Category Archives: Reformed Theology

You Don’t Even Know What the Word Reformed Means!

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Years ago, I would write on Reformed identity frequently. I have mostly lost interest in that. But at points my interest is once again piqued. For some strange reason I continue to visit X (formerly known as Twitter), and in the environs my algorithm leads me to I often come across people debating the virtues, or deficits, of Calvinism and/or non-Calvinism (Arminianism etc.). The constant orienting premise of these exchanges is that Calvinism or Reformed theology just is the 5 Points (TUILIP), or just is Westminster styled federal (covenantal) theology; within what Richard Muller identifies as Christian Aristotelianism. But I think if you think this way that you shouldn’t be commenting on Reformed theology, one way or the other (whether you are a self-professing Reformed person or a non-Reformed person). If you believe that what I just mentioned above is absolutely reflective of the whole Reformed theological development, then why should anyone take you seriously on anything else you might say about said tradition? If you just believe that Reformed theology is a monolithic tradition without baskets of doctrinal complexes and variation within its reality as a theological tradition, then you have no business engaging in the banter that typically attends ‘your’ online and offline exchanges with reference to what you believe is representative of the Reformed faith.

I’m Reformed. But I don’t fit any of the categories you reduce the Reformed tradition into. There are even early Reformed expressions that don’t fit the categories you reduce the Reformed trad into. You can find those everywhere (regionally, during Reformed theology’s developments). Some people in an ad hoc way will assert that only ‘confessional Reformed theology’ is representative of what it means to be Reformed. Okay, which confessions must be affirmed, and who decides what those are? Should the Reformed confessions, regional statements that they were and remain, be received in something like the ‘Three Forms of Unity?’ Some think so. But why not just receive the various confessions per your church’s theological needs? This in fact was the initial motivation behind the development of the Reformed confessions; i.e., to meet the regional needs of this or that Reformed church or cluster of churches.

Furthermore, as we have illustrated with our books on Evangelical Calvinism, there are in fact other Reformed expressions beyond and even contemporaneous with (as far as development) what people take Reformed theology to be today. None of this was done in a corner. Anyone familiar with church history and historical theology ought to know that the Reformed tradition comes in a stereoscopic fling of doctrinal variation, emphases, and categories. For example, I am Reformed, but more so of a modern development. Clearly, I work within an after Barth after TF Torrance expression; even a Calvinian one. Just because someone from a Westminster styled Presbyterian church in the 21st century might claim that only they are part of the succession of the truly Reformed church doesn’t make that assertion so. Particularly because the very essence of the Reformed faith is to be a tradition always already reforming by the dictates of and engagement with Holy Scripture. The Reformed faith proper recognizes that its principled ground is the Word of God, indeed, in contact with its reality, the living Word, Jesus Christ. Because of this, principially, the Reformed faith, whilst coming with a particular character, is never a static but dynamic and organic Christian reality and expression of the faith.

I simply want to register, once again, that there are no gatekeepers for the Reformed expression of the Christian reality. There are certain boundaries, which surely include the Reformed confessions and catechisms, but with an understanding and reception of those such that they are actively subordinate to Scripture’s reality (and not just in word only). Further, as alluded to earlier, the Reformed tradition is an expansive expression which is entailed by the fact that in its history and development it has various eddies, expressions, and exemplars. Next time you think that you know what the word “Reformed” signifies, make sure you are humble enough to recognize that it might, and in fact does have a greater valent than what you probably think it does (this will of course vary from person to person, and their understanding of these things).

‘Always Reforming’

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All Christian theology, 𝑑𝑒 𝑗𝑢𝑟𝑒, is eschatological. This is what makes space for 𝑒𝑐𝑐𝑙𝑒𝑠𝑖𝑎 𝑟𝑒𝑓𝑜𝑟𝑚𝑎𝑡𝑎, 𝑠𝑒𝑚𝑝𝑒𝑟 𝑟𝑒𝑓𝑜𝑟𝑚𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑎 𝑠𝑒𝑐𝑢𝑛𝑑𝑢𝑚 𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑏𝑖 𝑑𝑒𝑖 (“reformed and always being reformed according to the Word of God”). Selah

On Living the ‘Confessional Life’ from the Life at the Right Hand

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Being a confessional Christian is the way. Some might read this and think I am referring to being ‘Reformed.’ But that would be mistaken; the Reformed might think they have a corner on this language, but they don’t. What I mean when I say ‘confessional’ is being a Christian in the Christian existence who lives and breathes and does theology based on the confession that Jesus is Lord. Doing theology based on the premise that God has spoken (‘Deus dixit’), and only after that fact, that reality can a genuinely Christian theology obtain. Being confessional is to live life in echo of the Son’s Yes and Amen for us by the Holy Spirit; His Yes and Amen as Son of the Father in homoousial (consubstantial) fellowship (koinonia). It is to live the Christian life as if there are no “competitors” that we must flummox first; that we must defeat before we get on with the business of living the Christian life before God (coram Deo). That is, to be a genuinely confessional Christian is to live an unapologetic (and thus not apologetic) Christian life; and allow this attitude, this posture from within the life of the Right Hand, to shape the questions and answers we find as Christians who know their Shepherd’s voice. To live as a confessional Christian is to recognize that God alone either presents His own Self-interpretation, His own Self-revelation for us, vicariously including humanity in His priestly humanity or He doesn’t. It is to live in the after of the fact that He has in fact Self-revealed and given us, and gives us afresh anew, a capaciousness within Himself pro nobis (for us), in the capaciousness of Christ’s vicarious humanity to be for God, with God, and in God by the Holy Spirit. To be a confessional Christian is to live in this slavish bondage to the holiness of God for us in Jesus Christ; and from this spring, the fount of everlasting life bursts forever already from the belly of our beings in Christ.

As Christians, new and old, as they enter the fray of the Christian theological existence, they will find it very difficult, as if in a famine, to find the aforementioned type of confessional living that I think a genuine Christian existence requires of us. That is to simply repose in the viva vox Dei (‘living voice of God’) as we encounter that afresh anew through encountering His prosopon (face) in the living Word of God; in the Holy Scriptures, as those gain their ‘holiness’ insofar that Christ resurrects by the Spirit from every page turned.

The moral: Be a confessional Christian, it’s really the only way to live the Christian life with the type of telos, purpose that God has poemed in the lyrics of Christ’s eternal melody for us. Holy, Holy, Holy is the LORD God Almighty; who was, and is, and is to come. amen

The Classically Calvinist God: A Dissonance Between its Philosophical Buttress and its Lived and Preached Piety

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As I have been wont to say many times in the past: ‘who we think God is determines everything else following.’ In North America, and in my closest experience, John MacArthur, Paul Washer and their respective acolytes, illustrate this quite readily. John MacArthur and Paul Washer, both self-styled 5 Point Calvinists, maintain that God is a singular monad, an actus purus, a pure being who has been appropriated by the Christian God of revelation, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The result of thinking and speaking God this way, for MacArthur, Washer, and all else, no matter what interpretive tradition they follow, is to think God in rather cold, brute, impersonal, decretal, pure Creator types of way; just as the philosophical apparatus that stands behind said system of interpretation—so the 5 Points etc.—determines it to be (pun intended). That is to say, if a thinker a priori presumes that the God of Aristotle (and Thomas Aquinas) just is coordinate, categorically and definitionally, with the God Self-revealed and exegeted in Jesus Christ, then that thinker will indeed think of God in impersonal, passionless, unmoved mover types of ways. This will affect every other doctrine downstream from said thinker’s theology proper, because how we think God determines everything else following.

And so, salvation. Salvation for people like MacArthur and Washer, and even higher up on the Reformed food chain, as far as higher (and real) Reformed theology like we find in Federal (Covenantal) theology, is thought of under the species of a God-world relation wherein God arbitrarily relates to the creation, as the Creator, simply because he has almost begrudgingly done so; that is, to create. As if, ‘well I [God] created, so I’d better at least provide a ray of hope for at least some of the people I have populating this earth I created.’ That’s a very crude characterization, but intentionally so; I think it fits the spirit of the type of god produced when thought of under the pressures provided for by an inept philosophical apparatus for thinking what God is. When God is thought of this way, when a person gets ‘saved’ into this contractual type of relationship, this affects, as Calvin emphasized, a knowledge of self; and thus a knowledge of others. That is to say, if the God I have become reconciled to is characterized by impersonal brute passionless features, this will start to condition the way that I relate to myself and others. My tone, my mood will drip with rather aloof feeling, with abstract and even cold thought about the world out there. Indeed, the way I think about life in God in Christ, under these pressures, will in fact be characterized more by a wilderness untamed nature, rather than one under the control of a loving, caring, comPASSIONATE Father God of the Son, Son of the Father, in the sweet filial bond of the Holy Spirit. Salvation will be thought of in mercantile terms, qui pro quo even, wherein this pure being god makes a contract with humanity (covenant of works) such that if they keep their end, as those who are hypothetically elect (hypothetical cause they might have a temporary faith), God has determined to keep his end and bring this select crop of individuals, who God arbitrarily chose, into the bosom of his eternal felicity and beatification. In this frame of salvation there is an elite group of people, indeed thankful to be selected, as no part of their own, into the family of the Pure Being. This thinking necessarily creates a bifurcation between us (the ostensibly elect) and them (the absolutely reprobate). Apartheid and its undercurrent provided for by Dutch Calvinism in South Africa comes to mind at this juncture when racially applied.

Surely, I jest. Surely, I am overstating, and hyperbolizing the state of affairs. Nein. I am only pressing the implications of affirming the god of the decretrum absolutum (absolute decree). It becomes hard to discern these things because of feelings and emotions. Most 5 Point MacArthurites, Washerites et al., and Covenantal Reformed theology people operate with a high piety. It is this piety that muddies the waters, in regard to being able to see clearly with reference to the superstructure that stands behind their respective theology. They have many centuries of literature from people who write with some of the highest and pious language one could imagine in regard to God and salvation. And I think this seeming dissonance, between the background theology and piety, comes because these types of Christians are also voracious Bible readers. So, the God they walk away from in encounter through Holy Scripture, ends up providing them the categories and bases for communicating God with seeming filial and relational adoration and worship. They operate, theologically and spiritually, in a torn way. When they do their background theology they are perfectly fine with thinking God from a pure being, abstract and speculative means for thinking God. But when they attempt to fill this same theology out, sermonically, and in the pulpit ministry, you end up hearing a different thing; as if the philosophical background to their scholastic theology, has been betrayed by the Scriptures they so intently focus upon.

The Word of God is even more powerful than our theological systems. But if that’s the case why not principially start with the Scriptures as a theological methodology? Why not start the way Scripture does; not with prior speculative models for thinking (and proving) God, but with the concrete of God’s voice speaking His first word of creation: ‘In the beginning.’ Why not actually follow the Reformed ‘Scripture Principle’ and stop the practice of bringing a speculatively constructed god to the God of Scripture in Jesus Christ, and then stamping this prefabricated notion of God with the face of Jesus Christ? These are troubling matters with real life consequences. We can see that being played out in church contexts like John MacArthur’s, and many others who follow. I’d say some repentant thinking is in order, at the very least. Kyrie eleison

Balthasar. God and Scripture

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I thought this quote, while speaking to another issue (Barth and Balthasar’s disagreement over key theological points), is apropos in regards to how Protestant Christians approach the scriptures, interpretively. It is interesting that we can look at the same scriptures, and come to such different conclusions — on certain points of dogma and theological emphasis. This quote from Balthasar (quoting something else, see the biblio info) helps state the reality of this conundrum:

The battle is so serious because neither side can seriously deny that it is really the same object we refer to, but at the same time we can find no way to find unity over its right concept. . .. The dispute is therefore so pressing and urgent because we see the same reality in different ways, even if we dare not say that, by God’s eternal and unfathomable decree, the same reality is looking at us in such different ways. Thus, because we see so differently (aliter), we also end up seeing, at least partially, something different (alia). And thus, the dispute over the How (quale) comes to affect in fundamental ways all the secondary divergences over the What (quantum) . . ..[1]

This principle applies to many situations. Given a concern of mine, on interpretive traditions, this could be applied to that reality. So, in other words, “How” we understand God (our Doctrine of God), will inestimably, shape “What” our interpretive conclusions will be when we come to the text of scripture. This is so, because if scripture discloses God one way, and we have already conceived Him to be another way; then we most certainly will fail to see Him at all, when we actually try to read scripture. A consequence, if we presuppose a certain schema about God (i.e., that He is the unmoved mover of Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle) that is foreign to the God of the Bible; and then we develop methods of interpretation that are consonant with this preconceived notion, we are most certainly going to be reading “our” God into scripture — instead of reading Him “out” of it.

Scripture is to point us to Someone beyond itself, but if we don’t allow scripture to impose its own categories and objectives upon us; then we are doomed to find that we are only looking at our own reflections as we peer into it as a mirror of “our” souls. If we have a fundamental disagreement on Who God is (in other words, does our metaphysic predetermine who God is before we get to Him in Christ, or do we start with our knowledge of Him at the cross of Christ as the second person of the Trinity), then it is only natural that we will have a fundamental disagreement on how we should read this God off of scripture. Make sense . . .

Certainly, we all, as historic-orthodox Christians believe God is triune; but do we really allow scripture and the Revelation of Christ to shape what that means (and thus follow an interpretive model that places its center (Christ) at the foreground of our interpretive approach); or do we come to scripture, artificially seeking a God who will fit our preconceived notions of what “we” think God should look like (e.g. His “glory,” not foolishness, but “wisdom” per I Cor. 1:17ff). Certainly, nobody is immune to this problem; but I would suggest that much of Protestant Christianity (not just Protestant), especially Classically Reformed-Fundamentalist-Evangelicals (picking on them, because this is my own background), has followed a “method” (or mode) that has caused an articulation of God that is at odds with the one we meet in Christ-at-the-Cross.

 

[1] Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Die Theologie und die Kirche [Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1938]. Collected articles, 1920-1928.

*Post originally posted on August 29th, 2009 at a now defunct blog of mine.

 

Luther’s Personalist Grace Contra Scholastic (Catholic and Protestant) Created Grace

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Martin Luther’s doctrine of grace was of a personalist sort, contra the Thomist Catholic concept of grace as a ‘created grace’ or habitus (a disposition given by God to elect humanity in their “accidents” whereby they might habituate [cooperate] with God by way of gratia infusa [infused grace, which is created and thus derivative grace] and merit the possibility to ultimately be justified before God wherein the iustitia Christi finally consummates as the iustitia Dei [‘righteousness of Christ’ … ‘righteousness of God’]). This is significant to underscore, not just because it offers an alternative, “biblical,” account of grace, contra Roman Catholicism, but this implicates Reformed orthodoxy insofar that it received, and repristinated this doctrine of Grace, the Thomist doctrine, in the development and codification of its so-called “orthodox” Reformed theology. Here is Luther with some commentary by Helmut Thielicke:

‘I take grace in the proper sense,’ writes Luther in his treatise Against Latomus (1521), ‘as the favor of God—not a quality of the soul, as is taught by our more recent writers. This grace truly produces peace of heart until finally a man is healed from his corruption and feels he has a gracious God.’ LW 32, 227. In his 1519 commentary on Psalm 1:2 Luther says: ‘Here “delight” [in the Law of the Lord] stands, first of all, neither for ability [potentia] nor for the indolent habit [habitus] which was introduced from Aristotle by the new theologians in order to subvert the understanding of the Scriptures, nor for the action [actus] out of which, as they say, that ability or habit proceeds. All human nature does not have this delight, but it must necessarily come from heaven. For human nature is intent and inclined to evil, . . . The Law of the Lord is truly good, holy, and just. Then it follows that the desire of man is the opposite of the Law.” LW 14, 295.1

Thielicke develops Luther’s critique with greater depth, but for our purposes this quote will have to suffice. What should be understood though, as I highlighted previously, is that for the scholastics (Catholic or the Reformed orthodox latterly), what was most important was to recognize that ontologically nature retained its esse (essence), even post-fall; in other words, the intellect remained intact, retained a “point of contact” with God even after its rupture from God in the fall. In this frame, then, grace was only needed as an addition to the ‘accidents’ (not the essence) of humanity whereby the elect person might synergistically cooperate and perform ‘their’ salvation with God (in the Catholic frame this took place sacramentally through the Church; for the orthodox Reformed this was understood through Federal or Covenantal theology as that developed progressively along the way). But significantly, grace for the Aristotelian (as that was appropriated in various iterations of “Thomism”), was not, and would not be God himself, personally. The need, in the scholastic frame was not that desperate; that is, that God himself be grace for us (pro nobis). For the scholastic, as already noted, the fall did not plunge humanity into a rupture with God wherein the whole of what it means to be human was lost, just part, essentialistically, was lost. And it was ‘this part’ that a created grace, as a ‘medicine’ would make perfect (e.g. ‘grace perfects nature’). As the reader can see, though, Luther opposed this type of Aristotelian rambunctiousness.

For Luther, and others, even in the 16th and 17th century Reformed ambit, grace was in fact God for and with us. We of course see this theme picked up by people like Barth and TF Torrance in their contexts and under their own respective ideational periods of reference. Insofar that the Post Reformed orthodox have imbibed, retrieved, appropriated, repristinated the Thomist mantle, and they are doing that currently with exuberance, this is the doctrine of grace they are ingesting. There is a better way forward, and this is why I am so intent on introducing people to Karl Barth and Thomas Torrance. They are retrievers of the ‘Chalcedonian pattern,’ and the Athanasian frame wherein grace is indeed God for us in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. As such, salvation obtains for us, ‘in Christ,’ fully, and not through a synergistic frame of cooperating (or persevering) with God by way of ‘created grace’ wherein nature is perfected and not re-created through apocalyptic resurrection, ascension, and the Parousia.

There is a better way for the genuinely evangelical (historically understood) Christian, and it certainly isn’t by retrieving, whole hog, Post Reformed orthodoxy, or the type of mediaeval classical theism so many are attempting to “revive” the Protestant church with today. The biblical faith is intentionally trinitarian, relational, and thus personalistic. The ‘ground and grammar’ of any truly evangelical theology must be pollinated by biblical and revelational categories rather than philosophical and speculative ones (of the sort that we get through Aristotelian Christianity). Luther knew this, this was the basis of his reforming work. He understood God’s grace in personal, relational ways, and thus genuinely evangelical ways rather than in the philosophical categories that the schoolmen did.

 

1 Helmut Thielicke, Theological Ethics: Foundations (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966), 225 n. 3.

 

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

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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 ‘Christian Mystic’ (whatever that entails). One is now a Christian universalist, who sounds like he approves of a Rahnerian anonymous Christian mode and transcendental Christ-consciousness, while the other seemingly is a Hickian 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 respective worldpictures. One of them has read some Barth and Torrance, and appreciates them, it’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 aren’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 and Arminians when it comes to the false superstructure they are offering. Interestingly, these guys fail to appreciate the dialogical/dialectical nature of Barth’s/TFT’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 principled theology of the Word is abandoned for an amalgam and idiosyncratic appropriation of the consensus fidelium 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, isn’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 God’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 I’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 the centraldogma of someone’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 aren’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. It’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 ‘final’ judgment on things is always already left open to its eschatological and coming reality in Jesus Christ. This is the basis of the Reformed semper Reformanda, a basis that classical Calvinists can only pay lip service to these days. Nevertheless, to replace bad systems with a mystical system doesn’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.

 

What is Evangelical Calvinism?

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I wrote the following just before Thanksgiving last year. I was going to write a new post in an attempt to redress these things for new readers, but I thought I would just repost this one since it covers all the bases I had intended to cover in the post I was about to write. One thing that hinders people from really grasping our whole ‘Evangelical Calvinist’ project is the amount of historical context someone must have in order to really apprehend what we are doing. People (especially at the popular level) just presume that when they hear ‘Calvinism’ that they have a general idea of what any iteration of its doctrinal development must entail. Attempting to ‘become’ an Evangelical Calvinist requires work and staying-power that I have found most don’t have; and so we haven’t made hardly a dint in the popular ecclesial world. Be that as it may the historical and theological facts don’t go away; i.e. they aren’t mind-dependent (e.g. they don’t require that people know about them in order for them to be part of the swath of Reformed theological development). Hopefully the following will help bring further enlightenment for some.

What is Evangelical Calvinism, and how is it different from Federal (Covenantal) theology, and more popularly (and reductionistically) 5 Point Calvinism? For starters my Evangelical Calvinist colleague, Myk Habets and I have co-written two introductions to our 2 volumed Evangelical Calvinism series; you can read those in Volume 1 and Volume 2. But I wanted this post to be more concise than those intros are; and paired down for the social media attention span. In a nutshell Evangelical Calvinism is what the blurb to our first volume (2012) says:

In this exciting volume new and emerging voices join senior Reformed scholars in presenting a coherent and impassioned articulation of Calvinism for today’s world. Evangelical Calvinism represents a mood within current Reformed theology. The various contributors are in different ways articulating that mood, of which their very diversity is a significant element. In attempting to outline features of an Evangelical Calvinism a number of the contributors compare and contrast this approach with that of the Federal Calvinism that is currently dominant in North American Reformed theology, challenging the assumption that Federal Calvinism is the only possible expression of orthodox Reformed theology. This book does not, however, represent the arrival of a “new-Calvinism” or even a “neo-Calvinism,” if by those terms are meant a novel reading of the Reformed faith. An Evangelical Calvinism highlights a Calvinistic tradition that has developed particularly within Scotland, but is not unique to the Scots. The editors have picked up the baton passed on by John Calvin, Karl Barth, Thomas Torrance, and others, in order to offer the family of Reformed theologies a reinvigorated theological and spiritual ethos. This volume promises to set the agenda for Reformed-Calvinist discussion for some time to come.[1]

But you might be asking: okay, but what does Evangelical Calvinism entail in material detail? If you purchase our first volume (kindle is $9.99) Myk and I present 15 theological theses in the last chapter of the book. You will have a much fuller grasp of what in fact we are on about after reading these. Here they are, but without the development they receive in the book:

Thesis One. The Holy Trinity is the absolute ground and grammar of all epistemology, theology, and worship.

Thesis Two. The primacy of God’s triune life is grounded in love, for “God is love.”

Thesis Three. There is one covenant of grace.

Thesis Four. God is primarily covenantal and not contractual in his dealings with humanity.

Thesis Five. Election is christologically conditioned.

Thesis Six. Grace precedes law.

Thesis Seven. Assurance is of the essence of faith.

Thesis Eight. Evangelical Calvinism endorses a supralapsarian Christology which emphasizes the doctrine of the primacy of Christ.

Thesis Nine. Evangelical Calvinism is a form of dialectical theology.

Thesis Ten. Evangelical Calvinism places an emphasis upon the doctrine of union with/in Christ whereby all the benefits of Christ are ours.

Thesis Eleven. Christ lived, died, and rose again for all humanity, thus Evangelical Calvinism affirms a doctrine of universal atonement.

Thesis Twelve. Universalism is not a corollary of universal redemption and is not constitutive for Evangelical Calvinism.

Thesis Thirteen. There is no legitimate theological concept of double predestination as construed in the tradition of Reformed Scholasticism.

Thesis Fourteen. The atonement is multifaceted and must not be reduced to one culturally conditioned atonement theory but, rather, to a theologically unified but multi-faceted atonement model.

Thesis Fifteen. Evangelical Calvinism is in continuity with the Reformed confessional tradition.[2]

The contributors to our edited volumes work from various emphases, in regard to the broader Reformed tradition. But we all concur on a historic mood that we understand to be present and pervasive throughout the history and development of Reformed theology. My personal orientation, as an Evangelical Calvinist has taken shape after the theologies of Karl Barth, Thomas Torrance, John Calvin (and Martin Luther even though he isn’t “Calvinist,” per se). Evangelical Calvinism is Athanasian rather than Augustinian in trajectory. This means that we operate from within an ontological understanding of salvation rather than juridical/forensic, as the latter has developed and taken shape in the West (to oversimplify a bit). This also means, at least for me, that I think in terms of an absolute mode of sola gratia: viz. I do not operate with the Thomist or Aristotelian concept of ‘grace perfecting nature,’ as if the former complements or completes the latter in a one-for-one correspondence. In other words, I operate out of a slavish adherence to what TF Torrance identifies as ‘grace-all-the-way-down.’ This means that there is no dualistic conception, that there is no two-story universe of Nature/Grace. For me, as an Evangelical Calvinist, all of reality is grounded in God’s inner life of triune Grace for us (pro nobis). Karl Barth articulates this idea well when he writes:

How can grace meet him as grace if it simply decks itself out as nature. When grace is revealed, nature does not cease to exist. How can it, when God does not cease to be its Creator? But there is in nature more than nature. Nature itself becomes the theatre of grace, and grace is manifested as lordship over nature, and therefore in its freedom over against it. And again God is not less but more gracious for us in miracle than elsewhere. Again miracle is simply the revelation of the divine glory otherwise hidden from us, on the strength of which we can believe and honour Him elsewhere as Creator and Lord. Miracle must not be reduced to the level of God’s other and general being and action in the world. Its miraculous nature must not be denied. It must be maintained—even for the sake of the general truth. For it is miracle alone which opens for us the door to the secret that the Creator’s saving opposition to us does not confront us only at individual points and moments, but throughout the whole range of our spatio-temporal existence.[3]

This ought to give you a sense of what I am referring to in regard to ‘grace all the way down.’ My form of Evangelical Calvinism also works from the mode of theological development that Philip Ziegler identifies as Apocalyptic Theology; which the quote from Barth above illustrates quite nicely.

Ultimately, Evangelical Calvinism is an alternative iteration of Calvinism within broader Reformed theology that operates from a more Patristic or Eastern orientation. An iteration that starts its thinking from an absolute solo Christo (Christ alone), meaning that we reject natural theology, and its mechanism found in the so-called analogia entis (analogy of being). An iteration that rejects all forms of dualism as we find in classical Calvinism, and its adoption of the Aristotelian two-story universe of nature/grace. Evangelical Calvinism, in other words, is not your grandpa’s Calvinism; or maybe it is, that is if he was attuned to the ulterior development of Calvinism that was present all along through the 16th and 17th centuries of such development. Hopefully this piques your interest.

[1] Evangelical Calvinism: Essays Resourcing the Continuing Reformation of the Church: Volume 1.

[2] Myk Habets and Bobby Grow, Evangelical Calvinism: Essays Resourcing the Continuing Reformation of the Church (Eugene: OR, Pickwick Publications, 2012), 425-52.

[3] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1 §31: Study Edition Vol 9 (London/New York: T&T Clark, 2010), 72.

Jesus’s Eternal Life as the End and Beginning of All Things: Applied to the death of Ron Grow

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16 So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. 17 For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, 18 as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal. –II Corinthians 4

I am continuing to process my grief at the loss of my dad. My dad suffered like Job in many ways. Although much, if not most of my dad’s suffering was brought on by the [bad] choices he made. Nonetheless, he suffered immensely, and he did so as a child of the living God. He struggled with prescription drug addiction; deep doubts about his salvation (which actually led to the drug addiction); he endured unending sense of loss; he went through a divorce from my mom after 36 years of marriage that he never recovered from; he lost many close to him, the last was his cousin, Tommy, who was like a brother to him (Tommy wasn’t a Christian when he killed himself approx 3 years ago). My dad suffered immensely, and in ways that my short list does not adequately capture (I didn’t even mention all the physical stuff he dealt with). But in this all there was redemption. You see, my dad is the type of person that Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, came for. Jesus came for the bruised reed, the smoldering wick, the downcast and broken; my dad qualified. The wisdom of God, a staurological wisdom, is of the sort that assumes sinful humanity all the way down. In this assumption the Son ensarkos takes all the blights, even our unbelief and disobediences, and puts these many deaths to death in His singular death for us. The Son of God, the Christ penetrates so deeply into the warp and woof of our sinful beings that he captures our bone marrow itself and redeems it. He did this for my dad. Even in, especially in my dad’s broken and tattered status, the Son of God, who is the Christ, vanquished all the dark nights of the soul at their very fountainhead, and brought eternal life as a well-spring that flows throughout all the ages. My dad’s sinful and battered status was assumed by the Son of God in the incarnation, and redeemed from the inside/out. And yet, and this is the Wisdom, God was able to use all of the suffering, even of the self-inflicted sort that my dad suffered from, and bring new creation through the resurrected and vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ, the Son of Man. There is no loss where Jesus Christ sets His foot, there is only always gain. My dad experienced this gain in seedling form in 1970, and now in penultimate blossomed form in his currently intermediate status now.

Samuel Rutherford (1600 – 1661), Scottish theologian and pastor, wrote the following with reference to trial and tribulation vis-à-vis eternity:

For your afflictions are not eternal; time will end them, and so shall you at length see the Lord’s salvation. His love sleepeth not, but is still working for you. His salvation will not tarry or linger; and suffering for Him is the noblest cross that is out of Heaven. . . and this is the fruit, the flower and bloom growing out of your cross, that ye be a dead man to time, to clay, to gold, to country, to friends, wife, children, and all pieces of created nothings; for in them there is not a seat nor bottom for soul’s love. Oh, what room is for your love (if it were as broad as the sea) up in heaven, and in God!

We may indeed think, Cannot God bring us to heaven with ease and prosperity? Who doubteth but He can? But His infinite wisdom thinketh and decreeth the contrary; and we cannot see a reason of it, yet He hath a most just reason. We never with our eyes saw our own soul; yet we have a soul. We see many rivers, but we know not their first spring and original fountain; yet they have a beginning. Madam, when ye are come to the other side of the water, and have set down your foot on the shore of glorious eternity, and look back again to the waters and to your wearisome journey, and shall see, in that clear glass of endless glory, nearer to the bottom of God’s wisdom, ye shall then be forced to say, “If God had done otherwise with me than He hath done, I had never come to the enjoying of this crown of glory.”[1]

Don’t lose hope. God in Christ is hope. No matter what our plights in this vanquished life Christ is its end; and if He is its end He is its beginning too. Jesus is, indeed, the Alpha and Omega of God for the world; Jesus is this world’s telos, and only reason for existence. It is as we are participatio Christi that we begin to experience what this existence is all about. Unfortunately, since we still inhabit these bodies of death, our experience is shaped by bouts of death. But as Christians, even as we are constantly being given over to the death of Christ, it is only so that His life might be made manifest through the mortal members of our bodies; our bodies of death. This is what Rutherford is on about; he understood that this life isn’t our life at all, but Christ’s! Our lives, according to the Apostle Paul, aren’t ours, they are Christ’s. This means, once we are born again of the imperishable seed of baby Jesus’s life that no matter what sort of peril or trauma enters our lives, it isn’t ours, and it belongs to Christ. The Christian understands that we never live in abstraction from Christ; the Christian knows that the ground of their human being is Christ’s human being for them. The Christian recognizes that there is a correspondence between our lives and Christ’s, and this precisely because the Son freely chose to make His all circumscribing life correspond to ours; that by His poverty for us we might be made rich through the election of His resurrected humanity pro nobis.

My dad knows this hope. He travailed and kicked in suffering such that I could hardly bear it. There is a paradox in his loss. I miss him in ways that are hard to articulate. But when I think of his suffering, and the state he would be in right now, if he had survived, I find great joy in knowing that he has finally been released from the surely bonds that his body of death shrouded him in. Thankfully, those bonds were Christ’s, and Christ shrugged them off once and for all in the resurrection. My dad lives in the resurrection fully now. Maranatha!

[1] Samuel Rutherford, Selections from His Letters, cited by Nick Needham, 2000 Years Of Christ’s Power: Volume 4: The Age Of Religious Conflict (London: Christian Focus Publications, LTD, 2017), 440.

Barth with Gerhard and Wollebius on Sola Scriptura Contra the Authority of Rome

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The riposte from Roman Catholic and Orthodox apologists, maybe even some Anglican, is that the Bible’s canonicity is given to it in a causal way by the Church’s recognition. But the historic Protestant response is that as Calvin emphasizes, it is autopistis; or in other words, it is self-authenticating. Karl Barth, often chastised for being an enemy of Scripture, is actually one of Scripture’s most ardent warriors; particularly in regard to its Protestant iteration. Barth appeals to historic Protestant thinkers in his own articulation of a doctrine of Scripture. More pointedly, Barth appeals to John Gerhard and Johannes Wollebius as they counter Roman Catholics like, Sylvester Prierias and John Eck when they grant infallibility to the Pope and Roman Catholic Church over against Holy Scripture. Clearly this is an issue of authority; who has it? Does Scripture have it at a formal level, or does the Holy Roman See (this not to mention Orthodox conceptions of episcopacy vis-à-vis Scripture)?

Barth quotes Gerhard:

There is not a double authority of Scripture, but a single authority, and that is divine: it does not depend on the authority of the church, but on God alone. The authority of Scripture as far as we are concerned is nothing other than the manifestation and the knowledge of that single divine and supreme authority, which is internal and intrinsic to Scripture. Therefore, the church does not confer a new authority, as far as we are concerned, upon Scripture, but rather by its own testimony it leads us to the acknowledgement of that truth. We admit that of sacred Scripture the church is (1) the witness; (2) the guardian; (3) protector (4) the herald; (5) the interpreter. But let us not conclude from this that the authority of Scripture, whether in itself or in relation to us, depends on the church.[1]

And Wollebius:

The testimony of the church is prior in time, but the testimony of the Holy Spirit is prior in nature and causality. We believe that the testimony is of the church, not on account of the church. It is to be ascribed to the Holy Spirit on his own account. The testimony of the church demonstrates the fact ‘that’, but the testimony of the Holy Spirit demonstrates the ‘because’. The church advises, the Holy Spirit convinces. The testimony of the church provides opinion, but the testimony of the Holy Spirit provides knowledge and firm trustworthiness.[2]

Some Protestants, typically biblical studies folks it seems, want to signal the end of the Protestant Reformation. That in light of the New Paul Perspective[s] the soteriological reasons for the Protestant Reformation are no longer relevant; that Luther et al. were misguided. But these folks are moving too quickly. The Protestant Reformation, indeed had much to do with soteriology, but behind that there was a deeper issue of authority. This issue is ultimately an ecclesiological issue, and one that remains. What Gehard and Wollebius wrote in the 17th century is just as pertinent now as it was then; none of these issues have been resolved. Protestants still affirm the ‘Scripture Principle’ or sola Scriptura, whereas Roman Catholics (and Orthodox) do not. Indeed, at this level, the traditions are as far apart as ever. And this does have serious soteriological implications. If Rome or Constantinople have ‘the keys,’ then they decide who is genuinely ‘saved’ and who isn’t. There might be room for ecumenicism, such as we find with Thomas Torrance and the Orthodox focused on the doctrine of Trinity. But if we were to look to a doctrine of Scripture as the basis for ecumenical convergence between the traditions, it is not there.

 

[1] John Gerhard, Loci theolo., 1610 f., LI c. 3, 39, cited by Karl Barth, CD I/2 §19, 19.

[2] Johannes Wollebius, Comp. Christ. Theol., 1620, Praecogn. 9, cited by Karl Barth, CD I/2 §19, 19.