Category Archives: Theology Of The Cross

Luther against the god of the Philosophers and Descartes on God Knowledge per Juengel

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Knowledge of God and its bases has never been an uncontested thing in theological development and discourse. The Apostle Paul, of course, famously addresses the issue of knowledge of God in Romans 1 which has become the locus classicus for proponents of an ostensible natural theology:

18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, 19 because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. 20 For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. 21 For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. 22 Professing to be wise, they became fools, 23 and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures.

To appropriate this text as if it just does teach a natural theology, or way of thinking God in a form like Thomas Aquinas’ analogia entis entails—which would be a subset of a natural theology simpliciter—isn’t justified. Those who would simply assert such need to present an argument that Paul is intending to teach that who and what God is, is latent within something like the vestiges of creation.

On a different basis, but as corollary with something like Aquinas’ analogia entis, Rene Descartes attempts to present a certain knowledge of God from his methodological skepticism; thus, doubting everything as a basis for knowing until he gets to himself (so his cogito ergo sum). Descartes is offering his own form of an analogia entis, thinking godness from his idea of God that he has more certainly established by conniving God an epistemic ground founded in his own thinking as a prius to God.

Martin Luther yells a resounding Nein (as does Karl Barth in his own way). Eberhard JĂźngel presents an insightful commentary on how Luther differs from Descartes on a theory for a knowledge of God. He writes:

Remaining at the level of rational knowledge of God, for Luther too there is a fundamental cognitive difference between the “that-being” and “what-being” of God, between the ‘existence’ and the ‘essence’ of God: There is “a vast difference between knowing that there is a God and knowing who or what God is.” See Luther, Lectures on the Minor Prophets II: Jonah, Habakkuk (in Luther’s Works, vol. 19), ed. Hilton C. Oswald (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1974), p. 55. Whereas Descartes begins with the ‘essence of God’ which is comprehended in the ‘idea of God’ and moves to the ascertainment of the ‘existence of God’ through the ego . . . , Luther takes another route: “Reason . . . knows that there is a God, but it does not know who or which is the true God.. . .” And it is the misfortune of reason overstepping its boundaries that it wants to move from the knowledge that there is a God somehow to the knowledge of who God is, as Luther says: “Thus reason also plays blindman’s buff with God; it consistently gropes in the dark and misses the mark. It calls that God which is not God and fails to call Him God who really is God. Reason would do neither the one nor the other if it were not conscious of the existence of God or if it really knew who and what God is. Therefore it rushes in clumsily an assigns the name God and ascribes the divine honor to its own idea of God. Thus reason never finds the true God, but knows the former [scil. that God exists]—it is inscribed in everybody’s heart; the latter is taught only by the Holy Spirit.. . .” This difference does not obtain for faith. For faith knows that God is in that it experiences who or what God is.[1]

Luther concedes that natural humans have an abstract notion of Godness, but this is where such knowledge of God terminates. Ultimately, it could be inferred, that if this was the basis for a knowledge of God in conclusion, what people would end up with, in regard to filling out this abstract knowledge of Godness, would end up being merely a self-projection of the self onto this ‘natural’ schematizing towards a knowledge of God. For Luther, as Juengel helpfully distills, a genuine knowledge of God is only one that is grounded in the eye of faith. Which if this is the case, and I think it is, presupposes that first the hidden God (Deus absconditus) must come down to us and be with as and be the revealed God (Deus revelatus) for us. This is nothing short of what Barth (and TF Torrance) pick up on, and develop into, in Barth’s case, what he identifies as an analogia fidei/relationis (‘analogy of faith/relation’). But sticking with Luther contra Descartes, per Juengel, reason is incapable of knowing who and then what God is. And we could surmise from this if natural reason is incapable in precisely this way, then constructing a theology proper based upon categories provided for by the [classical] philosophers, like Plato and Aristotle represent, ends up being fool’s errand—a fool’s errand because this method can only lead the seeker of God into an abyss of idolatry (as Ludwig Feuerbach understood so presciently in his own modern context).

On a negative note, I present this to you so that you can more critically read what certain evangelical, Reformed and Lutheran theologians are attempting to recover in the name of an orthodox doctrine of God. They are recovering notional categories for thinking God from the direct heirs, in both the “orthodox” realms of Reformed and Lutheran thinkers, to Thomas Aquinas; and we might add, tangled into this, something like Descartes’ thinking in regard to a certainty towards knowing God. I would strongly recommend to avoid this approach in attempting to think rightly, and thus orthodoxly about the living God. As Luther knew, such intellectualist machinations about God, again, can only finally terminate in a conception of godness that is only able to repose in the notion that some ‘unknown god,’ an abstraction of the human-knower, must certainly exist. And if this ‘ratiocination’ about God is followed, what is left, is for said rationales to say both what and who God is; with an emphasis on the former, as we see fruiting in both Descartes and Thomas.

On a positive note, take heart, for those who seek to know God, as Luther so brightly understood, from the faith of Christ, it is here where the seeker stands on solid ground; as the Apostle has written: “For no man can lay a foundation other than the one which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.” When the Christian builds upon this foundation, the one seen with the faith of Christ, it is thence that the knower of God can genuinely be called such. When we aren’t building cathedrals of knowledge of God that wait upon ‘revelation perfecting reason,’ and instead allow God’s Self-revelation to impose Himself upon us, afresh anew by the Holy Spirit in Christ, it is here that the Christian can confidently proclaim that they see the face (prosopon) of God in Jesus Christ. This is the foundation, God’s being-in-becoming for the world in Jesus Christ that God has freely elected as the basis for the would-be knower of God to genuinely know who (and thus what) He is. And this is the all-important conclusion: that God is the one who has laid the foundation for knowing God in and from Himself, for us in Jesus Christ. He hasn’t left the Christian to be an orphan, or archaeologist attempting to discover God under the rubble of the artifacts of paleo pagan thinkers of a purported ultimacy. No, God has deigned that we know God from God alone in Christ alone by grace alone through faith alone; indeed, the faith of Christ.

I won’t directly address the Romans 1 passage, per se. I will leave that to the reader, and see if they can infer how I “exegeted” that pericope throughout the body of this post. (I have also written other posts that deal directly with that passage vis-à-vis a purported natural theology reading)

[1] Eberhard JĂźngel, God as the Mystery of the World, trans. by Darrell L. Guder (Eugene, OR: Wipf&Stock, 1983), 124 n. 53.

John Calvin’s Theology of the Cross as Theological Theology

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Staying on theme from the previous post, let’s continue to focus on the theologia crucis; except this time it won’t be Luther’s, but John Calvin’s. Karl Barth in his Church Dogmatics III/1 refers us to the foreword Calvin wrote for his Commentary on the Book of Genesis (1554). Herein Calvin offers something that sounds intimately close to Luther’s thinking on a theology of the cross. So Calvin:

indeed it is vain for any to philosophize in the manner of the world, unless they have first been humbled by the preaching of the gospel, and have instructed the whole compass of their intellect to submit to the foolishness of the cross. I say that we will find out nothing above or below that will lift us to God, until Christ has educated us in his school. Nothing further can be done, if we are not raised up from the lowest depths and carried aboard his cross above all the heavens, so that there by faith we might comprehend what no eye has ever seen, nor ear ever heard, and which far surpasses our hearts and minds. For the earth is not before us there, nor its fruits supplied for daily food, but Christ himself offers himself to us unto eternal life; nor do the heavens illuminate our bodily eyes with the splendor of the sun and stars, but the same Christ, the light of the world and the sun of righteousness, shines forth in our souls; nor does the empty air spread its ebb and flow around us, but the very Spirit of God quickens and enlivens us. And so there the invisible kingdom of Christ fills all things, and his spiritual grace is diffused through all things.[1]

For any theology to actually be genuinely Christian theology, I submit, it must be conditioned and regulated by the kerygmatic reality of the cross of Jesus Christ (think of the ‘cross’ as the Apostle Paul does as a metonym for both the incarnation and atonement in toto). If this is not the basis, both ontologically, epistemologically, and ontically for the Christian disciple to more accurately think God, then we will only be ‘thrown back onto ourselves’ (as TFT would say), thus projecting our images onto God’s image, only to worship an elevated image of our collective selves as God rather than the true and living God who is the same yesterday, today, and forever. And yet this is precisely what we see happening in much theological programming these days. There is a recovery of a theology of glory wherein the theologian believes they are on solid ground simply because of the vintage of the theology, and theologians they are ostensibly recovering for the purported revitalization and fortification of the Protestant churches en masse.

Contrariwise, as Calvin notes, and as Barth is emphasizing as he quotes Calvin, no matter what period a theology is developed in, no matter what its pedigree and historical pressures, if it isn’t funded by the fount of the cross of Christ, where the Christian is put to death over and again, afresh anew, thus being given over to the life of Christ, that His life might bring life to our lives in the mortal members of our bodies, then there is no savory life, leading to further life in the work and the words the theologians are propagating in the name of Christ, and ostensibly, for the churches. If Calvin, Luther, Barth et al. are to be taken seriously, as they should be, the theologian must constantly cast themselves at the mercy seat of God, which is cruciform in shape, and allow the staurologic (the logic of the cross), the ‘logic of God’s grace in Christ’ (see TFT) to fully condition the theologian’s mode as a theologian indeed. Outwith this wisdom, τῇ σοφίᾳ τοῦ θεοῦ (‘the wisdom of God’), which is the wisdom of the cross, the theologian is only pushed deeper into the well of their own resources; which of course only leads the theologian into self-congratulation and idolatry, even in the name of Christ.

I know I bang this drum loudly and often, but that’s because I think we are at endemic levels when it comes to what Luther would call theologies of glory. That is, the types of theologies that aren’t submitted to the wisdom of God, in a properly based theology of the cross wherein the theologian can genuinely say: “it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me,” and “I have determined to know nothing among you except Christ and Him crucified.” When this ethos characterizes the theologians demeanor (those expressed in the Pauline passages), when this becomes their daily mode as a Christian thinker and teacher for the Church, it is at this point they have something of value to say because they are no longer leaning on the powers of their own intellects, or of those they are ostensibly recovering, but instead they are resourcing the reality of the Gospel as that is the fund and ground of their very being, moment by moment.

[1] John Calvin, Commentary on the Book of Genesis: Foreword cited by Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/1 §40 [031] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 31.

Gerhard Forde on Martin Luther’s Theology of the Cross

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The following comes from an old defunct blog of mine. It is simply a passage from Lutheran theologian, Gerhard Forde, on Martin Luther’s theologia crucis, or ‘theology of the cross.’ When I was first confronted with Luther’s dialectic of a theology of the cross versus a theology of glory in my seminary Reformation theology class, it changed my life (not an overstatement). Not so much by focusing on its negative side (i.e., “versus a theology of glory”), but by focusing on the positive implications it provides in regard to a knowledge of God and how that implicates the Christian existence coram Deo. I will always cast myself as a theologian of the cross, which I see as an antecedent, in certain qualified ways, to Karl Barth’s style of a theology of crisis (e.g., with the different pressures, and historical circumstances understood).

What I want to primarily emphasize, after Forde, is how a theology of the cross makes the Christian vulnerable before God, just as God in the grace of Christ, has made Himself vulnerable for us. Not predicated by us, to be clear, but vulnerable in the sense that as TF Torrance would say, “God loves us more than He loves Himself,” in the sense that He freely choose to not be God without us, but with us. Here is Forde:

Thesis 22. That wisdom which perceives the invisible things of God by thinking in terms of works completely puffs up, blinds, and hardens.

Thesis 22 is, in effect, a statement about the religious effect of the theology of glory and the wisdom of law upon which it is based. Religious people in particular seem to have difficulty being theologians of the cross. That is because the theology of the cross is quite devastating for our usual religious aspirations under the wisdom of law. The indignation and resentment against God … is aroused not only — perhaps not even principally! — because of the strenuousness and rigor of the life proposed, but finally because in the cross God has literally taken away from us the possibility of doing anything of religious merit. In Jesus God has cut off all such possibility. God, as St. Paul could put it, has made foolish the wisdom of the wise. We are rendered passive over against God’s action. This is always galling for the old being. We adopt a very pious posture. It is, so the protests go, too easy, too cheap, it has no obvious ethical payoff, and so on and on. Religiously we like to look on ourselves as potential spiritual athletes desperately trying to make God’s team, having perhaps just a little problem or two with the training rules. We have a thirst for glory. We feel a certain uneasiness of conscience or even resentment within when the categorical totality of the action of God begins to dawn on us. We are always tempted to return to the safety and assurance of doing something anyway. Generally, it is to be suspected, that is all we planned to do, a little something. But to surrender the “wisdom” of law and works, or better, to have it taken away, is the first indication of what it means to be crucified with Christ.[1]

[1] Gerhard O. Forde, On Being a Theologian of the Cross: Reflections on Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation, 1518, 91-93.

 

Luther’s Kerygmatic God Versus the Speculative god of the Thomists

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The Christian world needs a revival! It needs to come to a genuine knowledge of God. Not a speculative knowledge, as those retrievers of Aquinas would have it; but a concrete known knowledge of God gifted to us in God’s Self-exegesis in Jesus Christ. When God becomes a predicate of a notional ‘godness’ that ‘we’ (think the philosophers) connive, God simply becomes a projection of our own faces (Ludwig Feuerbach knew this well). But this is the God that the evangelical Reformed types these days are introducing people to. Not the God of the Bible revealed in Jesus Christ, but the god of the philosophers, whether that be of Aristotle, Plotinus, or Descartes. The reformational types, if they are going to retrieve anyone, it ought to be a Protestant par excellence, like Luther, rather than the Catholic par excellence, Thomas Aquinas (and the whole mode of philosophical speculation about God that followed).

In the following Eberhard JĂźngel offers an insightful comparison between the speculated god of Rene Descartes versus the biblical and concrete God of Martin Luther. As the reader will see, the God of Luther is the kerygmatic God in Jesus Christ.

Remaining at the level of rational knowledge of God, for Luther too there is a fundamental cognitive difference between the “that-being” and “what-being” of God, between the ‘existence’ and the ‘essence’ of God: There is “a vast difference between knowing that there is a God and knowing who or what God is. . . .” Whereas Descartes begins with the ‘essence of God’ which is comprehended in the ‘idea of God’ and moves to the ascertainment of the ‘existence of God’ through the ego . . . , Luther takes another route: “Reason . . . knows that there is a God, but it does not know who or which is the true God. . . .” And it is the misfortune of reason overstepping its boundaries that it wants to move from the knowledge that there is a God somehow to the knowledge of who God is, as Luther says: “Thus reason also plays blindman’s buff with God; it consistently gropes in the dark and misses the mark. It calls that God which is not God and fails to call Him God who really is God. Reason would do neither the one nor the other if it were not conscious of the existence of God or if it really knew who and what God is. Therefore it rushes in clumsily and assigns the name God and ascribes divine honor to its own idea of God. Thus reason never finds the true God, but it finds the devil or its own concept of God ruled by the devil. . . .” For “Nature knows the former [scil. that God exists]—it is inscribed in everybody’s heart; the latter is taught only by the Holy Spirit. . . .” This difference does not obtain for faith. For faith knows that God is in that it experiences who or what God is.[1]

Knowledge of God is, of course!, key to all Christian existence and its theology. Get knowledge of God wrong, and everything subsequent is askew. If knowledge of God isn’t grounded in God’s Self-knowledge given for the world in Jesus Christ, then all that we are left with is a knowledge of God based upon our own whimsical machinations about what godness must be like. If we are left to this mode, the latter iteration, then, in the end, we haven’t been thinking about and talking to the genuine and living God whatsoever; indeed, all that we would have been doing is speaking to ourselves in self-assigned sacrosanct ways. This, I contend, is precisely what the god of Thomism presents the Church with. While this matter is a complex, given intentions and periodization, nonetheless, at an ultimate end what matters is that the Christian gets God right. And the only way to do that is to rely on the God who breaks the philosopher’s god’s back with the weight of His glory as revealed at the cross. Jüngel writes further: “The Cartesian God on the cross—and the cross would collapse! The ‘infinite substance, independent, omniscient, and omnipotent’ is too heavy. And that is its weakness.”[2] Jüngel’s, clearly, is a critique of a Cartesian notional God; I am applying his critique, clearly, to the contemporary Thomists, more broadly. The point of the matter holds true across all philosophers, and their respective notions of godness: they all start with an abstract human reflection about what godness must entail, and then attempt to synthesize the God of the Bible, the God Self-revealed in Jesus Christ, with that. But as Jüngel (and Luther et al.) rightly underscores, this presents us with an irradicable contradiction. The God Self-revealed in Jesus Christ breaks the philosopher’s genius by presenting it with an otherworldly sui generis reality that can only be accounted for by the categories of faith as presented in a logic of Grace.

I hope others will come to grasp the gravitas of these things, and stand against the tide of Thomist and other philosophical retrieval being done in the name of Christ and orthodoxy. There is no orthodoxy ‘but Christ and Him crucified,’ and the logic that the ‘wisdom of the Cross’ is suffused with as if from a new logic that contradicts the old. There is a better constructive way to be an ‘orthodox’ Christian while not selling out to the mainstream of revisionist retrieval being done by most evangelical theologians today; and this, on one hand or the other. Show me someone’s prolegomena, and “what” or “who” their God is will become immediately clear. Let’s be good Protestants, anyway.

[1] Eberhard JĂźngel, God as the Mystery of the World: On the Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified One in the Dispute Between Theism and Atheism, trans. by Darrell L. Guder (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock [Reprint], 2009), 124 n. 53.

[2] Ibid., 123.

Against the Theologians of Glory

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I’ve written against theologies of glory ever since (and before) I heard of them. A life verse of mine (among a gazillion) is the following: “For I’ve determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.” This typifies the staurological life I live the Christian as, from the cruciformed life of the risen Christ’s (or at least the one I aim for). Because of this I have an acute allergy to anyone who chooses instead to be a theologian of glory. Jesus identifies theologians of glory this way: “I do not receive honor from men. But I know you, that you do not have the love of God in you. I have come in My Father’s name, and you do not receive Me; if another comes in his own name, him you will receive. How can you believe, who receive honor from one another, and do not seek the honor that comes from the only God?” (John 5.41-4) He also has theologians of glory in mind here: “Take heed that you do not do your charitable deeds before men, to be seen by them. Otherwise you have no reward from your Father in heaven. Therefore, when you do a charitable deed, do not sound a trumpet before you as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory from men. Assuredly, I say to you, they have their reward. But when you do a charitable deed, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, that your charitable deed may be in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will Himself reward you openly.” (Mt. 6.1-4) These characteristics, where the person seeks praise from other men, rather than God, these typify theologians of glory. I rebuke that; I say ‘get behind me satan,’ when I encounter such putrid displays of self-seeking and glorification; whether I see that creep in myself or others.  

When this hits close to home, particularly with someone, or others who are supposedly your friends, your colleagues in the theological task, this becomes that much more difficult to stomach. It leaves you feeling disillusioned, wondering just how farcical so much of your time and energy might have been because you were unknowingly associating yourself with theologians of glory. I just had a really hard example of this hit me, one that hit very close to home. I’ve been entertaining the idea of putting a particular person on blast, and I have, in muted ways, on Facebook and Twitter, but putting them on the public and open world wide web for the whole world to see just how gross a theology of glory looks in real life living color. But I have chosen not to do that here now. Some people have been giving me grief, either by omission or commission, in regard to the honorary doctor of theology I received. You see, theologians of glory get really concerned about optics. They think that if you receive an honorary ThD from an internationally based denominational consortium of theological schools, that the degree itself isn’t worth much; that in fact, it is a fraudulent degree not worth the paper it’s printed on. If the school that awards you said degree isn’t a White Euro/Americo/Westerno school with grand tradition, deep funding sources, with name recognition among all the elites in the world, that the school is pretty much worthless. In fact, if you can’t find said school on a superficial google search, then the theologian of glory feels free to call you out for the whole world to see. You see, the theologian of glory knows that they have already been sanctioned to do that, they have all the rich White elites standing behind them; yeah, the paper they have hanging on their wall, and their published dissertations that five people might have read says so.   

Ultimately, the problem with theologians of glory is that they have drunk the theological industrial complex’s kool-aid. Indeed, they are so drunk on themselves, and their various accolades, they think they are so smart and couth, that they believe the whole world ought to simply get down on their knees and kiss their feet with every step taken. In other words, theologians of glory are deluded by their own echo-chambers. They have been called “the Dr.” for so long, they have become the go-to guys and gals so much in their respective institutions of higher learning, that they simply believe everyone ought to worship the ground they stand on; and the amazing thing about the theologian of glory, is that they will take this attitude all in the name of Jesus. They will claim to be doctors in service of the Church. Indeed, this is the most deluding factor for the theologian of glory. Their self-projected, self-elevated statuses have become so conflated with Christ that they can no longer distinguish between the real Jesus, and the Jesus they say they are witnessing for. They believe they can talk skubalon about others who they think are not their equals, and in fact they think they ought to talk about others in service of the Church. Until a person jumps through the hoops they had to, you know, to become a theologian of glory, these guys and gals, in their hallowed halls, look upon the rest of the Christian world as the plebians that they are.  

The moral of this story is this: only be a theologian of glory if you’re interested in receiving all of your praise and rewards and unbelief right now. Once the eschaton hits, and the Bema judgment comes, all of those rewards will be burnt up and judged as the straw that they are. Sure, you’ll be ‘saved,’ but as by fire; and Grandma Ethel’s rulership in the Kingdom will be multiple times greater than the theologian of glory, and his/her rulership. But that’s the sobering thing about everything: we are talking about eternal verities. We are talking about magnifying Jesus, and only genuine theologians of the cross do that; theologians of glory mock the “least of these,” and they do so in the name of Jesus Christ—a stricter judgment awaits.  

“Christian Theology” as an Insecurity

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The thought occurred to me last night that much of the theological developments over the last many centuries, particularly during and post-mediaeval times stem from personal insecurities. Ludwig Feuerbach famously made the observation that ‘theology is anthropology,’ that it is the self’s projection of its self-perceived notion of virtuousness and greatness. Here’s an anonymous description taken from an anonymous source: “Feuerbach claimed that our conceptions of “god” are always just projections of our own values. God fulfills our need to objectify our virtues, and embodies our values. Thus the essence of religion is human nature, and our Gods tell us about ourselves…”theology as anthropology”. Barth, took Feuerbach’s critique to heart, and I think he was right to do so. And this is probably what prompted my seemingly random thinking about the basis of theological motivation and development stemming from personal insecurities (of the theologians et al). Take this as my psycho-theological analysis.

Human interactions, inter-personal dynamics in societas writ large, outwith the Holy Spirit’s intervening and re-creating work moment by moment, can only be based upon a person’s insecurity coram Deo. People, by theo-biblical definition are born into a functionally abstract relationship towards God; God, the living ground and inner-reality of all humanity, and all other existences. If humanity, apart from subjective entrance into the new creation of God in Christ, are fragmented, abstract shadows vis-a-vis God, they will necessarily operate in daily life from a place of insecurity; this will implicate all endeavors, including theological developments. Someone might say, yeah, but Bobby, most people who do Christian theology do so from an intentional mode of being pro-fessionally Christian, and so would not suffer from this sort of abstract standing before God. I would respond: the Apostle Paul in I Corinthians exhorts the church there, particularly in chapters 1—4, to stop operating with and from the wisdom of the world; to cease operating as if the wisdom of the cross is foolish and weak. He was chiding self-professing Christians, genuine Christians even, to stop thinking from the wisdom-systems they had been inculcated into by fleshy birth. He challenged them to be theologians of the cross, rather than being theologians of glory as that was signified by their adoption of the sophia present in the world writ large; a wisdom built upon the self-projection of an insecure and un-enlivened humanity. In other words, it is highly possible, even probable, for Christians even, to fall prey to wisdom-systems, intellectual-centers that are ultimately at odds with the revealed and apocalyptic reality of the Gospel of God in Jesus Christ. These systems, when adopted and synthesized by Christians, end up distorting, at best, the way the Christian views and thus presents and proclaims God to themselves, and thus to others.

For my money, the aforementioned type of theology—the type based in insecurity and wisdom-systems of this world—is what we get when we adopt what historically has been identified as the via negativa or negative way of doing theology. We see this way most prominently demonstrated in the theology of someone like Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas famously synthesized Aristotle’s metaphysics into his Christian theology, thus producing a theology focused on a God known by a discursive speculative reasoning process from effect to cause within a tightly bound cause-effect chain-of-being hierarchy from below to above. I take this theological methodology, as it is principially formed by adoption of pagan philosophy, to be based in a human insecurity before the triune and living God. As such it suffers from a necessarily faulty starting point in regard to providing capacity to rightly think God. Even so, it has become so accreted in the Church’s Great Tradition, it has become so elevated as the pinnacle of the ‘orthodox’ way, that to point out what should be a simple biblical truth, tends to make the one pointing this out to be considered potentially heretical, at best, heterodox. This is usually how the insecure operate though, so such labeling would be consonant with their mode of function as the so-called orthodox.

My Mode as a Theologian of Crisis Against Theologians of Glory

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I didn’t become a Christian to gain approval from the theologians, the guild, or editors-in-chief. I became a Christian because I recognized my need for a Savior, and I did so because God recognized my need of a Savior first; thus, He elected my humanity in Christ, became me that I might become Him by the adoption of grace. Jesus, particularly in the Gospel of John, chided the Pharisees for seeking the approval of men rather than God; He said that this made it impossible for them to believe. And yet, even today in our post-Enlightenment 21st c context there are academic theological guilds who largely operate with the same sort of air of attitude and superiority that Jesus chided the Pharisees for. Martin Luther’s theologia gloriae (theology of glory) is largely apropos here as well. He critiqued the schoolmen for building on each other’s “approved” commentaries and ‘Sentences,’ thus seeking the approval of their peers rather than God, and God’s Word. Contemporary Protestant theologians, many who I know, can intellectually acknowledge what I’m saying here, and then self-deprecatingly slink right back into the sort of modern-day theology of glory I am highlighting.

My theological mode is grounded, indeed, in a theology of crisis. That is how the Lord got my attention, it is how He got hold of me in radical ways. I went through a decade (at least) of hard Anfechtung (trial, tribulation), in ways that are too hard to express here. But it was that ‘sentence of death,’ a staurological sentence that has shaped my life as a Christian ever since. I read through the Bible, and theology, incessantly so, because that is the response that sustained me through these dark nights of the soul; and continues to. Because of this, my Christian existence is a deeply personal reality, indeed one that is in fellowship with the communio sanctorum, and thus the God I know, and seek to know, has become deeply personal to me. As such, the theology I do, and the theologies that I’ll approvingly read, are focused on God as Triune, relational, and personalist. The guilded theologians have labeled this, by-and-large, as ‘theistic personalism,’ but I name it Deus absconditus is the Deus revelatus in Jesus Christ; in other words: the ‘hidden God’ is the ‘revealed God’ in Jesus Christ. The God I have come to know over and over again, daily, minute-by-minute, is not the God of the schoolmen, it is not the God of the theologians, it is not the God of the guilds, it is not the God who has been institutionalized in various ecclesial expressions, the God I have come to know through lively encounter, is the God who is the Father of the Son by the Spirit; and the Son, is Jesus Christ.

Often the guilded theologians will look at my “blog posts,” and think just that: ah, how quaint, another blog post. They think further: maybe if this guy would spend more time writing essays and getting them published in peer reviewed theological journals, I would show him more respect. And this attitude, the one I have just portrayed is to the point. Contrariwise, I am of the belief that a person can be a theologian, can avail themselves, even of those who operate as a theologian of glory—that is, their respective insights despite themselves—and continue to resist the sort of institutionalized self-glorifying spirit that animates the world of their relative identity as “theologians for the Church” (as they often claim to be). My theology of crisis has led me into the waters of the theologians, but at the same time it has made me an opponent of the sort of quid pro quo spirit that enlivens so much of the theological guild. It isn’t just that I ‘look out’ and thank God that I am ‘not one of them.’ It is that I look out and realize that precisely because I am one of them that I must live in a constant life of repentance; that I must cling to the crisis (or the crucis) that the crucified life of God in Christ confronts me with afresh and anew in my daily life.

I am a sinner. As such my theology (nostra theologia) is indeed a theology of crisis; my theology is staurological (crucifixion-shaped) because I live a life in the realm of the unseen realities of the Kingdom, but as if seen through the faith of Jesus Christ. As a Christian theologian I live a life longing to be saved from this body of death I continuously inhabit, even as justified before God (simul justus et peccator). I didn’t start this walk coram Deo in front of the theologians, or even in front of the Church, per se; I started this walk as the still small voice of the living God called me to himself, awakened me from my sleep at 2am when I was 3 years old. I came to Him that night, and have known His voice, in various ranges of amplification, ever since. It was years later, through deep crises, allowed and used by God, my Father, wherein I came to the realization that the only approval that mattered came from Him, not others. This is the foundation that ‘He’ has laid, and upon which He continues to build as He transforms me from glory to glory. I am only a pro-fessional theologian insofar that the con-fessional reality of God’s life for me in Jesus Christ conditions my life from moment to moment in this rather desolate existence as a Christian person in the 21st c.

I have written this with hopes that anyone who reads it might come to maybe question what their stance and motives are before God. Do they look down on others, or think that they have a special location in the body of Christ, an elevated station, because of their statuses created by publishing and degrees? Or do they see themselves, instead, through the lens of the cross of Jesus Christ?

Barth’s Theology of the Cross isn’t PostMetaphysical, it is Biblical

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Knowledge of God is not an escape into the safe heights of pure ideas, but an entry into the need of the present world, sharing in its suffering, its activity and its hope. — Karl Barth quoted in Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts, 100.1

Barth’s theologia crucis, his theology of the cross. It isn’t that this is postmetaphysical, it’s that it’s biblical. The biblical theological theology presents God as God presents Himself in the skin and bone of the Son of Man. There isn’t another version of God waiting in the ‘heights,’ one accessed by the philosopher. The only version of God that a genuinely Christian theological theology has access to is the one that it is confronted with in the face of Jesus Christ.

It’s funny to me how many contemporary theologians, often times youngish, want to frame things as if their retrieval of classical theology just is the theological way. They want to merge this type of classical theology with the teachings of canonical Scripture; as if the ‘heights’ they have pierced, through the philosophers, is commensurate with the disclosure of Holy Scripture. Barth knows how vain this approach is all too well; we would do well to follow him in his rejection of speculative theologizing, of the sort that is said to be the Great Tradition or of the consensus fidelium. If we are not to go beyond what’s written, we must stick slavishly to what is revealed, and fixate on that as it is born witness to in [Holy] Scripture.

 

1 Cited by, Center for Barth Studies, accessed 10-20-2021.

With Jesus and Paul on a Theology of Glory: Only Blindness Dwells There

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I do not receive glory from people. But I know that you do not have the love of God within you. I have come in my Father’s name, and you do not receive me. If another comes in his own name, you will receive him. How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?  Do not think that I will accuse you to the Father. There is one who accuses you: Moses, on whom you have set your hope. For if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?” -John 5:41-47 

This is the Dominical theology of glory; Martin Luther has his own, corollary, theologia gloriae. The greatest irony to me is that Jesus is directing this to the theologians of His day. He wasn’t calling out the ‘common people’ who ‘heard him gladly;’ He is confronting the religious, and theological leaders of His day, who of all people should have known better! They should have known that the Christ, that He was the King of kings and promised Messiah of Israel. But because they were so invested in receiving praise from each other, they couldn’t even believe in the God they said they were talking and debating about ad infinitum. The most staggering thing to me is that when, in general, a person is seeking the approval of others, rather than God’s, that they cannot believe in (or trust) God at a primordial level. And yet this is humanity’s basic orientation from conception. We are, by fallen nature, given to vicious and perduring fits of incurved focusedness, and a desire to receive accolades from our peers; and we’ll deceive ourselves, in self-deprecating ways, by using the name of Jesus to glaze our “praises” and “glories” in a way that they might appear to be for Him and not us. This is largely what shapes the spirit of the theological and clerical guilds; it is a praise from others rather than God that funds this universe. 

Au contraire, the Apostle Paul, following His Master, Jesus, writes: 

For am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ. -Galatians 1:10 

This is hard teaching, who can hear it?! This orientation is so pervasive, and collectively present to the human condition, that even when we read posts like this—ones attempting to alert us to the ‘condition’—we can agree, but then continue on performing as if we have somehow transcended the ailments of theologia gloriae. Once we believe that we have a foundation that is genuinely Jesus Christ, even as we have sublated that foundation with a foundation of our own ‘glorious’ constructing, we will begin building that out in the direction it has provided shape for. It is either a foundation built on a theologia crucis (theology of the cross) or a theologia gloriae; really, only time, and more to the point, the Eschatos will reveal which one. Fortunately, cause God is a God of grace, He remembers our ‘frames are but dust.’ As such, He assumed our theologia gloriae, and through His theologia crucis He made a way for us to live genuine lives of belief rather than unbelief; ones of trust of God, rather than fear of others. As Paul notes further: 

According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and someone else is building upon it. Let each one take care how he builds upon it. For no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw— each one’s work will become manifest, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. If the work that anyone has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward. If anyone’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire. -I Corinthians 3:10-15 

It is upon this foundation, the one that God has laid, and not us, that us theologians of glory have hope. Even so, we are prone to wander. We are crafty, like serpents at points, to the level that we can delude ourselves into thinking that the ‘work’ we’re doing is the ‘Father’s business,’ when in fact it is actually ours. When this mode of doing business becomes institutionalized into the normal structures of life, it is at this juncture that the persons involved require a radical in-breaking of God’s life for them in Christ. Only Christ, God’s power for the world, has the capacity to collapse such pretenses, and reduce them into the rubble that they are. Truly, as Paul points-up, ‘saved’ ‘redeemed’ people can commit great error and evil, and do so all in the name of Christ; the fire will reveal whether it was straw or gold that was being polished in the mean-time.  

May our lives reflect the gold of Christ’s life for us; and as those who are participatio Christi, may we constantly be reckoning ourselves dead to sin and alive to Christ; with hopes that we might indeed transcend theologies of glory, and genuinely live out theologies of the cross. It is in this ‘living out’ wherein we become witnesses to Jesus Christ, and do so as we are cast, daily, upon the One who raises the dead. But there isn’t much self-glory in this, indeed there is none; who can hear it!  

On a Theology of Glory

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Theologia gloriae (theology of glory) was the obverse of Luther’s theologia crucis (theology of the cross). He develops what he means by this binary in his Heidelberg Disputation. Rather than get into the historical details of its development I simply want to riff on a focus on his theologia gloriae. In a nutshell, Luther disdained the theologians who sought the praise of others. He primarily thought the scholastics did this by way of constantly referring to themselves, as they built their theological and ecclesial systems. What he accurately discerned was that the theologians of glory became so in-bred, so ‘built upon themselves,’ that they were no longer referring to Holy Scripture and its reality.

The theologian of glory, like the Pharisees Jesus confronts, as recounted in the Gospel of John, seek the praise of others. They are constantly referring to each other in the name of Jesus Christ. They are building on each other’s works rather than the works of Christ for them. As such their witness is compromised, even non-existent, as their ultimate point of witness is to the no-God of their own projection. They may have started out in the Spirit, but they are now being perfected by the flesh (to riff on the Apostle Paul). Theologians of glory are concerned with advancing themselves, with building CVs, with building clout among the peers, more than they are with receiving their sole approval from God. This is the danger the theologian of glory simply does not come to recognize because they are self-assured that they are ultimately theologians in the service of the Church. But what they really have become are servants to be seen by the Church; to receive accolades from their peers, and those they pontificate for. A theologian of glory, in modern parlance, might be considered a ‘rock star’ in his or her own context, and self-perception.

We all have this bent to become theologians of glory, but when its mode is institutionalized and tied to career advancement, it becomes all that more difficult to mortify. This is why I am so leery of academic theology, and the sub-culture it inhabits (and facilitates). It is shaped by a constant aim of being held in high esteem among the peers. It is about being seen physically, rather than focusing on the unseen as seen by the eyes of faith. My concern with this sort of institutionalized theological mode is that it inherently operates from a theology of glory; even if its practitioners object to this characterization; indeed, the objection might only help to illustrate its existence. Kyrie eleison