Category Archives: Theological Epistemology

A Rejoinder to the Credo Alliance on Natural Theology

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I just listened to a Credo Podcast featuring Matthew Barrett, J. V. Fesko, Fred Sanders, and Scott Swain. The title of the podcast is: Is Natural Theology in Conflict with the Gospel: Credo Alliance. You can go and listen to it for yourself (only approx. 30 minutes), by clicking on the linked title.

They all affirm the value of a natural theology; in the history often identified as the Two Books of Revelation (i.e., general/natural and special/revealed). What somewhat surprised me as I listened to each of them present their thoughts on this particular locus was how they seemingly, and unwittingly, moved back and forth between wanting to affirm their natural theology, and at the same time mistaking a theology of nature for their natural theology. They conflated a Logoi theology with a natural theology. They respectively were attempting to have their theological cake and eat a natural one too. But in this pursuit, in an attempt to maintain the primacy of the Protestant Scripture Principle in tandem with a natural theology, they ended up referring to a theology of nature, as if this could serve as a methodological natural theology. The lack of nuancing here left me wondering if in fact any of them actually understands the entailments of a methodological natural theology (as we find in Thomas Aquinas, Erich Przywara et al.). The panel referred to Thomas, as if a theological homeboy, but then began to sound more like acolytes of St. Ephrem the Syrian; or even, TF Torrance.

It is a weird thing—theological knowledge acquisition—often you build up in your mind’s eye perceptions of people, guilds and so forth. You presume that there must be some deeper well that stands behind it all; something that is overwhelmingly elevated and interstellar even. But the fact of the matter is that the human being, no matter how learned, no matter how read, has a limit. We all have liminal-meters that keep us situated in our creaturely places, such that when we expose our apotheosis of the theological edifices and grand mastered superstructures, the reality hits once again: we are of all people most to be pitied if Christ be not risen. If the limit isn’t the Word of God, the Logos of the triune God in the prosopon of Jesus Christ, if the limit includes a reason abstract from the filial bondship that the Son has with the Father by the Holy Spirit, then we will always be exposed as the philosophers we are, rather than the theologians we are wont to be.

All of this to say, respectfully: what I heard from this panel was quite a bit of confusion about what in fact they understand a natural theology to entail. What is it? A methodological natural theology that sets the epistemic quest for the theologian to gain God-knowledge, or is it a theology of nature wherein the little logoi in the Christologically conditioned cosmos finds its gravitas solely in the Logos of God? Such that nature itself is suffused with the primacy of Jesus Christ as the true Alpha and Omega of God. The theologian cannot simply hand-waive to wanting a primacy of Holy Scripture in the theological endeavor, and then sublate that by a reference to a muddled notion of natural theology in the same breath. If you listen to the podcast let me know if you come away with the same impression I had, or something else.

Evil, The ‘Ancient Menace’: Christ is Victor!

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My recent readings in Barth’s Church Dogmatics have me engaging with his development on a doctrine of nothingness (i.e., sin and evil). The particular section I am reading has been exceedingly edifying. The passage I am going to share from him is a summarizing type of statement of what he has been treating heretofore. As I was reading this section it gave me great hope to ponder the present and forthcoming realities, as those relate to Christ’s victory over nothingness-sin-evil, and all that entails eschatologically. It is hopeful to ruminate on the concrete victory of Christ vis-à-vis the despair and delirium the current (seen) world order suffers under. Without this blessed hope, and the soon to come, glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, this world surely has no ultimate meaning or purpose. Without the Logos ensarkos all the world can do is to make an attempt at self-generating some type of existential meaning in the face of the absurdum of the abyss of darkness that enshrouds this world system. But Christ! Barth writes,

What is nothingness? In the knowledge and confession of the Christian faith, i.e., looking retrospectively to the resurrection of Jesus Christ and prospectively to His coming again, there is only one possible answer. Nothingness is the past, the ancient menace, danger and destruction, the ancient non-being which obscured and defaced the divine creation of God but which is consigned to the past in Jesus Christ, in whose death it has received its deserts, being destroyed with the consummation of the positive will of God which is as such the end of His non-willing. Because Jesus is Victor, nothingness is routed and extirpated. It is that which in this One who was both very God and very man has been absolutely set behind, not only by God, but in unity with Him by man and therefore the creature. It is that from whose influence, dominion and power the relationship between Creator and creature was absolutely set free in Jesus Christ, so that it is no longer involved in their relationship as a third factor. This is what happened to nothingness once and for all in Jesus Christ. This is its status and appearance now that God has made His own and carried through the conflict with it in His Son. It is no longer to be feared. It can no longer “nihilate.” But obviously we may make these undoubtedly audacious statements only on the ground of one single presupposition. The aspect of creaturely activity both as a whole and in detail, our consciousness both of the world and of self, certainly do not bear them out. But what do we really know of it as taught by this consciousness? How can this teach us the truth that it is really past and done with? The only valid presupposition is a backward look to the resurrection of Jesus Christ and a forward look to His coming in glory, i.e., the look of Christian faith as rooted in and constantly nourished by the Word of God. The knowledge and confession of Christian faith, however, inevitably entails the affirmation that by the divine intervention nothingness has lost the perpetuity which it could and must and indeed did have apart from this intervention. It can no longer be validly regarded as possessing any claim or right power in relation to the creature, as though it were still before and above us, as though the world created by God were still subject to and dominated by it, as though Christians must hold it in awe, as though it were particularly Christian to hold it in the utmost awe and to summon the world to share in this awe. It is no longer legitimate to think of it as if real deliverance and release from it were still an event of the future. It is obvious that in point of fact we do constantly think of it in this way, with anxious, legalistic, tragic, hesitant, doleful, and basically pessimistic thoughts, and this inevitably where we are neither able nor prepared to think from the standpoint of Christian faith. But it is surely evident than when we think in this way it is not from a Christian standpoint, but in spite of it, in breach of the command imposed with our Christian faith. If our thought is conditioned by the obedience of Christian faith, we have only one freedom, namely, to regard nothingness as finally destroyed and to make a new beginning in remembrance of the One who has destroyed it. Only if our thought is thus conditioned by the obedience of Christian faith is it possible to proclaim the Gospel to the world as it really is, as the message of freedom for the One who has already come and acted as the Liberator, and therefore of the freedom which precludes the anxiety, legalism and pessimism so prevalent in the world. We need hardly describe how throughout the centuries the Christian Church has failed to shape its thought in the obedience of Christian faith, to proclaim it to the world in this obedience, to live in this freedom and to summon the world to it. For this reason and contrary to its true nature, so-called Christianity has become a sorry affair both within and without. It is shameful enough to have to admit that many of the interpretations of nothingness which we are forced to reject as non-Christian derive their power and cogency from the fact that for all their weakness and erroneousness they attest a Christian insight to the extent that they do at least offer a cheerful view and describe and treat nothingness as having no perpetuity. It ought to be the main characteristic of the Christian view that it can demonstrate this more surely because on surer ground, more boldly because in the exercise and proclamation of the freedom granted to do so, and more logically because not in a venture but in simple obedience. We must not imagine that we serve the seriousness of Christian knowledge, life and proclamation by retreating at this point and refusing to realise and admit that the apparently audacious is the norm, the only true possibility. The true seriousness of the matter, and we may emphasise this point in retrospect of the whole discussion, does not finally depend upon pessimistic but upon optimistic thought and speech. From a Christian standpoint “to be serious” can only mean to take seriously the fact that Jesus is Victor, the last word must always be secretly the first, namely, that nothingness has no perpetuity.[1]

Years ago, I read a book by Donald Bloesch called, Jesus is Victor!: Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Salvation. Bloesch was treating the very themes we have been reading about in Barth directly. Barth’s primary point (he has more than one) is that nothingness or sin or evil cannot be rightly known, but through the One who first stands against it for us. That God alone in Christ has the capacity to see what evil is, in light of His positive life of righteousness and holiness. For Barth, the world has no access to the concrete non-reality of nothingness. As such, they have no way of battling it. As an implication, this would be one reason, among many, that there is Victory alone in Christ alone. The world is ensnared by a trap that might seem like the Stoic fate of fatalism; but as Barth opines, in light of Christ, things are much worse than that. Which is why it takes all of God to be for all of us in the face of Jesus Christ. As Barth rightly emphasizes, there is no release from the anxiety, the dread, the tragic, the doom&gloom apart from the Light of Light of God piercing the darkness that we might come to more accurately understand what darkness, what nothingness actually entails. Not that we can grasp the inner-anatomy of nothingness, per se, but in Christ, we can finally, at the very least, recognize the depth dimensional reality that ensconces us within the binding of a dread-nothingness that God alone has the ability to know the depths of; indeed, as the Theanthropos, “. . . He does not will to be faithful to Himself except as He is faithful to His creature, adopting its cause and therefore constantly making the alien problem of nothingness His own.”[2]

Marantha!

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3 §50–51 [364] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 74–5.

[2] Ibid., 68.

On the Thomistic Captivity of the Protestantisms: Knowledge of the triune God

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Human agency is lost in the fall (which remains an inexplicable thing). The only hope for human agency to be reestablished before God is for God to re-create it as He has for us in the human agency of the Second and Greater Adam, who is the Christ. This is one reason people of a certain ilk reject the notion of a natural theology, and its subset in the anologis entis (analogy of being). Hence, knowledge of God is a purely Graced reality, and not a natural one in any way. I am, in fact, of said ilk (shocking!) I will always find it shocking the self-professed Reformed orthodox and Lutheran orthodox folks affirm natural theology as the fundamentum of their theological projects. Don’t you see why? These forlorn Protestantisms claim to hold to a radical form of Total Depravity, wherein what it means to be human, in a fallen sense, is to be so polluted by and riddled with sin, that ostensibly the ontic capacity, along with its noetic counterpart, cannot and will not come to know the true and the living God.

And yet I would suggest these Protestantisms are held within a Thomistic Captivity. That is, for them, as with Aquinas, what it means to be God, and then as corollary, what it means to be human, is to constantly have a resident and active intellect at play. And for the creature, even postlapsarian, this entails that the intellect, at the very least, retains its spark of being. That is, in order for the integrity of God’s being to be upheld, for those in the Thomist Captivity, human being’s intellect must be upheld even post-fall. As Steven Ozment so eloquently describes this chain of being for Thomas and his children:

The assumption that real relations existed between God, man, and the world made possible Aquinas’s confidence in a posteriori proofs of God’s existence; finite effects led necessarily to their origin, because they were really connected with it. The same assumption underlay Aquinas’s distinctive views on the “analogical” character of human knowledge and discourse about God. According to Aquinas, one could speak meaningfully of one’s relationship to God by analogy with one’s relationship with one’s fellow man because a real relationship existed between the values of people shared and those God had prescribed.[1]

With Thomas, for me, it isn’t the idea “that real relations existed between God, man . . . ,” I am a critical/theological realist after all. The problem in the Thomistic frame is that the ‘point of contact’ between God and man, the point of relation, is predicated by a chain-like continuity between God’s intellect and humanity’s (intact, at whatever level postlapse). But the Bible teaches otherwise in regard to the effects of the fall, on both the world simpliciter, and humanity.

I submit, that in order for humanity to come to have a genuine knowledge of the triune God, that the triune God must become us that we might become Him by grace. Without this participatio Christi all the human can do, even in the name of Christ, is construct monuments of their own intellects and worship them as God. This is why I reject the premises of a natural theology; and this is why I would recommend that you do the same.

[1]  Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform 1250–1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980), 49.

Bosom of the Father Knowledge

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No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him. –John 1:18

Jesus has brought all who will, because He first willed for us, into the bosom of the Father in union with Him. It is here, this locale, where knowledge of God alone obtains. It is God’s Self-knowledge that He has invited us into, as if a banqueting table. The Christian, by the grace of God in Christ, shares in the divine nature; indeed, the particular nature of the particular and only living God. Without God’s revelation there would be no reconciliation; and without reconciliation there would be no revelation of God; because ‘revelation is reconciliation,’ for all who will; because He first willed for us. So, a genuine knowledge of God is a necessarily Christian knowledge; for outwith this participation in the triune life, there is no God to have knowledge of; other than a knowledge of the self projected out onto a notion of godness that humanity itself has constructed.

The Heavenly Dust: Christian Knowledge of God

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

Torrance writes:

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

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

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

In the Rut of General Theism: Against Neutral Theology

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Christians don’t believe in an abstract ethereal god. Christians believe in the triune God who has Self-revealed Himself in Jesus Christ. Period. This should be an unremarkable assertion. There should be zero pushback to this. But in the so-called Great Tradition of the Church, and those who are ostensibly “retrieving” it, this isn’t the case. Classical theism, so-called, as a contemporary way to identify certain expressions of the antique past, especially with reference to a theology proper, have so synthesized, say, the Aristotelian categories with an ecclesiastical doctrine of God, that it is nay impossible to make a distinction, in substance (pun intended), between the philosopher’s unmoved mover of pure act, and the God revealed in the face of Jesus Christ. In other words, there is such a conflation between the god of the philosophers, and the Christian God in this instance, that the god of the philosophers in fact becomes the Christian God in substance. Indeed, most of contemporary theology today, especially on the Latin side (i.e., Catholic and Protestant), traffics on the highway that the philosophers, and their theologians, respectively, have constructed for them. That is to say, contemporary theology, especially in certain iterations of Protestant theology, have so imbibed the cathedral of the Protestant development, that is primarily through the ‘schoolmen,’ or the scholastics, that to do theology, for them, requires a straight repristination; an outright and absolute reception of whatever the Protestant fathers said; a total gleaning, a harvesting, if you will, of whatever golden apples the oldmen of Protestant yesteryear planted in their gardens of theological delight.

But what if they were simply squished by their sitz im leben (situation in life); what if they were just doing the best they could with what they had available to them, intellectually, at that time? What if what they did was rather imaginative and forward thinking for their times, respectively, but in the end wasn’t the last or final word? I’m here to say it wasn’t; it wasn’t the last or final, or not even the best word. Karl Barth writes the following in his own analysis of those theological times. What you will find is that he agrees with me (or more correctly, that I agree with him).

Unfortunately the connexion between the belief in providence and belief in Christ had not been worked out and demonstrated theologically by the Reformers themselves. Only occasionally and from afar, if at all, had they seen the problem of natural theology and the necessity of a radical application to all theology of their recognition of the free grace of God in Christ. In their case, to be sure, we almost always feel and detect, even though it is so seldom palpable theologically, that when they speak of the world dominion of God they are in fact speaking with Christian content and on the basis of the Gospel, not abstractly in terms of a neutral God of Jews, Turks, pagans and Christians. And this is what gives warmth and force to the matter in P. Gerhardt. But if in him there is an unmistakable movement away from the Word of God to the experience of the Christian subject, this was to some extent a reaction against the dominant and self-evident abstraction with which the orthodoxy of his day followed another self-evident rut in these matters. This was the rut of a general theism which, apart from the mention of the Deus triunus [triune God], occasional quotations from the Bible and references to Church history, lacked any distinctive Christian content, being primarily concerned to distinguish itself from atheism, and limiting its consideration of the Gospel to the establishment and development of Christology and resultant doctrines. As if this were the real way to treat that primarium caput fidei et religionis [chief cornerstone of faith and religion].[1]

Surely, what Barth is explicating is the more sure word; relatively speaking. The Christian God is not neutral, He is not general, and He is not discoverable in some leftover vestiges of His presence in the fallen created order. That is to say, the fallen heart and mind of the fallen humanity has no access into the inner sanctum of God’s eternal life; that is, not without God first becoming us that we might become Him in Christ (by grace not nature). Isn’t there an infinitely qualitative distance between God and humanity?, as Kierkegaard so rightly identified. Aren’t human beings, us, born dead in our trespasses and sins with an ugly ditch between us and the holy God of triune wonder? This is all Barth is getting at. This is all I’m getting at, with reference to Barth. Selah

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3 §48 [032] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 31.

God’s Triune Love-Knowledge as the Ground of Our Knowledge of God

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‘Without love all knowledge means nothing.’ Some, many, take this to mean that gaining knowledge, like deeper theological and biblical knowledge, necessarily entails that this is an unloving thing to do. Of course, the passage in I Corinthians 13 does not say that. It just says: that knowledge without love means nothing. So getting knowledge, like of Jesus Christ and the triune God, is really everything. And entailed within that, as that is first established for us in the vicarious humanity of Christ, the object of our knowledge, who turns out to be the subject and ground of our very lives, is in fact love. All I’m struggling to say is that being “anti-intellectual” (for lack of a better term) in the Christian frame necessarily fails precisely because the Christ-frame is in fact full of the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ.

Also, I’m not promoting what is called an intellectualist anthropology, in fact, just the opposite. There are plenty of theologies out there, particularly in the Latin or Western world, that start in the intellectualist anthropological ground. This is primarily because these traditions have falsely appropriated philosophical notions of godness wherein what it means to be God is to be the Big Brain, the pure act (actus purus) in the sky by and by.

And of course, the aforementioned isn’t who God has Self-revealed Himself to be for us. He has Self-revealed Himself to be Father, our Father, of the Son, in the eternal felicity and bond of the Holy Spirit. This is why God just is love; because He’s an eternal Subject-in-Being interpenetrating perichoretic koinonial co-inhering communion of intimate oneness-in-threeness / threeness-in-oneness.

 

On Being the Listening Church: How Dialectical Theology, Properly Understood, is Dialogical Theology

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What is dialectical theology? Barth is often referred to as a dialectical theologian; especially the earlier Barth. Some want to implicitly criticize Barth by asserting that because Barth was a dialectical theologian, he, eo ipso was a Hegelianizing theologian (i.e., putting Hegel’s dialectic to work for his theologizing). And yet, Barth is much more original than that. He was clearly a modern theologian, as is anyone who currently does theology in the 21st century. Even so, his methodology was to allow Holy Scripture and its reality in Jesus Christ to regulate his deployment of any other mechanisms he might have had available to him. That is to say, just as the best of the patristic fathers did with Hellenic grammars—evangelizing them into a non-correlationist salvation—Barth, I would argue, did with not just Hellenic grammars, but with his modern ones as well; whether that be with reference to Kant, Hegel, or whomever. For Barth, it wasn’t the tails of the philosophies or the grammars that wagged the dog, so to speak, but it was the “dog,” the Self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ, who ends up wagging the tail of said and available intellectual grammars of the time.

We can see the aforementioned sentiment as that is illustrated by Barth in response to one of his contemporaneous detractors, Eric Peterson. Barth, while he took Peterson’s critique of his dialecticism seriously, believed that Peterson sorely misread him. Notice how Alan and Andrew Torrance, respectively, lift up the way Peterson was critiquing Barth on Barth’s deployment of dialecticism:

In his booklet “What is Theology?,” Peterson stresses that if “revelation is paradox, then there is also no theology,” and, if this is the case, “there is also no revelation.” While Barth had frustrations with Peterson’s reading of him, he still took his words seriously. . ..[1]

In response to Peterson’s critique, Barth writes the following:

The revelation of which theology speaks is not dialectical, is not paradox. That hardly needs to be said. But when theology begins, when we humans think, speak, and write . . . on the basis of revelation then there is dialectic. Then there is a stating of essentially incomplete ideas and propositions among which every answer is also again a question. All such statements reach out beyond themselves towards the fulfilment of the inexpressible reality of divine speaking.[2]

Peterson was afraid that Barth’s theological methodology left things in a contradictory wash, such that no genuine knowledge of God, and subsequent doctrines, could ever critically obtain. And yet as we see in Barth’s response to Peterson, Barth is operating with a theological ontology wherein subsequent theological epistemologies (in regard to how we know and speak of God, humanly) must operate with the type of deference towards the ineffable and living God, that is demanded; such that, at our best, in Christ’s mediation, we can only proximate knowledge of God, that is, on this side of the Eschaton. And so, for Barth, really, as we pressed in our own way, in our Evangelical Calvinism books, and in a thesis, Barth’s (and Torrance’s) dialectical theology is really more of a dialogical theology wherein we cry out and pray to our God who is Holy. It is this “cry” that becomes the theological developments the church has witnessed throughout her existence post-ascension and pre-descension at the second coming of Jesus Christ. The priority in this frame is on the fact that Deus dixit (God has spoken … and in fact, continues to speak). In this way, for Barth, proper theological development is a matter of being the ‘listening church,’ the ’responsive church.’ In this relational and prayerful and koinonial frame, for Barth, and many of us following, to know God is to hear from God; and then to speak with God, and con-versate in this type of triunely directed and Self-given marriage of Himself for us; and thus, for Himself, just as Christ is for the Father for us in the bond of the Holy Spirit.

[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), 235.

[2] Barth, Church and Theology, 299–300 cited by Torrance and Torrance, Beyond Immanence, 236.

Bad Perceptions versus God’s Perceptions in a Culture Awash in Self-worship

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Perceptions don’t dictate the truth, per se. The truth is the truth without contingence upon our relative perceptions. Perceptions might dictate a variety of things in society writ large, but never the truth, per se. Perceptions are really and only self-projections of our dispositions and their forming pressures, as those have developed in our personal circumstances and experiences in the world. Nevertheless, we aren’t slavishly trapped within our perceptions, per se. But our only hope is to come to participate in the extra life of God; and begin to grow in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ. This way our perceptions will no longer merely be contingent upon the winds of our experiences, per se, but instead upon the solidity of God’s eternal and triune life, of which we have become participants through union with the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. As our perceptions come to be formed, more and more, by His anchoring reality, from within His life, which is Truth, we can begin to see things as they are, rather than how we would prefer them to be. There are good perceptions and bad perceptions. The former are formed by an ongoing relationship with the living God in and through the risen and ascended Christ. Bad perceptions are simply formed by living ensconced in the immanent world of our own making; as if we are like God.

The Miracle of Gospel Time and the Antidote it Provides for Our Political Time

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God’s covenant life of grace is the inner reality of the external creation and order that we are agents within as His creatures. This implicates everything; especially history, politics, theology, so on and so forth. God’s life of grace joins His life of eternal-time with the tangent of ‘calendar-time’ in such a way that the latter finds all of its predication in and through the former. One thing this does is that it at the same miraculous time universalizes and particularizes time and history all in the same go. That is to say, it so expands the horizons of the so-called space-time continuum that it ends up being an inane posture to think that our experiences of our personal-times could serve as the fulcrum for our perception of reality to begin with.

An application of the aforementioned notion on the relationship between eternity and time, as that is conjoined within the miracle of the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ, could be to use that as the basis for the Christian’s approach to matters related to politics, and everything else. In this time, in 2024 in America, we are currently faced with a POTUS election whose ramifications for time to come seem to circumscribe and even eclipse all of time, and all of reality for time to come. And yet in light of the miracle of the incarnation, death, burial, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ, such happenings are relativized by the greater and realer time of God’s time, God’s predication of the world in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. If nothing else, the greatness, the ineffableness of God’s in-breaking, and His continuous in-breaking, into this world, into “our” supposed time, ought to place all the fears and anxieties of these times into the womb of the Father where time in reality was first birthed for us in the Theanthropos, the Godman, Jesus Christ.

Here is how father and son duo, Alan and Andrew Torrance, write about these matters as developed in the theology of Karl Barth:

An additional positive point that comes up in Barth’s discussion of the moment is that the unity that God establishes between eternity and time is a unity with the whole of time—a unity that holds together in the past, present, and future in the oneness of God’s historical narrative. The idea that moments such as the moment of resurrection and the moment of faith are interconnected in the whole of time is again incomprehensible to us. This is because our thinking is caught up in and conditioned by the “stream of time,” preventing us from seeing the bigger theological picture sub specie aeternitatis. Insofar as we reduce history to our immediate experience of it, we close history off from the one who unites it as a whole. In so doing, we hold ourselves back from seeing that we are living in “the invisible New Age” in which “each moment in time is a parable of the eternal ‘Moment’.” As hard as this is to fathom, the fact that God, for Barth, unites Godself with history means that “every moment in time bears within it the unborn secret of revelation, and every moment can be thus qualified.” Time, he writes, “is swallowed up in eternity,” which means that flesh is swallowed up “in the infinite victory of the Spirit.” Therefore, every event in history must be understood according to the unity that the eternal God establishes with history and for history.[1]

These are deep considerations, but important ones if we as Christians are going to faithfully fulfil our role as witnesses to God’s meritorious works for us, for this world in Jesus Christ. It ought to keep us from being swallowed by the fear of the absolute immanentizing of this world, as if its own inner source and reality is all there was, is, and is to come. The point, ultimately, as this world, and all that happens within it are predicated by God’s life and redemption of this world, as this world has become God’s world, both as He originally created, and then recreated it from the flesh and blood, from the Eucharist of His life for the world as that has been eternally generate in the bosom of the Father by the hovering and creative movement of the Holy Spirit. The takeaway, for one thing, ought to be that nothing and nobody is greater than history’s reality as that reality has always already been such in the face (prosopon) of Jesus Christ. Christians have a hope and redound that this world currently needs in ways that this world does not understand without God’s Self-revelation and our witness to that as we repose in the surly concreteness of Christ’s life for this world. Ultimately, what I am getting at with all of this, is that we ought to continue to remain and “occupy” this land, this time, as God-worshippers. This is the basis and telos (purpose) of all of reality, of all of time as that has been gifted for us through God’s pre-destination for us, in His free and gracious election to not be God without us, but with us in the humanity of Jesus Christ. If knowledge of this reality reigns supreme in our movings and breathings we will offer this world, at this time, at God’s time for the world in Christ, a hope that the principalities and powers could only dream about in some sort of perverted parody of self-actualization.

[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), 210.