Category Archives: Theo-Anthropology

An Athanasian Reformed Reading of John 6:44-45: On Unconditional Election and the Effectual Call

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There was a debate, very recently, between Dr. James White and Dr. Leighton Flowers with reference to John 6:44-45. The theological locus under disputation was on the Calvinist doctrines of unconditional election and the effectual call. White argued the positive position, i.e., affirming unconditional election and the effectual call; whilst Flowers argued the negative, i.e., denying unconditional election and the effectual call. For the purposes of this post, I am just going to assume the reader understands the entailments of said doctrines, and cut right to the chase in offering the Athanasian Reformed (AR) (Evangelical Calvinist) reading of John 6:44-45. I believe it is the better more theologically acute way one must exegete John 6:44-45, among many other passages, in light of Christological orthodoxy. In other words, I will suggest (not argue here) that everyone reads the text of Scripture through theological lenses; and since that’s the case, it is best to exegete Scripture from good theological premises, rather than bad ones. I would simply assert here that both White and Flowers, respectively, offer a reading of John 6 that are based on bad theological premises.

Here is the passage in the English translation (NASB95):

44 No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up on the last day. 45 It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught of God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father, comes to Me.

White argues that all who are drawn of God will necessarily come to God (so, what he takes to be a prima facie argument for unconditional election vis-à-vis the effectual call). Flowers argues that the drawn ones who come to God are those who have not only heard, but have actively learned from the Father, and through this, said drawn ones freely choose to come to God based on their innate human freedom to do so (he believes the capacity comes, situationally, as people hear the call and learn from God of His way for them; but this based on an ontic capacity built into the human agent to accept or reject the call of God). So, in nuce, we can see how White clearly is thinking from the typical Calvinist emphasis on God’s sovereignty, and how Flowers, respectively, ends up emphasizing the human agents’ intact libertarian freewill to say yes or no to God’s offer of salvation.

The Athanasian Reformed alternative sees the eternal Son of God, as both the electing God and elected (archetypal) human for all of humanity. So, we can affirm unconditional election and the effectual call, but only under radically reified terms. So, for the AR, we maintain that what does the necessary work here, theologically, is a robust affirmation of a doctrine of the vicarious humanity of Christ (which is really just the Chalcedonian and Nicene understanding of the homoousious; i.e., that Jesus is both fully God and fully human in His singular person as the Christ). In this sense, the eternal Logos is both ‘unconditionally elect’ and ‘effectually called’ insofar that He freely chooses to become us that we might become Him by the grace of adoption (think of II Cor. 8:9 and the mirifica commutatio ‘wonderful exchange’). In this frame, Christ, God’s personal grace for the world, from within the triune Life, as the mediator between God and humanity, as our High Priest, enters into the sinful reprobate status all of humanity is born into; putting it to death at the cross; and rising anew as God’s humanity for the world, the second and greater Adam, the ‘firstborn from the dead,’ God’s ‘firstfruits,’ whereby humanity, in Christ’s humanity, the only genuine humanity coram Deo (before God) has been truly humanized in and from the humanizing humanity of Jesus Christ. As He, in His vicarious humanity said Yes to the Father for us, we by a correspondence of His faith, by the same Spirit’s breath now have the freedom of God to say yes and amen to God, acknowledging all that God has provided for us in His salvation for all of humanity (which is first His humanity for us).

So, for the AR, total depravity/total inability, to use those terms, is indeed a real problem for a humanity incurved upon itself (homo incurvatus in se). But what is different for AR is that on the one hand grace isn’t an abstract quality given to the elect, like created grace is, as maintained by the classical Calvinists (like White); on the other hand, grace, and being unilaterally placed into God’s grace is a necessity if fallen humanity is going to have the capacity to indeed seek God and receive His salvation for them. Further, contra the Arminian, or Flowers’ so-called provisionism, fallen humanity, again, is in need of God’s unilateral movement of placing us into His re-created and elect life in Christ, if in fact we are going to be able to speak of a genuine human freedom. So, against the Provisionists, AR maintains that in order to be truly human before God, that is to have genuine human freedom for God, that that must first be provided for all of humanity in and through God’s disruptive gracious humanity as that penetrates our dead humanity, giving us a new and real human life in His.

Hence, God’s unconditional election is inclusive of all of humanity, since the only humanity to be assumed in the incarnation was the fallen humanity. Jesus was “effectually called” (and I put that in quotes because AR does not affirm the Aristotelian causal theory that classical Calvinists do), freely coming for us, taking all of humanity with Him, as the second Adam, to the right hand of the Father. Why all of humanity does not finally affirm God’s election for us in Christ, seeing that all of the conditions for salvation have already been fully actualized in God’s humanity for the world, remains an aspect of the surd-like and inscrutable mystery of sin. All are elect in Christ, but not all finally come. We know why people do come, but sin keeps us in the dark in regard to why some don’t ultimately repent and acknowledge what God has already done, provided, and actualized for them in the real humanity of Christ.

In closing, with reference to John 6 and its grammar: verse 44 says, “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him.” Here, the doubly consubstantial life of Jesus, who is both the eternal Son, who is fully God, and who is also fully human, is theologically present in this clause. That is to say, in the analogy of the incarnation, the ‘Me’ and the ‘Father’ (insofar as the person and works of God are indivisible) are in reference to God’s life, and at the same time, in reference to God’s life of salvation actualized for the world in the man from Nazareth, Jesus Christ. Theologically the “draws him,” with reference to the ‘him,’ remains in the singular, insofar that the [hu]man who was first drawn of God, was God’s particular humanity for the world in Jesus Christ. He will indeed be “raised up on the last day” whereby every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord; and all of humanity, all of those who have repented, out of Christ’s repentance for us, will be exalted in consummate form with Him as the new creations we have become as participants in Christ’s new and resurrected humanity for us.

In a canonical way it is fitting then to close this post with reference to another Apostle, Paul:

May it never be! How shall we who died to sin still live in it? 3 Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? 4 Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. 5 For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection, 6 knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin; 7 for he who has died is freed from sin. -Romans 6:1-7

What we have been referring to as election and the vicarious humanity of Christ also finds biblical reference to Paul’s theological motif of ‘in Christ’ theology. It is really a doctrine of union with Christ that we are concerned with, and what is the entailment of a proper doctrine of pre-destination and election; insofar that what salvation involves first involves God’s choice to be for us in the humanity of Jesus Christ. And this free election of God’s becomes what we grammatically call the hypostatic union wherein God and humanity are united as God becomes humanity that we might become partakers of the divine nature in and through the person of Jesus Christ. But you see then how this involves a doctrine of unio cum Christo (union with Christ).

The Theological and Ideational History Behind the Deconstructed Culture Writ Large

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In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes. –Judges 21:25

The human heart has never changed. Ironically, in our secular times humanity, in the main, has come to believe that we have “progressed” beyond our primitive forebears. Secular humanity of the 21st century generally maintains that it has moved beyond the religious platitudes and superstitions of the pre-critical past, and moved onto greener and more enlightened pastures. But the secular age, in fact, is really just a mythology that needs to be demythologized by the lights of sound and theological consideration. This is what TF Torrance provides for us, as he sketches the inherent dualism that reigns over the spirit of the modern age. Dualism in the sense that the human spirit, in the secular, has been abstracted from its ground in its antecedent life, as that has been gifted to it through the Word of God. As TFT notes, the secular human has taken what once was an attribute of the living God, and immanentized it, or collapsed that attribute into the recesses of their own enslaved consciouses. As TF underscores, secular humanity has taken what was the genuine possession of the Creator, and attributed it to themselves. That is the capacity to determine the right way for oneself; the self curved into the depths of its own subjectivity, as if it alone knows and self-determines the good and the beautiful; or the distinction between the holy and profane.

Torrance writes the following:

The story of that development need not detain us further, but we may glance at two significant stages in it. The first of these is the immense impact of Cartesian dualism upon Protestant Christianity—that was an influence from the side of Roman Catholic philosophy, but it had its strongest impact in Protestantism where there had been asserted such a clear distinction between Grace and nature, the Creator and the creature. Once that distinction became distorted into a dualism, it tended to breed Deism, and Deism provoked the old antithesis of spirit and matter, and rampant spiritualism broke loose only to find itself faced with the menace of a positivistic and mechanistic interpretation of nature. It was in the midst of this that there took place the great ‘Copernican revolution’ initiated by Kant, which presents us with the other significant stage in the development of Protestantism which we must note. This is the stage in which the categorical imperative is identified with the self-legislating ego, the divine Spirit is identified with rational self-consciousness, or the inwardness of the human spirit, and out of which it lives, is the ‘Word’ which it hears in the depths of its own subjectivity.

The ’God’ of this Neo-Protestantism is the God who is correlated with the religious subject and its spiritual potentialities, the God who meets and satisfies the needs and answers the questions of ‘modern man’ (that creature that takes himself so frightfully seriously and imposes himself upon everything). Truth about Him is discerned within the religious subject himself, so that the business of theology is to examine the structure of the religious consciousness, particularly—so the stress developed as the nineteenth century wore on—in its historical and universal manifestations. It was within this context that Christianity was subjected to such exhaustive historico-psychological examination in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which mean that Christianity was regarded essentially as a process, while the Reformation was regarded simply as a development in that process, when the essence of religion in the human spirit began to break free from its childhood bondage under external authority and the sovereignty of the inward religious experience was asserted, and its right constantly to create for itself new forms through which to express itself in ‘modern culture’.

In this light it was inevitable that Christianity even in its origins should have been interpreted as the product of the human spirit, and so from Strauss to Bultmann the thesis has been maintained that the Gospel does not go back so much to Jesus Himself as to the creative spirituality of the early Church, and therefore if we are to be true to Jesus who in His way provoked that creation we ought to create new forms of Christianity for our own day. This whole conception has been helped on immensely by the application of the concept of evolution to the development of the religious spirit and by the new ‘modern’ notion of history, stemming from Dilthey, as that which man himself creates and for which he is responsible. Thus the historical truth of the Christian faith is only that which man can envisage for himself, what he can make real for himself, and for which he can make himself responsible through his own decisions. Christian truth is that which has become and continues to become true in and through the history which man himself creates by his existential decisions. That is the only reality which he can acknowledge—that is to say, whatever submits to the creativity of his active reason.[1]

In general, when Christians deconstruct in the 21st century, and reconstruct as Exvangelicals or progressive Christians, the aforementioned, as developed by TFT, in regard to the history of ideas, and their application to the human experience in the secular culture today, are the mechanics it obtains within. It’s really just the age-old story of the Genesis 3 narrative, and the fall of humanity into a dissolved status before God. It is the partaking of the forbidden fruit, over and again, whereby humanity believes the lie that the first Adam bit into; i.e., that we can be like God, knowing both good and evil. When the culture writ large, shorn of its ground in the living and triune God as its, attempts to exist in and from themselves, it is the intellectual hardware Torrance has identified for us, whereby a self-actualized person in the 21st century instantiates itself.

[1] Thomas F. Torrance, Theological Science (Oxford/London/New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 82–3.

H.A. Ironside and Karl Barth On: “There is no Man Behind the Back of Jesus”

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How blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked,
Nor stand in the path of sinners,
Nor sit in the seat of scoffers!
2 But his delight is in the law of the Lord,
And in His law he meditates day and night. Psalm 1:1-2

 

What does it mean to be genuinely human? This is a question philosophers, world religions, little kids, and others have been pondering for the millennia. Rather than speculate though, as Christians we have the more accurate way, the more concrete way; God’s way for answering said question. As is the case with everything in the Christian kingdom, our existences are contingent ones; existences that have a ground and condition from their antecedent reality in the One who has always already and eternally existed. The Christian’s conscious existence (over against the pagan’s unconscious existence) is a gifted, a graced, a given existence; an existence extra nos (‘outside of us’). Humanity simpliciter (simply, or at base) has an image, according to Scripture; and its image isn’t inherent to humanity writ large. Humanity’s image is in fact God’s image for us in the freely elect humanity of Jesus Christ; the humanity elected for us ever before the foundations of the world. When Adam and Eve were originally created, they weren’t created in an ontological vacuum; they were in fact created in the image of God: “13 For He rescued us from the domain of darkness, and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son, 14 in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. 15 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation” (Col. 1:13-15). As such, one implication of this, is that humanity is humanity, humanity has sanctity and dignity, in and from God’s humanity for them, for us, in Jesus Christ. That is to say, to be human, is to be reconciled with God; since this is what humanity, in the ‘image of God,’ was created for. To be human, biblically understood, is to be in right relationship with the living and triune God; this is humanity’s telos (‘purpose’), to be in an intimate relationship, a penetrating relationship, a participatory relationship with God.

An old-time dispensational preacher and teacher, Harry A. Ironside (someone whose commentary set I’ve read completely back in my early years), has the following to say in his commentary on Psalm 1; in regard to the theme of our question on humanity:

The first Psalm is the inspired introduction to the entire book. We may say that we have here, in contrast, two men, the blessed man and the wicked man. The blessed man is the Second Man, the Lord from heaven; the wicked man is the first man.

Notice the opening verses. “Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful. But his delight is in the law of the Lord; and in His law doth he meditate day and night. And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.”

Who is this blessed man to whom our attention is directed as we open this lovely Old Testament book of praise and prayer? Observe in the first place that the tenses as we have them here do not exactly convey the thought of the original Hebrew. It may be rendered, “Blessed is the man that hath not walked in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stood in the way of sinners, nor sat in the seat of the scornful.” He is not here expressing the blessedness of a man who was once a sinner and has been turned to righteousness and now no longer walks in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scornful. But he is telling us of the blessedness of the Man who has never done any of these things, the Man who never took his own way, the Man who never walked with the world as part of it, who never did a thing in opposition to the will of God. Who is that man?[1]

It is close to 30 years ago that I read the above from Ironside, and it has stuck with me since then. Ironically, this type of thinking is abundantly present in Karl Barth’s thinking and corpus as well. Clearly, there is a different informing theological and contextual/cultural background behind Ironside and Barth; but at a thematic (‘spirit’) level there is definitely some overlap between the two on an theoanthropology. Barth develops these things deeper and further than Ironside did, as a churchman and preacher, yet, I find it interesting that the same insight, about the humanity of Jesus, because of the pure force and witness of Holy Scripture, stands out to both of these men; men who, typically, would never be mentioned in the same sentence.

Here is how Barth begins to develop this theme, in regard to the humanity of Jesus, and how that implicates humanity in general—that is coram Deo (before God).

 

§45

MAN IN HIS DETERMINATION AS THE COVENANT-PARTNER OF GOD

That real man is determined by God for life with God has its inviolable correspondence in the fact that his creaturely being is a being in encounter—between I and Thou, man and woman. It is human in this encounter, and in this humanity it is a likeness of the being of its Creator and a being in hope in Him.

1.JESUS, MAN FOR OTHER MEN

Real man lives with God as His covenant-partner. For God has created him to participate in the history in which God is at work with him and he with God; to be His partner in this common history of the covenant. He created him as His covenant-partner. Thus real man does not live a godless life—without God. A godless explanation of man, which overlooks the fact that he belongs to God, is from the outset one which cannot explain real man, man himself. Indeed, it cannot even speak of him. It gropes past him into the void. It grasps only the sin in which he breaks the covenant with God and denies and obscures his true reality. Nor can it really explain or speak of his sin. For to do so it would obviously have to see him first in the light of the fact that he belongs to God, in his determination by the God who created him, and in the grace against which he sins. Real man does not act godlessly, but in the history of the covenant in which he is God’s partner by God’s election and calling. He thanks God for His grace by knowing Him as God, by obeying Him, by calling on Him as God, by enjoying freedom from Him and to Him. He is responsible before God, i.e., He gives to the Word of God the corresponding answer. That this is the case, that the man determined by God for life with God is real man, is decided by the existence of the man Jesus. Apart from anything else, this is the standard of what his reality is and what it is not. It reveals originally and definitively why God has created man. The man Jesus is man for God. As the Son of God He is this in a unique way. But as He is for God, the reality of each and every other man is decided. God has created man for Himself. And so real man is for God and not the reverse. He is the covenant-partner of God. He is determined by God for life with God. This is the distinctive feature of his being in the cosmos.[2]

Unlikely consorts, Barth and Ironside are; but in this thematic instance we can see how Barth complements and develops what Ironside only leaves in nascent form (indeed, and “metaphysically” differently than Ironside might have imagined). As an aside: this helps to illustrate my own in via. Many of the so-called “pietistic” “biblicist” evangelical preachers and thinkers hit upon themes, incidentally even, purely because of their warmhearted dedication to the Jesus and triune God of Holy Scripture. They would hit upon themes, deeply theological themes, purely because they were intent on following the contours of Holy Scripture. It is this background that made me “someone in waiting” for a Barth or a Torrance; they, respectively, because of their commitment to following the contours of the Bible, identified many of the same themes as these “North American evangelical pietists.” But because of their theological training, context, and background had the ideational resource to develop said biblical-theological themes that the pietists could only ever inchoately identify.

What it means to be a man, to be a woman, to be human, as Ironside and Barth, respectively, have both identified, is grounded fully in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. He indeed is ecce homo, ‘behold the Man,’ Christ Jesus. He is what it means to be genuinely human before God; uniquely as the Son of God. There is “no Man behind the back of Jesus,” He indeed is the Man from whence and towards which all of creaturely being has its being. To be concretely human in this world is to be in the man from Nazareth, Jesus Christ; since there is no world, or creaturely reality without His elect humanity come first (His is the inner reality of the covenant between God and humanity, of which the created order finds its external meaning).

 

5 For there is one God, and one mediator also between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, . . . I Timothy 2:5

 

[1] H. A. Ironside, Studies on Book One of the Psalms, accessed @ studylight.org 01-12-2024.

[2] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics. The Doctrine of God III/2 §45 (London/New York: T&T Clark, 2010), 1.

A Psychology on the Theological Rationalist

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The following is a post I wrote ten years ago that has been buried on a tumblr account I once had. I thought I would repost it here (there are some grammatical errors present, but I’m too lazy to fix them).

Here is a short reflection on what I would like to call Theological Rationalism. 

In order to reflect upon what it means to be rationalistic; it is best to, at the outset, recognize that in my usage there is a difference between being a rationalist and being rational. The former smacks of an anthropology that is grounded in an intellectualism, meaning that a person or human being can be reduced down to their intellect or mind as their defining feature for what it means to be human (so an essentialism of the mind and its constituent properties)–what we might (and do) find in someone like Thomas Aquinas’ anthropology or even more pointedly in Rene Descartes’ epistemological (ontological) project of cogito ergo sum (‘I think, therefore I am’). This is the kind of anthropology that funds what it is to be a rationalist. I see this as distinct from being rational in that being ‘rational’ simply means that someone is reasonable (by whatever standards that might presuppose) in the way they think, communicate, and act; but being rational does not mean that someone’s ‘being’ can be reduced to their mind and its capacity to actively assign meaning to reality in an essential fashion.

With this distinction in mind, I would like to apply what it means to be a rationalist to theological practice and activity. For me in my experience as a Christian person, when rationalism is applied, as it is, in my North American Christian (and Protestant) context, is that we end up with a form of Christian Fundamentalism. I think the most stalwart and able representative of this kind of theological rationalism might be someone like Carl Henry. Although Henry was actually more informed and aware of his theological surroundings and history than who I really have in mind with this post.

In this post, I am thinking more of the kind of Christian I am most familiar with at a popular level. What happens for the North American Christian, often, is that all of their Christian identity can be reduced to one or two overarching totalizing meta-narrative or stories through which they compress and seek to interpret all else. In this way, they feel a sense of control, indeed even power over the circumstances of their life, and in particular, over their relation to God. The key to what I am getting at (without getting into some concrete examples) is to recognize that these kinds of theological rationalists have been trained and conditioned to think in this way; in other words, it is not that they are intentionally seeking to control their relation to God (although they are sometimes), it is that they have been sold a bill of goods that reduces God and his acts to their preconceived theological framework, which is based upon their own active intellect’s which believes that all of reality can be compressed therein. The emphasis then is placed upon their minds, and their capacity to provide propositional explanation for God, and all of the theological related to him.

The slavery enters into this situation at a very basic level; these theological rationalists believe that they are worshipping God, but who they are really worshipping is a construal of God and his acts which they have constructed and conjured up in a way wherein their understanding of God becomes the essential basis wherein God is assigned his being/person. The terrible reality of this is that this person is stuck in a vicious circle; because they might realize (at some point) that they are not living in a true refreshing kind of freedom, and so they desperately look to God for help. But this is the paradoxical problem, when they look to God, they have already denuded God of any Lordly and contradictory and transformative force in their lives, because they have captured God by the power of their own minds; they have made God contingent upon their capacity to explain God in the terms that their minds (and the history of ideas this associated with) have actively constructed, and all this in the name of God in Christ.

The only escape from this, from the absolutized subjectivity is to start fresh. It is, as Thomas Torrance might say, to engage in a dialectic and process of repentant thinking. It is to repudiate any kind of theological rationalism, and its anthropology, and to adopt a new attitude wherein the God who has revealed himself in Christ no longer is held captive by our own psyches and their desires to be comfortable and in control. It is to finally rest in the fact that God is God, and that he has contradicted all of our reason by way of the cross. Once we are able to renounce/repent of our wayward flesh made absolute; it is here where the theological rationalist finally will have the capacity to be theologically reasonable–and this, based upon a dynamic love of Christ that is not contingent upon me and my mind, but upon God and his relation as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

 

The Freedom of the Human Before God: Getting Beyond the Usual Debates

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What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be free? These are the types of questions that have often plagued the Christian theological dialogue for centuries. Indeed, these theoanthropological loci have been the source of much consternation and division; that is, depending on how disparate Christian thinkers conclude on an answer to these questions. Often, whether in the theological or philosophical realms, answering these questions are reduced to, generally, two disparate tribes: 1) Arminian/Libertarian Free Agency, and 2) Calvinism/Compatibilist Determinism. There are of course other iterations of expression along the continuum that these seemingly two polar opposites are comprised of; but again, and generally speaking, this is what we have seen play out—with reference to our original questions—within the development and history of theological ideas (e.g., Augustine/Pelagius; Luther/Erasmus; Calvin/Pighius et al.)

In contradistinction, Athanasian Reformed theology, after Barth (and Athanasius), elides the seemingly unavoidable binary that the annals of history have been scorched by. We focus on the freedom of God as the only ground from whence any notion of freedom might be construed. The arguments surrounding freewill vis-à-vis human agency, before God, all start with an abstract soteriological question bequeathed to the church by, primarily, St. Augustine. Augustine’s bequeathment comes primarily from his commitment to Neo-Platonism, and how he thought of the relation between the eternal forms and their shadows in temporal history. Without getting into that now, we can only gesture at it for time and space constraints. It is Barth, as already noted, who offers an alternative way to reformulate these questions and answers; not from an abstract lens grounded in various humanity for whom God gave His life alone; but from the concrete humanity of God, as that is given for us in Jesus Christ. When Jesus is the ground from whence all theological questions flow, we are sure to be provided with the answers that God has freely chosen to bequeath upon us by His dearly beloved Son.

In the following passage from Barth, he is describing what, from his christological lights, a genuine human being is comprised by. In a way, without all of the context, when the reader reads this, it might sound like Barth is speaking abstractly about a needed performativity of humanity before God. But know, he is referring to God’s humanity for us in Jesus Christ (and yet, dialectically so).

What can and does happen in the human decision as such is that man offers himself to God. He thanks God. He is responsible before God, i.e., he makes himself a response to the Word of God—no less but also no more than that. He gives what he has, i.e., what he is, and therefore himself. No less than this is required of him. Less than this is not sufficient to constitute true humanity. To offer himself and place himself at the disposal of God—it is to this that he is summoned and for this that he is strengthened and empowered. Doing this, he is established as a human subject, and posits himself as such. Failing to do it, he fails to realise himself as man. For to do this is his only possibility. Offering and disposing himself to go to God and to be obedient to the divine call: “Come,” he pushes open the gate and steps out into freedom. As he does so, he is a creature which transcends the limits of the creature. And in this way he is the human creature. No less than this is required of him. If he did not do this, if he decided differently, he would not be man. But also no more is required of him. It is not required of him that he should make himself into a gift which necessarily satisfies and pleases God. It is required of him rather that he should know himself and will himself on the basis of the fact that he is called by God; that he should affirm himself as the being which sets out on its journey to God and is therefore taking the step of freedom. But it is not required of him that he should place himself at the side of God, or that his action should decide or anticipate this justification before God. He can take the first step, but he cannot ensure that it will successfully lead him to the goal at which he aims. He cannot give mor than he has. It is not within his power to make himself right and acceptable and well-pleasing to his Creator, and therefore worthy of being with Him. This is a matter beyond his control. He cannot impart or attribute it to himself. He cannot ensure that he will come to God merely by setting out to go to Him. Hence his going to God, his responsibility before Him, must be of such a kind as to realise and express his limitation. It must be a pure self-offering. It must be free from any sort of encroachment. It must renounce any suggestion that man’s decision might anticipate the decision which only God can take. Man’s responsibility before God must consist in a self-offering to God which is referred to God’s own decision and dependent upon it. Only when it has this character does it happen that man comes as well as goes to God, so that he himself transcends the limits of the creature and is thus a human creature, real man.[1]

Barth’s claim that to be ‘real man,’ that the creature must transcend his own impotent limits, is functioning as something like a witness. A witness to the reality that what is required of ‘real man’ remains the impossible possibility that really and ultimately can and has only been achieved by the Son of Man for us. The underlying premise to Barth’s inklings on ‘real man’ is clearly in reference to who he takes to be the only real man in all of history: i.e., Jesus Christ.

Getting back to the opening of this article, the reader might be wondering how the aforementioned gets us past the binary that say Calvinism and Arminianism operate from vis-à-vis human agency/freewill in salvation. Barth, rather than starting in abstract people, those who have been “predestined” to be the elect of God, starts with the premise of a concrete person; the Theanthropos (Godman). What this move does is focus our attention on the altitudes God is expecting of [hu]man to genuinely be [hu]man. God has a holy requirement that a genuine humanity will meet in relationship to who God is. Since fallen humanity is unable to reach these heights it is has been required of God, if indeed reconciliation is to obtain between God and humanity, that God provide ‘Himself a lamb.’ It is God’s desire, because of who He is as eternal and triune love, within Himself, that God created to begin with. It is God’s desire to have fellowship and participation with us as counterpoints upon whom He, in His other-processive life, might fellowship and enjoy eternal bliss with. And it has always already been God’s free choice, to be God’s image for us in Jesus Christ (Col. 1.15); indeed, this has always been the goal of original creation in the first place: to elevate us in the humanity of Christ, His image for us, into eternal participation and interpenetration with Him by the grace of adoption. And so in this, He pre-destined Himself to be for us as He elected to be us in the humanity of Jesus Christ, that we might, again by grace, become one spirit with Him (I Cor. 6.17).

All of the above noted, the reader still might be wondering: “okay, so how does this implicate human freedom in salvation?” In a nutshell, it works off the assumption that there is only one genuine freedom for the human being to truly be free from—God’s, since God alone is free. This is how [hu]man ‘transcends the limits of the creature and is thus a human creature, real man.’ He or she moves within the freedom for God that God is first for us in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. Jesus has trailblazed the way for a real humanity, as the firstborn from the dead, to become real humanity; that is rightly related to God, as God has always intended. By the Spirit, the human can now correspondently say Yes and Amen to God, from God’s Yes and Amen for them in the vicarious human agency of Jesus Christ. Our freedom as human beings before God is funded by God’s freedom to be for us; and in this freedom, as we become united to Christ, not just ‘carnally’ but ‘spiritually,’ it is herein whence the human being becomes genuinely human. This is because, following the logic we have been operating with thus far, based on the premises set by Barth, what it means to be really human is to really be resident in the bosom of the Father through participation and union with the Son. We seek God, therefore, because He has first sought us in Christ. He is free to do that, and ironically, by His very freedom, by Him penetrating the ‘unhealed’ of our fallen human natures through the hypostatic unioning in the incarnation, we become participant in His freedom. It is a freedom that only has eyes for the living God. And it is these eyes that portend the entailments of what it genuinely means to be human and free; that is in right and forever relationship with the God who created us just for this very purpose.

More to be said, of course! But hopefully you can start to see, maybe only in a liminal way (but hopefully more!) how this reframing of things, that is through a christological frame, gets us far beyond the usual antics that surround this long and entrenched battle between the saints of old and today.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/2 §44 The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 182.

The Gospel of Truth Confronting Our ‘Happily Sick’ Selves

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The Gospel is a Gospel of offense. Christ in the assumptio carnis doesn’t only explain God to us from within Himself and the triune life (Jn 1.18), but He explains who we are as fallen human beings vis-à-vis the holiness and person of the living God. The Gospel doesn’t allow us to remain comfortable with our sins; the Gospel doesn’t allow us to find companionship with our evil, dark and depraved hearts. The Gospel is the Way, the TRUTH, and the Life; as such, it puts us in our place. For the natural [hu]man this causes squirming, it challenges our base desires at their very root; the desires we’d rather live our live-long days with. But the Gospel pronounces a disruptive and loud, No! Gracefully, the Gospel doesn’t just take us to the dark side of our fallen condition; it dialectically, and at the same time, elevates us into the Light and Life of God.

Read along as father and son duo, Alan and Andrew Torrance explain how this looks in the theology of Kierkegaard:

To analyze Kierkegaard’s position more precisely, there are primarily two ways in which he considered Christ to be offensive. The more obvious of the two ways is that Christ proclaims a deeply countercultural message. While Jesus ultimately brings good news to the world, not everything he says will be immediately appealing, especially to elite members of society. For Kierkegaard, this point should be obvious to any sincere reader of Scripture. The reason Christ’s message is unsettling is that so many of us are content with the shape of our sinful lives. In the grip of “the sickness unto death,” we define ourselves according to our own finite ends in a way that is dead to God and in “the state of deepest spiritual wretchedness.” As Climacus puts it, the sinner exists in a state of imprisonment in which he “holds himself captive,” and in this state, he is oblivious to the sickness that accompanies his overly positive view of his life. When caught up in sin, it is extremely difficult to notice, let alone take seriously, our state of despair. We are happily sick, so when the true world-changing gospel message is spoken into this situation, it cannot simply be taken as a message that supports us in our daily lives. When God assumes human form, God does not settle in with us in our “sickbed,” nor does God comfort us in our sinful ways. Rather, God reveals Godself by acts of revelation that seek to deliver us from sickness. Anti-Climacus writes:

Christianity did not come into the world as a showpiece of gentle comfort, as the preacher blubberingly and falsely introduces it—but as the absolute. It is out of love that God so wills but it is also God who wills it, and he wills as he wills. He will not be transformed by human beings into a cozy human god; he wills to transform human beings and he wills it out of love.[1]

We will pick up with the ‘second way’ next time. Suffice it to say, Kierkegaard is onto what should appear to be the obvious: i.e., as fallen creatures we are more than comfortable with our fallen ways. Indeed, as fallen creatures, we aren’t even really aware that we are in fact, sick; more biblically, dead! As the Christology of Kierkegaard underscores, outwith Christ’s penetration into the soil and slum of our souls, we would simply run head-long, with glee, into the eternal abyss. But God’s love is greater than our blindness; and because God is gracious, He elects our humanity for Himself in Christ, and gives us His vicarious eyes. He gives us His eternal Light that we might see Light, and come to recognize the darkness that we so gleefully inhabit outwith His disruption into our humanity.

As an aside: the aforementioned has another implication. It implicates the way knowledge of God does or doesn’t work. If Kierkegaard’s theology is true on this front (and I think it is), this entails that fallen creatures left to themselves have no capacity in themselves, other than to see their darkness as light. Indeed, left to themselves, fallen humanity will construct God and gods in their light, which in fact, of course, is only their darkness in the end. The fallen creature needs God’s Life to assume theirs; bring their life up into His; and it is then only from that inhabitation that fallen humanity is elevated into a status and capacity, through union with Christ by the Spirit, that they can come to think and speak God’s thoughts Deus dixit (‘after He has spoken’). Natural theology simply doesn’t have the chops to offer a theological ontology/epistemology/anthropology that brings a fallen humanity into a genuine and viable knowledge of the living God. Christ alone remains the only mediator between God and humanity whereby fallen humanity can become adopted and elevated humanity as participants in and with Christ’s vicarious humanity for them/us.

Many other implications to be visited, but this will have to suffice for the moment.

[1] Alan J. Torrance and Andrew B. Torrance, Beyond Immanence: The Theological Vision of Kierkegaard and Barth (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2023), 77.

A Very Theological Proposal: Gratitude as the Ground for What it Means to be Human, Coram Deo

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“What is man that thou are mindful of him . . . ?” King David, as he stood before the grandeur of God, as He reflected upon God’s handiwork in creation, asked an age-old question, with reference to the who of humanity. In this instance, he wasn’t necessarily attempting to peer into the entailments of a theological anthropology, but instead simply standing in awe at the bigness of God relative to God’s compassion for us small little human beings here on the flatland. For the rest of this piece, I want to think about what it means to be human before God. Not from a philosophical or speculative vantage point, but from God’s concrete Self-revelation for us in Jesus Christ.

Philosophers of old, like Francisco Petrarch, impressed the idea that humanity is at its most virtuous, and thus most human, when it is turned into itself; when we live private lives wherein a cultivation of the virtues can obtain; with the result that humanity’s telos can be most realized in and through the developing virtues, the ultimate good. Petrarch, we might say, was a proto-Enlightened modern, in regard to his way of thinking humanity with reference to his turn to the subject attitude. But this isn’t the way Jesus thought of humanity, and its entailments coram Deo (before God). Jesus, as the second person of the Trinity, within the Divine Monarxia, within the processions of God’s eternal life, within the origins of relation within God’s triune life, ecstatically receives His life as the Son in relation to the Father. Likewise, the Father, in return, receives His life as the Father from the Son, as the Son is the Son of the Father; and this implicates the warp and woof of the Holy Spirit’s life, just the same, within the koinonia of the Father/Son. So, in this frame, life is understood, under perichoretic pressures, in the sense that primordial and eternal life, that of the triune God, is a life of interpenetrating subject-in-being givenness; wherein what it means to be truly alive is to be in reception of the other, and vice versa. This is an ec-static existence, even within the immanent life of God. As such, Arthur McGill offers the following insight as he reflects on these matters from within the Gospel of John:

Now, the Gospel of John is totally preoccupied with the themes of glory, of fulfilled life, and of realized worship. John identifies these themes with the death of Jesus. However, the death of Jesus can only be understood when we know who Jesus is. The first part of John’s Gospel concentrates on showing us who Jesus is; the second part focuses on the significance of Jesus’ dying. John sums up everything that can be said about the identity of Jesus in the phrase, he is “from the Father.” He not only comes from the Father in a sequential sense. All that he has and is comes from the Father. The Father gives the Son of Man his knowledge, his purposes in will, his authority in judgment, and above all, his life. The Son has life in himself, not from himself, but from the Father. Yet, from the Father, the Son has life, life within himself. In all of this, John presents Jesus as living by what I have called an ecstatic identity—a being not by virtue of anything that is his own, but a being by virtue of what the Father continually communicates to him.[1]

McGill, I think, brings out the proper focus when thinking about the implications of this ecstatic identity. This is a fellowshipping mode of being; an intimate reality of how life has eternally been within the environs of God’s dynamic life of co-inhering love. But it is this life that stands as the antecedent basis out of which God elected to create us, humans. It is in the image that He freely chose for Himself in the face (prosopon) of the Son, wherein we as creatures come to have life as participants in and from His life. This is God’s grace; it is an act in His becoming for us. Not a pure act, but a gracious act based upon His type of life that indeed determines the shape of all created life; particularly the life created in His image, as images of the image of God in the Son (cf. Col. 1.15).

And so, life is really a matter of being Grace formed from within the womb of the Father; indeed, as the Son has always already and eternally been in the womb of the Father as the Son for us. These are deep matters, doxological matters, but matters that we must concentrate on if we might come to understand what in fact it means to really be human before God. The Apostle Paul pens the following: “Therefore as you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him, having been firmly rooted and now being built up in Him and established in your faith, just as you were instructed, and overflowing with gratitude” (Col. 2.6,7). Notice how the themes of this passage correlate well with the themes we have been considering in this short development. The theme of “received Christ Jesus the Lord” (so the ec-static identity, as McGill identifies that for us), and the theme of grace or “gratitude” as the expression of understanding that this is in fact the ground of our lives in and from the ec-static life of the Son in Christ for us. Indeed, if the Son’s life, in eternal relation to the Father, is one of ecstatic identity, one that is in constant relational reception of the Father’s life for Him, then how much more is it not the case that our lives, as participants with Christ’s life (participatio Christi), aren’t indeed lives that ought to be constantly consumed by God’s possession of us, as He primordially pours forth His life for us; indeed as He does so in constant relation with the Son for us, within the eternal life of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?

Barth helps us think about these themes with greater focus:

But at this point we can and must attempt a more precise and material definition. If the Word of God is which man is, and is therefore historical, is a Word of divine grace, if he is thus summoned to hear and obey this Word, i.e., to be, and to continue to be, in the hearing of this Word, then the being of man can and must be more precisely defined as a being in gratitude. That casting of his faith on God which we have described as the true history and being of man is not so audacious and strange and fantastic as may appear at first sight. Rightly understood, it is in the strictest sense a natural human action. In it the creature remains in full self-possession, and exercises as directly as possible the true being beside which it has no other. It is, as it is told by God that He is gracious to it. In daring to cast itself upon God, it corresponds to the Word without which it would not be this human creature. When we understand the being of man as a correspondence to this Word, we understand it as a being in gratitude. Gratitude is the precise creaturely counterpart to the grace of God. What is by the Word of the grace of God, must be in gratitude; and man’s casting of his trust upon God is nothing other or less, but also nothing more, than the being of man as his act in gratitude.

The term εὐχαριστεῖν or εὐχαριστία, like the objective term χάρις which it reflects, is one of the terms which is only used soteriologically in the New Testament. But in the New Testament the existence of the man Jesus is a soteriological, the soteriological reality, and therefore in Jn. 1, Col. 1 and Heb. 1 we can also see its ontological significance. If man as such is not to be understood apart from the existence of the man Jesus, we cannot avoid the term grace and its complement gratitude even in the description of the being of man as such. As the One who in Jesus meets him as his Saviour, and says that me is gracious to him, God is already the Creator of man. The creaturely being of man must as such be understood as a being claimed by this Word, and therefore as a correspondence to the grace of God, and therefore as a being in gratitude.[2]

Selah.

[1] Arthur McGill, Death and Life: An American Theology, 70.

[2] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/2 §44 The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 160.

Being Robed in the Eschatos of God’s Triune Light

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For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent,
And for Jerusalem’s sake I will not keep quiet,
Until her righteousness goes forth like brightness,
And her salvation like a torch that is burning. -Isaiah 62:1

“Arise, shine; for your light has come,
And the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.
 “For behold, darkness will cover the earth
And deep darkness the peoples;
But the Lord will rise upon you
And His glory will appear upon you.
“Nations will come to your light,
And kings to the brightness of your rising. -Isaiah 60:1-3

I will rejoice greatly in the Lord,
My soul will exult in my God;
For He has clothed me with garments of salvation,
He has wrapped me with a robe of righteousness,
As a bridegroom decks himself with a garland,
And as a bride adorns herself with her jewels. -Isaiah 61:10

And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. -Genesis 2:25

 

A quick reflection on the Eschaton. The thought just occurred to me, once again, of just how self-incurved we are as fallen, yet redeemed, creatures still. We suffer from an unquenchable thirst for attention. We inherently desire, as creatures of the sin, that we would be accepted by others; not for the others’ sake, but for our own self-incurved fantasies. When we walk by a pane of glass, lit-up by the sunshine, we often look at ourselves to make sure we still look good; with our brand-new kicks in tow. We often compare ourselves with others and think: I might not be a supermodel, but I’m definitely better looking than that guy or gal. We are born with vain hearts that are disorderedly in love with themselves. In our very hearts, as fallen creatures, we seek our kingdom, and our righteousness; and all these other things are ultimately lost unto us (as King Solomon and so many others have learned by experience over the millennia.)

But what of the glorified bodies that we will put on at the second coming of Christ? The Prophet says we will be, and are in fact, robed in the garments of salvation, the robes of righteousness; indeed, Christ’s righteousness. Moses by the Spirit says that Adam and Eve were both naked and yet were not ashamed. They were literally naked and weren’t stumbled by the physical form in the perverted ways that fallen creatures now are. We see the Prophet refer to God’s Light for us, in a radically eschatological sense. I would suggest, that even beyond what Adam and Eve experienced, we will be, and even are now (by eyes of faith), so shrouded about with the Life of God’s triune Light for us, that in the Kingdom-sense we simply are radiating the Light of Christ’s life; that our bodies are ensconced in the Light of Christ, as we are participants in His life, that it is not possible but to evince and emote His Light; that we have become, in Christ’s resurrected and ascended vicarious humanity, witness bearers, to the nth degree, of God’s Life, as we have become encapsulated in His radiating Light. In other words, when we finally receive our new glorified bodies, like Christ’s, we could be naked, and not be stumbled because we will so effuse the life of God, indeed as God’s triune Life, is in fact our life, by the adoption of grace, that we will no longer have the capacity, nor the desire to focus on ourselves any longer. We will indeed be like our Father, in the Son, by the Holy Spirit. We will be so other focused from within God’s being (ousia), just as He is as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, that self-consumption in an abstract fallen sense will no longer be a possibility. We get a taste of what this might look like on the Mount of Transfiguration:

Six days later Jesus *took with Him Peter and James and John his brother, and *led them up on a high mountain by themselves. 2 And He was transfigured before them; and His face shone like the sun, and His garments became as white as light. 3 And behold, Moses and Elijah appeared to them, talking with Him. 4 Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, it is good for us to be here; if You wish, I will make three tabernacles here, one for You, and one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” 5 While he was still speaking, a bright cloud overshadowed them, and behold, a voice out of the cloud said, “This is My beloved Son, with whom I am well-pleased; listen to Him!” 6 When the disciples heard this, they fell face down to the ground and were terrified. 7 And Jesus came to them and touched them and said, “Get up, and do not be afraid.” 8 And lifting up their eyes, they saw no one except Jesus Himself alone. -Matthew 17

I long for the day when faith is swallowed up by sight. When we will no longer have this inherent penchant to constantly be self-consumed, and only be consumed by the life of the triune God, and all those participant in that life. I can’t wait till this body of death is finally put under Jesus’ feet, as the last enemy that it is, only to consummately be risen afresh anew with the glorified body of our Lord’s.

When you think about it, all of the world’s ills are formed by the incurved heart, the “Enlightened” turn to the subject. We want and do not have, and so we either literally kill, or figuratively kill, to get what we don’t have, but want. May Christ have mercy sooner than later! Maranatha

No One But God is Good: And Its Implications for Modern People

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Some people confuse the Enlightenment for the New Creation. To the point that the human spirit has come to a crossroads in its development, and become civilized, or good. But this is not what the Gospel says. The Gospel says that we are constantly being given over to the death of Jesus that His life might be made manifest through the mortal members of our bodies. This presupposes that as Martin Luther rightly emphasized, as Christians, we are simul iustus et peccator (simultaneously justified and sinner) while we continue to inhabit this in-between time within our bodies of death. The New Creation is not an abstract human achievement; that is to say, there is no turn or development to the good without the Godman (Theanthropos), the mediator between God and humanity, becoming sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God in His vicarious humanity for us. It is the lie of the desperately wicked and above all evil hearts, that fallen humanity is born with, that asserts that humanity has a spark of good (or divinity) built into them. Indeed, the ultimate lie is that humanity, on its own, has the capacity to achieve a holiness deigned by its own whims and desires; that it can simply call something good, and it is so. All that the Enlightenment did was push the Edenic lie further into the hearts of men and women; that is, that they could be God in and of themselves. It said that the indomitable human spirit in fact is God, and that humanity stands the best chance of flourishing by finally accepting the notion that all of the traditional attributes of God are in fact really just projections of the collective humanity of all times. As such, the conclusion (to the Enlightenment) is that humanity, in fact has really been God all along; that humanity has the capacity to be good on its own self-possessed and self-designed terms. Look at where this type of thinking has gotten us in the world. The world is literally collapsing under the pressure of its own “enlightened” thinking. Kyrie eleison (Lord have mercy!)

A Kerygmatic Anthropology

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Knowledge of ourselves first requires a genuine knowledge of the One who created us. Without that outer reference point, there can be no genuine knowledge of the self. This was a key axiom of Calvin’s, as he wrote in his Institutes; and it is key for Barth as he developed his theological anthropology in the Church Dogmatics. The following is an excerpt from Barth’s CD III/2, where he is, indeed, doing the yeoman’s work of developing what he takes to be a genuinely Christian understanding of what the entailments are of what it means to be human. You will notice, as is typical of Barth’s approach, he does not attempt to think about an anthropology as the secular, and even many other Christian theologies attempt to do, from an abstract point of contact found in a pure nature. Instead, Barth grounds his thinking about the entailments of a biblical anthropology by grounding it in the frame of a radical theology of the Word (which is, and ought to be, a very Protestant thing to do). Notice what Barth writes:

On the other hand we have to remember—and this is what makes our problem so difficult—that any tenable distinction between man as created by God and the sinful determination of his being is possible only if his sinful nature, his perversion and corruption, is minimised. But if we consider man truly and seriously in the light of the Word of God, this is just what may not be done. His corruption is radical and total. It there is no sin in which man is not also the creature of God (although in contradiction with God and himself), so also there is no creaturely essence in which man is not seen at strife with God and therefore sinful. Therefore we do not have in any case any direct vision of a sinless being of man fulfilling its original determination. There is no point at which we are not brought up against that corruption and depravity. We must be on our guard against any desire to illuminate the darkness in which the true nature of man is shrouded by taking into account what we suppose we know about man in general and as such from other sources. It must be our aim to view him clearly in the light of the Word of God, and therefore as the sinner which he is in his confrontation with God. If we ask concerning his true nature, we must never lose sight for a moment of his degeneracy.[1]

It is interesting, isn’t it? . . . When an anthropology is developed in the light of the Word of God what comes to the fore is that humanity simpliciter is sinful, degenerate, a depraved soul. Even so, this isn’t what humanity was ultimately created for; just the opposite. But we must first come to terms with our dire situation, and this is what obtains when the Logos incarnandus (the Word to be incarnate) becomes the Logos incarnatus (the Word incarnate) in the assumptio carnis (assumption of flesh/humanity). The Word of God forces those with eyes to see and ears to hear to recognize that the end of our humanity, as it is, is the cross of Jesus Christ; but that this isn’t its ultimate end. The cross of Jesus only becomes the soil that the seed of his broken life is thrown into, in order that it might rise and ascend again in its glorified and victorious status. This is what Barth, and the New Testament witness is getting at. I think instead of calling this a theological anthropology it would be more apropos to call it a kerygmatic anthropology; viz. an anthropology that is funded by the ground supplied for it by the Good News! that Christ is risen, that He is risen indeed!

Let the reader understand: while Barth’s theology is often mistakenly taken as academic theology, in fact what it really is is proclamation theology (a theology that will preach).

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/2 §43 The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 25.