Category Archives: Roman Catholic

The Church as Prolongation of the Incarnation or as Witnesser: The Catholics and Protestants

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Ecclesiology for people in the churches is an underdeveloped, and even undeveloped teaching for most. Unless a Christian person is self-motivated to pursue study of this important doctrine they will most likely live their Christian existence within the darkness of absence (of teaching). I think this, in fact, has a lot to do with many so-called Protestant Christians swimming the shallow end of the Tiber River; i.e., to become members of the Roman Catholic church. In nuce, Roman Catholic ecclesiology entails the notion that the Roman church itself prolongates the incarnation of Jesus Christ. That is to say, that the Roman ecclesia, for proponents of Roman Catholic theology, believe that its church is the visible embodiment of Jesus Christ Himself; thus, their reference to the mystici corporis Christi (‘mystical body of Christ’). Here is a snippet of a longer encyclical that Pope Pius XII wrote for the Catholic church with reference to understanding just what the Roman Catholic understanding of the Church is:

But if our Savior, by His death, became, in the full and complete sense of the word, the Head of the Church, it was likewise through His blood that the Church was enriched with the fullest communication of the Holy Spirit, through which, from the time when the Son of Man was lifted up and glorified on the Cross by His sufferings, she is divinely illumined. For then, as Augustine notes, [39] with the rending of the veil of the temple it happened that the dew of the Paraclete’s gifts, which heretofore had descended only on the fleece, that is on the people of Israel, fell copiously and abundantly (while the fleece remained dry and deserted) on the whole earth, that is on the Catholic Church, which is confined by no boundaries of race or territory. Just as at the first moment of the Incarnation the Son of the Eternal Father adorned with the fullness of the Holy Spirit the human nature which was substantially united to Him, that it might be a fitting instrument of the Divinity in the sanguinary work of the Redemption, so at the hour of His precious death He willed that His Church should be enriched with the abundant gifts of the Paraclete in order that in dispensing the divine fruits of the Redemption she might be, for the Incarnate Word, a powerful instrument that would never fail. For both the juridical mission of the Church, and the power to teach, govern and administer the Sacraments, derive their supernatural efficacy and force for the building up of the Body of Christ from the fact that Jesus Christ, hanging on the Cross, opened up to His Church the fountain of those divine gifts, which prevent her from ever teaching false doctrine and enable her to rule them for the salvation of their souls through divinely enlightened pastors and to bestow on them an abundance of heavenly graces.[1]

The Roman Catholic church maintains, as indicated by Pope Pius XII, that the Holy Spirit, as the enlivener and Creator of the Church has so mystically tied Himself into the visible manifestation of the Roman See, along with all of her sacraments, hierarchy of pastors, so on and so forth, that the only ‘place’ union with God in Christ can obtain is if someone is brought into union with the mystical body of Jesus Christ; or, in the Roman view, with the Roman Catholic church herself. This union is supervened by the bishops and priests of the Catholic church, not least of which, is the Pope himself. Once inducted and confirmed into the Catholic church, through baptism and partaking in the Mass of the sacraments, it is at this time that the Catholic convert becomes a ‘feeder’ on and mystical participant within the visible body of Christ on earth; or the Roman Catholic church. In this sense, and per Pius XII’s aforementioned words, there is a real sense wherein the Roman ecclesiology, with its insistent assertion on their status as the visible body of Christ on earth, that the Church itself becomes a prolongation of the incarnation. That is, for the Roman, the Church has become and is so entwined with the notion that Roma is now the apple of God’s eye, that she alone is God’s visible body on earth; that in order for communion with God to obtain for humanity, would-be Christians must come into, again, union with the mystical body of Christ; which is none other, according to Roman doctrine, but the Latin Catholic church.

Protestants, on the other hand, rooted in a radical theology of the Word of God, maintain that the body of Christ is fully present within the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ; indeed, even as Christ has resurrected with that body, ascended with that body, intercedes in priestly session at the right hand of the Father with that body, and will come again with that body; His glorified body. For the Protestant, thusly, there is no prolongation of the incarnation of Christ as a mystical body of Christ, but rather its concrete existence in the flesh and blood of Imannuel’s veins as He has freely elected to be for us, with us, and not God without us in Jesus Christ.

Hence, Protestants are not burdened with the notion that we must present some type of mystical body of Christ to each other and the world writ large, as if that body is constituted by a physical address in Vatican City, Italy. On the contrary, Protestants understand that the esse of the Church is constituted by the literal body of Christ Himself for us. Resultantly, the Protestant doesn’t seek to point a would-be or already Christians to a particular iteration or expression of the Church in the world as the Roman does. The Protestant understands that their respective Christian existence is constituted, indeed by the Holy Spirit, by way of union with Christ immediately, directly. The Protestant bears witness to the finished work of God in Christ as the reality (res) of the Church in the triune God. Karl Barth writes on this status of the Protestant Christian similarly,

. . . Their existence in the world depends upon the fact that this alone is their particular gift and task. They have not to assist or add to the being and work of their living Saviour who is the Lord of the world, let alone to replace it by their own work. The community is not a prolongation of His incarnation, His death, and resurrection, the acts of God and their revelation. It has not to do these things. It has to witness to them. It is its consolation that it can do this. Its marching-orders are to do it.[2]

Barth rightly notes that the work of the Church is absolutely finished in the work of Jesus Christ. It is His work of salvation, of building His Church, that He has already accomplished; the Church’s task, by the Spirit, is to bear witness to this, her reality, in her Head and reality, Jesus Christ. The Roman church, alternatively, believes that it constitutes itself by re-presenting the Mass, the death of Jesus Christ, through the primary sacraments of baptism and the eucharist. There remains an unfinished work within the Catholic ecclesiology which makes the prolongation of the incarnation of Jesus Christ the most organic outcome. That is, because their remains a proving ground, so to speak, of the Christian’s worth to inherit eternal life through the treasuries of Christ’s merits, over and beyond the work of Christ’s atonement. And so, for the Catholic Christian, the Mass and its sacraments remain the portal whereby salvation might be constantly offered, affirmed, reaffirmed, over and again, as the Christian seeks to establish a level of sanctification whereby they are found worthy enough to in fact become real and ultimate participants within the mystical body of Christ. If the Church, as it is for the Roman, is a prolongation of the incarnation, then the incarnation, logically, requires further re-establishment and curation by the faithful; if in fact, the body of Christ can be shown to be the true body of Christ in the world today.

This requires further fleshing out. But hopefully there has been enough provided for the reader to start to digest.

[1] Pope Pius XII, MYSTICI CORPORIS CHRISTI: ENCYCLICAL OF POPE PIUS XII ON THE MISTICAL BODY OF CHRIST TO OUR VENERABLE BRETHREN, PATRIARCHS, PRIMATES, ARCHBISHOPS, BISHIOPS, AND OTHER LOCAL ORDINARIES ENJOYING PEACE AND COMMUNION WITH THE APOSTOLIC SEE, published by, The Holy See, accessed 05-05-2026.

[2] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 §59 [318] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London:T&T Clark, 2010), 312.

A Catholic Ripping of the Protestant church / A Protestant Riposting to the Catholic churched

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The following is from an X/Twitter account that identifies herself as THE Based Trinity™. She is clearly a Roman Catholic, of the Latin Mass proclivity. And she was recently, or at some point, invited to a Protestant church service. Below I will provide her response to that experience, and then below that I will respectively present my response to her as I offered that on X.

I got invited to a Protestant “service.” Here’s how it all went down. The intro alone was 40 minutes of the “worship” band finding the resonant frequency of all my internal organs, making me queasy, with the zombies around me waving their hands in the air like they didn’t care (about actual scripture). This was followed by guilt tripping tithes and forced socialization, boomer women screaming commands at God to HEEEAAAHHHL IN JESUS NAME some specific congregants, a hot mess of a sermon with the theme of “don’t complain”, usurping parts of St. Paul’s epistles before boldly declaring “if you’re born again, ALL YOUR SINS ARE FORGIVEN!”, heaps of vain repetition (pastor making the congregation repeat every 6th or so line he calls out), and the good ole “altar call” where people go kneel before the worship band (prots like to call that idol worship when we do it). Not to mention the fact that I was repeatedly ambushed by everyone forcefully introducing theirselves – even when I was very obviously trying to maintain my sanity by quietly reading my Catholic Press prayer book. One lady tried shoving a visitor contact card in my face while I was doing so, and gave me this appalled dirty look when I politely declined. I’d gone to the 8am Mass beforehand, prayed my usual pre-Mass rosary, then prayed an extra rosary afterward.. but when I came out of that dentist’s office “church” I was ready to go to the noon Mass. I felt dirty and hollow and it broke my brain and my heart that while I was in there, everyone was lapping up the emotionally charged nonsense and waving their hands and muttering those “yes Jesus thank you Jesus Aaaaaymen” vain Protestant repetitions. Nothing has ever made me want to run back to my car and gun it to a TLM more than what I endured today. Of course, there was plenty of irony woven into the sermon. It pains me to see so many well meaning people who are so dangerously misled. Pray for them. We have to.

And my response:

As an evangelical I’d say this is an apt description of many evangelical church services in North America (although, “altar call?” if only most churches still did those). But yes, in my view, the evangelical churches have almost totally gone to seed; quite badly in fact. Even so, this does not necessarily entail that the Roman Catholics are the only or recommended alternative. It has its own problems—many in fact. What this does mean though, I think, is that evangelicalism shouldn’t be left on life support any longer by those of us who can feel this gal’s angst and emptiness, just the same. I don’t know what the way forward is for the evangelical churches (in name only). A return to simplicity and a Word focusedness is the only way I can really imagine. The Word for the Protestant, and the American evangelical as an ostensible subset, must shape the Protestant worship service; it must shape the body life of the church; it must be disentangled from this or that period of theological development and allow to stand on its own, within the history of its interpretation. Protestants, de jure, have a much surer way to offer than do the accretions found in Romanism. There is hope for the Protestant, a balm of Gilead available; and it must resound and find its ground in a theology of the Word of God alone as the esse of all that is real, and breathing and life giving. But I can resonate with this Catholic gal’s conclusion, in regard to the vanity of the evangelical churches. It’s just her antidote that is aloof.

A Response to Plato’s Impact on the Great Tradition of the Church

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Earlier this morning I listened to Credo Magazine’s podcast in which Matthew Barrett interviews Louis Markos, the author of From Plato to Christ, among other books. You can listen to that podcast here. They were discussing, of course, the role and impact that Plato had, and continues to have on the development of Christian theology. Barrett often likes to refer to the Great Tradition of the Church, which of course is really more of a Latin way to think about things theological and ecclesial (the Greeks have the Consensus Patrum, ha!) I of course repudiate the general prolegomenon, or theological methodology that broadly funds said Tradition. The following were some thoughts I ticked off, in response to the podcast, while at work, in a moment of free-time, and then posted them on my Twitter and Facebook accounts, respectively. I thought I’d share that here too.

One problem with the so-called Great Tradition of the Church, is its methodological direction; insofar that it offers one. It allows the shadowland of the philosophers—the accidents of history as given—to lead to the being of all reality in Jesus Christ. It supposes that there are vestigial logoi of God generally diffuse in the created order, and that profane humanity itself has the capacity to see it by way of an abstract and methodologically speculative reasoning. It then allows this framework to shape our respective knowledge of God when we are confronted with God’s “special revelation.” As if the heavens themselves declare the glory of the LORD in a way that is intellectually discernible outwith God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ. In other words, an actus purus (pure being) notion of godness (as the Great Trad is supposedly funded by vis-à-vis a doctrine of God) presupposes upon the reality of a natura pura (pure nature) wherein grace and nature are asymmetrically independent domains of God’s greater reality. The result is that nature simply is awaiting, even as it supplies the preparation and mediation, of its own perfection as God comes to it in the grace of Jesus Christ. And yet nowhere in canonical reality do we see this supposition operative. ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and earth’ … and in the beginning the seed of the women would crush the serpent’s head while bruising its heel. The canonical reality, just as creational reality in general, has always already been suffused by the concreto of God’s Grace. His first Word of creation was from and for the Word who was with God, and was God. As such the Great Tradition allows the creation itself to predicate God’s perfection, as if the instrument of nature’s perfection; instead of understanding that God has always already been creation’s inner reality just as sure “as the world was created so that Christ might be born.”[1]

I need to refine my thinking a bit further, but all-in-all I think what I have posited above represents a type of critique I would make of the Great Tradition’s grace-nature dualism whereby we get things like the analogia entis, among other loci.

[1] I stole the quote “the world was created so that Christ might be born,” from Scottish theologian, David Fergusson. I often refer to this quote, and thought it was a nice way to close out my previous thoughts leading into it.

The Depersonalization of God’s Grace by the Thomists Reformed and others

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What they aren’t telling you is that when you receive Aristotelian Christianity, when you recover Thomist theology, particularly in the Protestant Reformed scholastic flavor, for our purposes, you’re getting a doctrine of grace, and thus God, that thinks grace as a quality, a substance. Grace is depersonalized in this frame, as such the person of Christ is ruptured from the work of Christ allowing for a ‘natural’ space to obtain within a God-world relation. This is the combine of ‘grace perfecting nature’ ‘revelation perfecting reason.’ This is what the scholastic Reformed are pushing onto the “unbeknowing” masses, particularly the younger crowd out there (millennial and younger). I see this all day and all night long on theological social media. Young guys (mostly) and gals eating the doctors’ stuff up on the retrieval of Post Reformed orthodox theology, it is “Thomist,” it is unabashedly Aristotelian by way of formal and material categorization; in other words, it isn’t inherently or even incidentally ‘biblical’ in its offering—it is intentionally philosophical and speculative instead, exactly in contraposition from revelational reality. In this frame, God is a monad, actus purus (pure being), an unmoved substance who relates to the world through an impersonal decretum absolutum (absolute decree) within a substance metaphysical frame. When God is separated from His work in a God-world relation, when grace is no longer inherently God for the world in Christ, but a created quality, a created grace detached from God and located in the humanity’s ‘accidental’ life, whereby their ‘partially fallen’ bodies are ‘enabled’ to cooperate with God through this created grace, through this new habitus (disposition) ‘to be able’ to be for God, this does horrific things to a Christology (which I’ve written of elsewhere). Here is what Helmut Thielicke has to say on these matters:

We would turn now to the process of depersonalization which is initiated the moment grace is ontically separated from God, in order to set it forth with utter precision n the following propositions. In the first place, the grace of God in the Roman Catholic view is impersonal, not merely because as an effectus it has certain autonomy in respect of its author, and not only because as the bearer of a human or material habitus it can become the attribute of an entity which is not God, but primarily because in the theological system as a whole—we are thinking here of Thomas [Aquinas]—it is conceived as being in a measure present even “prior” to God. For the system of nature and supernature derives ultimately from the fact that Aristotelian ontology has taken over. Its antithesis between form and matter (εἶδος and ὕλη) precedes all Christian content. Indeed it provides the framework into which the Christian content is fitted. One might even say, it is discovered to be the most suitable container for that Christian content.

Only thus can we explain how it is possible to enunciate a doctrine of nature and supernature in the form of an ontological construction almost without making any reference to the fall. For it nature and supernature are already there as given factors, the fall can at most be only a disruption in the “inner workings” of this system. It can involve only a “dislocation,” a dislocation in the form of subtraction comparable to the dislocation in the form of addition which we noted in connection with redemption. With these given factors presupposed, theological thinking can never be constitutively determined by “events,” by the contingent historicity of the fall and of redemption in Jesus Christ. It can never be determined by events which, by virtue of their contingency, must always transcend any system we may devise for trying to grasp them. If the system itself is to some extent already given, then the events must be fitted into it. They can only be, as it were, illustrations of an ontic order, and of a history of the world, of salvation, and of judgment which is constituted by this ontic order, a history which may thus in its basic tendencies be understood a priori, in the manner in which the “pagan” Aristotle understood it.

Personalistic thinking rests on contingency. For it relates to personal “events,” eg, to man’s decision at the fall, or to God’s decision to give his only Son (John 3:16). Resolves of this kind are matters of the will. They cannot be postulated. They can be known only a posteriori. They can only be attested. Ontological thinking, on the contrary, rests on regularity, a regularity which is supposed to include personal events. This regularity, e.g., the mutual flowing together of pure form and matter which underlies Aristotelian ontology, is understandable a priori. This is why there has to be, and in fact is, a proof of God in Roman Catholic theology. A clear example of this ability to postulate is the typical ontological attempt of Anselm to answer with logical stringency the question: Cur Deus homo?1

I have been banging this same drum, the material engaged with in this post through Thielicke, since I started theoblogging in 2005. It has NEVER been engaged with in the literature, by those who have interacted with our books, or online in the theoblogosphere, or elsewhere. The only response, beyond crickets, that I have received is by way of assertion: i.e. “Post Reformed orthodoxy IS NOT based in an impersonal substance metaphysics.” The problem is that it is, and demonstrably so as Thielicke, Barth, Torrance[s], Ron Frost, myself and others have now shown over and over again! But we are up against a theological Deus ex machina known as Post Reformed orthodoxy. Its proponents keep reassuring its would-be elect that it represents the orthodox and genuine iteration of catholic Christianity; that it isn’t a variant, or even a duplication of Roman Catholic theology, that it is in fact the “golden chaine” of post-Nicene theological development.

But if God isn’t personally grace for us in Jesus Christ, and for the Thomists He is not, then there is ultimately no hope! Under this framework wherein grace is ruptured from God, Jesus enters the world under the conditions of a decree framed by a doctrine of grace that is definitionally disconnected from the giver of grace; as such, in the incarnation the Logos ensarkos the Son of God becomes a predicate of creation, and insofar that Chalcedonian Christology affirms the inseparably between God and humanity (without admixture) in the singular person of Jesus Christ, insofar as the an/ -enhypostasis is the case in regard to the personhood of Jesus, God becomes a predicate of His own creation in the incarnation. The decretum absolutum makes God’s life contingent upon His own creation even whilst it is attempting to keep Him ‘Simple’ and untouched by His creation; this is quite the conundrum!

 

1 Helmut Thielicke, Theological Ethics: Foundations (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966), 242-43.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

Grace All the Way Down: Contra Analogia Entis and Pelagian Modes of Theologizing

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It is either all of grace, all of God unilaterally for us in Jesus Christ, or it isn’t grace at all. This is what the incarnation declares loud and clear, and thus what contradicts any systems of theological reflection that would attempt to give any place for an abstract humanity to approach God in any way. If it is all of grace, then it is not possible for humanity to cooperate with God whatosoever. This is what a good theological ontology will tell the Christian; but it ultimately isn’t an ontology at all, it really is a sound Christology that informs all else. Without this frame of reference the Christian will be prone toward developing Cassianistic or Pelagian hermeneutics, and this will shape the way they exegete Holy Scripture and do the subsequent theologizing that follows biblical exegesis. Karl Barth saw all of this unfolding in the Catholic church’s systems of both Molinism and Thomism; he saw an analogia entis (analogy of being) present in the midst of both of these systems. He identified in these systems a space for humanity, in the salvific reality, wherein the would-be Christian could cooperate or even compete with God’s own Self-givenness for the world in Jesus Christ.

For an effective denial of Molinism is possible only when we cease to think in a God-creature system, in the framework of the analogia entis. It is possible only when theology dares to be theology and not ontology, and the question of a freedom of the creature which creates conditions for God can no longer arise. But this can happen only when theology is oriented on God’s revelation and therefore Christology. It has to be determined to think and teach about the relation between God and the creature only in the way prescribed by the fact of the assumption of the flesh by the divine Word in the person of Jesus Christ and the consequent assumption of sinful man to be the child of God. Where this is the case, there is no question of speaking of a being that embraces both parties, or creation’s grasping at itself and therefore at God. There can be no dream of a freedom that belongs to the creature in face of God. It will necessarily be seen that the decision about the existence and nature of the relation between God and the creature lies exclusively with God, as does the validity and continuity of this decision. God competes and co-operates with the creature in Jesus Christ. But in Him there cannot be any competition and co-operation of the creature with God. For a theology orientated on God there can be no question of the inversion made by the Jesuits. Everything depends, of course, on whether or not there is this orientation. Only if it begins with the knowledge of Jesus Christ can theology so think and speak that the divine and the creaturely spheres are automatically distinguished and related in a way that makes wholly impossible the replacement of the order A-B by the order B-A. It must be wholly and from the very first, and not merely occasionally or subsequently, a theology of revelation and grace, a christological theology, if it is to speak at this point conclusively and effectively. If it is not this, or not this absolutely, then the protest against the inversion will come too late and can never be effective. It will be forced to admit that within the complexio oppositorum [creative tension] the counter-theory is always possible. Indeed, if it is to speak in wider terms it will somehow have to fit the counter-theory in with its own position.[1]

We can see Barth’s critique of the ‘Jesuits’ (middle knowledge), which he later applies equally to the Thomists; which he argues has taken on the Jesuit character, even while maintaining the Thomist mode. But the point is that any theology, whether Catholic or Protestant (which he is getting to in all of this, as far as critique) that allows for this sort of ‘inversion’ of placing human being before God’s being for us in Jesus Christ will result in a purely grace-less theological system all the way down. To the extent that the Christian thinker appreciates this, is the extent that they will be living genuinely from the Grace of God in Christ, or not.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1 §31: Study Edition Vol 9 (London/New York: T&T Clark, 2010), 151-52.

The ‘Heathenish’ God of the Roman Catholics and Others

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Karl Barth is not for the faint of heart, particularly when he is referring to a doctrine of God. This post will not be for the faint of heart. This post is a continuation and development of my last couple of posts: picking up on the themes of Aristotle’s god, and also the doctrine of election, respectively. I wanted to share even more than I’m going to with reference to Barth’s argument against the analogy of being and a partitive conception of God. But the long quote I will share with you now comes as a summary to the two larger sections I had planned on sharing. You will notice him alluding to the analogy of being, and even directly bring up the concept of the unity of God in His Self-revelation. These are the bases of Barth’s hard critique against, in particular, the Roman Catholic conception of God. What you will see, if you are aware of what is currently happening in the retrieval movements of Reformed and evangelical theology, is that Barth’s critique of the Roman Catholic conception of God can equally be applied to the doctrine of God being retrieved by these evangelicals and Reformed; indeed, they are retrieving, for all intents and purposes, the Tridentine God for evangelical consumption.

Barth writes:

It is in this sense and for these reasons that we oppose the Roman Catholic doctrine of the knowability of God, and therefore that certo cognosci posse [‘can with certainty be known’]. Our opposition does not begin with the different answer that we have to give. It only emerges at that point. It begins with our differing putting of the question. And we are compelled to say that it is at this point and this point alone that we regard it as decisive and critical. If Roman Catholic doctrine affirms that reason can know God from the world, in the last resort that is only the necessary answer to the question as put by it. And ultimately—particularly when we have regard to the careful formulation of the Vaticanum, which never speaks of more than a posse [ability]—it is not in itself absolutely intolerable as an interpretation in meliorem partem [understood in a charitable sense]. The intolerable and unpardonable thing in Roman Catholic theology is that the question is put in this way, that there is this splitting up of the concept of God, and hand in hand with it the abstraction from the real work and activity of God in favour of a general being of God which He has in common with us and all being. To put the question in this way is to commit a twofold act of violence which means the introduction of a foreign god into the sphere of the Church. The fact that knowability is ascribed to this god, apart from his revelation, is in no way surprising. In itself it is even quite proper. This god really is knowable naturalis humanae rationis lumine e rebus creatis [‘from the created things, by the natural light of human reason’] apart from God, i.e., apart from God’s special help. But to affirm that the true, whole God, active and effective, the Head and Shepherd of the Church, can be knowable in this way is only possible if He has already been identified with that false god. What thanks do we owe to that god for the benefit and the grace and mercy of his revelation? Between him and man the relationship is obviously very different. It is not that a door can be opened only from within. On the contrary, man has free ingress and egress of his own authority and power. Quite apart from grace and miracle, has not man always had what is in relation to the being of the world the very “natural” capacity to persuade himself and others of a higher and divine being? All idols spring from this capacity. And the really wicked and damnable thing in the Roman Catholic doctrine is that it equates the Lord of the Church with that idol and says of Him therefore the very thing that would naturally be said of it. This is the decisive difference between them and us. There is therefore no sense in contrasting their theses and ours in detail and discussing them in this contrast. Our primary contradiction is not of the “natural theology” of the Vaticanum as such. This is only a self-evident consequence of our initial contradiction of its concept of God. We reject this because it is a construct which obviously derives from an attempt to unite Yahweh with Baal, the triune God of Holy Scripture with the concept of being of Aristotelian and Stoic philosophy. The assertion that reason can know God from created things applies to the second and heathenish component of this concept of God, so that when we view the construct on this side we do not recognise God in it at all, nor can we accept it as a Christian concept of God. But that means that for us the assertion has no solid foundation. We cannot, therefore, attack it in detail. For how can we attack it? We can only say Yes and Amen to it as far as it applies to the god, the false god, to whom it refers. It is in itself incorrigible. But we cannot allow that it says anything about God at all, or that it is one of the assertions which have to be made in the Christian doctrine of God.[1]

What Barth is communicating seems rather self-explanatory. What I am hoping is that it communicates just how radical of a proposal I am committed to when it comes to a knowledge of the true and living God. I fully endorse everything Barth writes in the quote I just shared from him. To rely on versions of God that we can ostensibly connive on our own [even redeemed] reason is no different than what the Israelites attempted to do when they constructed a golden calf, or worshiped God from their ‘high places.’

My contention, along with Barth, is that the God who not only the Roman Catholics, but many of the Protestants among us, are claiming as God is not in fact the true and genuine God come in the revelation of Godself in Jesus Christ. The consequences and implications of this are not lost on me. What Barth is claiming is what Feuerbach was claiming before him. That is, that any conception of God come to apart from reliance upon God’s Self-revelation, and the capacity to know this God by personal participation with this God in the humanity of Jesus Christ, is what Barth elsewhere calls the no-God. Knowledge of God, for Barth, is not arrived at by reason’s self-reflection on nature. Knowledge of God, for Barth, is arrived at by reason of God’s Self-revelation of His divine nature for us as that comes mediate in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. Anything short of this can only be an idol god who does not represent the fully divine impress of the God for us and in us by the Spirit in Jesus Christ. This is as radical as it gets, and is something to come to grips with.

 

[1] Barth, CD II/1 §26 (T&T Clark Study Edition), 82-3.

Grace Compared and Correlated: classical Reformed theology versus evangelical Calvinist theology

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There is a lot of talk nowadays about the theology of Thomas Aquinas. Typically when it is Reformed Protestants the reference to Aquinas’ theology has more to do tommyaquinaswith his Trinitarian theology, and doctrine of God, and less to do with his soteriology. But in a way they are of a piece; how we conceive of God will implicate how we think of salvation, and other theological places downstream from God. In light of that I thought it would be interesting to present something of a portrait of Aquinas’ doctrine of salvation, and then leave that with some suggestive notes.

Steven Ozment, I have found[1], is a trustworthy guide in elucidating the theology of the medieval and early Reformed periods; as such we will refer to his nutshell description of how salvation looks within a Thomist frame. He writes:

It was a traditional teaching of the medieval church, perhaps best formulated by Thomas Aquinas, that a man who freely performed good works in a state of grace cooperated in the attainment of his salvation. Religious life was organized around this premise. Secular living was in this way taken up into the religious life; good works became the sine qua non of saving faith. He who did his moral best within a state of grace received salvation as his just due. In the technical language of the medieval theologian, faith formed by acts of charity (fides caritate formata) received eternal life as full or condign merit (meritum de condign). Entrance into the state of grace was God’s exclusive and special gift, not man’s achievement, and it was the indispensable foundation for man’s moral cooperation. An infusio gratiae preceded every meritorious act. The steps to salvation were:

1 Gratuitous infusion of grace

2 Moral cooperation: doing the best one can with the aid of grace

3 Reward of eternal life as a just due[2]

Bear in mind the flow of how salvation was appropriated in the medieval Thomist mind started with 1) a gratuitous infusion of grace from God (this is also called created grace where grace is thought of as ‘stuff’ the elect receive in order to cooperate with God in the salvation process through), 2) then the elect are ‘enabled’ to cooperate (as just noted) with God, doing good charitable works, with 3) the hope of being rewarded with eternal life.

It might seem pretty clear why contemporary Reformed Protestants don’t get into Thomas Aquinas’ model of salvation as a fruitful place to develop salvation themes, but the irony is, is that they do. Remember as I noted above that how we think of God will flow downstream and implicate everything else; well, it does.

Closer in time to the medieval period (than us) were the Post-Reformed orthodox theologians. These theologians were men who inhabited the 16th and 17th centuries, and they developed the categories and grammar of Reformed theology that many today are resourcing and developing for contemporary consumption; among not only overtly confessionally Reformed fellowships and communions, but also for ‘conservative’ evangelical Christians at large (think of the work and impact of The Gospel Coalition). The Post-Reformed orthodox theologians, interestingly, developed an understanding of grace and salvation that sounds very similar to what we just read about Aquinas’ and the medieval understanding of salvation (within the Papal Roman Catholic context). Ecclesial historian, Richard Muller in his Latin theological dictionary defines how the Post-Reformed orthodox understood grace and salvation this way:

gratia: grace; in Greek, χάρις;  the gracious or benevolent disposition of God toward sinful mankind and, therefore, the divine operation by which the sinful heart and mind are regenerated and the continuing divine power or operation that cleanses, strengthens, and sanctifies the regenerate. The Protestant scholastics distinguish five actus gratiae, or actualizations of grace. (1) Gratia praeveniens, or prevenient grace, is the grace of the Holy Spirit bestowed upon sinners in and through the Word; it must precede repentance. (2)Gratia praeparens is the preparing grace, according to which the Spirit instills in the repentant sinner a full knowledge of his inability and also his desire to accept the promises of the gospel. This is the stage of the life of the sinners that can be termed the praeparatio ad conversionem (q.v.) and that the Lutheran orthodox characterize as a time of terrores conscientiae (q.v.). Both this preparation for conversion and the terrors of conscience draw directly upon the second use of the law, the usus paedagogicus (see usus legis). (3)Gratia operans, or operating grace, is the effective grace of conversion, according to which the Spirit regenerates the will, illuminates the mind, and imparts faith. Operating grace is, therefore, the grace of justification insofar as it creates in man the means, or medium, faith, through which we are justified by grace…. (4) Gratia cooperans, or cooperating grace, is the continuing grace of the Spirit, also termed gratia inhabitans, indwelling grace, which cooperates with and reinforces the regenerate will and intellect in sanctification. Gratia cooperans is the ground of all works and, insofar as it is a new capacity in the believer for the good, it can be called the habitus gratiae, or disposition of grace. Finally, some of the scholastics make a distinction between gratia cooperans and (5)gratia conservans, or conserving, preserving grace, according to which the Spirit enables the believer to persevere in faith. This latter distinction arises most probably out of the distinction betweensanctificatio (q.v.) and perseverantia (q.v.) in the scholastic ordo salutis (q.v.), or order of salvation….[3]

If we had the space it would be interesting to attempt to draw corollaries between the five ‘actualizations of grace’ and the infusion gratiae (infused grace) that we find in Aquinas. I have done further research on this, and the ‘actualizations of grace’ we find in Protestant orthodox theology come from Aquinas, and for Aquinas it comes from Aristotle. Gratia operans or operating grace, gratia cooperans or cooperating grace, and habitus gratiae or disposition of grace all can be found as foundational pieces within Thomas Aquinas’ understanding of salvation; which is ironic, because these are all fundamental components that shape Protestant Reformed orthodox soteriology.

Why is this important? Because how we think of God affects how we think of salvation, and a host of other things downstream. If Protestant theology was an attempt to protest and break from Roman theology, but the Protestant orthodox period ends up sounding once again like the very theology that the magisterial Reformers (i.e. Martin Luther, John Calvin, et al.) were seeking to break away from; wouldn’t it behoove us to critically engage with what we are being fed by contemporary theologians who are giving us theology/soteriology directly informed by theologian’s theology that is shaped by a theological/soteriological framework that might be suspect? In other words, what if the Protestant orthodox period, instead of being an actual reforming project was instead a return to the theology that the early magisterial reformers protested against? What if the early Reformation was “stillbirthed?”[4]

Is it the best way forward for Protestant Christians to rely on Aristotle for funding our conceptions of God and Grace? It seems like many a theologian in the Reformed and evangelical traditions in the 21st century think so. But do we really want a conception of salvation that has us cooperating with God; with a conception then that has a focus towards our good works as indicatives and proofs of our salvation? Do we want a salvation like this that first points us to ourselves, even if in the name of Christ, which only after we observe our good works we are able to reflexively look to Christ our great hope? What will this do, at the least, to our daily walks and Christian spirituality? There is a better way forward.

Ron Frost, my former historical theology professor in seminary, and mentor offers what he calls Affective Theology as an alternative to the Federal Protestant orthodox theology we just sketched and briefly considered. We here at the evangelical Calvinist offer an alternative that comes from a form of Scottish Theology through Thomas Torrance, and then from Karl Barth. These alternatives, different as they are (Frost’s approach is not related to Thomas Torrance or Karl Barth whatsoever), have a focus towards God in Christ that moves beyond the Aristotelian framed theories of salvation offered by the Post Reformed orthodox as well as what we find in contemporary popular theology like what we are currently finding in the theology promulgated by The Gospel Coalition (and other similar groups: i.e. Together 4 the Gospel etc.).

While I don’t talk about this as much as I used to, it is still this reality that motivates me. Barth and Torrance have become welcome voices for me, but there are other alternative voices in the history of ideas (which Frost really taps into, esp. with reference to Puritan theology). Like it or not there is some competition between ideas here; Federal/Covenantal/Confessional Reformed theology (i.e. corollary with Post-Reformed orthodox theology) versus what we in an umbrella term are calling evangelical Calvinism.

More to be said …

 

[1] Text we used for my Reformation Theology class in seminary.

[2] Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform 1250–1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe (New Haven&London: Yale University Press, 1980), 233.

[3] Richard A. Muller, Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms: Drawn Principally from Protestant Scholastics Theology (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 1985), 129-30.

[4] See Ronald N. Frost, “Aristotle’s ‘Ethics:’ The ‘Real’ Reason for Luther’s Reformation?,” Trinity Journal 18:2 (1997).

 

Matt Frost Critiques Arminius’ ‘Actualism’/Salvation; And I Say Some Stuff Too

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Here Matt Frost—Barthio-Lutheran theologian—offers a critique of Jacobus Arminius (the purported founder of what we know today as Arminianism, but from reading Arminius, directly now, I would claim that what defines fatimamarymost Arminians today and what defined Arminius’ theology yesterday are not corollary, or they are different); and in particular, Matt is critiquing based upon my little claim that Arminius was trying to offer his own version of theological actualism in contrast to the substance metaphysics supporting the “Calvinist’s” understanding of salvation and predestination that he (Arminius) is arguing against. Here is Matt Frost’s response to Arminius (and his ‘actualism’ i.e. oversimplified what is, is):

Such a theology of glory. The cross need never be mentioned; it is not central, not substantial, but accidental. It is not the shape of the thing, but merely the opening gambit. The decree is the thing.

The problem is that Arminius’ “actualism” here is actualism of the human person in history, as the central agent involved in the question of salvation. We are what we do, and the matter of salvation follows accordingly. God has possibilized salvation in Christ, and it is the believer who actualizes it. The proximate cause of salvation here is always belief and perseverance; only the ultimate and mediate/instrumental causes belong to God. This is the problem with the decretal understanding of salvation: it becomes the “law of the land,” which does not fulfill itself. It sets the terms of salvation, terms which are either met or not by human agents.

By comparison, Barth’s actualism (for example) declares that God is what God does, and that the matter of salvation follows accordingly. There is no decree. There is action, the primary fact, and announcement of that action, the secondary fact. Faith does something else: it leads toward moral behavior concordant with God’s accomplished salvation, when we understand and trust that fact. By trusting in God’s grace we begin to become what we are in Christ—our existence begins to conform to our essence—but we are that regardless of the relative possibility of our absolutely impossible existences in sin.

Either Arminius presumes (which he seems to) that there are human beings who shall be judged righteous on the basis of their perseverance in faith, and therefore saved, or he’s proposed a system in which all fail and all are therefore damned in divine foreknowledge. Grace in such a system as he proposes is (as in so much of scholasticism) the provision of effective assistance, and of reward. And it can be this because the assumption underlying it is that there is something worth saving, and that salvation and damnation are on the basis of worth. Salvation is a reward, the attainment of which has been made possible and then announced, and its achievement is left to human agency under the mask of divine foreknowledge. God has only achieved the salvation of the willing, and “election” is the election of a self-selecting group of people who choose salvation by sufficiently embracing the given means.

Have I mentioned I don’t like it? 😉

I think Matt is right! That is why our mode of Evangelical Calvinism, along with Torrance (and Barth) sees humanity’s humanity grounded and conditioned by Christ’s vicarious humanity for us. Instead of salvation being left to human agency under the mask of divine foreknowledge; salvation is left to Spirit anointed human agency under the mask of the divine life that the Son has always shared with the Father. There is no wondering whether salvation will be accomplished, in our scheme; salvation has been accomplished by the surety of God’s own person. It is not something that needs more accruing—by our perseverance in good works—it is someOne who has already finished the work of the Father by the Holy Spirit’s creative and recreative work through the Son’s obedience to become a man, and ultimately His obedience unto death, that makes salvation sure. Thus all we can do is participate in this by the Holy Spirit as we are united to the priestly humanity of Jesus Christ.

See what Matt is rightly critiquing is a form of semi-Pelagianism (moralizing) that he sees at work in Arminius’ theology; and it is this same conception of grace (and moralizing) that is present, not just in Arminius, but in the Calvinism (of which he was a part) of his day. This is the critique of Calvinism that I was first introduced to by Ron Frost in seminary, and it is still one I hold to today; viz. that any time we commodify grace (i.e. created grace), and see it as a quality that we can habituate in as the process by which we attain enough merit before God to then be found worthy to become initiate in the pilgrimage (think ‘viatore’) of salvation (i.e. Medieval conception of salvation), or as that which secures our process in the perseverance of good works (classical Arminian and Calvinist conceptions of salvation); then salvation becomes contingent upon “my” (and your) earning power—as if we could earn more “chips” from the meritorious achievement of Christ (which is how the Roman Catholic Church operates, as the dispenser of grace or merit chips)—and not based on the personal life of God for us in Jesus Christ. We are condemned to a world of obsessively and introvertedly looking at ourselves before we might ever be able to (reflexively) look at Christ. We, if we do this (along with Arminius), have just, at least engaged in the Nestorian (if not Ebionite) heresy of placing divinity in competition with humanity; when in fact the incarnation declares that these two have been reconciled and recreated by the Spirit in the second person of the Trinity, in the Son of God, Jesus Christ.

I am streaming now, time to stop.

Cornelius Van Til on Karl Barth: Grace and Nature, Worship Creation or Creator

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I think Cornelius Van Til offers a good sketch of Barth’s understanding of grace as personified personally in Jesus Christ (instead of grace as a principle or quality). You will notice in Van Til’s sketch how he accentuates Barth’s disdain for the natural theology and analogy of being of both Roman Catholic theology and later post-Reformed orthodoxy (or Westminster Calvinism, simpliciter). I totally appreciate this emphasis, from Barth, as you know; and I think Van Til presents Barth accurately in this way; note Van Til,

[B]arth’s answer to both charges is that speaking Christologically of grace is not to speak speculatively in any direction. One may freely use the language of any school of philosophy. But one must, as a theologian, be free from the control of all philosophy.

Thinking Christologically of grace enables us, says Barth, to speak along the lines of Reformational theology. Thinking Christologically of grace enables us to escape the Romanist approach to grace and the free will of man. Romanism thinks along the lines of the analogy of being (italics mine), and in doing so, is largely controlled by philosophical speculation. It is this philosophical speculation that accounts for its use of natural theology. In Romanist theology Christ comes into the picture too late; he comes in afterwards, and a Christ coming in afterwards is, in effect, Christ not coming in at all.

Against this the Reformers, thinking Christologically, gave God the true priority over man, and grace the true priority over man’s participation in it.

But the Reformers did not consistently work out the relation of grace to sin along Christological lines. They were unable to fathom the full implication of their own idea of the sovereignty of grace. They did not realize that the full freedom and glory of God’s grace to man in Christ is expressed in the very idea of his being the one who suffers the wrath of God for man.

Again, the Reformers, and notably Calvin, had no full appreciation for the biblical universalism involved in the true idea of grace. We must therefore go beyond the Reformers in stressing both the full sovereignty and the full universality of the nature of grace. Instead of thus going beyond the Reformers, later orthodox theologians all too often fell back on natural theology and on the idea of direct revelation in history. Thus they tended once more to make the consciousness of man think of itself as autonomous. And thus they became, all too often, the forerunners of the consciousness theology of Schleiermacher and his followers.

This in turn prepared the way for a theology which was, in effect, as Feuerbauch maintained, nothing more than an undercover anthropology.

If then we are to work out the true Reformation principle of theology, and therewith escape the synergistic views of Romanism, we must think of grace Christologically. And if we are to escape the narrowness of an evil orthodoxy and the subjectivism of the consciousness theologians, we must think of grace Christologically. And finally if we are really to enjoy the full certainty of the gift of the grace of God in Christ for all men, and in doing so laugh in Feuerbach’s face, then we must think of grace Christologically. [Cornelius Van Til, Christianity and Barthianism, 31-32]

Why Does This Matter Again?

There are a lot of threads in Van Til’s sketch of Barth; let me focus on one thread, the primary thread running throughout this account. That is that Grace is Personal in Christ, and any other account—as evinced in those noted (the Romanists, post-Reformed orthodox, Schleiermacher, et. al.)—collapses grace into creation such that creation dominates our thinking about God. If we follow this method—natural theology—we take God captive by our creations and constructs, and God is no longer capable to speak Lordly words over and against us (so he ceases to be Lord in this scenario). The Apostle Paul warns of such madness when he writes:

18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, 19 because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them. 20 For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse, 21 because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Professing to be wise, they became fools, 23 and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man—and birds and four-footed animals and creeping things. Romans 1:18-23

This is why this discussion matters; the gravity of this weights on whether we can say that we are worshipping God as revealed in Jesus Christ, or are we worshipping God created in our image? This oversimplifies things quite a bit, but this is the nub of it for me.