Category Archives: Theology Of Retrieval

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.

Why Thomas Aquinas is Not the Protestant’s Savior: On His Doctrina of Grace

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Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor of the Roman Catholic church, is a Doctor of Theology located in the 13th century. When this is appreciated, things go better. If we could look at him, purely historically, this would be a better way. But instead, people, in particular, Protestant theologians are attempting to retrieve Aquinas’ theology, and the broader Thomist mantle in general, for what they see as a necessary corrective for the evangelical turn into heterodox and heretical positions in regard to doctrine and its subsequent praxis as it is applied to the daily lives of its adherents. But is Aquinas really the salve the evangelical Protestant churches need? Do we need to imbibe the theology of a Roman Catholic theologian with all of his thinking on nature/grace in tow? Just because certain Post Reformed orthodox theologians received Thomas’ theology, to varying degrees, in the ways they did, does this mean that evangelical Protestants ought to do this now?

My response to the above questions, of course, is a resounding and loud: No! Let me offer one reason, among many, why a Protestant Christian shouldn’t retrieve Thomas Aquinas’ theology in a positive way. Here we will hover, briefly, over Aquinas’ doctrine of grace, as that has been received in its Protestant Reformed orthodox dress (which, of course, is how many of the current Protestant theologians of retrieval are attempting to recover Aquinas’ broader lineaments for the churches). Richard Muller provides us with a good definition of this type of scholastic grace:

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

In the above definition it is gratia operans which serves instructive for our purposes. Here, we have Thomas’ doctrine of ‘created grace,’ which is, as he writes: “Strictly speaking, a supervening quality is not so much in existence itself, as a way in which something else exists; and so grace is not created, but men are created in it, established in a new existence out of nothing, without earning it: Created in Christ Jesus in good works.”[2] For Aquinas there is an interconnectedness occurring in reality. Thus, what he attempts to say is that, analogically, grace is not a created quality because Christ is still the first cause from whom this grace comes. The new existence is equivalent (i.e. for Thomas) to the accident, while the “out of nothing” is equal to the “exist” (i.e. or essence) of man. As such, in the final analysis, grace ends up being a created quality which is externally implanted into humanity. In other words, for Aquinas, grace is not an essential aspect of what it means to be human, and as such is thought of in terms of a created quality, albeit one that comes through Christ, and which becomes, in its reception, our gratia operans, or ‘operating grace,’ by which the elect cooperates with God in the attainment of their salvation. It is this type of thinking that gets modulated by the Federal theologians, and incorporated into their covenantal schemata of salvation, as this is functional in their Covenant of Works/Grace framework.

I offer this up as one example of a serious problem for those, especially of Baptistic orientation, who would attempt to recover the theology of Thomas Aquinas as if a salve for the evangelical churches. Aquinas is a Roman Catholic theologian, and as such, his total program, as that follows from his theology proper, will be corollary with Roman Catholic dogma and what they consider to be sacra doctrina. These Protestants who are recovering Aquinas as a boon, have seemingly strayed from their commitment to the historically Protestant ‘Scripture Principle.’ Their only response to that charge is to claim that Thomas’ theology is corollary with the teachings of Holy Scripture. But then this begs the question: in what way is Thomas’ teaching on a doctrine of grace, in our example, corollary with the teachings of Holy Scripture (particularly as Protestant’s read it)?

 

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

[2] St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae A Concise Translation, ed. Timothy McDermott (Westiminster: Christian Classics, 1989), 313.

On a Genuinely Christian Theology of History and Apocalyptic Theology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Contemporary Reformed Are Recovering Catholic Modes of Thinking and Thus Spirituality: The Genuine Protestant Way Against Analogia Entis

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If you’re a Catholic or scholastic Protestant thinker, you’ll follow along with Erich Przywara’s dictum (following Thomas’) of ‘revelation perfecting revelation.’ You’ll see a continuity between the naked philosopher’s machinations, and what comes in perfection through God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ. You’ll maintain that humanity, since it is born into an iteration of God’s grace (which is an abstract creation), has the capacity, albeit, finite, to think towards the God of creation. On the other hand, if you’re a genuinely Protestant thinker who takes the noetic effects of the fall, who takes total depravity seriously, and who does not sublate such teaching with a Thomist intellectualist anthropology, you’ll be like Karl Barth and repudiate something like Przywara’s analogia entis. 

In other words, Barth sees the same ‘prefix’ that condemned in ‘The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life’ operative within Przywara’s Analogia Entis. Przywara posits that insights gained apart from God’s revelation of Jesus Christ stand in continuity with those acquired in and through this revelation because the ‘nature’ that philosophers are examining is, in fact, within the realm of grace simply as a result of God’s act of creation. Here lies the problem. Barth believes that this account overlooks the effects of the human sin. In his view, God’s act in creation cannot lead to true knowledge of God because creation is fallen. If nature stands in continuity with grace, therefore, it can do so solely because of the justifying work of Jesus Christ. This means that any relationship with God, or any true knowledge of God, stems solely from the knowledge of our justification. This is where we must start. Knowledge obtained from sources other than this starting point in Jesus Christ — such as the knowledge gained by the philosophers — does not stand in continuity with the knowledge of God given in and through Christ. The revelation of Jesus Christ, rather, comes from the outside as something new and distinct, and it stands in judgement over all other sources for the knowledge of God.1 

We currently have a bunch of scholastic Reformed theologians telling their students, and anyone who will listen, to recover Thomas Aquinas’ way of ‘grace perfecting nature.’ And yet this is at precise crosspurposes with Luther’s reformational move of solafidian. Barth understands the original intention and implications of Luther’s reformation, the scholastics Reformed remain clueless here. If you claim to be a committed Protestant who affirms an actual fall, with all of its ontological and noetic implications, then you ought to repudiate the natural theology of the Catholics, and scholastics Reformed. The scholastics Reformed only re-appropriated the Catholic mode of theological epistemology, and its prior doctrine of creation; they do not operate as genuine Protestant thinkers. Just because that’s ‘part’ of the Reformed heritage, ie the scholastics Reformed, does not make it the orthodox Protestantism that ought to be redivivus; but that is the driving supposition behind this particular recovery movement.

 

1 Keith L. Johnson, Karl Barth and the Analogia Entis (New York: T&T Clark, 2010), 149.  

A Grand Critique of the Classical Calvinist, Classical Theist Conception of God and All Subsequent Theology

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Before I write this post let me be clear about something: When I write posts against other Christian traditions, like in critique, I am writing them, at a first order level, with the understanding that Christian precedes tradition. In other words, I am typically not challenging whether or not the proponents of some interpretive tradition are eternally justified or not; I am not questioning whether they are brothers or sisters or not; but I often am challenging their theological understandings in regard to important loci. Indeed, my challenges consist of language of such provocative and serious depth as ‘anti-Christ,’ ‘demonic,’ and other like grammar. I often do believe that the interpretive traditions I am challenging are of the sort that will and can have deleterious spiritual consequences for their adherents; which is why I feel compelled to riposte against them.

Such is the case with what I call: Classical Calvinism. I use the designation ‘Classical Calvinism’ more as a riff on ‘Classical Theism.’ It is my conviction, and the history of ideas bears this out, that Classical Calvinism is a sub-set of Aristotelian and Western theological developments. Thomas Aquinas synthesized Aristotelian categories into his theological developments; insofar that Classical Calvinism imbibes that heritage, it imbibes echoes of Aristotle, Aquinas, and a host of other Protestant developers of this tradition in a particularly Protestant trajectory. It is this movement of Protestant thought development that I seek to rebuff in the name of Jesus Christ.

So, I have now mentioned the centrality of Aristotelian thought-categories for the development of Protestant Scholasticism Reformed theology; let’s continue with this focus, and consider how pervasive this reality was (and is, insofar that the current theology of retrieval movement currently underway is retrieving just this history) towards the formation of what most now consider to be what I call classical Calvinism. Richard Muller writes at great length:

Trajectories in Aristotelianism and Rationalism. Although the early orthodox era (from roughly 1565 to 1640) is also the era during which the new science was being set forth by Kepler, Galileo, and Bacon, and the new rationalism was being initially expounded by Descartes and Lord Herbert of Cherbury, the rise of modern science and modern rationalism did not profoundly affect Protestant orthodox theology until the latter half of the seventeenth century. For the most part, early orthodox Protestant theologians doubted the new cosmology and rejected rationalist philosophy, resting content with the late Renaissance revisions of Christian Aristotelianism at the hands of Roman Catholic philosophers like Zabarella and Sua´rez and of Protestant thinkers like Ramus and Burgersdijk. The new cosmology had to wait until the latter part of the seventeenth century for Isaac Newton’s physical and mathematical discoveries to make any sense at all and seventeenth-century rationalism, particularly in the deductive model presented by Descartes, has never proved entirely congenial to traditional theology and was never incorporated either universally or without intense debate into Reformed orthodox thought.

Just as the Ptolemaic universe remained the basis of the Western worldview until the end of the seventeenth century and continued to affect literary and philosophical forms of expression well into the eighteenth, so did Christianized Aristotelianism remain the dominant philosophical perspective throughout the era of orthodoxy. Here too, as in the area of theological system, important developments took place in the context of the Protestant universities in the late sixteenth century. Where Melanchthon, Vermigli, and others of their generation had tended to content themselves with the teaching of rhetoric, logic, ethics, and physics without giving particular attention to the potential impact of these disciplines on theology, in the second half of the century, the philosophical disciplines began to have a marked effect on Protestant theology. Aristotelian physics served the doctrine of creation in the works of Hyperius, Daneau and Zanchi; Agricolan and Ramist logic began to clarify the structure of theological systems, and metaphysics re-entered the Protestant classroom in the writings of Schegk, Martinius, Keckermann, Alsted, and Timpler.

This development of Christian Aristotelianism in the Protestant universities not only parallels the development of Protestant scholasticism but bears witness to a similar phenomenon. The gradual production of philosophical tradition was set aside followed by a sudden return to philosophy. Instead, it indicates a transition from medieval textbooks, like the Summulae logicales of Peter of Spain and the De dialectia inventione of Rudolf Agricola, to textbooks written by Protestants for Protestants, like Melanchthon’s De rhetorica libri tres (1519), Institutiones rhetoricae (1521), his commentaries on Aristotles’Politics and Ethics (1536) and the De Anima (1540), Seton’s Dialectica (1545), Ramus’ Dialectica (1543) and the spate of works based upon it, or somewhat eclectic but also more traditional manuals like Sanderson’s Logicae artis compendium (1615) and Burgersdijk’s Institutiones logicae (1626) or is Idea philosophiae naturalis (1622). The absence of Protestant works from the era of the early Reformation points toward a use of established textbooks prior to the development of new ones under the pressure not only of Protestant theology but also of humanism and of changes and developments in the philosophical disciplines themselves. The publication of Protestant works in these areas parallels the rise and flowering of Protestant academies, gymnasia, and universities. Schmitt summarizes the situation neatly:

. . . Latin Aristotelianism stretching from the twelfth to the seventeenth century had a degree of unity and organic development that cannot be easily dismissed. . . . the differences distinguishing the Catholic, Lutheran,  or Calvinist varieties, are far outweighed by a unifying concern for the same philosophical and scientific problems and an invocation of the same sources of inspiration by which to solve them.

Furthermore, the continuity must be understood in terms of the subsequent trajectories and modifications of late medieval schools of thought — Thomism, Scotism, nominalism, the varieties of via antiqua and via moderna — and the ways in which these schools of thought were received and mediated by the various trajectories of theology and philosophy in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. For if the Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist theologians shared a common Christian Aristotelian foundation, they differed, even  among themselves, over the nuances of the model and over which of the late medieval trajectories was most suitable a vehicle for their theological formulation.

The continuity of Christian Aristotelianism and scholastic method from the medieval into the early modern period together with the relationship of these two phenomena to Protestant orthodoxy pinpoint one further issue to be considered in the study of orthodox or scholastic Protestantism. It is not only an error to attempt to characterize Protestant orthodoxy by means of a comparison with one or another of the Reformers (as in the case of the “Calvin against the Calvinists” thesis). It is also an error to discuss Protestant orthodoxy without being continually aware of the broad movement of ideas from the late Middle Ages, through the Reformation, into post-Reformation Protestantism. Whereas the Reformation is surely the formative event for Protestantism, it is also true that the Reformation, which took place during the first half of the sixteenth century, is the briefer phenomenon, enclosed, as it were by the five-hundred year history of scholasticism and Christian Aristotelianism. In accord, moreover, with the older scholastic models as well as with the assumptions of the Reformers concerning the biblical norm of theology, The Reformed scholastics uniformly maintained the priority of revelation over reason and insisted on the ancillary status of philosophy. In approaching the continuities and discontinuities of Protestant scholasticism with the Middle Ages and the Reformation, the chief task is to assess the Protestant adjustment of traditional scholastic categories in the light of the Reformation and the patterns according to which it mediated that tradition, both positively and negatively, to future generations of Protestants. This approach is not only more adequate to the understanding of Protestant orthodoxy, but is also the framework for a clearer understanding of the meaning of the Reformation itself.[1]

What are the implications we can glean from this?:

  1. Muller’s thesis is somewhat acceptable — given the expansive nature he sets for the accounting of the various streams represented by the “Reformed tradition.”
  2. Christian Aristotelianism is the framework wherein Protestant theology took shape in the main.
  3. Muller admits to both a conceptual and methodological Aristotelianism within the period known as the “post-Reformation.”
  4. Muller holds that the continuity which he argues for between all periods of the “Reformation” is grounded in late Medievalism — thus construing the magesterial (early and “high”) Protestant Reformation as a hick-up in comparison to the tsunami that swept through from the 12th into the 17th century.
  5. For Muller, it seems, the only real difference between Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist Aristotelians is a matter of emphasis and theological order. In other words, for Muller Christian Aristotelianism is the best philosophical framework commensurate with articulating Christian dogma.

According to the premiere Christian historian of this period, Richard Muller, Aristotelianism is so central to the development of theology during this period that he thinks it best to call it: Christian Aristotelianism. This is the heritage that so many conservative Reformed Christian theologians are currently retrieving for the evangelical churches (think of the work of people like Scott Swain, Michael Allen, Kevin Vanhoozer et al.). The belief is that the theology during this pre-modern time is the bulwark that evangelical Christians currently need; swamped as they are, so the tale goes, in the mud of modern and postmodern forms of incurved anthropocentric individualistic Christianities. I can agree that their diagnosis is largely correct in regard to the shape of modern 21st century evangelical Christianity. But I heavily demur in regard to the theological medicine they are prescribing evangelical Christians. You see, the 16th and 17th century Post Reformation Reformed orthodox theology that they are retrieving presents people with a conception of God that is not based on God’s triune Self-revelation in Jesus Christ, no matter how much they claim that they do; instead they offer people a conception of God that is grammarized and packaged in Aristotelian categories. You know, a God who relates to the world through decrees that keep Him untouched and unmoved by His creation; a God who thus relates to the world through a jurist frame where performing the Law is paramount for the bruised reed in order for the would-be saint to be in right relationship with God (think of Federal or Covenantal theology and its Covenants of Works and Grace).

Since these ‘retrievers’ imagine that the only way out of the morass of contemporary evangelical theology is to retrieve a conception of God based on pre-modern categories, they are willing to retrieve a conception of God, well intentioned as it was developed at its time in history, that for all intents and purposes is a God developed on unrevealed bases. As much as I disagree with David Congdon in significant ways, he offers a good sketch of the sort of ‘metaphysical’ God that is being retrieved by our contemporary ‘evangelical retrievers’:

Modernity is the age in which this metaphysical understanding of history was called radically and irrevocably into question, as indicated paradigmatically by the rise of the historical-critical method. “Only with the collapse of traditional western metaphysics, i.e., with the loss of its self-evident character, did the historicity of existence fully enter into consciousness,” out of which arose “the freedom, but also the absolute necessity, to regard the historical [Historische] in its pure historicalness [Historizität].” No longer was the hierarchical and essentialist “chain of being” taken for granted. No longer was the ecclesiastical tale of our given place in God’s order accepted on faith. It was no longer assumed that the old stories could narrate each person’s identity. For those institutions and ideologies that pend on this authority, new strategies were devised to shore up faith: most notably, Roman Catholics put forward the doctrine of papal infallibility in the early 1870s, while Reformed Protestants formulated the doctrine of biblical inerrancy in the early 1880s. Both sides were able to claim that such views were held long before they were codified in their modern form, and yet it is significant that these doctrines were codified when they were.[2]

To retrieve ‘Christian Aristotelianism’ is to retrieve the God conceived by a speculating ‘metaphysics’ and a chain of being that is presupposed as inherent between God and humanity. We see, as Congdon develops, that it is the moderns who critique this sort of understanding of God. And as we noted earlier contemporary classical Calvinists believe that it is the moderns who turned evangelical theology in on itself and starting doing anthropology as theology (think of the way Schleiermacher’s theology is often appealed to). As I said, I agree with the classical Calvinist’s diagnosis of the evangelical theological problem; one that can largely be laid at the feet of many modern theologians. But what Congdon is noting can be used as a helpful or constructive corrective in certain ways.

My contention is that while the moderns essentially did give us an anthropomorphized ‘theology,’ not all did. Which, in my view means, that the critique of the moderns, contra much of the premodern developments on a doctrine of God, are largely correct. In other words, I contend that many premoderns, and for our purposes, those in the Protestant orthodox realm, developed a doctrine of God (and thus all of their subsequent theologizing was fundamentally impacted in deleterious ways) based on unrevealed bases. I.e. these theologians, doing the best they could at the time, did not, in principial ways, allow Holy Scripture and its reality in Jesus Christ, to function as the categorical framework through which they thought God. Instead, as Muller has pointed out, they used Aristotle, mediated in the various ways that he was, to inform their engagement with revelation; as a preamble to the faith, so to speak.

Conclusion

Classical Calvinists, as classical theists of mediaeval shape, have based all of their theologizing, which of course includes very significantly, their soteriology (like Federal theology, “Five Point Calvinism,” etc.) on a faulty non-revealed conception of God. As such classical Calvinism (and its cousin, classical Arminianism) are based on speculative theories of God that have no real point of contact with the God revealed in Jesus Christ. It is not possible to conclude with an ‘orthodox’ doctrine of God when revelation is not the principled basis for how God is thought. Muller mistakes the intention of the synthesizers, which was noble, with the actual fact of production. In other words, just because the intent of those who developed many of these premodern theologies was noble, does not correlate with the most proximate reflection on what the Evangel implies about who God is. As strongly-stated as my thesis is, I am not wanting to suggest that they were not really worshipping the Christian God back then, just that they did not have the most adequate resources to arrive at the best spot possible when attempting to think God. So, my question to the current classical Calvinists, to those attempting to retrieve the theology from back then, is why do that? The Gospel itself ought to be allowed to speak fresh words into the current moment, even as we consider the various trajectories of the past. If we are not willing to allow the risen Lord to speak to us now, with all of the tradition considered, and simply insist on repristinating the past, even in translated forms, we will have antiquated a reality that is in fact still living: Jesus Christ.

In the next posts we will continue this critique by referring to Barth’s critique (CD II/1 §26) of the Roman Catholic conception of God (and as that is extrapolated out to the Post Reformed orthodox conception of God), insofar as he critiques a partitive understanding of God (versus God’s Self-revealed unity), and the analogy of being (analogia entis).

 

[1] Richard A. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, Vol. One,  71-73.

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

Bone and Flesh of the Christ: An Imaginary Grounded in the Bloody Cross for Knowledge of God

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Something I just tweeted and want to expand upon: “If Heaven and the coming eschaton are pervaded by the face of Christ, all the way through, then what use do I have for discursive and abstract theologies that only attempt to work their way up to Him from other places. Why not start and end with Christ; the Alpha and Omega?” Nothing too off theme from what I often post on, but I keep coming back to this over and again. We live in a barrage of theological methodology—at least we do if we inhabit theological-social-media—that is constantly telling us that the only real, historic, orthodox, and conservative way to do theology is to follow the canons handed to us by our forebears in ecclesial history. We are constantly told that in order to be orthodox—and not heterodox—we must simply follow in the foot-steps of what is understood as classical theism; that we must follow the consensus καθολικός. But why?

As Protestants (sometimes Reformed, or Lutheran etc.) who are committed to the Reformation Scripture Principle, and the attending Theology of the Word, why is it required that we affirm what I take to be a petitio principii? Why must we simply presume that ‘Church Tradition’ just is what God mandates for theological consumption?; as if we can access God’s mind through the panoply of the ecclesial historical offering. Alarm bells usually start going off for folks at this point. If they have insight into the divergencies of doctrinal development in the history, they start to think that I might be veering off into Socinian or Arminian heresy. But in reality, what I am really doing is challenging the common notion that Church Tradition is so concretized that it cannot be challenged, or improved upon in any way. I am not saying that the trad has no value, or that it doesn’t set some sort of baseline parameters by which Christians might move out and in constructively. But what I am suggesting is that tradition, even the ecumenical kind, is purely eschatological. In other words, it is of only proximate value insofar as it represents the machinations of men and women through the centuries as they have been confronted with the living reality of Jesus Christ. In other words, the trad is relative; it is only valuable insofar as it accurately accesses the Holy of Holies of God’s inner life as that is revealed in Jesus Christ. As such, Church Tradition, and the conciliar reality that stands behind that, at least for the Protestant, is not something that has sacerdotal force over the confessing Christian. And this, precisely because we are not bound by the creedal but by the living Christ who the creedal is attempting to grammarize and bear witness to the best it can.

It is this ‘best it can’ reality that my tweet is attempting to draw attention to though. My conviction, as so many of you know by now—and this is why Barth has been such an important character for me—is there is only One possible way to the Father, or to the inner-life of God; and that, is through Jesus Christ alone. I am slavishly committed to the reality that Jesus Christ, alone, is God’s Self-exegasto (exegesis), and that without Him there is absolutely no way for the Christian, or non-Christian to arrive at an accurate or compelling knowledge of who God is. And this is important as well; I am committed to the idea that Christian theology is fully and only circumscribed by engaging with Who rather than What God is. Indeed, this is precisely the point that I go off the rails, just as theologians presume to speak as if they know what God is prior to meeting Him as the who. The moment we start thinking in terms of ‘whatness’ God ceases to be a personal God who can only be known by encounter with Him. To bring whatness to God, and allow that to be regulative for the theologically proper task, from the start, subjugates God to human whims and imaginaries. The God Revealed is a Who; I know Him as my elder brother, and my Holy Father; I know God in and from this filial stand-point. It is because of this stand-point, because God is not simply a brute-being, but my loving Father, that I come to know Him as I speak with Him by the Spirit’s breath as I participate in that from the mediatorial-humanity of Jesus Christ.

Ultimately, I don’t want to imagine God. I don’t think the developers of church tradition ever had that as their goal either. Nevertheless, the metaphysics they had available to them in the past were only of relative value; just as the tools we have at our behest have relative value as well. But I am persuaded that we can and should advance forward in our knowledge of God. That we can learn and retrieve from listening to the past, but at the same token we can do so constructively. There are too many passages in the New Testament that call us to be growing in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ; to keep pursuing knowledge of God until we are all united in the One faith delivered once and for all to the saints; and to be being transformed from glory to glory as we grow in the eternal life of God which is the knowledge of Jesus Christ as an eternal well-spring that keeps bursting forth with depths of knowledge that cannot be contained by discursive means of contemplation and speculation.

I see so much of what is happening in the sacred halls of the conservative evangelical seminaries and universities as motivated by fear. They seemingly are afraid that we will fall back into the Socinian, Romantic, Rationalist, Enlightened traps and compromise the genuinely evangelical Gospel that they believe was sufficiently cordoned off by our 16th and 17th century fathers. But this is not the way I think. I am just as conservative as these guys and gals in mood and ethos. Yet, I am persuaded that God is bigger than the fear this approach seemingly operates from. I am convinced that God’s Ways are not our Ways, and His Thoughts not our Thoughts; as such, this supplies the ‘orthodox’ Christian with the hope that it’s possible to know Him in greater ways than even our fathers did.

And I happen to think that this quest to know Him in ever in-creasing ways only comes as we are open to seeing Him in the sorts of imaginative and beautiful ways that He alone has revealed in His glory, as that is observed in the inviting Face of Jesus Christ. I believe that only God can reveal God, and that to presume upon some sort of latency or vestiges of God in the created order (taxis) can only lead us to self-project our fancies upon God rather than allow Him to speak to us who in fact He actually is. I don’t think there is any sort of epistemic warrant for humanity to simply come and say ‘well, this just is the way God is … we can know this by observing, and negating the created order, and then use that as the negative mold by which we positively come to understand God.’ Clearly, I am referring us to a theological taxis at this point. I am concerned that we have placed a doctrine of creation/salvation prior to God, through which we subsume God to this order and then assert that the rationality embedded in the created order must be effect[ually] determinative of just what God is as God; as if God left a treasure map in the sand for us to discover Him through. But I am pretty sure that just the opposite is the case.

As far as I’m concerned, the Bible is perspicuous on all of this. Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life; no man comes to the Father except through Him. Yes, we have ‘dogmatized’ this verse and sublimated it by our dogmatic category of justification; but I think it attests to something much grander than that (that is, not less than that, but much more and even prior to that in a theological ordo). I think when it says that Jesus is the way, truth, and life that this circumscribes everything! That this means that anterior to any sort of human-cognizing of God, that God in His pre-determined life for us, that His way as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as the pre-cognate reality, as that is given ‘whoness’ in His eternal and antecedent (to us) plenitude is the only basis upon which humanity might come to a genuine knowledge of God. Only as God stoops down in the bone and flesh of Jesus Christ and confronts the world, it is here that the scales can be peeled back, and the sons of men can finally see God afresh and anew. I take this to be the Gospel reality; the Gospel reality is a limiting reality, such that it puts humanity in its place with Christ on the cross. And only as such a time as this, as that reality of being constantly given over to the death of Christ might we also know the life of Christ; the life of God. The classical theologies do not give us this God, not in their methods. They have become drunk with the god of the philosophers rather than being drunk with the Holy Spirit (cf. Eph 5.18). Yes, they might say “oh, dearest Bobby, we have heard this all before” . . . okay, then repent.

The Word of God as the CentralDogma for Protestant Theology

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For me, a theology of the Word is definitive for what it means to be a Protestant Christian; as such, I think our theologies ought to be conditioned by their reposition upon the Word of God. There seems to be some slide in this area among Protestant retrievers; i.e. the guys and gals who are in the process of developing a ‘Reformed Catholicity’ among other nomenclature. As Protestants we should have a de jure or principled commitment to Holy Scripture and its reality in Jesus Christ as the primal initiative for all things theological and praxis. The Word of God ought to be the centraldogma of all that Protestant theology entails and is characterized by, such that when people read a Protestant theology they are thrust back, not upon the church, but Scripture, and its reality in Christ. I think this was a central motivation for the magisterial reformers, and is why we ended up with a sola scriptura. But, as Protestants, in our zeal to ‘recover’ the Great Tradition of the Church, we are seemingly being seduced back into the scholastic tradition-building tradition; and the ecclesial authority attendant with that, thus losing the actual authority of Scripture. As Protestants we say all else, in regard to a theory of authority, is subordinate to Holy Scripture; but in practice, and theological endeavor, I see something else happening.

John Calvin offers a good word on Scripture’s special place for his type of Protestant theology. In the following he is in early discussion on his concept of knowledge of God, and how he sees God’s Word as the special place that the ‘children of God’ are given to have an accurate, and thus non-idolatrous, knowledge of God. The moment we digress into Trad-itional knowledge of God, at least as our regulative authority, we have crossed over into speculative rather than revealed knowledge of God. As one of the early pre-post-Reformed orthodox Reformed theologians, Calvin understood this, in regard to the character that a Word-based theology ought to have for his Protestant brethren and sistren. He writes:

Since it is evident that God used His word with those whom He wanted to instruct fruitfully, because He saw that His form and image which He had imprinted in the edifice of the world was not sufficient, we must walk by this path if we desire with a good heart rightly to contemplate His truth. We must, I say, return to the word in which God is shown very well and painted as if living by His works, when these are considered no according to perversity of our judgment but according to the rule of the eternal truth. If we turn away from this word, no matter how quickly we go, we will never arrive at the goal because we are not running in the path. For we must take into account that the light of God which the apostle calls “inaccessible” is for us like a labyrinth to lose us unless we are led through it by the directing of the word, so that it is better for us to limp along in this path than to run quickly outside of it. That is why David, having recounted how the glory of God is preached by the heavens, the works of His hands proclaimed by the firmament, His glory manifested by the well-ordered succession of day and night, then comes down to the commemoration of His word (Ps. 19[1]). “The law of the Lord,” he says, “is without blemish, converting the soul; the testimony of the Lord is true, giving wisdom to the lowly; the righteousness of the Lord is right, rejoicing the hearts; the precept of the Lord is clear, enlightening the eyes” (Ps. 19[7-8]). By this he signifies that the teaching by creatures is universal to all, but the instruction by the word is specific to the children of God.[1]

We can understand Calvin better as we place the above quote into his teaching on the twofold knowledge of God,[2] more broadly; but for our purposes, what is important to highlight is the centrality the Word of God has for Calvin at a base level. For the Protestant there is an aversion to speculation about God, and “Godness,” just at the point that we (as Protestants) are committed to what God has revealed of Himself to and for us in Christ as attested to by the canon that Holy Scripture is.

As I broach this issue, in regard to the material and formal sufficiency of God’s Word, what you might also be alerted to is why I have chosen to go the way I have, in regard to the tradition I have, in Reformed theology. I think to be catholic, in the best sense, is to be committed to the rule of Faith, who is Scripture’s reality, Jesus Christ. I know that many believe that to be genuinely catholic these days, means to one degree or the other, that we tie ourselves into the Tradition of the Church. But I think prior to that, and more decisive than that, what it really means to be catholic is to be tied into the humanity of God in Jesus Christ; how can we be more catholic than that?[3]

[1] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion: 1541 French Edition, trans. by Elsie Anne McKee (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009), 37.

[2] From the quote we can also pickup Calvin’s notional thinking on the sensus Divinitatis, but again, for our purposes we are focused on the Word in this post.

[3] There are many related and underwriting threads just waiting to be pulled upon in regard to my question here, like: 1) theory of authority, 2) theory of revelation, 3) ecclesiological theory in general, 4) how we think catholicity vis-Ă -vis progressive historical developments etc.

Why Are Evangelicals So Obsessed With Recovering Theology Pre 18th Century?

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Just a thought. Why are so many evangelicals prone to pre-critical/modern theological modes? Why is the recovery that is being done propelling evangelical theologians back pre 18th century theology, and later. John Webster writes:

‘Retrieval’, then, is a mode of theology, an attitude of mind and a way of approaching theological tasks which is present with greater or lesser prominence in a range of different thinkers, not all of them self-consciously ‘conservative’ or ‘orthodox’. Although here we concentrate upon strong versions of this approach, it can be found in less stringent forms and in combination with other styles of theological work. A rough set of resemblances between different examples of this kind of theology would include the following: these theologies are ‘objectivist’ or ‘realist’ insofar as they consider Christian faith and theology to be a response to a self-bestowing divine reality which precedes and overcomes the limited reach of rational intention; their material accounts of this divine reality are heavily indebted to the trinitarian, incarnational, and soteriological teaching of the classical Christianity of the ecumenical councils; they consider that the governing norms of theological inquiry are established by the object by which theology is brought into being (the source of theology is thus its norm); accordingly, they do not accord final weight to external criteria or to the methods and procedures which enjoy prestige outside theology; their accounts of the location, audience, and ends of Christian doctrine are generally governed by the relation of theology to the community of faith as its primary sphere; and in their judgements about the historical setting of systematic theology they tend to deploy a theological (rather than socio-cultural) understanding of tradition which outbids the view that modernity has imposed a new and inescapable set of conditions on theological work. For such theologies, immersion in the texts and habits of thought of earlier (especially pre-modern) theology opens up a wide view of the object of Christian theological reflection, setting before its contemporary practitioners descriptions of the faith unharnessed by current anxieties, and enabling a certain liberty in relation to the present. With this in mind, we begin by considering the study of history as a diagnostic to identify what are taken to be misdirections in modern theology, and then the deployment of history as a resource to overcome them.[1]

I can see the appeal to go back to a time where the Christian God, at least in the Western European world, simply just was. I can see why evangelicals desire to think theological theology from and through the ‘theologians’ (as Gunton calls it), rather than deal with the constant assaults of the higher critics and history of religionists at every turn. Retrieving theology from a time and period that was enveloped by the reality of the triune God is very appealing. Recovering theology from a time where the Bible was understood as God’s Word, particularly for the post reformers in the 16th and 17th centuries, based upon the movements of the magisterial reformers, is very inviting. And so this sort of move by evangelicals makes sense to me.

I am an evangelical. And I don’t think some people get this, but this is why Karl Barth, among the various premoderns I am attracted to, is so appealing to me. If you shorn Barth of his period, and his self-conscious and intentional engagement with the sources from his time, what you get is someone who is attempting to simply follow the contours of Holy Scripture. If it was possible to think Barth as a theologian of the post reformed orthodox period, and there are some antecedents in that period (just read Muller’s PRRD), he isn’t as far removed as some of those who see him as an antagonist might think.

Anyway, it all makes sense to me. We are evangelicals. We have veneration for Holy Scripture and its reality in Christ; as such, finding theologians who had an equal heart-beat for such things, and without the anxieties created by modernity, is a boon to the evangelical’s mode and mood as theologians and disciples of Jesus Christ. I get it.

[1] John Webster, “Theologies of Retrieval,” in The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology, edited by John Webster, Kathryn Tanner, and Iain Torrance (Oxford/NY: Oxford University Press, 2007), 584-85.

Correcting the Errors of Classical Theism and Its Recovery for the Protestant Evangelical Churches: Get God Wrong, Get Everything Following Wrong

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I am reposting the following—not that old of a post—in lieu of writing another one of the same flavor. I was intending on writing a new post that offers more thinking on this most important of issues, but then began scanning through some of my posts, and thought this would do. Young evangelical-reformed theologians are currently being trained, and just in the blossoming years of their careers, to retrieve Protestant theology for the evangelical churches in a certain mode and way. They have largely failed to self-critically question some of the various categories they have simply received (textus receptus) from the past, and instead have embarked upon an endeavor that is enflamed by a burning quest to repristinate or re-present what the golden age that they believe the evangelical churches have lost vis-Ă -vis her theological heritage. I am not against theology of retrieval, in fact I’m for it, but I believe it must be done constructive-critically with a realistic expectation that the Bible and its reality alone in Jesus Christ is allowed to be regulative for the lenses by which the ressourcement work is done. But I don’t see this as the ultimate lens through which most of this work is being done; instead there is a seeming dismissal of anything that smacks of ‘modernity,’ even if the theologically modern have produced material critiques (despite their formal beginnings) that the ‘repristinators’ ought to be obliged to engage with. Instead the repristinators simply relegate the modern into the abyss of hell, and thus only find things inspired by the devil and his minions therein. As such where they see anti-Christ, ironically, there, often, can be the voice of the risen Christ. Ultimately it shouldn’t matter what period of theological development produces the ideas we Christians rally to. What should matter is whether or not Jesus is being most magnified and identified as prime over and against all else when it comes to theological reflection. I could go on, instead I commend to you a long blog post that says what I want to say, and have already said.

Who is God? This basic but all important question has significant ramifications for everything; it is not just a “theological academic” question, it is a question that people live out of every day of their daily lives (whether they are a theist or not). This question drives me in all that I do, and it has for all the years I can remember; one way or the other. This is why I am so passionate about issues revolving around Reformed theology, and theology in general. As a Protestant Christian I have a certain way into thinking God, it is one that is in dialogue with the tradition of the church, but at the same time is not slavishly linked to the tradition when the tradition veers from its subordination to the reality of Holy Scripture, Jesus Christ. It is this commitment, and this reality that continues to propel me forward in my quest to know who God is; it is for this reason that I am an Evangelical Calvinist, so called. An Evangelical Calvinist operates in a mood that is by definition dialogical or dialekin; where an emphasis on a living encounter with God’s Word in Christ is elevated, and the ability, therein, is given to continue to know God in ever deepening and freshening ways. As a result of this way engaging with the tradition of the church, particularly when it comes to theology proper, provides certain concrete parameters, or least grammars, but it is not necessarily the end of the discussion only the beginning. For the remainder of this post we will look briefly at the tradition, in regard to a doctrine of God, and then will use that as the foil to highlight the better way that I have found in Barth’s theology and in modern theology in general. We will conclude this post with my fleeting thoughts on why I think this is important for what I will call ‘church theology’ (some call this “practical theology”).

In one part of the medieval tradition of the church, when it came to a theology proper, we had what is known as nominalism; often William of Ockham is noted as its primary purveyor (even if that is under contest today). In nominalism there are two ways to think God: 1) God as he is in eternity in himself (in se), which is tied into his ‘power’ or what is called potentia absoluta; 2) God as he is in the economy (ad extra) of salvation in temporal history, which is also tied into his ‘power’ and what is called potentia ordinata. The effect of this conception is to present a rupture, potentially, between who God is in eternity (in his antecedent life), and who God is in Jesus Christ in the Incarnation and salvation history (in life concrete). The nominalist way of securing a relationship between these two modes of God was to inject a concept of ‘covenant’ into the mix resulting, as the case may be, in an ad hoc relationship between God and the world; one that was based, indeed, upon God, but one that did not secure a relationship between the God in eternity and his acts in time such that his acts in time in Jesus Christ necessarily had any relationship to who God really was or might be in his interior life (we might also want to bring Scotus voluntarism into the discussion at this point as well).

So we have the aforementioned in the history, and that gets appropriated and redressed in the Post Reformed Orthodox period (16th/17th c.); it is this type of distinction that really never leaves us, even in the modern period. Here is an example of this in the theology of Herman Gollwitzer, as that is critiqued by Eberhard Jüngel, according to David Congdon. What I want the reader to see is not only how this sort of dualism continues to persist, but how someone like Jüngel responded to it. What I hope the reader will recognize is the sort of development inherent to a doctrine of God, and that even the moderns, with all the sloppy talk of them ALL distorting a doctrine of God, instead were steeply engaged with an orthodox doctrine of God while at the same time attempting to provide for better treatments wherein knowledge of God could be secured, and controlled by a concentrated referral to God’s Word made flesh in Jesus Christ. Here is Congdon on Jüngel and Gollwitzer:

The fundamental criticism Jüngel levels against Gollwitzer is that he posits a bifurcation in God’s being between nature and will, between essence and existence. In other words, Gollwitzer inserts an ontological separation between “God-in-and-for-God-self” and “God-for-us,” between Deus in se and Deus pro nobis. Jüngel summarizes the issue in the following way: “Gollwitzer stresses . . . that the mode of being [Seinsart] of revelation has its ground ‘not in the essence of God but in the will of God,’ so that it is ‘not possible per analogiam to infer back’ from the understanding of God’s being-as-revelation in the mode of being [Seinsweise] of an innerhistorical subject ‘to the essence of God in the sense of God’s constitutive nature [Beschaffenheit], but only to the essence of God’s will, i.e., from God’s will as made known in history to God’s eternal will as the will of God’s free love’” (ibid., 6). Gollwitzer affirms that God ad extra reveals God ad intra, but he rejects the notion that God’s historical acts reveal God’s eternal being; instead, they only reveal God’s eternal will. Gollwitzer backs away, then, from the work of theological ontology. He does this in order to preserve God’s freedom, which Gollwitzer secures by—as Jüngel puts it—leaving “a metaphysical background in the being of God that is indifferent to God’s historical acts of revelation” (ibid.). He separates the “essence of God” from the “essence of God’s will”: the former existing as the ontological ground of the latter, though otherwise having no obvious relation to it. The constitution of God’s eternal being is, therefore, static and unaffected by the acts of God in time and space. Unfortunately, in speaking about the “essence of God’s will” Gollwitzer failed to speak correspondingly of the “will of God’s essence” (ibid.). By separating essence and will he ends up creating an abstract hidden “God behind God,” in which case there is no guarantee that the God revealed in Jesus Christ is ontologically the same God who exists from all eternity.[1]

This sounds similar to my sketch of the potentias; I think. This is a continuing and pervasive problem in the churches; particularly as the evangelical churches attempt to resource the categories developed for a doctrine of God in the mediaeval and Post Reformation Reformed orthodox periods. Whether the resourcing is on the nominalist, Thomist, or Scotus side, the problem remains in the sense that there is always a rupture placed between God’s inner life and outer life; between God’s essence and acts. The problems, on a continuum, vis-à-vis the various traditions, can be nuanced in significant ways, and some do better than others in closing the gap between the problem we see illustrated by Gollwitzer’s distinction, but the problem remains (e.g. appeal to decrees or the decretum absolutum). We see, according to Congdon’s development, Jüngel’s critique of Gollwitzer; it is this tradition of critique that developed in the modern period (which is constantly derided as doing irreparable damage to a doctrine of God; thus part of the emphasis for theology of retrieval by evangelical conservatives) that we will turn to through appeal to Bruce McCormack’s development of Karl Barth’s own critique and movement beyond another modern theologian named Alexander Schweizer. As with Gollwitzer and the Nominalists et al., Schweizer similarly has this problem of having an excess of God that stands above or behind the back of Jesus Christ. Barth seeks to correct this—and I think he does!—pervasive problem by using the traditional category of election with the function of bringing God in eternity and his acts in time together in the singular person of Jesus Christ. He writes:

That election is “the sum of the Gospel” was grounded by Karl Barth in the fundamental claim that the primary object of election is not humankind but God himself. In Barth’s view, the primal decision of God (the “decree” if you will) is never to be God apart from humankind. Alternately expressed, God chooses himself for us; God decides himself for grace. In this wholly gracious, wholly free, unconditional primal decision of God for grace is contained in nuce all else that follows in time: the election of the eternal Son for incarnation, suffering, and death on a cross; the election in him of the whole of humanity for communion with God; the outpouring of the Spirit, the creation and upbuilding of a community of believers who represent the whole of humanity. It is at this point that Barth’s most original contribution to the historical development of the doctrine of election must be seen to lie. In making God to be not only the subject of election but also its primary object, Barth was making election to be the key of his doctrine of God. Barth would have been in formal agreement with the Schweizerian dictum “What God does in time must be grounded in the eternal being of God”; indeed, it was one of his most cherished convictions. But the material connections in which such a claim stands in Barth’s theology as a whole give it a very different meaning than it had for Alexander Schweizer.

Barth took as the starting-point for all of his dogmatic reflections the Self-revelation of God in the history of Jesus Christ, that is, the incarnation, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of the God-man. To put it this way is already to suggest that the starting-point is not simply the man Jesus as he appeared on the surface of history. The starting-point is the God-man as witnessed to in Scripture, and the history of this God-man begins in the way taken by God in taking to himself a fully human life as his very own (in all its limitations, up to including death). It is this history which Barth has in mind.

On the basis of the Self-revelation, he then asked, what must God be like if he can do what he has in fact done? What is the condition of the possibility in eternity for the incarnation, death, and resurrection of the Son of God in time? In taking this approach, Barth was taking a principled stance against the more traditional procedure (followed in large measure by Schweizer) of beginning with an “abstract” concept of God (which is to say, one that has been completely fleshed out without reference to God’s Self-revelation in Christ) and only then turning to that revelation to find in it confirmation of what was already attributed to God without it. Such a procedure, as we have already seen in relation to Schweizer, determines in advance what revelation in Christ will be allowed to say. Against this procedure employed by theism in all its forms (classical and neo-Protestant), Barth proposed to work in an a posteriori fashion, beginning not with a general concept of God or a general concept of human being but with a most highly concrete reality, Jesus Christ. And so, if God has in fact done something, it will not do to say that God cannot do it. Theologically responsible reflection will only be able to ask, What is the eternal ground for God’s acts in time?[2]

The ‘procedure’ for Barth, as McCormack details, was to refer theological method to the second person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ, as decisive for reflecting upon who God is. In this procedure the gap is closed between God’s being in eternity and time, not by appeal to speculative or discursive means made by assertion via the theologians, but instead by appeal to God himself as that is revealed by Godself in God clothed with the particular flesh of the man from Nazareth. This becomes important precisely because it dispossesses the controls for considering who God might be away from the theologians, and places that within the control of God as now regulated by God’s Self-revelation in Christ. The ‘God of eternity’ in his immanent life is now the same God we see in the ‘God of the economy’ in the life of Christ. For Barth, according to McCormack, the even more radical reality is that God has freely elected to not be God without us, and has chosen that this be the very ground of his ‘being’ as God; as that is realized in his becoming for us in grace (this of course is not uncontroversial in North American Barth studies).

Conclusion

In closing, in an attempt to make this already too long of a blog post shorter than it could be, let me bring some of this home in more personal terms. When I am sitting in the pew at church on Sunday mornings in my evangelical conservative church that is committed to recovering the God articulated in the Post Reformed orthodox period it becomes difficult for me to sit there without at least squirming. Some people want to reduce Christian ministry to meeting the needs of broken people with the love of Christ, and this reduction entails the minimization of rigorous doctrinal reflection in the name of expediency for the Christian ministry. But what if the God you think you are doing ministry for and in the name of is different than the God you think you are doing ministry for; viz. will who God is, and your understanding of that impact the type of ministry you are doing? Is all of this awash in the end such that our good intentions will cover the multitude of theological errors we operated under? God’s grace is certainly bigger than our misunderstandings, but this does not excuse us from being people of the truth and ‘aiming for perfection’ as the Apostle Paul exhorts us to. But this is why I am troubled when sitting in church and I hear, over and again, things asserted about the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that I KNOW are not from the Bible but instead derive from the speculative thoughts and developed traditions of the theologians; and these traditions simply received based upon the good-will of the people in the name of conservative Protestant orthodox theology.

In short: I want my understanding of God to be regulated and controlled by God, under the constraints he has set out for himself in his Self-revelation in Jesus Christ. Does this mean we no longer have to rigorously work out what even this type of theology proper looks like? No. But it means we are much better footing than before. If we get God wrong all subsequent thinking following, all subsequent doctrinal developments will be awry. Simply dismissing this—as almost ALL conservative evangelical theologians do—as merely Barthian or modern theological rubbish shouldn’t be taken that seriously, and they should quit taking themselves so seriously. I realize that I am mostly speaking into the wind, but be that as it may, hopefully there are some of you in the wind who have ears to hear and eyes to see even in the midst of the storm.

[1] David W. Congdon, The Mission of Demythologizing: Rudolf Bultmann’s Dialectical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 15 n19. [emphasis mine]

[2] Bruce L. McCormack, Orthodox and Modern: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth(Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008), 57-8.

The Calvinian Turn to Jesus Christ Versus the Catholic Turn to the Vicar: A Rationale for the Evangelical Calvinist Via

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John Calvin provided for a Protestantly Reformed turn towards a genuinely Christocentric theology of the Word, that prior (except in lineaments found in some Patristics and then in Martin Luther) was hard to find; particularly in the mediaeval context within which Calvin found himself, even if that was of the late variety. In the modern period when we read someone like Karl Barth and Thomas Torrance, and then compare that with a reading of John Calvin, what stands out is the way that Barth/Torrance followed Calvin’s ‘turn,’ but only in even more radical or theo-logically conclusive ways. This is something I don’t think current Protestants who are attempting to retrieve the ‘classical’ past appreciate very much; viz. this turn that Calvin helped initiate (along with Luther), a radical turn to a genuine theology of the Word in Jesus Christ—a turn to a christocentric approach to theological endeavor versus the theocentric that reigned supreme in the Tridentine.

Julie Canlis—as we once again refer to her magisterial work, Calvin’s Ladder—helps us appreciate this Calvinian turn as she contrasts that with the Aquinasian approach (you’ll see her reference the structure of Thomas’s Summa Theologiae and how that materially illustrates her point). She writes:

A comparison of Aquinas and Calvin reveals that, while Calvin picks up on this scholastic scheme, he also fundamentally alters it. Pushing beyond Wyatt’s insight, we discover that it no longer is the story of humanity’s ascent to God by grace (Aquinas), or of the soul’s ascent (Augustine), but of Christ’s ascent. Calvin refuses to tack Christ as a tertia pars onto the Plotinian circle of creation’s procession from and return to God. Instead, Christ breaks open the circle and grafts it onto himself. For Calvin, the figure of Christ has shattered any scheme that begins with creation and allows creation to be considered apart from Christ, through whom it was made and to whom it is directed. In subtly shifting Aquinas’s exitus- reditus scheme from anthropology to Christ, Calvin challenges Aquinas’s attempt at theocentrism as not going far enough. It is not Christ who fits into the procrustean bed of anthropology but we who are fitted to Christ and his ascent. In him and by his Spirit, we ascend to the Father.[1]

She is certainly right to recognize that Calvin operated in the milieu of his own period; how could he not? But, as Canlis also helps us see, Calvin was a constructive and ingenious Christian thinker propelled by his newfound Protest-ant faith; a faith given direction and shape by a principled commitment to the Word rather than to the Church as his ultimate authority. Within this complex Calvin was ingressed into a new world that had the imaginary to think the church from Christ rather than Christ from the church; as such, he was able to make the turn that others prior couldn’t.

I would suggest that Barth and Torrance picked up on this turn in Calvin, and as I noted previously, radicalized it further; to its rightful conclusion even. Both Barth and Torrance, and us Evangelical Calvinists, are genuinely Calvinian in the sense that we operate not just in the spirit, but the letter of Calvin’s turn to Jesus Christ as the centraldogma of all that is viable in theological endeavor. I think our counterparts in other tributaries of the Reformed faith, in their zeal to recover the ‘catholic faith’ have unfortunately overlooked the sort of Christ conditioned notion of God that Calvin (and Luther) did not. As Evangelical Calvinists we attempt to move and breath in this Christ concentrated spirit, with the result that all our theologizing is principially and intensively Christ pressured. We think this is the right trajectory to be on since Jesus himself seemed to take this approach when engaging with Holy Scripture (cf. Jn 5.39; etc.).

[1] Julie Canlis, Calvin’s Ladder: A Spiritual Theology of Ascent and Ascension(Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2010), Loc. 493, 498.