcendental Christ-consciousness, while the other seemingly is aĀ HickianĀ pluralist. They both are against creedal (credo) belief (relatively speaking), and instead affirm what they identify as religious (religio) belief; the latter being some form of mystical meta material that holds all of reality together (some might think of the Logoi theology of some of the patristics at this point). There is a deep commitment to an apophatic theology among these two. They find the apparent antinomies of Calvinism and Arminianism to be intolerable, but they are okay with deep mystery when it comes to their respectiveĀ worldpictures. One of them has read some Barth and Torrance, and appreciates them, itā€™s just that he thinks they are irrational when it comes to their inner-theo-logic vis a vis universalism. This guy is a priori committed to Christian universalism, he believes if Barth and TFT were consistent with their logic that they would also have to be absolute universalists. Since they arenā€™t, according to this guy, they run afoul of being consistent, and thus present an incoherent theology. Both he and his buddy maintain that Barth and TFT are simply too contradictory to follow on this point, and thus ought to be placed into the same camp as the classical Calvinists andĀ ArminiansĀ when it comes to the false superstructure they are offering. Interestingly, these guys fail to appreciate the dialogical/dialectical nature of Barthā€™s/TFTā€™s approaches, respectively, when it comes to thinking things theological in nature; even if one of them acknowledges that they have this mode of theological existence informing their respective ways. In the end, they sound more New Age (or Gnostic) than Christian.

When a principledĀ theology of the WordĀ is abandoned for an amalgam and idiosyncratic appropriation of theĀ consensusĀ fideliumĀ you never know where the person will end up. People, in the main, are clearly fed up with the phoniness of evangelical Christianity; I am too. But the alternative, for my lights, isnā€™t to simply cobble together some sort of mystical religion wherein cohabitation with an ostensible religious psychology becomes the mainstay. To be genuinely Christian, in my view, means that the person must think God from God in a principial way. In other words, to be genuinely Christian in mode means to think God from Godā€™s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ; and to do so from a robust theology of the Word. When Scripture becomes the wax-nose of a purported mystical approach, it no longer has ultimate meaning as a Christian text. When the scandal of particularity is swallowed by the mystery of the universe, as has been by the two Iā€™m referring to in this post, Scripture loses its ordained place as the place where God has freely chosen to speak as if in the burning bush. God is not a pervasive energy, or stream of consciousness pervading through the cosmos. He is a particular and scandalous God who has freely chosen to reveal Himself in the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ. Once that scandal is no longer theĀ centraldogmaĀ of someoneā€™s mode as a purported Christian, all one has left is some form of [Christian] Gnosticism of the sort that I think the guys I have been referring to have imbibed.

Systems of theology arenā€™t bad, just bad systems are bad. Systems of theology are as inevitable as tradition-making is. These two guys want to reject systems that they see as totalizing machinery. Of course, in their rejection they simply posit a new system of their own. It is true that scholasticism may have anticipated the totalizing systems of rationalism. Even so, to reject systems in toto, as I just noted, cannot follow. Itā€™s simply a matter of whether or not a system is held with the right amount of humility or not. For the Christian, the best system will understand its relative place next to eschatological reality. All good systematic theology recognizes its proximate value insofar that ā€˜finalā€™ judgment on things is always already left open to its eschatological and coming reality in Jesus Christ. This is the basis of the ReformedĀ semperĀ Reformanda, a basis that classical Calvinists can only pay lip service to these days. Nevertheless, to replace bad systems with a mystical system doesnā€™t solve anything, it only, by definition darkens things by thinking and speaking in the negation.

I recognize this is a rather cryptic post, but I wanted to offload after I spent two hours watching this podcast unfold last night.

 

Friedrich Schleiermacher is Still On Ice Pro Me

Posted on by

There is a movement among some theologians to retrieve and even recast Friedrich Schleiermacher in a positive and constructive way. I had some vigorous correspondence with a younger Schleiermacher scholar in years past with reference to this very event (of recuperating FS). Iā€™ve had time to reflect further on this; and part of that reflection has been by reading through FSā€™sĀ Christian FaithĀ (Iā€™ve only nearly completed volume one, and havenā€™t jumped into volume 2 yet). The two primary scholars I have in mind, in regard to this attempt to retrieve FS, are Kevin Hector and James Gordon (the latter is the one Iā€™ve had correspondence with). Iā€™ve read both of their respective essays on this matter, and they make somewhat of an interesting case for this retrieval attempt. But at the end of the day, Iā€™m still with Barth, in regard to Schleiermacher. While Barth understood that it was impossible to ignore FS, at the same time his critique[s] of FS stand.Ā Ā 

For my money, there is no need to appeal to FS, in order to promote a constructive and deep theological offering for the evangelical churches. He is non-starting for a variety of reasons; primary of which is that he is a subordinationist. The scholars IĀ referredĀ to previously attempt to contest this, at some levels, if not by simply asking people to read FS more charitably than that. I have been attempting that sort of reading, but it still hasnā€™t yielded an FS who I think presents a theologian who ends up being helpful for thinking actual and genuine Christian theology. If there is even a question about what a theologian thinks about the ā€˜whoā€™ of Jesus Christ, particularly with reference to his deity, then that ambiguity itself disqualifies said theologian (FS, or whomever) from being an important voice in the theological process. At best, I see FS, as maybe a necessary foil for understanding how modern theology has taken shape in the Western world; so, Iā€™d relegate his import to the history of ideas, rather than to constructive Christian Dogmatics.Ā Ā Ā 

Miscellanies on How Academic Theology Keeps Us Close to God: And Christian Discipleship

Posted on by

I read academic theology mostly because it is the medium that keeps me closest to God; other than a voracious commitment to reading large quantities of Holy Scripture. So, it hits me strange when I hear people claim, in my low Free church location, that academic theology is dry, arid, and doesnā€™t really hit home with the real needs of the people in the churches. This is strange to me, as I think to myself in that moment, because Iā€™ve always figured that I am one of the many; I am one of ā€œthe peopleā€ in the Church. Because of this, and when confronted with this sentiment, it makes me wonder why if academic theology (so called) can have the benefit it does for me, why it canā€™t have a similar benefit for every Christian? I am not special; I am a justified sinner like the rest of us. I am prone to wander, as that oleā€™ time hymn so rightly lyricizes for us. What helps me be less prone is to constantly WORK at staying ā€˜in step with the Spirit.ā€™ I take it that because Jesus has raised up teachers for His Churchā€™s edification (cf. Eph 4), that these teachers and teachings are gifts to the Church; and gifts with the goal of building us up rather than tearing us down. As the case may be, and it may, academic theology, at least for me, typically contains a rigor and order that this world system just canā€™t muster; as such it has the capacity to feed my soul and form my spirit that orders its way to and from the eternal and Triune Life of the Living God. I live in a chaotic world, and I feel that pressure every day. It is only as I feed my soul with well ordered thinking, an order that comes directly from paying close attention to the in-breaking and apocalyptic reality of the Gospel, that I find solace and peace of heart.

But even greater than the aforementioned, the sort of theology that I find most life-giving is indeed the sort that is grounded fulsomely in the Gospel reality itself. Meaning, that the best theology is of the sort, in my view, that is grounded in the concrete and historical Yes of God for us in Jesus Christ. Herein is the wisdom of God. You see, I donā€™t live in some sort of Gnostic-Holy Land, where I find my source of life and energy by ruminating on abstract and speculative ideas. Nein! I am a flesh and blood human being who is simul justus et peccator, and I fail at life moment by moment. As such I need Godā€™s wisdom to confront me afresh and anew every moment of every day; outwith this confrontation, and joyful encounter, I simply fall off into a woeful mire of despair and depression. And when I fall off into this land of wane and woe, it is on this plane that I engage in my most egregious sins before God. So, good theology for me, is a theology that meets me in the existential day to day and elevates me out of the muck of the mundane and energizes me with new creation life of enchantment with and praise of the mysterium Trinitatis (mysterious Trinity). It as I get lost in this sort of theological life that I start to sense the power and freedom that the Son of God said He has placed me into (cf. Jn 8.32).

This is good theology. Theology that meets each of us in our most dire moments, often what weā€™ve come to consider as the mundane of day to day. Good theology gets down into the blood and dirt of our lives and recreates it anew and afresh in and through the risen humanity of Jesus Christ. But in this recreation we are like Israel, a newborn baby wrapped-up in the bloody afterbirth of our sinful inception; it requires God to pick us up, wash us off, and declare what is new and holy about us in Christ. It is in this ongoing processā€”mortification and vivificationā€”that we actually feel the growing pains of this new birth as we are constantly being given over to both the life and death of Christ in us that our mortal bodies might be enlivened with the life of God in Christ with us. But herein is the daily struggle. Prior to this we had no experience of this, we had no ā€˜struggle.ā€™ We may have had a secular struggle that we ourselves had constructed based upon conditions and pressures that this world system has set forth; ones based upon self-projected and incurved ends. But prior to the new birth in Christ we had never experienced this battle between the ā€˜fleshā€™ and the Spirit of Christ in us. Herein good theology is that which comes to us and succors us unto the womb of God wherein He is explained to us over and again by His Self-explanation for us in the dearly beloved Son, sweet Jesus.

But if we are not WORKING at this relationship with God, if we are not availing ourselves of the teachers He has provided for the upbuilding of His Church; then we genuinely will live in a mundane world denuded of any sort of ultimate significance other than what we existentially attempt to construct ourselves (which at the end of the day is idolatry). This is what continues to plague the evangelical churches, in my opinion. People have become too satisfied with a church culture that is based upon cultural platitudes baptized as ā€˜good theology.ā€™ As such, people do not have the critical apparatus to actually recognize the holy from the profane; how can they? If the holy has been conflated with the profane precisely because people arenā€™t putting in the WORK, then this sort of confrontation with God cannot actually occur. This is the hard truth of the Christian life. We are called to deny ourselves, take up our crosses, and follow Christ. Instead the majority of pastors out there have been inculcated into a church culture ā€˜out thereā€™ that has sold its soul for a pottage of entrepreneurship and upward mobility. If the churchā€™s primary theologian is caught up with visions of doing ā€˜real ministryā€™ that have no basis in the theologian putting in the WORK, then how in the world are the people in the churches supposed to ever be discipled in the ways of Good Theology?

The Character of God in Election. Miscellanies

Posted on by

At a personal existential level thought about election and reprobation is no small matter, or it shouldnā€™t be. It says much about whom God is; viz. the way God works in this area, or at least the way we conceive of God working in this area, indicates how it is that we conceive of God in the first place. This is why, at least for Karl Barth, to think a doctrine of God is not abstract from election/reprobation, but central to it. When we think of election it ought to conjure up the way we think of a God-world relation; i.e. election speaks to, again, the character of God, to the ways of God, and with whom he has to do. It is interesting, then, that this teaching often gets relegated to the bin of abstraction and speculation. True, the technical dogmatic words of ā€˜electionā€™ and ā€˜reprobationā€™ are not found in Holy Scripture; but then again, neither is the word: ā€˜Trinity.ā€™ So this is a matter of theological import, but not one that is not present in Scripture, rather it is ā€œhiddenā€ within the inner-logic of Scripture and allows Scripture to assert the things it does, one way or the other, about justification before God, so on and so forth.

As noted, for Barth, election became central to his doctrine of God and its development. It has a rather radical edge to it, particularly if we follow Bruce McCormackā€™s distillation and development of it. Indeed, McCormackā€™s development of Barthā€™s doctrine of election vis-Ć -vis doctrine of God has caused no small controversy. At first this ā€˜controversyā€™ was called the Companion Controversy, because McCormackā€™s chapter offering to The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth was the sort of watershed definitive point wherein McCormack drew out what he sees as the implications of Barthā€™s reformulation of a doctrine of election (juxtaposed with the classical position found in someone like John Calvin); it more recently has come to be called the ā€˜Barth Wars.ā€™ George Hunsinger, Paul Molnar et al. have countered McCormackā€™s proposal, and attempted to keep Barth more ā€˜classicalā€™ in his orientation when it comes to a doctrine of election. Hunsinger goes so far as to label the McCormack school as ā€˜the revisionists,ā€™ whereas he calls his position ā€˜textualā€™ (i.e. implying that he is faithfully following the contours of Barthā€™s thought found concretely in the Church Dogmatics). This issue, for those involved in Barth studies, is well worn, and I would say almost passĆ©; but only in a festering type of way. In other words, while this controversy has sort of warmed over, simply because of the passing of time and attention spans, doesnā€™t mean that anything has been resolved between the two sides. If you arenā€™t aware of all this, and even if you are, I thought I would share some insight into the history of this debate, as well as some of its material locutions; along with providing some perspective towards the background of McCormackā€™s own development and reception of Barthā€™s theology in this area. For help here I will enlist one of McCormackā€™s former PhD students, David Congdon. In Davidā€™s big book on Bultmann he offers the kind of detail I am hoping to provide, and so to his summary of these things we turn:

The debate surrounds McCormackā€™s now famous argument that Barthā€™s later theology, if it is to be consistent with his doctrine of election in KD 2.2, ought to make election logically prior to triunity: ā€œThe decision for the covenant of grace is the ground of Godā€™s triunity and, therefore, of the eternal generation of the Son and of the eternal procession of the Holy Spirit from Father and Son. In other words, the works of God ad intra (the trinitarian processions) find their ground in the first of the works of God ad extra (viz., election).ā€ See Bruce L. McCormack, ā€œGrace and Being: The Role of Godā€™s Gracious Election in Karl Barthā€™s Theological Ontology,ā€ in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, ed. John Webster (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 92ā€“110, at 103. See also Bruce McCormack, ā€œKarl Barthā€™s Historicized Christology: Just How ā€˜Chalcedonianā€™ Is It?ā€ in Orthodox and Modern: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 201ā€“33, originally published in German in 2002, where he says that ā€œit is precisely the primal decision of God in election which constitutes the event in which God differentiates himself into three modes of being. Election thus has a certain logical priority even over the triunity of Godā€ (ibid., 218).

McCormackā€™s views on this matter find their origin in JĆ¼ngelā€™sĀ  Gottes Sein ist im Werden. In this monograph JĆ¼ngel argues that Godā€™s being is a historical event constituted by Godā€™s free decision. ā€œDecision,ā€ JĆ¼ngel says, ā€œdoes not belong to the being of God as something additional [Hinzutretendes] to this being, but rather, as event, Godā€™s being is Godā€™s own decision. ā€˜The fact that Godā€™s being is event, the event of Godā€™s act, must . . . mean that it is Godā€™s own conscious, willed, and accomplished decisionā€™ [KD 2.1:304/271]. What the doctrine of the Trinity already worked out is now confirmed by working out a concept of being appropriate to God: Godā€™s being is constituted through historicity [Geschichtlichkeit].ā€ Eberhard JĆ¼ngel,Ā  Gottes Sein ist im Werden: Verantwortliche Rede vom Sein Gottes bei Karl Barth: Eine Paraphrase, 4th ed. (TĆ¼bingen: Mohr, 1986), 80. Later, in a reflection on the significance of Barthā€™s statement that ā€œJesus Christ is the electing God,ā€ JĆ¼ngel states even more provocatively that ā€œGod has thus determined Godself in the second mode of being of the Trinity to be the electing God. ā€˜Jesus Christ is the electing Godā€™ [KD 2.2:111/103]. In that here one of the three modes of being is determined to be the electing God, we have to understand Godā€™s primal decision as an event in the being of God that differentiates the modes of Godā€™s beingā€ (ibid., 85).

McCormackā€™s argument in ā€œGrace and Beingā€ has initiated an intense debate within Barth studies regarding the relation between triunity and election, and specifically the nature of divine freedom. Many of these contributions are collected in Michael T. Dempsey, ed., Trinity and Election in Contemporary Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011). The most significant critique and response are George Hunsinger, ā€œElection and the Trinity: Twenty-Five Theses on the Theology of Karl Barth,ā€ Modern Theology 24, no. 2 (2008): 179ā€“98, and Bruce L. McCormack, ā€œElection and the Trinity: Theses in Response to George Hunsinger,ā€ Scottish Journal of Theology 63, no. 2 (2010): 203ā€“24. See also Bruce L. McCormack, ā€œTrinity and Election: A Progress Report,ā€ in Ontmoetingen: Tijdgenoten en getuigen: Studies aangeboden aan Gerrit Neven, ed. Akke van der Kooi, Volker KĆ¼ster, and Rinse Reeling Brouwer (Kampen: Kok, 2009), 14ā€“35; Bruce L. McCormack, ā€œLetā€™s Speak Plainly: A Response to Paul Molnar,ā€ Theology Today 67, no. 1 (2010): 57ā€“65.[1]

There is much to consider here, but at this point I only want to underscore Hunsingerā€™s (and Molnarā€™s) primary critique of McCormackā€™s thesis. They both hone in on the apparent problem present in McCormackā€™s thesis: i.e. that he appears to make Godā€™s being (his very inner life) contingent upon creation; upon Godā€™s choice to not be God without his election of humanity for himself in Christ. The critique, ultimately, is that McCormackā€™s ā€˜Barthianā€™ presentation here suffers from a type of panentheism. Not only that, Hunsinger, in particular, goes after McCormackā€™s placement of election prior to Godā€™s being as Triune; this, suggests Hunsinger, seems even logically (not just chronologically) implausible.

The above noted let me reign this in a bit. I started this post out with noting the idea that the doctrine of election is or should be a rather personal and existentialist reality. I suggested that this doctrine is inimical to oneā€™s understanding of God and his relation to the world (particularly to creatures); that it is ultimately inimical to the way we think of Godā€™s character. I then introduced us to an innovative way that election and theology proper were related in Barthā€™s theology; further detailing this move by way of introducing us to an internecine debate among Barth scholars involved in Barth studies. I want to now conclude this exercise by highlighting why I think wrestling through these issues remains seriously important; e.g. so engaging with why I think the personal-existential aspect of this doctrine is important for all those who by the Spirit say that Jesus is Lord.

Election is Christological, as such it is soteriological, as such it touches upon what it means to be alive (human) before God; it touches upon every waking aspect of who we are as creatures living before a Holy a God. It is important, therefore, to have a doctrine of election that has the ability to be concrete; that has the capaciousness to recognize how central God is to this reality; and what this doctrine, in particular, says about the character of God. Does God only love a select group of people based upon an absolute decree? Does God have to construct such a mechanism, as decrees, in order to ensure that his Pure Being status remains untouched by his creation; to ensure that he has no passions, that he has no moving parts in his inner life that might be unregulated by his simple being? Or does our doctrine of election start itā€™s thinking about a God-world relation in and from Godā€™s personal self-givennness for us in the gift of the Son for the World; does our doctrine of election start from a person (and this is personal), or does it start from a set of propositions intended to ensure Godā€™s status as the actual infinite?

I think God is personal; that his inner life is onto-relationally related in such a way that his inner being as God is given shape by his self-givenness (love) for the other in his own life. I think that this is the primal basis from whence we ought to think of a God-world relation; i.e. of election. We ought to think God from the way God decided we should think of him: from his Self Revelation and exegesis in the Son. If tradition gets in the way of that, or thwarts that, then that is bad tradition. Any tradition that nullifies the Word of God is bad tradition (cf. Mt. 15). In these instances the tradition needs to take a back-seat (subordinate) place relative to Godā€™s Word.

What is primarily important to me about Barth’s reformulated doctrine of electionā€”apart from the more technical issues in the ‘Barth Wars’ā€”is how he focuses election (as everything else) in and around Jesus Christ in a very intense and concentrated manner. I.e. For Barth, election means: that Jesus Christ is both the electing God and elected human; that in his election to be human he elects all of humanity in a vicarious way, such that he takes on humanity’s “reprobate” status (cf. II Cor. 5.21). The wonderful exchange takes place (cf. II Cor. 8.9), and we, by God’s grace in Christ, receive his elect status for us as he takes our reprobate status with him into the grave and resurrects us with him in his elect status as the first fruits the first-born from the dead as the human for all of humanity. This says something about God’s character; it says that ‘God so loved the WORLD that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him will not perish but have everlasting/eternal life. It says that God loves humanity, and that he loves all of humanity with the same love that he loves his dearly beloved Son. This is meaningful to me.

And this now ends these rather fragmented, but hopefully at some level coherent, thoughts.

[1] David W. Congdon, The Mission of Demythologizing: Rudolf Bultmannā€™s Dialectical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 173 n. 335.

‘Schooled in the faith of Christ’: Thomas Torrance Responds to Rachel Held Evans’ “Questioning” Approach

Posted on by

As you all know I had an interesting engagement with Rachel Held Evans this last week here at the blog; particularly because I chose to write too quickly, jesusteacherand thus not respectfully of RHE. In the aftermath of that I have continued to think about ways to engage with RHE, and her post on Abraham and Isaac (which was really a post on hermeneutical theory). What was more central though to Rachelā€™s post was actually her questioning of how God is represented as the one who commanded the Israelites to go into the Canaanite nations and slaughter them (Rachel uses the more provocative language of ethnic cleansing, with all of the modern political and ethical connotations attached to that that language conjures for all of us). I want to take another shot at engaging with Rachel, and the content of her post. In particular I want to focus, this time on how she has claimed that she is simply engaging in honest questioning of the text of scripture and its ethical implications. Many others, in Rachelā€™s defense, also asserted that this is all that Rachel is doing. The post that got me in trouble with many of her readers (whether those readers be fans or not of Rachelā€™s writings in general) revolved around the fact that I was questioning Rachelā€™s questioning. Of course the way I came at Rachel, like I have already noted, was disrespectful and not right on my part. But I still think in spite of my foolishness in that first post, there was still a nub of criticism therein that was legitimate. In that sense then, let me focus on one aspect of Rachelā€™s general and overall mode; i.e. on the way that she approaches just about every issue: She tends to claim that all that she is doing is being a skeptic, a ā€˜questioner.ā€™ It is this mode that I will engage throughout the rest of this post.

Learning To Be ā€˜Christianā€™ Questioners

Is it right to be a skeptic, a questioner, a ā€˜naked-questionerā€™ as a Christian; or do we as Christians have a higher calling a more ennobling task set before us? I would argue that we have a higher task set before us, one that we do not get to determine, but one that is imposed upon us. Those of us, Rachel included!, who name Jesus as Lord are not allowed to ask random, or arbitrary questions of God in Jesus Christ; we have been called to submit to the questions and answers imposed upon us by Godā€™s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ. And so this brings me back to Rachelā€™s mode[1], she claims to be an honest questioner and skeptic, and that she is bringing her experience, science, modern ethics, etc. to God, and asking him to meet her expectations based upon those various loci. Note Rachel as she ā€˜questionsā€™ Godā€™s apparent ruthlessness (in the story of Joshua toward the Canaanites) based upon the aforementioned loci:

This is a hard God to root for. Ā Itā€™s a hard God to defend against all my doubts and all the challenges posed by science, reason, experience, and intuition. Ā  I once heard someone say he became an atheist for theological reasons, and that makes sense to me. Once you are convinced that the deity you were taught to worship does evil things, itā€™s easier to question the deityā€™s very existence than it is to set aside your moral objections and worship anyway.[2]

But this is not what we have been called to as Christians, as I just noted; with the Revelation of God in Jesus Christ there comes a method, a set of questions that God has determined as the norming questions that he would have us ask of him, conditioned as they are by the center of his life given for us in his Son. Thomas F. Torrance (as he reflects on Karl Barthā€™s method of theologizing) might counsel us (including Rachel and her readers) this way:

. . . Barth found his theology thrust back more and more upon its proper object, and so he set himself to think through the whole of theological knowledge in such a way that it might be consistently faithful to the concrete act of God in Jesus Christ from which it actually takes its rise in the Church, and, further, in the course of that inquiry to ask about the presuppositions and conditions on the basis of which it comes about that God is known, in order to develop from within the actual content of theology its own interior logic and its own inner criticism which will help to set theology free from every form of ideological corruption.[3]

For Barth, for Torrance there is not an arbitrary way to question God or the way he acts, there is a concrete way that is given to us. It is a way that is not in our hands, not reposing upon our intellectual misgivings; it is a way that is imposed upon us, and thus not in our control ā€“ and so it scandalizes us. Torrance comments further on this way as he thinks about the benefits of catechesis and the scientific method (which means seeing Jesus alone as the regulator and giver of the questions that God has given us to bring to him as a freewill offering):

ā€¦ The really scientific questions are questions which the object, that we are studying, through its very nature puts to us, so that we in our turn put only those questions which will allow the object to declare itself to us or to yield to us its secrets. The more we know about a thing the more we know the kind of questions to ask which will serve its revealing and be the means of communicating knowledge of it. This scientific principle has to be applied to Christian instruction, and it is here that we see the fundamental importance of the catechetical method. The young learner does not know enough as yet to ask the right questions. We have to encourage him to ask questions, but also to learn that only the appropriate questions will be a means of knowledge. This is nowhere more true than in regard to Christian communication. Christianity does not set out to answer manā€™s questions. If it did it would only give him what he already desires to know and has secretly determined how he will know it. Christianity is above all the question the Truth puts to man at every point in his life, so that it teaches him to ask the right, the true questions about himself, and to form on his lips the questions which the Truth by its own nature puts to him to ask of the Truth itself that it may disclose or reveal itself to himā€¦.[4]

Conclusion

I would suggest, moving away from Rachel H Evans, but staying close, that Rachelā€™s popularity (other than the fact that she is a smart, intelligent, genuine person) has a lot to do with the way people, Christian people in general have been trained to approach God. Christians, especially in North America, have been trained to approach God on their own heart-felt terms, and the questions that arise out of that frame of reference. Rachel Held Evansā€™ approach, I would suggest, embodies that in a way that gives voice and words to the questions that so many post-evangelicals have. They are questions, I would further suggest, that are hang-overs from their evangelicalism; apologetic questions that arise from an apologetic faith. This remains, among other things, a great irony of the Rachel Held Evans movement (and I am simply referencing her prominence among many many like-minded sojourners), if I can call it that; a desire, in some sense to be ā€œpostā€ evangelical, and yet still operating from the very premises of evangelicalism (as far as the kind of rationalist and apologetic questions that have plagued it for so long).

As an alternative, Rachel Held Evans & companions, all Christians could follow Thomas Torranceā€™s advice and be ā€˜schooled in the faith of Christā€™ and allow his life to impose upon us his questions (and then answers). This way there will be a ā€˜rule of faithā€™ regulating our approach to God that will keep us from asserting a lordship of our own, and allow us to assume a posture wherein we recognize that Jesus is Lord, and that we can only then operate in and from the domain of his Word, instead of in and from the domain of our own words.

 

[1] Why am I focusing on Rachel so much? Because she is high profile, and has massive impact upon a gigantic swath of the Christian church. Her influence is massive! And so she deserves special attention, especially if she is ā€˜teachingā€™ people how to think biblically and theologically; and she is!

[2] Rachel Held Evans,Ā SOURCE.Ā 

[3] Torrance, Theological Science, 7.

[4] Thomas F. Torrance, The School Of Faith: The Catechisms of the Reformed Church (Eugene, OR: Wipf&Stock Publishers, 1996), xxvi.

‘This Thing’, It Changed My Life …

Posted on by

I have really been feeling convicted latelyā€”and I mean thisā€”about getting back to something that I have somewhat abandoned over the last few years in my research and reading. And this something is the very thing that set me on the path, in the first place, to ever becomeĀ The Evangelical Calvinist.Ā This something, is something that I was really introduced to, for the first time, in seminary, by Ron Frost. It is something that is ofĀ utmostĀ importance when working through theological alternatives, and it is the very thing that opened my eyes to the wonderful world of theology, in ways that I never knew were possible; that is until I was first introduced to this thing. It was introduction to this thing that allowed me to start understanding how Calvinism came to be, how it developed; and it was introduction to this thing that gave me a deep appreciation for the Reformed heritage that so many of us Protestants simply take for granted, even though we sup from its table in countless ways (without critically realizing that we do). It was introduction to this thing that kicked me out of the theologicalĀ doldrums that I had brought from my undergrad training, in regard to systematic theology. If it wasn’t for this thing, I might have ended up becoming an analytical theologian, or philosopher of religion; but this thing kept me from that, and set me on a totally different trajectoryā€”one I have yet to recover from, except for the fact that I have not been paying as close of attention to this thing as I should have been (but there is only so much time). Anyway, after I tell you what this thing is, you might feel let down, or that this build up ends in rather anti-climatic form. But for me it doesn’t; for me this thing is really important, and I will be seeking to recover this thing, once again, in a way that ought to provide me with the critical kind of distance that may have been lacking in some of my thinking over the past few years.

I will let you guess what this thingĀ is. If you are unable to here; in my next post, I will reveal what this thing is, and discuss it further, and what it will mean for my studies moving forward.