Category Archives: Robert Dale Dawson

The Miracle of the Gospel against Worldviewism

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When we think of ‘worldview’ as an analytic tool, in order to categorize various belief systems worldwide, we often think, as Christians, that we have a spot in that type of indexing. But I am not ultimately a proponent of thinking of the Christian reality in the philosophical terms presupposed for thinking in terms of a worldview. Even so, insofar as this discipline of intellection goes, it can be helpful in at least providing a sense of order in regard to thinking about the various juxtapositions of the various ‘belief systems’ that populate the world, and its peoples. But at the same time, when the Christian gets into the ‘meatier’ things what ought to become evidently clear is that the Christian reality, who is the Christ and the triune God, are incapable of being subject to the sociological strictures used to adjudicate belief systems. The Christian reality gets behind such maneuvers; it is basic to the very fabric of seen and unseen reality; it has no analogues in the created order; it is a miracle of sui generis and novum magnitude.

For the remainder of this article, I want to provide a good word from Karl Barth on the problem that thinking about the Christianity reality, in terms of worldview, presents the Christian with. This type of thinking might contradict dearly held beliefs about the very structure of reality, for some. But I think that what Barth is getting at is, indeed, the most faithful telling the Christian can hear in regard to thinking about both protology and eschatology with reference to their center in Jesus Christ. What will be observed, as I develop this a bit further, is the primordial nature of the Christian reality; such that its reality has no competitors, as if in a dualistic duel.

Robert Dale Dawson writes, with reference to Barth’s theology of the resurrection, and the primal significance and reach such theology has towards Barth’s thinking.

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.[1]

Dawson sets us up to read Barth well with reference to the problems that world-view presents its would-be practitioners with. The reader will notice how Dawson’s description of Barth’s thinking of “the primordiality of the resurrection as the singular history-making, yet history-delimiting, act of God” dovetails nicely with Barth’s thoughts in general, with regard to thinking the Evangel in the terms that world-view presupposes.

Barth writes at length:

. . . We conclude this introductory consideration with an observation which in the light of this applies to the Christian doctrine of creation as a whole.

Its theme is the work of God which is characterised by the fact that—because the covenant is its basic purpose and meaning and God in Jesus Christ is the Creator—it is divine benefit. The character of its theme, established in this way, is what distinguishes the Christin doctrine of creation from all the so-called world-views which have emerged or may conceivably emerge in the spheres of mythology, philosophy and science. It differs from all these by the fact that it is based on God’s revelation. But this is not merely a formal difference. It is also material. The Christian doctrine of creation does not merely take its rise from another source. It also arises very differently from all such world-views. It not only has a different origin, but has a different object and pursues a different course. The divine activity which is its object can never become the theme of a world-view.

The truth of this assertion is seen at once from the fact that none of the world-views so far known to us has attained to the concept of creation by following to the end the way from noetics to ontology and genesology, but has usually remained stuck either in noetics or at most in ontology. The philosophical equivalent for the theological idea of divine creation would have us to be at least that of a pure and basic becoming underlying and therefore preceding all perception and being. But the world-views normally take their point of departure within the circle of perception and being, subject and object, and are content to describe it according to the relationships determined by a particular view, the variations and differences, progressions and retrogressions, between the individual systems being so great that on the one hand the universe seems to be more like a great thought, and on the other more like a great machine. In some cases the basic problem of becoming, the question of the whence of the universe, whether it be conceived as thought or machine, is not even noticed but naively ignored. In others it is not overlooked but consciously left open, with a resigned or emphatic assertion of its inherent unanswerability. In others again there may be an attempt to answer it, but only in the form of a geneseologically deepened noetics or ontology, so that it is not really answered but only distorted. For the problem of becoming as opposed to that of knowledge or being is a new and independent problem which cannot be answered by any interpretation of knowledge and being and their mutual relationship. It must be viewed independently if it is to escape the suspicion that it has not really been viewed at all.[2]

The reader might better be informed now, at the very least, as to why Barth rejects the discipline and categorization that world-view offers as an analytic tool; at least in regard to thinking the Christian reality. I am, once again (surprise!), in agreement with Barth on this. His rejection of worldview thinking, of course, fits well with his rejection of natural theology; indeed, his rejection of natural theology naturally (pun intended) leads to a rejection of thinking in terms of worldviews.

When it comes to the evangelistic task (gift), personally, I make use of whatever tools seem necessary for that particular engagement. Speaking in terms of worldviews, initially, might be helpful towards grabbing some sort of intellectual footing among the people we are seeking to reach for Christ. But for me, really, the better way is to go the way of Barth; at least when proclaiming the Gospel to people. People (all of us) need to be confronted with the unapologetic and weightiness of the living God; that’s what a genuine presentation of the Gospel does (and comes with). It is the ‘natural man’ who wants to reason their way to whatever they want to reason themselves to. But the Gospel, and its eternal reality, is not natural. The Gospel is supranatural even as it comes veiled in the natural of the human body. It is in this way, on the analogy of the incarnation, that the Gospel (God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ; for ‘revelation is reconciliation’) is in the world, but not of it. God is genuinely and fully human in Christ, but human in the sense that He is, in Christ, the archetype, the firstborn of creation, humanity (cf. Col 1.15). He is the One for the many. Even this movement itself, its unilateral ingress, ought to show the seeker the Way, the order of God; indeed, the order of the Gospel itself. The order, as Dawson, with reference to Barth, and Barth himself have shown is of a primordial nature vis-à-vis the creation (and re-creation) of the world. There is no “worldview” that can account for that since the world has no view without first being created and re-created ex nihilo, as it were, in and from the resurrection of God in the humanity of Jesus Christ. Worldviewism can attempt to give account for these heights via propositions and generalizations, but the Gospel itself ultimately resists such attempts; the Gospel represents, to use philosophical jargon: the scandal of particularity. The claim of the Gospel is that there is only One living God, and that He is for us, for the world in Jesus Christ. The claim of the Gospel is that Christ alone is the way, the truth, and the life; that is the primordiality of the whole thing. The Gospel, and all of its implications, is the MIRACLE.

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

[2] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/1 §42 The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 335-36.

On a Genuinely Christian Theology of History and Apocalyptic Theology

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Samuel Adams in his book The Reality of God and Historical Method: Apocalyptic Theology in Conversation with N. T. Wright offers many important insights in regard to ‘apocalyptic theology’ in contradistinction to NT Wright’s ‘worldview’ or what I would call ‘naturalist’ approach to biblical studies and theological reflection. One aspect I want to highlight from Adams’ book (his published PhD dissertation written at the University of St. Andrews) is his point about a theology history (we might also classify this as a theological ontology and its implications for historiographic method and conclusion). What he writes, as the reader will see, doesn’t just contradict Wright’s naturalist approach, but it implicates any historiographical work that appeals to a natural theology in regard to its own historiographical methodology. For my money this implicates the current work being done in the name of ‘theology of retrieval’ by many evangelical Reformed types. I have made this same critique in years past, in regard to the reality of the prior assumptions that so-called ecclesial historians, such as Richard Muller, bring to their work of re-constructing the Protestant history of the 16th and 17th centuries as that developed in what has come to be called Post Reformed orthodoxy. What the reader will see, as Adams so concisely details, is how we all bring informing theological matrices to the task of re-constructing the “recorded” history. As such it is best to be upfront about this, and as a matter of first order importance, be transparent about what particular ‘theology of history’ we are bringing to our historiographical reconstruction. This way we won’t lead our readers to think that we are simply presenting them with the ‘naked facts’ of history. We won’t allow our readers to confuse, potentially, our theological frameworks for the so-called ‘reconstructed’ history, as if the history we are culling comes with its own inherent sacrosanct imprimatur. Adams writes:

From the outset the issue has been the reality of God and the theoretical implications of that reality for the work of historiography—historiography, that is, in the service of theology. A theology of historiography, as I have argued, is not divorced from a theology of history because historiography must assume a narrative, a story, in order to make sense of historical “data.” Bare facts do not exist outside of the complex webs of human interpretation. The stories that make up history are never metaphysically or theologically neutral. Therefore, it is methodologically dishonest not to begin with a theology of history, even if that theology is informed to a large extent by historical events. There is no way out of this circularity, nor should there be. But there is a way into this circularity. This is what is referred to (perhaps ambiguously) as the “apocalyptic event,” the breaking-in from outside that both sets anew the agenda for the story and also maintains at all times a transcendent corrective/critique. This somewhat abstract and theoretical way of speaking of the theology of history is only a conceptualization of the concrete reality of the incarnation and the relationship of the Father’s action in sending the Son, becoming Jesus of Nazareth, living, bearing witness to the kingdom, dying, rising and ascending. This is the reality of God that is given in history but cannot be contained by any one prior telling of history, except to say that the final meaning of all history is revealed in the life, death and resurrection of this same Jesus of Nazareth.[1]

Robert Dale Dawson, as he writes on a doctrine of resurrection in theology of Karl Barth, offers an insight that dovetails nicely with Adams’ point about the analogy of the incarnation as the basis for developing a genuinely Christian theology of history:

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]

Rather than naively assuming that human beings just do have the natural or latent capacity to read history in brute investigative ways, as Adams and Dawson both underscore, respectively, for the Christian telling there is no such natural historiographical capaciousness available. This, in particular, as Adams develops, implicates the type of methodology that NT Wright deploys in his biblical studies mode vis-à-vis Pauline theology; more generally his point, along with Dawson’s, particularly as that relates to the development of Church history, implicates any historiographical work, insofar that that work has prior commitments (those of the historian) informing the re-constructional work of said historian.

The aforementioned tells us at least two things: 1) all interpreters, whether historians or not, bring a priori ideological and ideational commitments to their interpretive work, 2) as Christian interpreters we necessarily work from the new creation of God’s historical life for the world in Jesus Christ. The latter point ought to inflect the prior insofar that Christians, even historian ones, principially, always are bearing witness to the reality of Jesus Christ. If the historian, or interpreter in general, claims to be presupposition-less when approaching their task as a historian, as Muller, and other retrievers of historical theology often claim, or imply, the discerning Christian ought to challenge this with the fact both Adams and Dawson point up, respectively. That is, nobody is a tabula rasa, we are all shaped by some ideation; if we claim to not be, it is this this mode itself, of being naïve to our ideational forces, that becomes the ideological construct that ends up informing our respective tellings of theological history. As such, one consequence, as already mentioned, ends up being that the historian’s prior theological framework becomes conflated with the way they re-construct the history. And when this reconstruction is grounded in a natural theology, as if the Church or Biblical historian is ‘doing theology’ in their historical reconstruction, the historian’s natural theology becomes the very history they are ostensibly reconstructing. But it is this very point that ought to be up for consideration prior to the narrativizing of Holy Scripture’s history, if not the history of the Church and its respective interpretations and dogmatizing.

The final reduction: every interpreter is befuddled by their own ideational sitz im leben. We ought to admit this, and then recognize that God has provided the world with a new history to think “history” from (we could think geschichte and historie at this point) within. That is, the Christian ought to recognize that the ground and grammar of all interpretation, for the Christian, has been provided for and delimited by the God’s new creation as actualized in the resurrection/ascension of Jesus Christ. This is the “ideological” frame the Christian exegete, whether that be of the Bible, Church history, Ethics so on and so forth has been provided with, and is provided with afresh anew, apocalyptically, by the irruptive reality of the Theanthropos, Jesus Christ, who is the reality, the telos and goal, from beginning to end, of all of creation; and thus, all of world history and its developments.

[1] Samuel V. Adams, The Reality of God and Historical Method: Apocalyptic Theology in Conversation with N. T. Wright (Downers Grove, Illinois: IVP Academic, 2015), 271.

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

A Reflection on Hebrews 10:26 and the Futility of Fighting for this World Order

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26 For if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, 27 but a fearful expectation of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries. 28 Anyone who has set aside the law of Moses dies without mercy on the evidence of two or three witnesses. 29 How much worse punishment, do you think, will be deserved by the one who has trampled underfoot the Son of God, and has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has outraged the Spirit of grace? 30 For we know him who said, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay.” And again, “The Lord will judge his people.” 31 It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. —Hebrews 10:26-31

I want to focus on the emboldened clause in verse 26. It seems lost on people, Christian people even, that the One who spoke the world into existence, the One who continues to hold the visible and invisible worlds together by His power, this One became human that we might by the grace of adoption become sons and daughters of the living God; just as Jesus Christ is our brother. I enter this brief excursus with the aforementioned attempt to orient our perspectives because everything, all of reality hangs on that reality. The incarnation and atonement, the death, burial, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ has become too domesticated. The sui generis otherworldly / thisworldly nature of the Theanthropos, Godman breaking into this world has become all too common. Because of this people generally fail to grasp the significance of the clause under consideration.

What people, in the main, fail to appreciate is that God become human in Jesus Christ, all the way unto the obedience and death of the cross, means that there no longer is a normal world to which we can return. The world has genuinely and apocalyptically been put to death, and anyone attempting to find their identity therein, and therefrom, are only attempting to breathe life into a corpse incapable of resurrection. ‘There no longer remains a sacrifice for sins’ entails that there was only One person, God in Christ, who had the resource and power to penetrate into the dark abyss of the fallen human heart, put it to literal death, and from that start afresh anew and re-create a new heavens and earth, under the foot and dominion of the Son of Man, and all those co-heirs with Him. In other words, this sort of pining away for a recuperation of the world that Christ has already declared dead, and put to death, by His death of all deaths, is the satanic errand that even the Egyptian high priests knew was the fool’s errand; they knew, and so should we, that only the ‘finger of God’ can bring new life ex nihilo. 

Robert Dale Dawson sums up what I am after as he comments on a doctrine of the resurrection in the theology of Karl Barth: “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.”1 I take this notional reality in Barth’s theology of the resurrection as the ground for allowing the author to the Hebrews to make the astonishing claim that ‘there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins,’ if and fact a person rejects God’s Self-sacrifice for them, for the world, in Jesus Christ. In short, for the Christian, there is no other world to return to, but the Kingdom of God that has been established outwith human hands; the Kingdom, the new creation that has been established and re-created by God alone. It is high time that Christians demythologize the notion that in this world we have a home; we surely, and clearly do not. We are ambassadors of the fact that this world in fact is no more, and that the only world that has concrete perduring reality to it is the one that has come in the dust and blood of Jesus’ body.

1 Robert Dale Dawson, The Resurrection in Karl Barth (UK/USA: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007), 13

Christian History::It Is, Jesus

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Christian History is both similar to, and yet distinct from Greek conceptions of history during the time of Christ. Not surprising, a Christian notion of history has Christ as its centraldogma. Unique to Christian history is the concentration and even delimitation to other notions of histories that the resurrection and person of Jesus Christ present it with. I wasn’t going to share the following passage in this post, since I’ve shared it multiple times in other posts, but it is quite pertinent to the insight I want to share from Michael Gillespie on Christian history. The following is from Robert Dale Dawson, and his insight on how Barth’s doctrine of the resurrection of Christ impacts all of reality at a primal level. Dawson writes:

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.[1]

And here is Gillespie on Christian history. Maybe you will see how what he writes about the development of a Christian understanding of history qua Greek history, coheres quite nicely with the theological account of history-making referred to by Dawson with reference to Barth’s doctrine of the resurrection. Gillespie writes:

This synthesis of Christian theology and ancient history brought about a decisive and fundamental change in the conception of history itself. The original Greek sense of history as witness remains in Christian history, but it is no longer the knowledge of what is seen but the knowledge of God through the witness of the Apostles. History which had sought the eternal in the actual thus becomes the revelation of the eternal as such, the witness to the hidden truth or meaning of events as a whole, which comes to light and hence visibility in and through the Word, i.e., in and through Christ. History thus comes to rest not upon seeing or contemplation, i.e., not upon the immediate experience and apprehension of the eternal, but upon the authority and through the mediation of Scripture, i.e., through the Word itself. Thus history for Christianity is not the enquiry into or the account of events with a view to extracting and immortalizing noble deeds but the faith in the single event, the kairos, that reveals the hitherto hidden truth and order in all creation.

All Christian history in this sense is written sub specie aeternitatis. Time is no longer understood as the realm of transience, governed by caprice or destiny, but the unfolding of eternity backwards and forwards out of the moment of creation, i.e., out of the kairos in which Christ comes into the world. This single event is thus the key to all creation, since every other event follows from it and is only comprehensible in terms of it. History in this sense becomes prophetic, for just as the Old Testament prophets were able to foresee the coming of Christ by means of divine inspiration, so on the basis of this new dispensation the significance of the entire past and the entire future becomes comprehensible.[2]

If you are interested in reading a deeper theological account on these things you can always crack open sections of Barth’s Church Dogmatics I/1 where he elaborates with his normal genius on the concept of kairos that Gillespie refers to. To be clear, Gillespie’s development isn’t with reference to Barth, per se, but Barth, for my lights, exemplifies this conception of Christian History better than any other theologian that I am aware of. It is important to understand that for the Christian, history isn’t simply ditch wherein we must attempt to cipher out its esse, nor is it simply a linear unfolding of brute hard facts (even though history is made up of factual and concrete events); but for the Christian, history, is always understood from its eschatological telos as the Christ always already sits front and center as the gravitas from whence all of history flows. If this is the case, then Christian history is less focused on the linear unfolding of events, and their reconstruction, per se, and more focused on the apocalyptic in-breaking of history’s ultimate reality in the risen Jesus Christ. In other words, for the Christian, history is about Jesus because Jesus is God’s history for the world yesterday, today, and forever.

I cannot think of a better passage of Scripture to end this post on, but from what we find in Colossians 1:15 and following. Here we see the doctrine of the Primacy of Jesus Christ, and His emphasis as the image of God, as the firstborn from the dead, from whence all of reality is oriented and grounded for time immemorial. I leave you with a passage that the Scotist thesis sees as central, and what some have called ‘elevation theology’:

15 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. 16 For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him. 17 And He is before all things, and in Him all things consist. 18 And He is the head of the body, the church, who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things He may have the preeminence.19 For it pleased the Father that in Him all the fullness should dwell, 20 and by Him to reconcile all things to Himself, by Him, whether things on earth or things in heaven, having made peace through the blood of His cross.21 And you, who once were alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now He has reconciled 22 in the body of His flesh through death, to present you holy, and blameless, and above reproach in His sight— 23 if indeed you continue in the faith, grounded and steadfast, and are not moved away from the hope of the gospel which you heard, which was preached to every creature under heaven, of which I, Paul, became a minister.

 

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

[2] Michael Allen Gillespie, Hegel, Heidegger, and the Ground of History (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 6-7.

One More Response to Leighton Flowers and Semi-Pelagianism: How a Christ Conditioned Theological Ontology Corrects

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Leighton Flowers; one more time. He continues to assert that his soteriological position is not semi-Pelagian; and this is understandable, who would want to have that as the label of their soteriological theory. Flowers has been under critique by folks like James White (someone I equally consider semi-Pelagian in soteriological theory), more recently by Jordan Cooper, and even by me (even though Flowers only seems inclined to publicly respond to people with bigger social media platforms). The charge from these guys, and me, is that Flowers’ theory of salvation suffers from what in the history would be identified as semi-Pelagianism. I have already attempted to sketch the basics of Flowers’ understanding of salvation here, so we won’t rehash that. But in response to this ongoing critique of his position he just posted another, more brief, response to his despisers here. Just watch what he says in this latest dispatch of his, and listen very carefully to how he tries to thread the needle between an anthropology (which is his) that is most definitely of the species, semi-Pelagian, and the opposite pole of God’s unilateral and de jure movement in the accomplishment of salvation in Jesus Christ. As you will notice, Leighton likes to use illustrations and analogies; we might say that Flowers is willing to die by the illustrations and analogies of a thousand deaths. You will also notice that Flowers often uses biblical ‘parables’ and superficial referral to descriptive events in Scripture in order to build his soteriological superstructure; this is not an advisable hermeneutic. For someone who says they only want to go where the Bible goes, you would think they would want to also operate with a critical biblical hermeneutic that pays close attention to the literary and theological features of said text.

At bottom, Flowers rejects the concept that a person is ‘born’ with a moral or spiritual incapacity to say yes or no to God in Christ in the Gospel offer. Flowers believes that a person ‘retains’ said ‘moral’ capacity, post-fall, to recognize their need for Christ when confronted with the Gospel. We might say that Flowers’ theory operates with a sort of occasionalism or situationalism in regard to the Gospel power. That is, Flowers seems to think that in any given moment a person can simply say yes or no to God, when confronted with God in Gospel, of their own resources. Flowers will say, along with his statement of faith, that he affirms that God takes the ‘first step’ towards humanity (this would be de jure or objectively)—and he believes this is a sufficient response and workaround the charge that he suffers from semi-Pelagianism—but that at the in se level the person confronted with this objective Gospel reality, even as the Holy Spirit has used a variety of occasions or situations to ‘woo’ said person, has the ‘moral capacity’ within themselves, some sort of inherent original creational capacity, resistant to the noetic effects of the fall, to say yes or no to the Gospel offer. As I noted in my last Flowers post, this fits well with, at least, semi-Pelagian theory.

One of the theologians Flowers depends on, in order to evade the charge of semi-Pelagian, is Adam Harwood of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary (where Flowers earned his DMin degree). Harwood, in an article attempting to ‘shed’ the charge of semi-Pelagian, relative to his and Flowers’ et al. view, shares the pertinent articles of confession from their statement of faith:

Article 2, “(W)e deny that any sinner is saved apart from a free response to the Holy Spirit’s drawing through the Gospel.”

Article 4, “We affirm that grace is God’s generous decision to provide salvation… in freely offering the Gospel in the power of the Holy Spirit, and in uniting the believer to Christ through the Holy Spirit by faith.”

Article 5, “We affirm that any person who responds to the Gospel with repentance and faith is born again through the power of the Holy Spirit. He is a new creation in Christ and enters, at the moment he believes, into eternal life.”

Article 8, The call to salvation is made “by the Holy Spirit through the Gospel.”[1]

I have emboldened the parts of the articles that ought to illustrate, for the careful and perceptive thinker, of the sort of ‘sleight-of-hand’ this statement, and its proponents, like Harwood and Flowers represent, are attempting to engage in (albeit with genuine intention). In particular, we see the statement affirming that grace is God’s generous decision to provide salvation; this is the de jure or objective component I was noting earlier. In article five, as I’ve emboldened, it says that ‘any person who responds (this would be the de facto, in se, or subjective response) to the Gospel becomes a ‘new creation.’ These are exactly the points that demonstrate the sub-grace anthropology this position suffers from. I say sub-grace because it thinks of grace in qualitative or substantial terms, in abstract terms that only think grace as a mechanism that God brings salvation through to individual respondents. But this isn’t how the Bible thinks of God’s grace; the Bible thinks of God’s grace as the all encompassing reality of God’s life for us, for the creation itself. Just as ‘in the beginning God created the heavens and earth,’ was His first act of grace (as Ray Anderson so helpfully identifies), ‘in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,’ as riff on Genesis 1.1, is the climax of that first act of God to create to begin with. In other words, and this is where Flowers et al. goes clearly off the rails, and this because of his anemic biblical hermeneutic and commitment to a nuda or solo Scriptura, God’s grace cannot and should not ever be thought of apart from God’s free choice and election to be for and with us, and not be God without us, in Jesus Christ. This is what the original creation was funded by, as we see God’s first narratival act in Scripture is, indeed, to create when He didn’t have to; and it is this same creatio ex nihilo that funds the recreatio ex nihilo actualized in the resurrected humanity of Jesus Christ. This is what Flowers et al. fail to grasp in this whole discussion about an abstract moral or spiritual incapacity for God; they don’t think theologically whatsoever; they don’t seem to recognize that there is a theological taxis (order) to the canonical flow and deep-context of Holy Scripture. They fail to recognize that Scripture has a robust Trinitarian ground and grammar, and as such reduce this whole discussion of anthropology vis-à-vis moral incapacity for God, to an abstract locus (think of the Ramist methodology that funds the scholasticism of Post Reformed orthodoxy) that is detached from its theo-logical dimensional ground in the pleroma of God’s triune life for us in Jesus Christ.

In nuce: Flowers et al. is looking for a silver-bullet verse or cluster of verses from the Bible that proves that he is wrong, and the rest of the classical tradition is right in regard to this idea that humanity is or is not morally or spiritually capable to say yes or no to God of their own volition (even as the occasion of ‘wooing’ is set by the Holy Spirit). But this whole quest is a reductionistic one that ignores a doctrine of creation/recreation as that is taught and ‘understood’ by Scripture’s reality in Jesus Christ. Robert Dale Dawson gets at this in a very precise way as he is commenting on Karl Barth’s doctrine of resurrection:

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]

Reference to this summative passage from Dawson might seem out of place in our current discussion, but it is not! Indeed, this passage is rather illustrative, and thus instructive for our purposes of critique towards Flowers&co. Flowers et al. get lost in a reduction of the text of Holy Scripture when they reduce it to a datum to be scoured for proving this abstract or that abstract doctrine. Doctrines that are strained out through a Ramist locus methodology that have no necessary attachment to the broader theological soundings and reality that the text of Holy Scripture bears witness to; viz. the ineffable and inexhaustible riches of God’s triune life. Because of this approach, Flowers’ et al. miss the creation/recreational themes that are present from the very first verse of the Bible. As such, they don’t even start to think of anthropology/soteriology and other ologies within and from a theological ontology that necessarily starts from the ‘new creation’ reality of the resurrection. They fail to realize, even as Barth realized it in full, the very fact and need for the incarnation and atonement of God in Jesus Christ for us, reveals to us (or it should!) that we indeed have been plunged into a spiritual incapacity for God; of the sort that what was required was that God assume our sinful humanity in Christ, take it to the cross, put it death, and raise it anew in the resurrected RECREATED vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. This is God’s ‘grace all the way down,’ and it decimates any attempt to even start the discussion that Flowers et al. are currently lost within. The biblical discussion worth having is an Athanasian one (see his little book On Incarnation), not the Augustinian one that Flowers, along with his Calvinist and Lutheran orthodox counterparts are having. But this is the point: Flowers, for all his bluster about “being biblical” is starting his biblicism in just as strident of a theological place as anyone else; it is just that his starting point suffers from the entailments that give rise to debates about semi-Pelagianism, and other abstractions that a properly formed, Christ concretized theological ontology and hermeneutic elide from the get go.

The incarnation and resurrection of God in Christ itself indicates, without question, that humanity outwith God’s grace all the way down, is most certainly spiritually incapable of saying yes to God; since Jesus is God’s Yes and Amen for us. If Jesus, in His vicarious humanity, in His resurrected humanity is God’s Yes and Amen for us, then only those in ontic and ontological participation with Him, as He assumed our humanity that we by the Holy Spirit’s adoption might come to assume His, are spiritually capable ‘from there!,’ in echo of His Yes and Amen for us, to say yes and amen to the Father’s free offering of salvation in the Son’s choice to be us, for us, and in us. These are biblical categories, of Chalcedonian pattern, that Flowers et al. are clueless of. He is not open for correction in this area, and thus will continue on in the misguided foray of attempting to thwart “Calvinism” at the cost of his own theological soul. The bottom line point is that we are spiritually capable to say yes to God because of the recreational ground of God’s Grace that He has provided for in the new humanity of Jesus Christ. We are capable for God because God in Christ was first capable for us and in us. QED

Addendum: You all might be interested in reading this short post as a supplement to this post. While Flowers doesn’t speak in these sort of nuanced terms, it is hard to see him even thinking in the terms of ‘cooperative grace’ or the semi-Pelagian notion of grace that we see described in ‘habitus grace’, as that is operative in the Roman soteriological framework. I think I might another post using the definition by Muller with more direction focused on Flowers, hopefully for a final time. I just don’t think he is interested in thinking through these things in the sort of nuanced way required.

[1] Source.

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

No Reality Behind the Back of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ: An Affront to Atheism and Natural Systems

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Introduction

It is important, in my view, to recognize that there is nothing natural about the Gospel. If theology is the explication of the Gospel, therefore, there is nothing natural about the theological task. In other words, as the Apostle Paul notes in Galatians: “For I would have you know, brethren, that the gospel which was preached by me is not according to man.  For I neither received it from man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.” In the realm of apologetics this might be troubling. But we aren’t doing apologetics, per se, we’re doing Christian Dogmatics; which done well, is its own best apologetic.

For the remainder of this lengthy post we will take a look at a section from George Hunsinger, as he describes the way Karl Barth did Christian theology. What I hope stands out is how a genuinely Christian theology looks, one based strictly on the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. On the negative side: I hope that Christian Dogmatics is understood to be something fully distinct, and even greater than, what has come to be called Christian apologetics. As these elements are underscored, my further hope is that as we come to better understand how a genuinely Christian Dogmatics is undertaken (i.e. which is to say: its prolegomenon, or methodological soundings), we will understand why I think it is a false errand for the Christian to interpose an apologetic ground into their respective theologies and Christian Dogmatics. This post will dovetail nicely with the one I recently published on foundationalism.

The Genuinely Christian Dogmatic Way

Before we get to the Hunsinger quote, let us hear from Robert Dale Dawson on Barth’s theology of resurrection. What Dawson draws out in Barth’s theology is fundamental to understanding what Hunsinger will latterly develop. Dawson illustrates for us just how primal resurrection or recreation ought to be for how the Christian thinks at both a theologically ontological level, and epistemological level. What Dawson shows, if Barth’s thought is to be taken seriously, is that all of reality, God’s reality, can only be known and engaged with at its Archimedean point when a person has been given eyes of faith to see it with.

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.[1]

For Barth, according to Dawson, the resurrection, as corollary with something like creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing), is such a basic and primal reality that all of created reality is contingent upon its first order reality. We might say in this frame, for Barth: there is no going behind the back of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. His resurrection or recreation is as fundamental to all reality to such an extent, that without it there would be no ‘real’ creation for real[ist] thought and living to take place within. To put it in an Athanasian key: if Christ had not come and resurrected all of created reality would have simply evaporated back into the nothingness it had been thrust into at the fall. In other words, what was determined at the Noahic flood of utter destruction would have been the worldwide reality without the coming and going forth of Christ in the belly of Jonah’s big fish. As David Fergusson has rightly noted: “The world was made so that Christ might be born.”[2] The point: all that is, seen and unseen, is because of and for Christ; without Christ coming the first time, the world simply would not be. And without Christ coming the second time, the world would simply slip off into the oblivion we see attempting to overtake her currently. For Barth, according to Dawson, supplemented by the thought of others, all of reality is contingent upon God’s new life for us in the vicarious humanity of the resurrected Christ.

In light of what we just considered, Hunsinger offers further substantiation on how Barth thought from the particularity and concreteness of the incarnation of God in Christ. Here, Hunsinger is detailing how Barth operated from what Hunsinger identified as Barth’s ‘Chalcedonian pattern.’ What the reader will see is the way Barth, according to Hunsinger, deployed the categories of the hypostatic union, and/or Chalcedonian Christology, towards the way he attempted to think all reality; which is to say, theological reality. We will read along with Hunsinger for a moment, and then attempt to elucidate how Hunsinger and Dawson’s readings of Barth converge.

Testing for Incoherence Within the Framework of the Chalcedonian Pattern

The coherentist mode of testing, as it emerged in the survey of rationalism, also plays a decisive role in Barth’s justification of his position on double agency. Directly and indirectly, therefore, it serves to justify his reliance on the conceptions of miracle and mystery in that position. On the exegetical or hermeneutical premise that the terms of the Chalcedonian pattern are rooted in the biblical testimony regarding how divine and human agency are related, the mode of doctrinal testing proceeds as follows. The Chalcedonian pattern is used to specify counterpositions that would be doctrinally incoherent (and also incoherent with scripture). “Without separation or division” means that no independent human autonomy can be posited in relation to God. “Without confusion or change” means that not divine determinism or monism can be posited in relation to humanity. Finally, “complete in deity and complete in humanity” means that no symmetrical relationship can be posited between divine and human actions (or better, none that is not asymmetrical). It also means that the two cannot be posited as ultimately identical. Taken together, these considerations mean that, if the foregoing conditions are to be met, no nonmiraculous and nonmysterious conception is possible. The charge of incoherence (as previously defined) thereby reveals itself to be abstract, in the sense that it does not adequately take all the necessary factors into account. It does not work inductively from the subject matter (as attested by scripture)–as the motif of particularism would prescribe. Instead, it starts from general considerations such as formal logic and applies them to certain isolated aspects of the more “concrete” position. At the same time, the charge may well have implicated itself, wittingly or unwittingly, in one of the rejected couterpositions.[3]

The reader will have noticed that Hunsinger is attempting to defend Barth from the charge often made against him that his theological paradigm is incoherent. What Hunsinger is attempting to show (and he does) is that Barth is simply attempting to think God and all of reality from the analogy of the incarnation. Barth starts with the premise that Jesus Christ is God’s exegesis alone (cf. Jn 1.18), and he never strays from this commitment in his theological method. If we couple this with what Dawson highlights, in regard to Barth’s understanding of the primal history and ontological delimiting reality of the resurrection/recreation of Jesus Christ, these things start to make sense.

Barth’s whole approach to theology is to think from the scandal of the cross, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ (cf. I Cor. 1.17-25). There is no general or natural ground, in Barth’s schema, to approach God through. There is only the holy ground He creates for Himself in the penetration of all humanity by His assumption of that humanity in Christ. The most obvious biblical illustration of this is Moses and the burning bush. None of that scenario was contingent upon Moses discovering just the right conditions for thinking God. God showed up in the most unexpected way, and his ‘showing up’ was what made that ground hallowed and receptive for what He desired to accomplish therein.

The point of this is that for the Christian, we are not attempting to ‘prove’ God’s existence prior to our ability to speak about God. We are folks who know and speak God only after He has spoken (Deus dixit) to us in and through His Word, who is the Christ. As the evangelist John makes clear: “My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me; and I give eternal life to them, and they will never perish; and no one will snatch them out of My hand.  My Father, who has given them to Me, is greater than all; and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand.  I and the Father are one.”[4] But what stands behind this, as we have been developing throughout this post, is that we know and hear the living God’s voice not based on anything we have discovered, but based on the fact that God has first acted for us in Christ that we might know and hear Him.

Conclusion

What atheists and agnostics, and other pagans, fail to recognize is that the Christian God just is. He isn’t at our behest; we are at His. What the unbeliever fails realize is that the Christian God is fully hidden in the holiness of His own inner and eternal life; and that without His mercifulness and graciousness to reveal Himself to and for the world, the world could never know of Him. It is only by the faith of Christ that people come to have eyes of faith to see Him with, and ears of faith to hear Him with. It isn’t a blind faith, so called, it is the concrete faith of Christ that came with His sweaty and bloody cross-work, which resulted in the new creation of resurrection and new life. It is the new life that the Christian is able to think God from. It isn’t a dead thinking, but a living thinking in con-versation with the risen Christ who sits at the right hand of the Father. There is no apologetic in the world that can think this type of God in abstraction from God’s willingness to first be for us. The atheist might think they have “disproven” God’s existence by reliance on metaphysical naturalism, or based on assertion and self-will. But the Christian God can neither be proven nor disproven; He can only be known and heard as the person bows their knee in submission to Christ, and acknowledges that He is Lord. This, not by might, nor by power, but by the Spirit.

5 Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, 6 who, being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, 7 but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men. 8 And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross. 9 Therefore God also has highly exalted Him and given Him the name which is above every name, 10 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those in heaven, and of those on earth, and of those under the earth, 11 and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. –Philippians 2:5-11

[1] Robert Dale Dawson, The Resurrection in Karl Barth (UK/USA: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007), 13 [Emphasis is mine].

[2] David Fergusson, “Creation,” in The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology, edited by John Webster, Kathryn Tanner, and Iain Torrance, 76-7.

[3] George Hunsinger, How To Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 195-98 nook version. 

[4] John 1:27-30.

The Radical Sacrifice of God in Apocalyptic Frame

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I just started reading, not only Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, but just this evening, Terry Eagleton’s new book: Radical Sacrifice. They are in tandem percolating my wits in a certain direction and mode of feeling. This particular post will reference Eagleton’s work, in discussion with a burgeoning theological mode that someone like Philip Ziegler is at the forefront of developing; viz. I will bring Eagleton’s thinking into some con-versation with Ziegler’s work, and then not to mention, I will touch upon some of Karl Barth’s thinking as distilled by Robert Dale Dawson (meaning I will be drawing off of previous posts as I bring those into passing with Eagleton’s). The point I want to press has, once again, to do with Apocalyptic Theology, but in this instance, I want to fill that out with Eagleton’s thinking on sacrifice as irruption and representative of a primordial new. To start with I will help refresh our understanding of what apocalyptic theology entails; I will then illustrate that by referring to Dawson’s thinking on Barth’s theology of resurrection; and then use that to lead into Eagleton’s notion of sacrifice.

Here Ziegler refers us to two other thinkers to help us understand what an Apocalyptic Theology is after:

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

In the words of Donald MacKinnon, its subject matters in nothing less than “God’s own protest against the world He has made, by which at the same time that world is renewed and reborn.”[1]

We see this idea that the ‘world is renewed and reborn’ through God’s ‘invasion’ in Christ, the sort of ostensibly discontinuous discord between the world now and the world to come/came in Christ in Barth’s theology as well. Here Robert Dale Dawson unfolds how that looks in relation to Barth’s doctrine of resurrection:

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]

I provide these two ideational vignettes in order, as I noted, to lead us into some similar thinking from Eagleton. The theme to grasp from these previous interlocutors is the idea of disruption; Divine disruption. There is a tumult that occurs in the crucifixion of God in Christ. The fact itself, that it requires God to enflesh, and assume blood and oxygen for us, ought to suggest to us that something alien (meaning radical and extraneous to us, by way of antecedent and determination) has occurred, of the sort that out of its ashes only something new and elevated could arise. In other words, the sacrifice of God’s Son for us, ought to let us know that the depth of sin’s pollution is beyond the scope of a simple remodel (of presently available materials — as if nature simply needed to be ‘perfected’); it ought to alert us to the idea that what was required was a decreation in order for a recreation to enter in and bring us to the heights that God had freely chosen to pre-destine for us according to His eternally gracious and lovely good will to be for us rather than against us in the election of His dearly beloved Son. It is in this vein that Eagleton helps us think about the in-breaking of God’s life for us in Christ, and the sort of radical irruption that necessarily occurred thusly. You’ll notice that Eagleton speaks in more profane and less theologically driven terms than I am.

The most compelling version of sacrifice concerns the flou-rishing of the self, not its extinction. It involves a formidable release of energy, a transformation of the human subject and a turbulent transitus from death to new life. If sacrifice is a political act, it is not least because it concerns an accession to power. As one commentator remarks, ‘almost all sacrifice is about power, or powers’. The ritual is indeed about loss and waste, but in the name of a more fruitful form of life. Julian of Norwich sees it in terms of childbirth, where pain is a prelude to joy. If sacrifice involves yielding something up, it is in order to possess it more deeply. As Hubert and Mauss observe, ‘there is no sacrifice into which some idea of redemption does not enter’. It is true that the institution has a number of retrograde features, as its critics have been at pains t point out. As we shall see, it has been for the most part a profoundly conservative practice. Yet there is a radical kernel to be extracted from its mystical shell. Sacrifice concerns the passage of the lowly, unremarkable thing from weakness to power. It marks a movement from victimhood to full humanity, destitution to riches, the world as we know it to some transfigured domain. It is this disruptive rite of passage that is known among other things as consecration. To make an object sacred is to mark it out by investing it with a sublimely dangerous power. If sacrifice is often violent, it is because the depth of the change it promises cannot be a matter of smooth evolution or simple continuity.

In this sense, the practice of ritual sacrifice nurtures a wisdom beyond the rationality of the modern, at least as its most callow. It sets its face against the consoling illusion that fulfilment can be achieved without a fundamental rupture and rebirth. The consecration of the sacrificial victim is a matter of wholesale transformation, not some piecemeal evolution. One cannot pass from time to eternity while remaining intact. Since the gods are totally other to humanity, any contact with them involves a metamorphosis as fundamental as the passage from living to dying. The idea of sacrifice broods among other things on the mystery by which life springs from death, seeking a passage through loss and devastation in order to thrive. Dennis J. Schmidt writes of how for Hegel, ‘conflict, contradiction, negation, sacrifice, and death saturate the life of the spirit so thoroughly that they define the very truth of the spirit’. In a similar vein, Miguel de Beistegui observes that ‘one should recognise that [for Hegel] the greatness of Spirit in history or of man in his action reveals itself primarily in sundering and in death, in sacrifice and in struggle, and that thought itself derives its depth only from taking the full measure of this tragic grandeur’. Pre-modern societies are conscious in a similar way of a secret complicity between living and dying. If the fumes of burnt offerings no longer waft to the nostrils of petulant deities in our own time, it is partly because modernity enforces a rigorous distinction between the two states.[3]

The basic gist I’d like to leave with is this: There is much more going on in the ‘death, burial, and resurrection’ of Jesus Christ than often meets the prima facie eye. There is, as Torrance would say, a ‘depth dimension’ to the reality of the Gospel that pushes deeper and more vertically, while operating within the horizontal flatland, than we often realize.

I think Eagleton’s initial thoughts on sacrifice, while from a different vantage point than a proper ‘apocalyptic theology,’ helps us delve deeper into the history of ideas of what might be informing the way we ought to think a biblical notion of ‘sacrifice.’ It helped illumine things further for me, and hopefully it has done the same for you! PAX CHRISTI

 

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

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

[3] Terry Eagleton, Radical Sacrifice (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018), Loc. 138, 147, 154, 162 kindle.

The Analogy of Advent Rather Than The Analogy of Being: The “Christ-Myth” Demythologized

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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.[1]

The above quote from Robert Dale Dawson captures a significant point in regard to the apocalyptic-dialectical nature of Barth’s theory of history-revelation; particularly this clause: “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.” It fits well with Eberhard Jüngel’s ‘demythologizing’ project—if we want to call it that—vis-à-vis Rudolf Bultmann’s understanding of ‘myth’ and ‘demyth.’

As David Congdon develops Bultmann’s understanding of myth and demythologizing what comes to the fore, particularly as he places Jüngel into conversation with Bultmann, is how ‘myth’ coalesces with what Dawson describes, with reference to Barth’s doctrine of resurrection, as ‘the primordiality of the resurrection as the singular history-making, yet history-delimiting, act of God.’ Often when we hear “myth” we think in terms of its profane or pagan etiology (or lexical origination, colloquially understood); when we hear myth we hear fairytale. But this is precisely not what Bultmann, Jüngel, or Barth understand as the entailment of myth (Barth’s language is actually saga instead of myth; roughly as corollary with Bultmann’s myth). In order to explicate this further I am going to quote Congdon (again, don’t tell him) as he develops Jüngel’s own understanding of mythos as this relates to knowledge of God. Congdon writes at length:

According to Jüngel, faith as the knowledge of God is concerned with a person’s existential relocation (i.e., knower located with the known) and not with the world’s theoretical explanation (i.e., known located with the knower). The knowledge of God is not a worldview but rather and existential event, as the dialectical revolution in theology discovered anew. Demythologizing is necessary in order to prevent theology from losing sight of its proper task as the articulation of this existential relation to God. In this way it furthers the project of dialectical theology. Demythologizing continually unsettles and reorients theology, and in so doing preserves the practical truth of the Christ-myth. Commenting on Luther’s axiom that “our theology is certain because it places us outside ourselves [ponit nos extra nos],” Jüngel presents the summation of his theological argument for the necessity of demythologizing:

Those who in faith know the mystery of Jesus Christ, who are thus placed outside themselves, find their existential place “in Christ” (2 Cor 5:17). This mythical power to localize the knower anew is the truth of myth preserved in Christianity. But this is precisely what is obscured by the “theoretical” act of knowledge that takes place concurrently in myth, which localizes the known—the God who comes to the world—in the context of the reality of the knower and consequently in the context of his or her world, thus making God a worldly object. . . . Christian theology therefore requires demythologizing. It is necessary in order to expose the eminently “practical” truth of the christological myth: the truth of the divine word that interrupts human beings and calls them outside themselves. . . . Demythologizing therefore serves the truth of myth by destroying the “theoretical” world-explanation of myth in order to expose the “practical” power of mythical words to move our existence and in doing so to impart a new approach to human being-in-the-world.

Demythologizing is nothing less than the necessary entailment of faith in Jesus Christ. The knowledge of Christ in faith not only relocates the believer existentially but also precludes from the start any attempt by the believer to give theoretical certainty to her knowledge. Faith that conforms to the truth of the Christ-myth is, to use Jüngel’s earlier expression, an adaequatio totus homo ad rem—a correspondence of the whole person to the thing. But since the res, the object of faith, is Christ himself, the Lord of all creation, the person who corresponds to this object experiences a fundamental displacement from herself. The “certainty of faith” (Glaubensgewissheit), precisely because it is grounded in the “certainty of God” (Entsicherung) of oneself.” We only participate in the practical truth of the christological myth by being placed extra nos. The stabilization of this myth in the form of a theoretical explanation involves remaining in se, and thus is impossible on the grounds of the Christ-myth itself. This is another way of saying that the myth of Jesus Christ demands the ongoing task of demythologizing.

The Christ-myth radically differentiates itself from every other myth. Because the kerygmatic Christ-myth involves a strict differentiation between creator and creature—between grace and sin, gospel and law—that defies every attempt to systematize it and thus secure one’s place within it, the practical truth it communicates is one that cannot coexist with an abstract theoretical truth or worldview. In this way the Christ-myth fulfills the genuine purpose of myth, which “expresses the insight that human beings cannot secure themselves through . . . reason.” Religious myth in the general sense described and denounced within scientific myth-criticism do not have their basis in this creator-creature differentiation. They lend themselves, therefore, to what Calvin calls the “perpetual factory of idols” that characterizes human nature—what we might call the “perpetual factory of worldviews.” Practical truth takes the form of theoretical truth in the case of myth-in-general, whereas the practical truth of Christ is one that perpetually demythologizes theory. Myth-in-general grants existential relocation by providing epistemological certainty (in the form of Welterklärung or Weltanschauung); the Christ-myth provides epistemological certainty only by granting existential relocation (in the form of faith). The myth of Christ overcomes the subject-object divide not through an explanation of the object but through the justification of the sinful subject. Christian faith is essentially a demythologizing faith or it is not faith in Jesus Christ.[2]

On pace with this, the four evangelists (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) engaged in a type of ‘demythologizing’ project. Without the illumination, and more, in the case of the Apostles, the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the evangelists and the rest of the illuminated masses (particularly the five hundred witnesses alongside the Apostles cf. I Cor. 15), would have simply remained at the level of ‘myth’ when it came to the Christ. Even though they had personal experience with Jesus, the Disciples, without “demythologizing” the events of the “Christ-myth” would have simply remained at the level of subjects looking at an object who had no incisive or theological meaning, no gospel (kerygmatic) significance for their lives. This is what the Synoptics and the Gospel of John are engaging in; giving theological significance to the “mythological” events of Christ’s life (events that appear, on the face, to simply have horizontal significance alone). Does this make sense?

The reason I started this all off with the Dawson quote, with particular focus on his language of “the primordiality of the resurrection as the singular history-making, yet history-delimiting, act of God” is because I wanted to foreground this discussion with a category that would allow us to appreciate what is meant by “demythologizing” when it comes to Bultmann’s and Jüngel’s projects, respectively. In other words, as is present in Barth, the reality of the Christ-event is a sui generis non-analogous event that has broken into history and set the limits of real reality by his seemingly and merely historical existence. That’s what Bultmann’s ‘Christ-myth’ is intended to signify (as I understand it); that if left to itself, Jesus Christ appears as just another human who comes to signify a personage of theoretical and religious importance within a worldview system that is pinned up by the manufacturing of various proofs and legendary tales. But what encounter with the Christ does in the lives with eyes to see and ears to hear is immediately invoke a process of ‘demythologization’, or the eruption of recognition that this man [of Nazareth] is actually someone greater than mere myth; instead he is the God-man who has broken the surly bonds of this creation and set it anew. It is as the disciple of Christ comes into this realization that they are decentered and recentered only as they find their human being in the new creation of God in Christ. Here, knowledge of God is ‘secured,’ but only in the faith of Christ and not in any theoretical basis constructed by an abstract humanity come to God on its terms.

P.S. I was unable to work the language of ‘analogy of advent’ into this post; but conceptually it is present. We will have to overtly deal with that as Congdon details that in JĂźngel’s theology at a later date.

Addendum: Because of some push back from someone I know on FB, and through blogging over the years let me say the following for other’s benefit: I am not becoming Bultmannian. The content of this post moves liberally and freely back and forth between Bultmann, Barth, and JĂźngel; without making important points of distinction. I remain committed, at most, to what Hunsinger calls the “textual” Barth, which means I am committed to a pretty traditional mode of theological reflection and consideration. What is in this post represents something very bloggy. My contact was concerned that I was seemingly moving into a Bultmann and Congdon direction. No, I’m not. If I had the space and time and energy I could draw out what I am doing. But this post before this addendum was already 1500 words; which is long for blog reader’s attention spans. It is hard to broach topics like this in the space I have to work with, and make important and clean distinctions along the way. The reason I felt motivated to post this one was because there are, what I think amount to equivocal soundings in Bultmann’s trajectory that correlate with Barth’s analogy of faith approach. But the reality is that Barth grounds the relationship between God and humanity in a heightened emphasis upon the antecedent reality of God which is not reducible to the sort of soteriological-dialectical approach that Bultmann and Congdon are proponents of. In other words, Bultmann and Congdon ultimately reduce God to an extra-mental reality between the knower and God, such that God’s reality is purely reduced to encounter or experience that people have when they are faced with the “kerygmatic” reality of the Christ. And when I say “extra-mental” what that really means is that the Christ event is not contingent upon his objective and concrete penetration into the world in the incarnation, but instead his reality becomes contingent upon existential encounter in the knower. In this sense the Christ could become evaporated to idea, even if Bultmann et al say otherwise. I do recognize this as a serious problem, and it does lead to other deleterious conclusions such as denying the bodily resurrection of Christ (so we have people referring to the “Easter-Faith-Christ” etc.), and denying any notion of the after-life in the eschaton/heaven (as David Congdon does). So my post was intended to help me process this through (you know “write to learn”), but I can see how it makes it seem as if I’ve softened up to a Bultmannian trajectory; that couldn’t be further from the truth. Just to be clear.

Here is something I wrote very recently that attempts to make clear what I ultimately think about David Congdon’s move to a Bultmann mode of theological reflection. Just to reiterate. I haven’t changed on this.

 

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

[2] David W. Congdon, The Mission of Demythologizing: Rudolf Bultmann’s Dialectical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 455-58.

Demythologizing the Theology of Karl Barth: On the Unhistorical Nature of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ

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I’m going to get back to posting more on Barth’s theology once again; and with that a series of posts, scattered about, on modern theology and the value I see in it for the evangelical churches. This will be the first post of many with these sorts of emphases as the fund. In this post I want to briefly highlight an aspect of Barth’s theology that is often caricatured and thus misunderstood; indeed it is an aspect that has been used against him to paint him as a heretic, and someone not to be trusted by the evangelicals. I am referring to Barth’s doctrine of resurrection. The claim is often made that Barth rejected the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ, and as such, the logic goes, he should be understood as a liberal theologian not to be affirmed. The first time I ever heard of Barth (much before I went to bible college or seminary) was probably back in 1994 on Christian radio; the person talking brought up Barth, and how, indeed, he denied the resurrection of the Christ. This was the very first time I had ever heard the name of Karl Barth, and because of that whenever I heard his name latterly my antennae would go up and I would immediately think “heretic.” I’m thankful that since then I have received teaching that has led me in the more accurate way in understanding Barth’s actual theology, and the superstructure supporting it.

In the following we will hear from Bruce McCormack and his quick sketch of how Barth thought of resurrection. You will notice that Immanuel Kant is mentioned, and you will see how Barth’s theology of resurrection is intended to respond to the Kantian categories; indeed, to respond in a way that uses Kant’s categories, but in such a way that it reifies them by allowing the living God to populate them with the theological cogency and urgency that the ground establishing reality of the resurrection provides for as the prius that makes all things new in a theological epistemology (as that is grounded in a theological ontology). McCormack writes of the Romerbrief Barth:

For the Barth of the second edition of Romans, the resurrection event is revelation. But the resurrection is an event which is “unhistorical.” By this, Barth did not mean that the resurrection occurred in some other realm than that of the space and time in which we live. The resurrection was already understood by him at that time as a “bodily, corporeal, personal” event. That which happens to a body (whether living or dead makes no real difference) happens in space and time. In stressing the “unhistorical” character of the resurrection, then, what Barth meant to say was that it was not an event to be laid alongside other events. It was not an event produced by forces operative in history. History does not produced something like a bodily resurrection—not in our experience, anyway. For that, an act of God is required. But an act of God is just as unintuitable as the being of God. We may see its effects, but we do not see the thing itself; hence, Barth’s insistence that the resurrection event has no extension whatsoever on the historical plane known to us; hence, also, his insistence that Jesus as the Christ can be understood only as a problem, as a myth. Seen in material terms, Barth’s solution to the problem created by Kant was to suggest that the unintuitable divine power which was at work in raising Jesus from the dead cast a light backwards, so to speak, on an event which is intuitable, namely, the event of the cross. Light is cast on this event, a power is exercised, so that without setting aside or altering the human cognitive apparatus as described by Kant, the limitations inherent to that apparatus are transcended. The unintuitable God is revealed to faith through the medium of an intuitable event. Revelation reaches its goal in the human recipient, and knowledge of God is realized.[1]

As I noted, Barth, especially the early Barth, was working in and from Kantian categories; albeit from a Schleiermacherean theological tradition (as far as theological epistemology goes). And so this should help explain why Barth places his doctrine of resurrection on a different plane than ‘normal’ history works and thinks from. Barth sees resurrection as revelation which by the miracle of faith, for the believer, becomes the objective ground upon which knowledge of God and his reality can be known. This is why McCormack keeps bringing up ‘intuitable’ and ‘unituitable,’ this was the dilemma or at least the categorical matrices which Kant presented Barth and the moderns with; i.e. the dualist idea of the ‘phenomenal’ and the ‘noumenal.’ Barth sought for a way, under these pressures, to outthink Kant, by thinking with Kant through Christological realities that would “satisfy” the Kantian categories by using the theological categories of Deus absconditus (‘the hidden God’) and Deus revelatus (‘the revealed God’) as the corollaries of the Kantian noumenal/phenomenal to throw these very categories into Christian theological refreshment.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. As McCormack develops further while Barth, in Romans, was moving in the right directions he still did not have a robust response to Kant; not a fully christologically funded response anyway. This negligence, according to McCormack, wouldn’t start to be addressed, and thus flourish, until we get to the Göttingen Barth where the patrological categories of an/enhypostasis come into vision of Barth’s theological optics. As we leave Barth in Romans all he has resource to, as far as closing the gap between the noumenal (unintuitable) and the phenomenal (intuitable) is to refer to the power of God. What an/enhypostasis supplies the Göttingen Barth with is a way to round out the person of Christ as the fertile ground upon which resurrection gains the required theological ontology in order for a theological epistemology to rise that is fully Christ concentrated and thus pneumatologically resourceable in regard to making sense of how the hidden God could remain hidden in the incarnation and at the same time knowable. We will have to develop these themes later.

What I really wanted to underscore was that for the contextual Barth there is much more to the story than the caricatures portend. As McCormack has helped us see, for Barth, the resurrection of Jesus Christ was bodily, corporeal, and real; it’s just that it is unable to be explained by referencing normal historiographical lenses precisely because, on Barthian terms, the resurrection itself is history-granting. We leave in this vein with a quote from Robert Dale Dawson, which fits in well with some of the insights we’ve already gleaned from McCormack:

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]

[1] Bruce L. McCormack, Orthodox and Modern: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008), 29-30.

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

Living in the ‘Feeling’ and Reality of Freedom from Sin that God Desires For Us In Christ: From Gestation to Resurrection

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I really struggled with a false sense of guilt and condemnation for particular sins from my past for years upon years. The enemy of my soul kept me living under ‘a yoke of bondage’ that Jesus said I ‘would be free indeed’ from. The Lord did not leave me as an orphan though, by the Spirit he ministered to me through a sort of rigorous exercise of training me to think rightly about reality as declared in the evangel of His life as borne witness to in Holy Scripture. After many years of anxiety and depression, particularly stemming from living under this false yoke of condemnation the Lord used the reality of creation and recreation to bring the freedom that I so desperately desired. I am sure that I am not alone in this walk, and so I thought I would share a little bit of how this ‘training’ from the Lord looks; at least the way it looks for me.

As I just intimated a doctrine of creation and recreation, along with God’s sovereign providential care of all reality, played the required roles for me to finally see that I truly was and am free (for God and others). As already noted this sort of education from God was motivated by a crisis—we might refer to it as a theology of crisis—a crisis that brought the realization home that I did not have the resources in myself to bring the freedom that God alone could bring.[1] So how does this relate to God being Creator; and not just in an intellectual sense, but how does that reality relate to these real life spiritual issues in a existential felt manner?

In order to help explain what I’m attempting to detail let me offer a very brief definition of the theological concept creatio ex nihilo (‘creation out of nothing’). Keith Ward offers this definition:

Creatio ex nihilo (Latin for “creation from nothing”) refers to the view that the universe, the whole of space-time, is created by a free act of God out of nothing, and not either out of some preexisting material or out of the divine substance itself. This view was widely, though not universally, accepted in the early Christian Church, and was formally defined as dogma by the fourth Lateran Council in 1215. Creatio ex nihilo is now almost universally accepted by Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Indian theism generally holds that the universe is substantially one with God, though it is usually still thought of as a free and unconstrained act of God.[2]

There are many important theological implications we could explore simply based upon this brief definition, but for our purposes I wanted to inject this definition into this discussion to elevate the idea that God is the Creator, and thus all of creation is contingent upon his Word. It was this idea that God started to use in my life, years ago, before I ever had any understanding of ‘creation out of nothing’, that I could have freedom from my past. This concept, before I knew the theological parlance was captured for me in this Bible verse, “3And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature, and upholds all things by the word of His power. When He had made purification of sins, He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high….” (Heb. 1.3). Interesting how even in this verse the concept of being purified from sins and God’s ‘upholding all things by the word of His power’ are connected. It was this connection that God used to bring freedom for me. The lesson took many years, and was full of ‘anfechtung’ (trial-tribulation). The Lord allowed me to existentially feel the weight of what this world might look like without him as the One holding it together. It is very hard for me to verbalize the sense that I experienced, but it was as if I was questioning all of reality; even physical reality. I would look out at the world and based upon the sort of nihilistic logic that had infiltrated my mind (as a Christian!) over the years I would have this excruciating condition of feeling the transitoriness of all of reality. It was living in this reality, accompanied by ‘intellectual doubts’ (not spiritual) about God’s existence, that of course!, threw me into great pits of despondency and despair. But it was also through this that my perception of reality was transferred from one contingent upon my word—and this world system’s word—to God’s Word. It was this process, ironically, that allowed me to finally understand that “If God is for us, who is against us? 32 He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things?33 Who will bring a charge against God’s elect? God is the one who justifies; 34 who is the one who condemns? Christ Jesus is He who died, yes, rather who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who also intercedes for us.” (Rom. 8.31–32) Again, like with the Hebrews passage, we see here in Paul’s theology that a connection is made between freedom from condemnation and the creational reality of God’s Word; except here what is emphasized is not creation in general, but creation in particular as that is particularized in the re-creation of God in Jesus Christ’s resurrection. Once I’d been schooled enough with the reality that ‘reality’ is God’s reality based alone upon his given and sustaining Word; once I could ‘feel’ that weight, not just intellectually, but spiritually-affectively, the resurrection and re-creation therein had the real life impact I personally needed to be ‘free’ and stand fast in the freedom that the Son said I would be free within (Jn. 8.36); his freedom in the re-creation; the resurrection; the new creation; the new humanity that is his for us.

So I had this doctrine of creation out of nothing in place, in a ‘felt’ way; with the emphasis being upon the reality that God alone holds all of reality together. It was within this conceptual frame that the doctrine of re-creation and resurrection came alive for me; in an existential-spiritual-felt and lived sense. This is why Karl Barth’s doctrine of resurrection has resonated with me so deeply. It is tied into the type of ‘primordial’ thinking that creatio ex nihilo operates from—as part and parcel of God’s upholding Word—and then explicates that from within a theology of God’s Word wherein the primacy of Christ’s life is understood as the telos the fulcrum of what created reality is all about. Robert Dale Dawson really helped me to appreciate this sort of connection between creation out of nothing and Barth’s doctrine of re-creation as he wrote this:

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.[3]

Threading out the academic technicalities (that are important in their original context), and focusing on the concepts that serve our purposes, what I draw from this is the significance of what Dawson identifies in Barth’s theology as ‘the primordiality of the resurrection as the singular history-making, yet history-delimiting, act of God.’ Can you see how all of this might provide the sort of apocalyptic freedom we are in need of in order to live the sort of ‘free’ life that God wants us to before him? It does seem rather mechanical and academic; I agree. Let me try to summarize and draw together the themes I’ve been attempting to highlight in order to provide you with a maybe-way forward in your own spiritual walk and life as a Christian.

The Conclusion. It is actually rather basic, but deeply profound; at least for me. What is required is that we ask for eyes of faith to see what God sees in Christ. He will school us in his ways as we seek him first in the Scripture’s reality in Christ. He will work things into our lives that will shorn away the accretions of the ‘worldly-system-wisdom’ with his wisdom; the wisdom of the cross. He will allow you to ‘feel’ the existential weight of his life, and the reality that that upholds, and within this, this apocalyptic reality of his in-breaking life into ours, the reality that the God who could rightly condemn us has broken into the surly contingencies of our sinful lives and become the ‘Judge, judged.’ If the God who holds all reality together by the Word of his power in Jesus Christ invades this world in the Son, takes his just condemnation of our sins (no matter what they are!) upon himself for us, puts that death to death in his death on the cross, and then re-creates all of reality in his resurrection; then there remains no space for condemnation. The One who could condemn me stands in the way and has eliminated the sphere for condemnation insofar that he has re-created a world wherein only his righteousness reigns and dwells in his enfleshed life for us in his Son, Jesus Christ. What I just noted is the key to grasp. There is another world in Christ; a world accessible by the eyes of faith, provided by the eyes of Christ, in his vicarious humanity which we are enlivened into by the Holy Spirit. This is the real reality that Christians live in and from; and it is this reality that I cling to whenever the enemy of my soul wants to bring me into a life of bondage that belongs to the world that he is king over; a world that is dead and no longer real by virtue of the reality of God’s new world re-created and realized in the primacy of Jesus Christ.

I hope this small reflection might help provide some liberation for some of you out there as well. I realize this all might seem pretty academic, but I don’t really see things that way; I’m hoping you’ll see as a result of this post why I don’t see things in terms of the ‘academic.’ I think good theology, whether people think it is “academic” or not can begin to see that at spiritual levels these ideas can have real life impact and consequences, and that God can use them for the good; he did so, and continues to work this way for me. Just recently, as recent as yesterday, the devil tried to bring me back into a sense of false condemnation and guilt, and I found relief in the very ideas I’ve just outlined. The process, in the head, can be somewhat mechanistic, when working through things this way, but, at least for me, it is what is required for to live a life of freedom that God wants me to live in and from his Son, and my Savior, Jesus Christ. Soli Deo Gloria.

 

[1] This might also explain why I have so much resonance with Karl Barth’s theology. Early on Barth was known as a theologian of crisis. Martin Luther’s theology was spawned by deep angst, and his theology is often related to what is known in German as Anfechtung (trial/tribulation). This is why I have found these theologians, among others, as some of my most insightful teachers; they understand that the ‘wisdom of the cross’, that a theologia crucis and a theologia resurrectionis are the key components for knowing God and making him known to others. This is where God meets us; it’s where he knows we must be met if we are going to meet him.

[2] Keith Ward, Creatio Ex Nihilo (Encyclopedia.com), accessed 05-18-2018.

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