Category Archives: Revelational Theology

Stream of Consciousness on the Supernatural

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It is unfortunate that so many Christians in the West, and elsewhere, have so taken on the materialist/physicalist picture of the world, like in the way we process things on a daily basis, that we allow that to impinge, and thus reduce, or negate, the reality of the supranatural reality of all reality. I.e., that humanity, the world, the globe, the earth and the 𝑐𝑜𝑠𝑚𝑜𝑠 itself, is created by the living God, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. As such, the rest of what Paul identifies as the 𝑝𝑙𝑒𝑟𝑜𝑚𝑎 (as he gives that his christological twist) in the epistle to the Colossians, also is necessarily negated; that is, the world of the spiritual realm of angels, demons, demiurges etc., in general.

Often times, in overreaction to the the materialist world, other Christians will go to other extremes and absolutize what has come to be known as the charismatic and even the Pentecostal world picture; where in fact, miracles and the supranatural becomes normalized, categorized, and codified, such that it becomes so normal that, in effect, God and the supranatural has been domesticated to our own personal experiences in consumerist types of ways.

Contrariwise to the aforementioned, a substantive benefit, one of many, of being immersed in Holy Scripture, is that these faulty extremes themselves become negated. The supranatural, the spiritual, miracles, so on and so forth come to have a concrete context. The context, is indeed God’s own free life within itself; within His own Self-determination, not ours. The reality of Jesus Christ, as the Self-determination of God for the world, wherein Heaven and earth, God and humanity, are united in His singular person becomes the norming norm (𝑛𝑜𝑟𝑚𝑎 𝑛𝑜𝑟𝑚𝑎𝑛𝑠) of the real life Christian world picture. The material world (i.e., albeit created and contingent on the upholding power of God’s Word), and the spiritual world (i.e., the inner, eternal, and triune Life of God) have a ground to be thought from in the center of God’s life. The ground is both transcendent and immanent. God’s act in Christ, indeed as that has first been freely determined in God’s choice to not be God without but with us in Jesus Christ, becomes the point of departure by which the Christian world picture comes to have an organicism wherein miracles, the spiritual reality of life (which is the antecedent reality to all of contingent life), the supranatural and natural have an inner-core that is alien to us; that is outside of us (𝑒𝑥𝑡𝑟𝑎 𝑛𝑜𝑠). As we live in this world, with this inner-ground of God’s life for us as the grounding-calibration of all things, we can rightly engage with this world, without reduction or negation, in the way it actually is, without it becoming more or less than it is at the same time.

The Heavenly Dust: Christian Knowledge of God

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As Christians we want to think about God as Christians. Christians, definitionally, aren’t profane persons. Indeed, according to Scripture, Christians are saints; i.e., set apart in Christ who is our Set Apart in the presence of the Father for us. This might seem scandalous to even recognize, but Christians are simply in a different place in regard to knowing reality as it is; insofar as the Christ (Jesus) allows us entrée in these, our bodies of death, in this in-between time. Some might want to push back and describe my observations as idealist. But it is just the opposite, in fact. Only Christians, in regard to thinking God and all else, can operate as non-idealists. That is to say, the Christian is confronted in their very beings with the fact that they, in themselves, left to their profane-selves, are sublated by the very dust and water their flatlander bodies consist of. Further, this entails that Christians, as they are confronted by reality in Jesus Christ, can acknowledge their subhuman statuses as profane persons; repent, because God in Christ first repented for us; and experience life re-created on the primordial plane of God’s elect and elevated life for us in Jesus Christ. On this new plane the dust the Christian consists of is no longer mortal and earthy, but immortal and heavenly; it is of a new body, with new capacities, which entail a capacity to actually think the living and true God from within a center in Himself for us in Jesus Christ. If this is the case, it behooves the Christian, who is distinct from the profane or secular person, to learn to imbibe and think from the sensory-tablet provided for by the Son of Man, as He sits at the Right Hand of the Father.

Torrance writes:

Here we are faced with another fundamental characteristic of the Truth of God as it is in Jesus; it is both divine and human. Knowledge of it, accordingly, is essentially bi-polar. This bi-polarity corresponds to the two-fold objectivity of the Word we have already noted. Knowledge of God is given to us in this Man, Jesus, but that knowledge does not allow us to leave the Man Jesus behind when we know Him in His divine nature. There is an indivisible unity in the ultimate Fact of Christ, true God and true Man. Theological knowledge rests upon and partakes of that duality-in-unity in the Person of Christ. In Him we know God in terms of what God is not, namely, man, for in Christ God, who is God and not man, has become Man and comes as Man, but in such a way that what God is in Christ He is antecedently and eternally in Himself. We know God is indissoluble unity with Jesus as we encounter Him through the witness of men, and we know Jesus in His human and historical actuality in indissoluble unity with God.[1]

The Christian inhabits another world whilst grounded in this world by the grace of God in the face of Jesus Christ. The Christian doesn’t have to leave this world to see the antecedent world of God’s Kingdom. Precisely because God’s Kingdom, in the wisdom of the Cross, the wisdom of God in Christ, comes to us; here, where we are in this mortal dust, in order to make us partakers of the heavenly dust of His recreated-resurrected-ascended humanity.

[1] Thomas F. Torrance, Theological Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 149.

The Gospel of the Forty Days

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The resurrection of Jesus Christ is what all of history is contingent upon. All that we experience, linearly, has a ground behind, underneath, and after it that is in fact the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Without that centraldogma there is no history; there is no nothing. I think we, especially as Christians of all people, really need to get our heads around this reality. When we do we start living as those who have the hope of Christ in us, the purifying hope. We have a critical valence to look at the world from that is not purely conditioned by the immediate hype and circumstance. This is what Barth captures so well:

For the history and message of Easter contains everything else, while without it everything else would be left in the air as a mere abstraction. Everything else in the New Testament contains and presupposes the resurrection. It is the key to the whole. We can agree finally that acceptance or rejection of the Gospel of the New Testament, at any rate as understood by the New Testament itself, depends on our acceptance or rejection of the evangelium quadraginta dierum [gospel of the forty days]. Either we believe with the New Testament in the risen Jesus Christ, or we do not believe in Him at all. This is the statement which believers and non-believers alike can surely accept as a fair assessment of the sources.[1]

On one hand you can hear in Barth a critique of Bultmann’s demythologizing project. But more theologically significant is simply the establishment of the fact “that Christ is risen” explains everything immediate, in regard to the composition of the New Testament itself. But even more, the resurrection makes sense of the whole of reality in a very organic rather than totalizing way. That is to say, the resurrection of Jesus Christ presents us with an openness of life towards the triune God. It is here where a theology of nature, and a theology of everything else is resident; that is, in the resurrected humanity of Jesus Christ. Without His humanity there would have never been any tinder for this world to be formed by; never a purpose for it to rotate in the Milky Way. Until this radical reality is apprehended the Christian will continue to inhabit a wilderness like experience. They won’t have the eyes to see or the ears to hear the depth reality and intonation of God’s still small voice as it breezes by them afresh anew by the Spirit’s hovering life. The resurrection makes all things new. It puts to death the old (sorry natural law/theology), and presents humanity with God’s humanity for the world in Jesus Christ. If we are going to have any chance of knowing God, of accessing His created order, and its telos, we will only come to this through participation with Jesus Christ; through His union with us, that we might be in union with Him, in the triune life of the eternal God.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/2 §47 [444] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 7.

Pierre Maury Contra the ‘Horrible Decree’ of Predestination in the classical Calvinists

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Pierre Maury was Karl Barth’s ‘French connection’ and friend. Without Maury’s thinking and writing on a reformulated Reformed doctrine of predestination, Barth’s turn, and own treatment of predestination (as exemplified in his Church Dogmatics II/2) may never have happened; at least not in the shape that it did. Here is Maury on a critique of the classical Augustinian inspired doctrine of election/reprobation (especially as that developed within what came to be called Post Reformed orthodox Dogmatics in the 16th and 17th centuries, respectively):

Before we proceed further, there is an important point which must be made clear. If what we have said is true, it is obvious that the decree of election—call it predestination here, if you will—is not, as classic theology has maintained, from Augustine to Luther Calvin and the orthodox dogmatic theologians of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, the obscure and impenetrable decision of a divinity who does not, on this point, reveal his designs. It was because they asserted that the absolute decree of the Creator, anterior to any creation—and even to any fall, as the Supralapsarians held—was the unknowable secret of an absolute power, that predestination frightened even those who defended it with the most unflagging ardour. There was Calvin, for instance, whom the ‘labyrinths’ of this mystery filled with a kind of holy terror. How can it be otherwise, if we know and can know nothing of the motives which lie behind God’s creative activity, if the liberty with which he loves us is replaced by the arbitrary decision of pure omnipotence? How can such a God of the covenant, appear in that eternity (and so in time, in which his purposes are worked out) as anything but a capricious tyrant; not the God of grace but the wielder of a crushing power who is worshipped only in terror? How is one to be sure that it his will to save the lost?

Of course I do not wish for a moment to detract from the mystery of God’s sovereign liberty. He wills to act only in accordance with his good pleasure (Phil. 2.13), but is a good pleasure. His entire revelation tells us so, tirelessly. There is nothing higher than his goodness, nor anterior to it. God loves always, from all eternity. And his purpose, before which, and outside which, there is none other, is to ally his life with the life of men in mutual love. Often, moved by their adoration of the divine majesty, the great predestinarian doctors—especially Calvin—have exalted the mystery of the absolute decree. But why have they turned it into a mystery as impenetrable as night, the secret of an opaque God? God does not live and act in the obscurity of eternal darkness, but in light—‘unapproachable’, yes, but light! Darkness and night are, in the Bible, the abode of the Devil, in which he plans and prepares his ‘works of darkness’. If there is any tyrannical power that would victimize man, it is he, not the Father ‘who hath delivered us from the power of darkness’ (Col. 1.13), and ‘hath called [us] out of darkness into his marvellous light’ (I Peter 2.9).

If it is necessary, then, to maintain the mystery of election—and it is absolutely necessary, for God’s freedom is the sovereign liberty of the Creator, which our liberty may neither dispute nor judge: ‘O man, who art thou that repliest against God?’ (Rom. 9.20)—it is only on the basis of knowing and preaching that this mystery is none other than the peace that passes understanding. It is unfathomable because the love of God is unfathomable. And the only act of adoration God expects of us is our wonder at a purpose that overwhelms us.[1]

If the reader is aware of Barth’s own reformulation of a Reformed doctrine of predestination, what we just read from Maury should ring familiar to you.

Whether reading Barth, Torrance, Maury et al. the theme remains the same: for them, respectively, to think a doctrine of predestination (election/reprobation) in abstraction from a purposeful ground in Jesus Christ, is to not think a genuinely Christian, and thus biblical doctrine of predestination. This is the crux of it all: i.e., how someone arrives at their relative conclusions in regard to a doctrine of predestination, have directly to do with the theory of revelation (and authority) they affirm. If they are committed to a principled revelational understanding of knowing God, they will look something like Maury on a doctrine of predestination. If not, and they hold to a principled speculative and negative understanding of knowing God, they will look something like Thomas Aquinas, and his respective heirs in the Post Reformed orthodox development.

The issue, ultimately, comes down to a very practical and spiritual one. The way we think God determines all subsequent doctrinal developments. If we think God’s will toward us remains hidden in some sort of ‘horrible decree’ of election/reprobation, then we will have good reason to live in an unhealthy fear of Him. If we believe that God has fully Self-revealed Himself for us in the face of Jesus Christ, in a filial relationship of triune love, then we will have a healthy fear and love of the Father. This will latterly shape the way we engage with and treat others; both within the Church and world.

For further reading on Pierre Maury and his theology, especially as that relates to Barth’s own developing theology, see: Simon Hattrell’s exquisite book:  Election, Barth, and the French Connection, 2nd Edition: How Pierre Maury Gave a “Decisive Impetus” to Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Election.

[1] Pierre Maury, Predestination and Other Papers (Richmond, Virginia: John Knox Press, 1960), 35–6.

On a Crucifixional ‘Certainty’ of Faith as Knowledge of God: With Reference to Herbert McCabe

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Herbert McCabe on the certainty of the Christian reality (contra wishful thinking, so on and so forth):

Now there are some people who will admit even this. They will admit that Christianity is reasonable even in this sense, that it is not merely logically coherent, but also a pretty reasonable hypothesis. They will admit that there is a lot of evidence of one kind and another to suggest that Christian beliefs are true, just as there is a lot of evidence of one kind and another to suggest that telepathy is quite common or that Queen Elizabeth I was in love with Essex. What they find so unreasonable in Christians is that, instead of saying that Christianity is highly probable, they claim to be completely certain. When you do establish something by this kind of probable and convergent argument, you have every right to hold it as your opinion, but you have no right to claim absolute certainty and to be sure that you will never meet a genuine refutation of it. This is what finally seems unreasonable about faith to the openminded liberal sceptic. And here I can agree with him. In this sense I am prepared to admit that you might call faith unreasonable.

It is not unreasonable in the sense that it is absurd or incoherent. Nor is it unreasonable in the sense that there are not good reasons for it. But it is, if you like, unreasonable in that it demands a certainty which is not warranted by the reasons. I am completely certain that I am in Oxford at the moment. I have all the evidence I need for certainty on this point. It is true that I admit the logical possibility that I may be drugged or dreaming or involved in some extraordinarily elaborate deception. But this doesn’t really affect my certainty. Yet the evidence which makes it reasonable to hold, for example, that Christ rose from the dead comes nowhere near this kind of evidence. One might say that the evidence is spite of all probability does really seem to point to this fantastic conclusion, but it is certainly not the kind of evidence which makes me quite sure and certain. And yet I am more certain that Christ rose from the dead than I am that I am in Oxford. When it comes to my being there, I am prepared to accept the remote possibility that I am the victim of an enormous practical joke. But I am not prepared to envisage any possibility of deception about the resurrection. Of course I can easily envisage my argument for the resurrection being disposed of. I can envisage myself being confronted by what is seems to me to be unanswerable arguments against it. But this is not the same thing. I am prepared to envisage myself ceasing to believe in it, but I am not prepared to envisage either that there really are unanswerable arguments against it or that I would be justified in ceasing to believe it. All this is because, although reasons may lead me to belief, they are not the basis of my belief. I believe certain things because God has told them to me, and I am able to believe them with certainty and complete assurance only because of the divine life within me. It is a gift of God that I believe, not something I can achieve by human means.[1]

As a Christian, full of the Spirit, doesn’t McCabe’s thinking resonate with you? It certainly has resonance with the thinking of Barth on faith, and Christ’s faith for us as we find correspondence with His and from His by the Holy Spirit. It isn’t that there is no physical or historical evidence for such things, it’s that it goes way beyond such parameters. It isn’t that it is some type of existential foray into the mystical; indeed, as that might be generated by an abstract human’s innards. It is that God has made concrete contact with us through the interior life of His life for us, with us, and in us, in Christ. McCabe isn’t referring to some sort of epistemic certainty that satisfies our base hopes. Instead, He is referring to the triune God’s unilateral Self-determination to bring us, to elevate us into the very heart of His inner life; to share in the glory that the Son has always already shared with the Father by the Holy Spirit. This type of certainty of relationship comes with an inherent vulnerability to it, of the sort wherein a child is dependent upon their parent. This knowledge of God, of our relationship with Him, comes with a desperateness to it; of the type where the Christian knows that they know that they don’t continue to stand without their Father standing for them in the Son, the Savior of the world. It is a primordial situation wherein we just show up in this world, and our Father graciously comes to us, as if a babe tossed into the weeds and dust of the wastelands, picks us up, cleans us up, and brings us into the eternal life spring that is showering forth from the One in the bosom of the Father; indeed, in the Son.

I take what McCabe is referring to as a ‘taste and see that God is good,’ or an Anselmian fides quaerens intellectum (‘faith seeking understanding’) mode of being. And as I already noted, there is a primordiality to all of this. That is to say, as Barth’s theology does, that the Christian has entered into a new creation in the resurrected humanity of Jesus Christ. We are on a new playing field wherein the eyes to see the invisible as the concrete, are the eyes of the faith of Christ that we have come into union with by the grace of adoption into the family and triune life of the eternal and living God. Barth scholar Robert Dale Dawson communicates these truths in the following way, with reference to Barth’s theology of the resurrection (I’ve used this quote multiple times because I think it is helpful towards piercing into what Barth is after throughout his theological oeuvre):

A large number of analyses come up short by dwelling upon the historical question, often falsely construing Barth’s inversion of the order of the historical enterprise and the resurrection of Jesus as an aspect of his historical skepticism. For Barth the resurrection of Jesus is not a datum of the sort to be analyzed and understood, by other data, by means of historical critical science. While a real event within the nexus of space and time the resurrection is also the event of the creation of new time and space. Such an event can only be described as an act of God; that is an otherwise impossible event. The event of the resurrection of Jesus is that of the creation of the conditions of the possibility for all other events, and as such it cannot be accounted for in terms considered appropriate for all other events. This is not the expression of an historical skeptic, but of one who is convinced of the primordiality of the resurrection as the singular history-making, yet history-delimiting, act of God.[2]

According to Barth, and I think the Gospel implications themselves, we are not thinking of reality in terms of a grace perfecting nature or a revelation perfecting reason (ironically, McCabe is a Thomist, but uniquely so); we are thinking from the new theo-logic that comes from a city not of our own making or machination. As Christians, and I see this in McCabe’s thinking, our bases for knowing God come from an otherworldly, that is indeed thisworldly reality. As such, we have a certainty about it in the ways already noted, but also in a way that this world considers both foolish and weak. There is a staurological (crucifixional) ground to this type of thinking that understands that knowledge of God comes first from a putting to death of what we consider “reasonable,” by our inborn lights, and a resurrection unto a new creation wherein what is reasonable is only determined by God’s pre-destination for His consummate and concrete Kingdom to come, and currently coming minute-by-minute. amen

[1] Herbert McCabe, Faith Within Reason (London: Continuum, 2007), 28–9.

[2] Robert Dale Dawson, The Resurrection in Karl Barth (UK: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007), 13.

God Speaks, but Only Through Men in Christ

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It’s better to know God in the way that He has deigned to be known. He has freely chosen to be known through men’s (Prophets and Apostles) voices, and not His voice directly (like audibly per se). Even as He came to us in the Son, He came as a human being; the human being par excellence. But still, He accommodates to speak to us, to reveal Himself to us, in a man’s voice, a human’s voice; albeit the Godman’s voice. The person we finally encounter in the Man, Christ Jesus’ voice, is the person of the triune God; nevertheless, He is speaking to us in a way that we can grasp, in our human tongue. This is His grace for us, that He has freely chosen to speak to us, and to do so in the ‘tongues’ that we could comprehend; in the Man, the Mediator between God and humanity, the Man, Christ Jesus! Amen.

No to the ‘Just Is’ God: Knowing God in Fulfillment Rather than Promise; Knowing God as Christians Rather than as Pre-Christian Christians

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Classical theism, particularly of the medieval and post reformed orthodox (16th and 17th c.) style operates from a rather discursive notion of God. We might come to imagine that we just do know God; that is if we press our powers enough and rely heavily enough upon the yet unintroduced Holy Spirit in our lives. It is from this posture that many classical theists pick up their Bibles, at least of the Protestant sort, and just think that the God they have come to accept as their personal Lord (soli Deo gloria) starts out as God for them in Genesis 1:1 and linearly eventuates through the turns and eddies of salvation-history as the Savior they have met in Jesus Christ. It is upon this type of basis—as I have severely oversimplified it—that many classical theists operate from a just is assertive posture about God’s existence and their relative knowledge of this God (aided by the creative quality of grace each of the elect have in the accidents of their souls).

We have covered this ground on this blog a million times; I know! But I want to reiterate it again. I cannot get over how significant this is; viz. how we have knowledge of God, and which God we actually have knowledge of. If we get this most basic point wrong then everything else following will have the shape of how wrong we are or how right we are; in the sense that the God we believe we’ve come to know is actually the real and living God or not. What I am after—always—even as dramatic as I’ve just painted it has to do with prolegomena (or theological method and how that is given pre-Dogmatic shape by the God we believe we’ve come to know). Do creatures just have an implicit knowledge or sense of God; or is knowledge of God something completely and utterly and absolutely alien to us; is knowledge of God in its most intensive and principial modes something that is fully contingent upon God encountering us? More pointedly, is knowledge of God something that we can principally call Christian Knowledge of God?

Here is what I think (you know this): I only have come to know God, in my Christian experience and realization through the Son, Jesus Christ. As such my knowledge of God, even in the Old Testament, does not have an abstract character to it, instead it always already has a Christ conditioned character to it. My knowledge of God, as a Christian, never was generic; my knowledge of God has always been filled out by the illumination that has come from my position as a Christian in union with Christ (unio cum Christo). So I didn’t come to the God of the Old Testament without the Son; I’ve only come to God, as a Christian, within the fulfillment of the promises made about him as the new creation of God in the vicarious and mediatorial humanity he assumed in the incarnation. As such my knowledge of God is not from a hypothetical space as if I was born a Jew in the ancient near east; my knowledge of God, as a Christian, at a definitional and prescriptive level comes bound up in the man from Nazareth. If this is the case we have, what I would like to call, a ‘retroactive recognition’ and knowledge of God; meaning that as Christians we don’t read God linearly from Genesis 1:1, instead we read God starting in the reality of John 1:1 and understand God, even in the Old Testament, only as the Father of the Son and the Son of the Father by the Holy Spirit.

If the above is true then a just is knowledge of God, of the sort that we find in many classical theisms does not make sense as a genuinely Christian mode for knowledge of God. For the Christian, in principle, there has never been a generic starting point for knowledge of God; there has never been a time where we, as a Christian, would pick up the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible and think of God in any other terms as the Father of the Son by the Holy Spirit, as if we could think of God in a time before (in salvation-history terms) we first knew him as the God who first loved us in the Son, Christ, that we might love him. We wouldn’t have the motivation or care to read the Old Testament and think God in personal and relational terms without first having relationship with this God as the Father of the Son Son of the Father by the Holy Spirit. But this is the route so many classical theists of the classical type want us to take in our knowledge of God. I don’t want to take this route; I don’t think it’s consistent with my position as a Christian. In other words, my knowledge of God as a Christian is necessarily what it is precisely because I am a Christian. As such the knowledge of God I have access to is fully and contingent upon his Self-revelation in Jesus Christ. As a Christian I don’t have another way, no churchly way, and no profane way of knowing God. God is either Self-explicated for us or he is explicated as is by us in abstraction from his Self-explication. There is no just is God; there is only the God for us that we know through Jesus Christ as the Son of the Father Father of the Son by the Holy Spirit. If this is so we can’t have a refracted knowledge of God that beams off of Scripture as if we meet God in the promises; no, our knowledge of God only comes to us in the fulfillment of the promises, in the seed of David, Jesus Christ. This does things to theological methodology, and subsequently to Christian spirituality.

Miscellanies on the Thomist Intellectualist Tradition and its Impact on Reformed Theology

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westminster

Something that I don’t think most Reformed theologians, whether yet budding, or senior are all that concerned with or cognizant of is the role that their respective anthropology plays in their theological prolegomena. I would say that most if not almost all of North American (and Western) Protestant Reformed theologies are funded by thinkers who are committed, in one form or another, to what is called an intellectualist anthropology. The originator of this type of anthropology, for Christian theological consumption, is most prominently, Thomas Aquinas; indeed Norman Fiering, in his index of medievally derived anthropologies, calls Thomas’s anthropology Thomist intellectualist—which would be a general label for anyone who receives Thomas’s intellectualist anthropology after him, in one way or the other. Here is how Aquinas describes the centrality of the ‘intellect’ or reason as definitive for what it means to be human:

In the original integrated state of man reason controlled our lower powers perfectly and God perfected the reason subordinated to him. This state was lost to us by Adam’s sin, and the resulting lack of order among the powers of our soul that incline us to virtue we call a wounding of nature. Ignorance is a wound in reason’s response to truth, wickedness in will’s response to good; weakness wounds the response of our aggressive emotions to challenge and difficulty, and disordered desire our affections’ reasonable and balanced response to pleasure. All sins inflict these four wounds blunting reason’s practical sense, hardening the will against good, increasing the difficulty of acting well and inflaming desire.[1]

For Thomas, the intellect, in a faculty psychology, is the defining component of what it means to be human. As we can see from his Summa Thomas does not believe that, during the fall, the ‘intellect’ was touched[2], instead it is only the ‘disordered desire [of] our affections’ that corrupts the rest of our humanity; as such the mind/intellect becomes central to what it means to be human relative to God as ultimate mind/intellect and Creator.

Ron Frost develops this further, and the impact this type of intellectualist anthropology had on the theology/soteriology of Post Reformed orthodox theologian William Perkins:

… William Perkins was answering the question of how God reaches humanity—the relation of grace to nature—by reengaging Thomas Aquinas’s thirteenth-century cooperative approach to salvation. Aquinas, with Aristotle, believed that morality is determined by the will, so that virtue is gained by making the virtuous choice. In its Christian expression the human will must be engaged in a saving choice to believe. But Aquinas also held, with Augustine, that the will is crippled by sin. Aquinas’s solution was to synthesize the moral axiom of Aristotle and Augustine’s axiom of disability: God places a newly created gift of grace in the souls of the elect that enables the will to operate once again. By this means of gracious enabling the will receives the necessary power to embrace salvation by an act of faith. This enabling “habit of grace” allows a person to make the saving decision, a decision God crowns with merit.

This cooperative scheme featured the human and divine wills working together, with the mind using the information offered by God. When the will has a set of operations set before it, its challenge is to overcome distracting affections. The greater power of the properly informed will, the greater its ability to defeat faulty passions. The act of believing is thus the premier work of the will, and is only accomplished by the prevenient enabling grace God provides.[3]

It is the mind/intellect that is given primacy in Perkins’s theological anthropology, and we can see (as reported by Frost) how this gets cashed out in Perkins’s soteriology.

Perkins was not alone, he was simply expressing what was common fare among the Post Reformation Protestant scholastic theology he was a part of during his period of history. Richard Muller speaks to the reality of this Thomist intellectualist tradition as he describes Arminius’s context as a theologian of his time:

The enlightenment of the intellect that draws man spiritually into final union with God leads to the “enlargement” of the will “from the inborn agreement of the will the intellect, and the analogy implanted in both, according to which the understanding extends itself to acts of volition, in the very proportion that it understands and knows.” Arminius, in summary, places himself fully into the intellectualist tradition.

What is more, Arminius’ argument for the priority of intellect in the final vision of God perfectly reproduces the classic intellectualist thesis of Thomas Aquinas. For Aquinas, intellect is higher or nobler than will inasmuch as the intellect does not merely address an object that is external to itself (as does the will) but, in addressing the object, also in some sense receives the object into itself and possesses in itself the form of the object. In the final vision of God, according to Aquinas, the soul has direct vision of the divine essence that is higher and nobler than the will’s love of God.

The juxtaposition of an intellectualist philosophical perspective with a practical orientation in Arminius’ theology represents, as noted earlier, a significant departure from the major medieval paradigms and a use of the scholastic past that is best characterized as eclectic. Praxis is, typically, associated with love and will, speculatio or contemplatio with intellect: the intellectualist model will, therefore, advocate a theology that is either primarily or utterly contemplative while the voluntarist model will define theology as primarily or utterly practical. Thus Aquinas assumes that theology is primarily contemplative whereas Scotus defines theology as practical. The Reformed tended toward a compromise that respect the balance of intellect and will but recognized the underlying soteriological issue as voluntaristic and, therefore, defined theology as both speculative and practical with emphasis on the practical….[4]

An Evangelical Calvinist Response

As we have just surveyed—I fear too fragementedly—what was predominate in Post Reformed orthodox theology was a mind/will centered anthropology that reflects (through an analogy of being) upon who God is conceived to be in this frame. The intellectualist tradition presumes that God as eternal ‘being’ implicates (as reflection as it were) what it means to be human being; and thus reasoning from the effect back to the cause, the intellectualist tradition believes that what it means to be God is someone who exists a se as a big intellect. This shapes the way classically Reformed (inclusive of Arminians) thinkers think of God, and it follows then that ‘feeling’ or ‘movement’ in God, which love presupposes upon, is simply an anthropopathism; in other words, love is not real, in an ontological sense. What defines God is something like an ultimate-Spock like being of existence, as such this God relates to humanity in a God-world relation in very impersonal ways (like through decrees).

The evangelical Calvinist after Barth and Torrance, on the other hand, does not think of God from within an intellectualist speculative tradition. Instead evangelical Calvinists along with Athanasius think it is better to think God, and as consequent, theological anthropology, from the eternal relation of Father-Son revealed by the Holy Spirit in Christ in the incarnation of the Son. As Athanasius famously asserts, “Therefore it is more pious and more accurate to signify God from the Son and call Him Father, than to name Him from His works only and call Him Unoriginate.” Evangelical Calvinists don’t attempt to think God from an analogy of being (analogia entis) in and from an abstract humanity; we think God from a center in God, in His Self-exegesis in the Son, Jesus Christ.

As we have illustrated in this post, if someone is committed to an intellectualist anthropology and tradition it gets cashed out in interesting ways; particularly with reference to how a thinker conceives of God, and how salvation is understood and given shape after that conception of God. As is the case in all instances, how God is conceived in the first order, will have subsequent and second order consequences for every other theological loci following.

I am afraid I have only started to pull on a whole bunch of threads all at once in this post, but I wanted to start pulling those threads so that maybe someone’s curiosity might be piqued to the point of doing further research themselves. I realize this post has a kind of palpable incoherence to it, but I am simply wanting to provide soundings for you as you come to realize that there are alternative traditions available to you, even in the Reformed world of thought.

What evangelical Calvinism does is to eschew thinking from a center within an abstract humanity; in other words we repudiate the idea that there is an analogy of being between God and humanity. There is no point of contact, then, between God and humanity from whence God can be conceived of apart from God’s own Self-revelation in Jesus Christ. If this is true, evangelical Calvinists have the advantage of the ground of all theological grammar, anthropology, and worship being the Triune life of God itself as ‘mediated’ to humanity in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. We do not have to think God from a faculty psychology as the ground of being from whence we think God. We can eschew thinking God from the accidents and effects that we discover and observe in the created order[5], and instead think directly of God, mediated in the hidden-ness of God in the humanity of God enfleshed in Jesus Christ.

 

 

[1] St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Concise Translation, 270-71.

[2] This is an important point because it keeps it keeps the imago Dei intact, and an analogy of being can be interconnected between God’s being (who is ultimate intellect) and human being (who is penultimate intellect).

[3] Ronald N. Frost, “The Bruised Reed: By Richard Sibbes (1577–1635),” in The Devoted Life: An Invitation to the Puritan Classics, eds. Kelly M. Kapic and Randall C. Gleason (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 88-9.

[4] Richard A. Muller, God, Creation, and Providence in the Thought of Jacob Arminius: Sources and Directions of Scholastic Protestantism in the Era of Early Orthodoxy (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 1991), 78-9.

[5] See Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 7.: “. . . the proposition that “God exists” is self evident in itself, for, as we shall see later, its subject and predicate are identical, since God is his own existence. But, because what it is to be God is not evident to us, the proposition is not self-evident to us, and needs to be made evident. This is done by means of things which, though less evident in themselves, are nevertheless more evident to us, by means, namely of God’s effects.”

Allow God to Tell His Own Story. Albrecht Ritschl, Karl Barth, and Thomas Torrance: A Better Way to do Genuine Christian Theology

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Karl Barth is famous for wanting to think theological thoughts strictly and only after Deus dixit (‘God has spoken’); he is famous for his desire to do Revelational Theology. Thomas F. Torrance, in his own way, but in the wake of Barth is likewise famous for his desire to do Revelational Theology. They were both very successful at this, and have left a great heritage for those of us who want ritschlto do theology After Barth&After Torrance. Neither Barth nor Torrance invented this approach; we could identify strains towards this type of approach strewn throughout church history. In this post I want to identify a more recent voice (relative to Barth’s location in history) that helped to foster the kind of trajectory that Barth, Torrance, and others picked up on later. I am sure for those who are Barth-haters that they would be tempted to use this as ammunition to tar-and-feather Barth (and Torrance) to the dump of theological Liberalism; be that as it may, I am going to risk it, and name this voice for you.

As you have been reading this post thus far you might wonder what the big deal is; you might be thinking “don’t all Christian theologians do revelational theology;” “don’t all Christian theologians attempt to avoid philosophical metaphysics in their theologizing and attempt to think God directly from Jesus Christ as God’s Self-exegesis and interpretation (Jn 1.18)?” Most would claim to do so, but most in Protestant theology have cozied up to the idea that some metaphysics (whether that be Thomist, Scotist, Nominalist, etc.) are inevitable; that some philosophical categories are necessary in order to attempt to think and communicate God in an intelligible coherent way. Barth and Torrance, and this voice I am going to identify don’t think this is the case, and they have not cozied up to this idea about using philosophy and metaphysics as the driver for the doing of Christian theology; like I noted they are committed principially to the idea that we can only do Christian theology after God has spoken (Deus dixit), and thus revelational theology.

The ‘voice’ that helped to pave the way for someone like Barth, at least in his emphasis on revelational theology was famed theologian Albrecht Ritschl (1822). Ritschl was anti-Hegel, and anti After Hegel theologians; if you know anything about Hegel you know that he wanted to supplant traditional Christian theology with his philosophically shaped pantheistic dialectically styled theologizing. Ristchl was responding to this style of philosophy and “metaphysics” (as it were); Barth similarly was responding to Hegel, but Kant even more. Nonetheless, it is interesting (at least to me) to see in Ritschl that in an de jure objective and principled way I can agree with; even if I cannot agree with probably anything else Ritschl stood for in his exegetical and theological conclusions.

In order to get an idea about all of this we will hear from H.R. Mackintosh (Thomas F. Torrance’s beloved teacher) as he develops Ritschl’s thinking on this, while at the same time offers a bit of critique.

Our study of this method may suitably begin with an allusion to two pernicious influences which, at every stage of his development except the first, Ritschl sought to drive from the field. One is Speculative Rationalism, with its claim that the true basis of theology is to be found in theoretical metaphysics. No doubt in a broad sense most of us are speculative rationalists in so far as we try to think out and think through the implications of Christian faith, in an effort to correlate each belief with all the rest. And in calling for the expulsion of metaphysics from theology, as I think we shall see Ritschl in form asked for more than could be conceded, and as it were drove the nail in so hard as to split the wood. Faith must always be metaphysical, for it rests upon convictions which, if true, must profoundly affect our whole view of the universe and the conduct befitting us within it. In this important sense, a metaphysical import belongs to every judgment concerning Ultimate Reality. Yet the belief or judgment in question need not have been reached by way of metaphysical argument, and in point of fact no essential Christian belief has ever been so reached, although metaphysical argument may later have been employed to defend it. And this, in the last resort, is the point Ritschl is bent on making. There is a Speculative Rationalism which comes to meet the Gospel with a ready-made framework of philosophical conceptions, insisting that faith is bound to use these conceptions, and no other, when it proceeds to formulate its own living content, and this in spite of the fact that its fundamental categories may have taken shape quite irrespectively of the experiences that make man a Christian. Philosophy as such is, even for the believer, the final court of appeal. This type of thought, of which Hegelianism is the classic instance, Ritschl strove not without success to dislodge from the seat of power. Anyone who knows more than the rudiments of his thought will acknowledge that his view of the living God, of revelation of Christ, of miracle, of the Church, is such as to lift the mind beyond the range of any metaphysic operating with general ideas. It becomes plain that, in spite of its great intellectual value, technical philosophy leaves on one side just those problems which possess a life-and-death interest for believing men. No books on metaphysics can be named which contain a serious handling of such matters as fellowship with God, the guilt of sin, the hearing of prayer, above all the redeeming Person of Jesus. By insisting that the Christian mind must at every point of religious belief be guided solely by revelation of God in Christ, Ritschl did his utmost to expel any and every presumptuous form of Speculative Rationalism; and it may well be that the future historian will reckon this to have been his best service to theology.[1]

And in case you were wondering how Ritschl fits with the trajectory of Barth/Torrance, or vice versa, here is what Torrance commentates in regard to Barth’s approach (which Torrance shared in this regard):

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

Moral of the Story:

Allow God’s own Self-exegeis, His own Self-interpretation to impose Godself upon you and the way you think about God and all His works (without separation between His Person and Work). Allow the categories and conceptions supplied by God Himself in Christ to provide the way we think God, and repudiate any approach to theologizing that allows philosophy and foreign metaphysics to set the tone for how we think God. If you do this things will go better; because if we get God wrong everything else that follows will be wrong.

 

[1] Hugh Ross Mackintosh, Types of Modern Theology: Schleiermacher to Barth (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937), 142-43.

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