Category Archives: Thomas F. Torrance

George Hunsinger Clarifies the Doctrine of Vicarious Humanity in TF Torrance’s Theology

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Here is something I originally posted at another blog way back in December 2008. At this point I was still in the process of just cutting my teeth on Torrance’s theology, and grasping better how central the doctrine of the vicarious humanity of Christ (and the homoousion) was in his theology. I had already been reading TFT at this point for around two years, but I found this blog comment christcenteredfrom George Hunsinger very clarifying; I am sharing it because maybe it will be the same for you. You will note at the end of this post that I offer a bit of critique of classical Calvinism; I wasn’t even the evangelical Calvinist at this point yet, but it was in the making 🙂 .

The following are some thoughts presented by Professor George Hunsinger (Princeton Theological Seminary) over at Ben’s site Faith and Theology. He is discussing T. F. Torrance’s understanding of the mediation of Christ, and how this relates to the incarnation, at an ontological level. He is highlighting how the incarnation (assumptio), for Torrance, is ‘mediation’ where fallen humanity, united with Him, finds ‘healing’ through Christ’s acts of obedience to the Father; in this sense, Christ vicariously achieves regeneration ‘for us’, and prior to us, through which we, by His faith, find life super-abundant. Here is Prof. Hunsinger’s initial statement, and then his further elaboration, per a commenter’s request:

Torrance’s idea about “ontological healing” was an attempt to re-think the doctrine of sanctification. It attempted to place it within the frame of Christ’s incarnational mediation, in which our Lord “took this conflict into his own being” and “took part in it from both sides,” including therefore from the human side. Like Barth, only more so, Torrance explained both our justification and our sanctification by means of Christ’s obedient humanity. For sanctification this meant that regeneration took place in Christ before it took place in us. For Torrance there was one sanctification common to Christ and the church, and it was ours only by virtue of our participation in him (unio mystica).

Torrance maintained that the Incarnate Son’s assumptio carnis involved the assumption of our human nature, not in a neutral sense but in the sense of our fallenness, our “flesh.” In other words, Christ made “the status, constitution and situation” of the fallen human race his own.

Torrance interpreted Rom. 8:3 to mean that Christ “condemned sin in the flesh” by bearing God’s judgment on sin, for our sakes and in our place, in his own humanity.

However, Christ’s human obedience meant not only that he submitted to God’s judgment in our place, but that he also brought about the regeneration (“ontological healing”) of the very humanity he had assumed, again for our sakes and in our place. Christ was, in this sense, the “firstborn” of the new creation.

The regeneration of the faithful was then understood to take place through their participatio Christi, that is, through their union and communion with Christ. Those who entered into union with Christ by grace through faith were given a share in his regenerate or sanctified humanity. What had been perfected in him was imparted by the Spirit to them, and this spiritual impartation was understood to occur through mystical union with Christ.

He joins himself to us, and us to himself, by means of his body and blood.

Regeneration was therefore vicarious first, and then a matter of union with Christ. It was a matter of internal rather than external relations. Christ and the church were one mystical body. Christ’s giving of himself to the church meant, among other things, his imparting to the faithful of the regeneration he had accomplished for them in the flesh. For them it was a matter of participation, not merely of repetition or imitation. [Quote taken from: here — see both the body of the post, and subsequently, the comment section for full context]

I find this very helpful, and clarifying, I hope you do as well! The emphasis in this framework is on Christ’s ‘assumption of us’, prior to our reception of Him, by faith. This framing identifies the stress Torrance placed on the need for ‘ontological healing’ to occur on our behalf, through Christ’s vicarious mediation, in order for us to ‘participate’ in His life, through ‘Spirit-enlivened-union’ with Him. This goes beyond the typical and classical (Calvinist) framing of mediation as an ‘act’ of juridical (‘law-based’) duty on the part of Christ for us—this goes to the crux of humanity’s problem, and deals with the heart of the matter—our ‘inner-sin’ problem expressed in ‘outer-behavioral-patterns’ (it is an inner to outer movement, instead of, say a ‘Thomistic’, outter to inner movement). Be edified! And thank you Prof. Hunsinger for sharing these thoughts!

‘Vicariousness’ in TFT’s Theology illustrated by the Eucharist and Reported by Molnar: Against Dualistic Thinking in Salvation

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Here’s a post that I bet none of you have seen; it is from another blog of mine, probably around nine years old.

The following is going to be a long quote from Paul Molnar (the Roman Catholic😉 on Torrance’s theology. I want to quote this for those of you, especially, who are more prone towards a “classically” conceived Calvinism; or even a Roman Catholic perspective. In this piece I hope that you will get a feel for Torrance’s insistence upon a thoroughly Christ-centered, Spirit-centered approach that holyeucharisthe believes we must take if we are going to ground all of life and reality in life — viz. that we must “ground” all of life in Christ’s life (God’s life), or else we will fall into an array of theological problems. Let’s begin this quote:

What can be learned from Torrance’s emphasis on Christ’s high priestly mediation and his rejection of dualistic epistemology and ontology in understanding the Eucharist in a Trinitarian way? First, God gives himself to us in Jesus Christ; the Gift is identical with the Giver. If our understanding of God’s relation with the world is ‘damaged’ because of a dualistic perspective, then we will assume that God has not actually given himself within created time and space ‘but only something of himself through a created mediation’. A dualistic perspective actually divides the Gift from the Giver. The Catholic tendency focuses on the Gift in its concern for real presence, thought of ‘as inhering in the Eucharist as such’. The Protestant tendency focuses on ourselves as receivers over against the Giver. Torrance insists, against both of these tendencies, that because the Gift is identical with the Giver, God is immediately present in his own being and life through Jesus Christ; this self-giving ‘takes place in the Holy Spirit who is not just an emanation from God but the immediate presence and activity of God in his own divine Being, the Spirit of the Father and the Son . . . this is a real presence of Christ to us’.

Second, with respect to the Eucharistic sacrifice, the Offerer is identical with the Offering: what ‘the Incarnate Son offers to the Father on our behalf is his own human life which he took from us and assumed into unity with his divine life, his self-offering through the eternal Spirit of the Father’. Because the historical offering of his body on the cross is inherently one with himself as the Offerer, it is a once-and-for-all event which remains eternally valid. Understood dualistically, the Offerer and Offering are not finally one; ‘neither is his offering once and for all nor is it completely and sufficiently vicarious’. He becomes only a created intermediary and the offering is seen as a merely human offering so that no real mediation between God and creatures has taken place. Torrance insists that if Christ’s human priesthood is seen within a Nestorian or Apollinarian framework ‘then it becomes only a representative and no longer a vicarious priesthood, for it is no longer unique but only an exemplary form of our own’; thus it is no longer uniquely substitutionary.

This directs us to rely on ourselves ‘to effect our own “Pelagian” mediation with God by being our own priests and by offering to him our own sacrifices’. Even if this is done ‘for Christ’s sake’ and motivated by him, since it is not done ‘with him and in him we have no access through him into the immediate presence of God’. If, however, ‘Jesus Christ is himself both Priest and Victim, Offerer and Offering’ who has effected atoning reconciliation and so for ever ‘unites God and man in his one Person and as such coinheres with the Father and the Holy Spirit in the eternal Trinity, then, we participate in his self-consecration and self-offering to the Father and thus appear with him and in him and through him before the Majesty of God in worship, praise and adoration with no other sacrifice than the sacrifice of Christ Jesus our Mediator and High Priest’.

When the Church worships, praises and adores the Father through Jesus Christ, it is the self-offering and self-consecration of Jesus Christ ‘in our nature ascending to the Father from the Church in which he dwells through the Spirit;’ ‘it is Christ himself who worships, praises and adores the Father in and through his members’ shaping their prayers and conforming them in their communion in his body and blood.

T. F. Torrance’s achievement here is immense. By focusing on ‘God as Man’ rather than upon God in Man’, Torrance embraces a high Christology which concentrates on the humanity of the incarnate Son of God and a view of Eucharistic worship and life ‘in which the primacy is given to the priestly mediation of Jesus Christ’:

It is in fact the eternal life of the incarnate Son in us that ascends to the Father in our worship and prayer through, with and in him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit. While they are our worship and prayer, in as much as we freely and fully participate in the Sonship of Christ and in the whole course of his filial obedience to the Father, they are derived from and rooted in a source beyond themselves, in the economic condescension and ascension of the Son of God. The movement of worship and prayer . . . is essentially correlative to the movement of the divine love and grace, from the Father, through the Son and in the Spirit.

This leads to a more unified soteirology which views incarnation and atonement as a single continuous movement of God’s redeeming love which accentuates Jesus Christ’s ‘God-manward and his man-Godward activity’. Focusing on Jesus’ vicarious humanity emphasizes that Christ has put himself in our place, experiencing our aliented human condition and healing it. Eucharistic anamnesis is no mere recollection of what Christ has done for us once for all, but a memorial which ‘according to his command’ and ‘through the Spirit is filled with the presence of Christ in the indivisible unity of all his vicarious work and his glorified Person’. . . .[1]

The vicarious point is a very important one for TFT, and his “Evangelical Calvinism.” I hope that you’ve found this quote from Molnar enlightening (I realize Molnar is controversial for some, nevertheless I find his thoughts here spot on, relative to highlighting TFT’s ‘theology of vicariousness’).

[1] Paul Metzger, ed., Paul Molnar, Trinitarian Soundings in Systematic Theology, 184-86.

 

The Quicksilver Nature of the Church: Torrance’s Commentary on Barth’s der RĂśmerbrief

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T.F. Torrance’s commentary on Barth’s der Römerbrief is sublime and sobering all at once. The American evangelical, the American mainliner, the Christian in general should take heed to the words written by Torrance in this brief surmising of TF. What stands out, to me, is the implicit order and informing theology underwriting Torrance’s observations about the nature of the church; it is that the church is not prior to Christ, but after. In other words, it is precisely at the point that the church fails to recognize that Jesus is Lord that the church functions as if it is Lord squelching the possibility for genuinely hearing from the true Lord of His church.

This is where the diastasis comes in in Barth’s diacritical doctrine of the Church. The Church cannot fulfill its function in the hands of God except by being broken, in repentance and suffering and dissolution in the hands of God, but then it is made to point beyond itself and finds its essential life in witness and mission. The tragedy of the Church is that it clutches itself and nurses itself, and regards itself as the prolongation of grace, as the extension of religious experience, and so makes itself into an ex-essential denial of grace and the supernatural kingdom of God. But that is the way that has been taken by neo-Protestantism which has attempted to construct a religion out of the Gospel, and so to set it as one human possibility in the midst of others — but that is precisely to fall from grace. “The Church which sings its triumphs and trams and popularizes and modernizes itself, in order to minister to and satisfy every need except the one; the Church which, in spite of many exposures, is still satisfied with itself, and, like Quicksilver, still seeks and finds its own level; such a Church can never succeed, be it never so zealous, never so active in ridding itself of its failings and blemishes. With or without its offenses, it can never be the Church of God, because it is ignorant of the meaning of repentance.”[1]

This is challenging; not challenging in the sense that I think it only applies to others “out there,” but challenging in the sense that it applies to me “in here.”

Of note, theologically, as I alluded to earlier, for Barth and Torrance, there is a radically christo-concentrated focus that funds their thinking (which we all know by now). In this instance we see how it informs TFT’s reading of Barth, but more pointedly how that applies to the church of Jesus Christ at large.

 

[1] [Romerbrief, 370]. Thomas F. Torrance, Karl Barth: An Introduction to His Early Theology 1910 — 1931, 91.

 

The Sina Qua Non of the Gospel, The Trinity

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The Holy Trinity is the absolute ground and grammar of all epistemology, theology, and worship; so says our thesis one from chapter fifteen in our volume one Evangelical Calvinism book. Torrance beautifully illustrates this in what he writes below:

trinity-iconWhile the Lord Jesus Christ constitutes the pivotal centre of our knowledge of God, God’s distinctive self-revelation as Holy Trinity, One Being, Three Persons, creates the overall framework within which all Christian theology is to be formulated. Understandably, therefore, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity has been called the innermost heart of Christian faith and worship, the central dogma of classical theology, the fundamental grammar of our knowledge of God. It belongs to the Gospel of God’s saving and redeeming love in Jesus Christ who died for us and rose again and has given us the Holy Spirit who has shed the love of God abroad in our hearts. The doctrine of the Trinity enshrines the essentially Christian conception of God: it constitutes the ultimate evangelical expression of the Grace of the Lord Jesus Christ who though he was rich for our sakes became poor that we through his poverty might become rich, of the Love of God who did not spare his own Son but delivered him up for us all, for it is in that personal sacrifice of the Father to which everything in the Gospel goes back, and of the Communion of the Holy Spirit through whom and in whom we are made to participate in the eternal Communion of the Father and the Son and are united with one another in the redeemed life of the people of God. Through Christ and in the Spirit God has communicated himself to us in such a wonderful way that we may really know him and have communion with in his inner life as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.[1]

[1] Thomas F. Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God: One Being Three Persons, 2.

 

Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth on Divine Simplicity and Analogy [of Being] in Comparison

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The following is the combination of two posts I wrote about a year ago, I was broaching the issue of analogy in regard to how human beings attempt to speak and know God. What I sketched was the disparity that inheres between Thomas Aquinas’s and Karl Barth’s respective deployments of analogy, and how it works or doesn’t within each approach. I thought it might be helpful to combine these two posts into one, and re-present it in that form. As you will see I am appealing to George Hunsinger’s work throughout; I think his perspective is helpful in not only describing the aquinas2dilemma that is inherent to using analogy as a theological tool, but how that “tool” gets even more so exacerbated given the reality of God’s Simplicity and non-composite nature. In order to combine these two posts I had to modify some of the language a bit. If you want to read the original postings you can read those here and here.

Once, I tried to compare and contrast Thomas F. Torrance’s and Thomas Aquinas’ respective and disparate views on the usage of ‘analogy’ in theological engagement. I did this in our (Myk Habets’ and my) edited book Evangelical Calvinism: Essays Resourcing the Continuing Reformation of the Church; my personal chapter in that book is titled: Analogia Fidei or Analogia Entis: Either Through Christ or Through Nature. I wasn’t altogether pleased with how that chapter came out, but it is what it is (it wasn’t bad; it just was where I was at when I wrote it).

George Hunsinger in his new book Evangelical, Catholic, and Reformed: Essays on Barth and Other Themes engages with the same issue I attempted to, but his comparison and contrast is between Karl Barth and Thomas Aquinas; a similar endeavor to mine (I mean in regard to the traditions on analogy being compared). Throughout the rest of this post (which will probably run long) I am going to engage with Hunsinger’s comparative and constructive work here, which will involve engaging with the ostensible problem of Divine Simplicity and analogy respectively.

The Fourth Lateran Council serves as a jumping off point for Hunsinger in setting up this (his) discussion. We will enter into this with him at length (in other words I am going to be doing some extensive quotation work), and then we will follow it up with my own reflections in response to Hunsinger’s salient points on Barth and Aquinas in discussion. So Hunsinger:

A famous formula from the Fourth Lateran Council ran as follows:

For between Creator and creature there can be noted no similarity so great that a greater dissimilarity cannot be seen between them. (Constitutions, ii)

Whatever this formula might mean, it is not necessarily in agreement with the view taken by Irenaeus. Although both would posit an analogy between the Creator and the creature, the Lateran formula, if taken strictly, seemed to construe their metaphysical difference as a matter of degree (“greater dissimilarity”), whereas Irenaeus, if taken strictly, appeared to adopt a more radical view. For him their difference would seem to be absolute, as set forth through a pattern of negation and eminence, not just a matter of degree. Uncreated light, being wholly other than created light, was placed in a class by itself: God was “unlike any light that we know.”

The idea of divine simplicity seemed to generate a quandary. Defining God as wholly other than any creatures seemed to rule out the possibility of analogical discourse in theology. The idea of analogy, even as construed by the Fourth Lateran Council, seemed to posit that God and the creature were somehow metaphysically comparable. The dissimilarity between them, no matter how great, was finally a matter of degree. Divine simplicity, on the other hand, seemed to require a difference that was not merely relative but absolute. If so, it seemed to rule out the possibility of analogical discourse about God. Language about God, on these terms, could only be equivocal and apophatic. Analogical views of theological language that affirm divine simplicity, or God’s radical difference from the world, need to deal with this dilemma.[1]

To sharpen this dilemma Hunsinger appeals to Denys Turner and Patristic Hippolytus; first to Turner:

There can be no good sense … in any … calculation of the greater and lesser degrees of “distance” which lie between Creator and creatures as contrasted with that between one creature and another; for it is not on some common scale of difference that these differences differ … as if to say: it is this kind or that, only infinitely so…. A term of comparison … presupposes a common scale…. For if God is not any kind of being, then his difference from creatures is not a difference of any kind, hence is not a difference of any size, hence is not incomparably greater, but, on the contrary, is, simply, incommensurable. “Greater” and “lesser” cannot come into it, logically speaking.[2]

Hunsinger then cites Hippolytus:

For comparisons can be instituted only between objects of like nature, and not between objects of unlike nature. But between God the Maker of all things and that which is made, between the infinite and the finite, between infinitude and finitude, there can be no kind of comparison, since these differ from each other not in mere comparison (or relatively), but absolutely in essence. And yet at the same time there has been effected a certain inexpressible and irrefragable union of the two into one substance [upostasin] which entirely passes the understanding of anything that is made. For the divine is just the same after the incarnation that it was before the incarnation; in its essence infinite, illimitable, impassible, incomparable, unchangeable, inconvertible, self-potent [autosXenes], and, in short, subsisting in essence alone the infinitely worthy good.[3]

If God is ‘simple’ and non-composite, if He just is and His predicates are just who He is fully and wholly in all that those are realized in Himself; if God is so unique and other in this regard, such that He is not open to creaturely comparison, then how can we ever speak of God in anything but equivocal ways? This is the dilemma that Hunsinger has introduced us to, and the dilemma that Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth understand and work through in their respective ways.

As we have been describing there is a dilemma of sorts, a dilemma that has arisen because of an affirmation of so called Divine Simplicity (the idea that God in His inner being is non-composite andsui generis, unlike anything creaturely conceivable), and our ability to speak about this ‘other’ God in meaningful and full ways. The dilemma arises because if God genuinely is apophatically distant from us we have no recourse from within our own human conniving to even speak of God, but only maybe in equivocal ways. But as we saw, further, in the last post the Fourth Lateran Council posited the possibility for there to be a degree of similarity of kind between the Creator and the creature such that it could be potentially possible for human beings to speak of God analogically as humans find a point of contact in their own beings vis-à-vis God.

This is the context within which Thomas Aquinas operated, from within the context that the Fourth Lateran Council provided; for a degree of likeness between God and humanity. As such Thomas barthiconfamously developed his analogia entis (analogy of being) wherein he worked his way from nature back to nature’s cause in God; as a result His conception of God took a bottom-up approach as he worked through what he thought of as an interconnected chain of being between God and humanity.

George Hunsinger, with the help of Rocca, describes what this really looks like within the theology of Thomas Aquinas:

Rocca advances three points of particular interest. First, for Aquinas analogy was “more a matter of judgment than of concept in the traditional sense”…. In other words, analogy was more about modes of reflection (meaning) than about modes of being (truth), though of course the two cannot be separated. Second, analogical discourse in theology presupposed truths about God to which Aquinas had already assented on the basis of faith, and those truths took primacy over truths of reason…. Finally, an important condition for the possibility of analogical discourse was “the creatures ontological imitation of the divine nature and properties”….

Despite the creature’s radical unlikeness to God, the creature nevertheless corresponded to God by nature so as to make analogical discourse possible. A real metaphysical similarity was in force between the human creature and God…. The statement from the Fourth Lateran Council regarding creaturely likeness in the midst of greater unlikeness, to which Aquinas subscribed, meant that “a real though deficient likeness to God” was inherent in the creature by God’s design…. An inherent likeness in the midst of unlikeness helped make analogical discourse possible.[4]

Contrariwise, Karl Barth, while using analogy in order to talk Christianly about God, worked from what can be construed as a top-down approach wherein there was a radical and qualitative difference between God and humanity. Such a difference in fact that lest God reach down to us in gracious accommodation our ability to know this ‘simple’ God would be impossible (so Barth has a thickapophatism underlying his theology). But this seems strange, doesn’t it? If Barth worked from a top-down approach, if he had a heavy apophatism underwriting his theology, if he saw a qualitative difference (contrary to the Fourth Lateran Council) between God and humanity then in what way could Barth have analogy operating in his theology; how could he avoid speaking equivocally about God out of his own machinations? Hunsinger answers those questions, and more, this way:

… Barth solved the problem of analogical discourse by appealing not so much to nature as to grace. Although human language was inherently incapable of referring to God, it was nevertheless made capable of doing so. Human language, as sanctified by grace, was at once affirmed, annulled, and elevated — affirmed in its creatureliness and annulled in its incapacity, in order to be elevated beyond itself. This gracious process of affirming, nullifying, and elevating, of capacitating the incapacitated, was associated with being raised from the dead (II/1, 231). It was therefore miraculous and beyond comprehension. Barth’s controlling metaphor was not creation but resurrection.

Grace made possible, and continued to make possible, what was otherwise impossible. Analogical discourse was grounded not in some metaphysical similarity between God and the creature, but solely in the sovereign freedom of divine grace. Human language, without ceasing to be essentially inadequate, was extended to be made fully appropriate. To be made appropriate despite being inadequate meant becoming absolutely dependent on grace. It was a miraculous dependence that occurred perfectly and perpetually: not statically but dynamically, not merely once and for all, but continually again and again.

Yet in elevating human language beyond its natural capacities, God “does not perform a violent miracle” (II/1, 229). The Creator enjoys an original and proper claim on human language, even though it has no such claim on him. Neither human sin nor creaturely finitude could undo this primordial divine claim. Human language belongs to the good creation in and through which God knows himself as God. When the Lord God graciously elevates human words, concepts, and images to participate in the truth of his own self-knowledge, language is not alienated from its original purpose, “but, on the contrary, restored to it” (II/1, 229).

For Barth, because God and the creature are incommensurable, any ontological continuity between them — not only regarding predicates like goodness, reason, and wisdom, but also regarding “non-agential” predicates like being, beauty, and light — must be seen as miraculously given, again and again, from above. Ontological continuity with the reality of God does not belong to the creature qua creature. It does not belong to the creature as a given endowment or a fixed condition — not originally, and not even subsequently. The continuity does not exist except as it is continually given, and it is not given except miraculously through God’s gracious operation. As continually though miraculously given, the continuity is not merely “occasional” (a common misunderstanding of Barth). It is rather a function of the perpetual operation of God’s grace as grounded and centered in Christ from before the foundation of the world. As such the continuity is always at once real and yet also incomprehensible. Therefore the ontological difference between God and the creature is not seen as “infinitely greater” but as absolute. Any similarities between the creature and God — real though incomprehensible, incomprehensible though real — are not grounded in the creatureliness of the creature, but strictly and entirely (not just partially) in divine grace as a perpetual and miraculous operation from above.[5]

For Barth, as Hunsinger underscores well, there is nothing in creation itself, no ‘pure nature’ built into the fabric of what it means to be human wherein a point of contact can be made between the creature and the Creator (like we see in Aquinas). For Barth creation has always been ready for recreation, as such it has always been anticipating something beyond itself in order to truly have purpose and order within God’s good creation. In other words, in Barth’s theology, creation itself does not precede God’s grace, but instead is preceded by it in the election of God’s grace in Christ. As such human language as a part of God’s good creation is open and ready to be commandeered by God’s grace through which human language is given capacity to analogically speak of the God who opens language up in this way. So for Barth the analogy (of faith) happens as language is appropriated by God for us, taken from its inadequate setting, put to ‘death’ as it were, and resurrected and recreated in Christ in such a way that we are able to think and speak God from a center within Himself as he allows human language to find gracious correspondence to who He is as explained and revealed by Jesus Christ.

The important takeaway in regard to understanding what Barth is getting at is this: we are completely at God’s behest. If we are going to know and speak God it will only happen if God desires for it to happen. And God has graciously desired for that to happen, and He has limited that happening, so to speak, in and through His grace given to us and for us in His Son Jesus Christ. The consequence, contrary to the Thomist approach, is that we cannot posit a conception of God based upon a corollary of being (however dissimilar in grade that that might be) between ourselves and God from a built-into-creation point of contact. Things (in the Barthian account) are much more tenuous and vulnerable than that; within a Barth account we walk by faith, and not a faith generated from ourselves, but by the faith of Christ for us generated by His grace, His life with us. As we are related to Him by the Spirit, as He freely and willingly related to us in Incarnation (by the Spirit), it is in this gracious relation wherein who God is can be known and spoken.

I hope this has been a helpful comparison and contrast between Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth on analogy. The way I have left it makes it appear that Barth and Aquinas are worlds apart. George Hunsinger, as he continues to write, actually attempts to bring them closer together; it is an imaginative attempt that you will have to read for yourself to see what you think.

 

[1] George Hunsinger, Evangelical Catholic And Reformed: Doctrinal Essays on Barth and Related Themes (Grand Rapids, Michigan/Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2015), 61 kindle.

[2] Denys Turner cited by George Hunsinger in Ibid., 61-2.

[3] Hippolytus cited by George Hunsinger in Ibid., 62-3.

[4] Hunsinger, Evangelical Catholic And Reformed: Doctrinal Essays on Barth and Related Themes, 70-1 kindle.

[5] Ibid.

On Being a ‘Dynamic’ Christian Thinker versus Being an ‘Unmoved Mover’

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This post deals with some technical stuff that might not be interesting for all readers, but I find it quite instructive towards better understanding why it is that Thomas Torrance rejects the determinism that shapes frameworks of thought like that found, theologically, within Arminianism and Calvinism. And it should also help to illustrate an alternative route to thinking about things in causally determinative ways; which implicates the ways that, in the West, in general, we have become most accustomed to think, even though someone like Einstein and his theory of relativity aristotle2has demonstrated that reality, in fact does not work in mechanistically determinative ways. If this is so, then systems of thought like classic Calv/Arm are no longer viable in their classical theistic forms. Here is what Torrance writes about such things—just for a little context, he has been discussing the role of order, and contingency that we experience in creation; he persuasively argues that contingency (like creation presupposes) must presuppose a ‘rational’ ground of order beyond contingency, such that creation and contingency both find their orientation beyond themselves thus bequeathing to us an open-structured mode that only asks us to seek and think in accord with the intelligibility that stands beyond contingency … so contingency then allows for things, like knowledge, to be held in a dynamic relation relative to the personal ground of its reality V. a static relation that requires that we fill in the gaps between an unmoved mover and  what we experience in creation (and us), thus maintaining some sort of necessary constancy between the Creator and the creation (I doubt the context I just provided helps very much; like I said, this is rather technical material). Here is Torrance:

Now let us consider the other concept mentioned above, that of inertia. It is not difficult to trace its source either, in late Patristic and mediaveal theology — not to mention Neoplatonic and Arabian thought — particularly as the doctrine of the immutability and impassibility of God became tied up with the Aristotelian notion of the unmoved mover or a centre of absolute rest which was resurrected and powerfully integrated with Latin scholastic philosophy, science, and theology. In theology itself, it induced a deistic disjunction between God and the world, which scholastic thought tried to modify through bringing into play all four Aristotelian causes, the ‘final’ and ‘formal’ along with the ‘material’ and ‘efficient’ causes. The effect of this, however, was not to overcome the dualist modes of thought inherited from St. Augustine, the Magister Theologiae, but actually to harden the dualism by throwing it into a causal structure. This was particularly apparent in the conception of sacraments as “causing grace”, which was further aggravated (as in the doctrine of “real presence”) by the acceptance of Aristotle’s definition of place as “the immobile limit of the containing body”. In mediaeval science, on the other hand, the conception of a causal system ultimately grounded in and determined by a centre of absolute rest had the effect of obstructing attempts to develop emperical interpretations of nature for it denigrated contingentia as irrational. [Thomas F. Torrance, The Christian Frame of Mind, 24-5]

The moral is that we will either operate with something like an Aristotelian static view of metaphysics offers, or we will operate with a dynamic view of reality that is offered through a Trinitarian theology (and illustrated by an Einsteinian theory of relativity). One that is mediated through the contingencies of God become human in Jesus Christ.

The Father-Son Relation: Rowan Williams on the Irenaean Theology of Participation, and TF Torrance’s Homoousion

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Rowan Williams in his chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Jesus entitled A History of Faith in Jesus offers historical insight to the rapid doxological posture the early church took towards Jesus as God become man. As Williams details this he highlights this particular development in the theology of Irenaeus, and how Irenaeus provided for what Karl Barth, later, might call an analogia relationis. This is a beautiful way, a doxological and participatory way to conceive of what God in Christ has done for us in the mediatorial vicarious humanity of the eternal Logos, Jesus irenaeusChrist. It is this relation that Thomas Torrance swoons about so much and as corollary so do we as evangelical Calvinists. Williams writes of this development in Irenaeus’ theology this way:

Some of the language of early Alexandrian theology in particular similarly emphasises the role of Jesus as the visible manifestation of the invisible God, the mediator, not so much  of salvation or forgiveness as of true perception of the divine nature. The earlier theologian to stress this theme, however, is not an Alexandrian, but an émigré from Asia Minor, Irenaeus, who became bishop of Lyons in France; and fro him Jesus’ role as revealer immediately connects with a further and more profound set of considerations. Jesus reveals because of his own relation to the Father; because his face is wholly turned to the Father, it reflects his glory. For us to know and recognise that glory, we must be brought into that relation – a fundamental theme of Paul and John in the New Testament (Rom 8, John 17, among much else), which Irenaeus develops extensively, Jesus is an example, not only in the sense of being a model of behavior we ought to imitate (again a New Testament theme, as in Matt 11.29; 1 Cor 11.1), but as a paradigm of relation to God as Father. Our attention or devotion to him is a kind of tracing the contour of his life so as to see its conformity to the Father’s character and purpose; we are to pick up the essential clues as to how to recognise what it is to be a child of the heavenly Father by looking single-mindedly at him (cf. Heb 12.2). Being in the Spirit is not only or even primarily a gift of prophetic alignment with the ultimate judgement of Jesus, but entails the gift of sharing Jesus’ relation with the Father, beginning to love God as parent with the same confidence as Jesus shows.[1]

As I reflect upon this it conjures up for me the way T.F. Torrance presses into his constructive appropriation of the Athanasian themed, patrological focused homoousion, that developed post-Irenaeus. The idea that Jesus, the eternal Son, is consubstantial or one nature (ousia) with the Father [and the Holy Spirit]. Note Torrance:

. . . Hilary of Poitiers argued that it was the primary purpose of the Son to enable us to know the one true God as Father. This was the theme to which he gave considerable theological reflection in view of the Nicene homoousion and what it implied for our two-fold belief in God the Father Almighty and in God the Son of the Father. ‘All who have God for their Father through faith have him for Father through the same faith whereby we confess that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.’ Again: ‘The very centre of saving faith is the belief not merely in God but in God as Father; nor merely in Christ, but in Christ as the Son of God; in him, not as a creature, but as God the Creator born of God.’ ‘The work which the Lord came to do was not to enable you to know him as the Father of the Son who addresses you . . . The end and aim of this revelation of the Son is that you should know the Father . . . Remember that the revelation is not of the Father manifested as God, but of God manifested as the Father’.[2]

It is this theme of participation in Christ, who is homoousios or consubstantial with the Father that was so important for Irenaeus, Nicene and Chalcedonian theology, as well as for people like Torrance who made that particular doctrine a touchstone for his theological-hermeneutic. It is the idea of ‘relation’ with God as Father through the Son by the Holy Spirit that I believe is so important for what it means to know God in proper standing as His children. It is a matter of being rightly related through Christ; if we understand what that means, we will understand God to be our loving Father, and as Williams writes we will begin “to love God as parent with the same confidence as Jesus shows.”

As of late we have seen a lot of energy expended over the so called eternal functional subordination debate; the debate that is attempting to clarify what in fact the inner-life (ad intra) of God’s life looks like. I would contend that if that debate was shaped more by the dialogical, participationist mood that we have been highlighting in this post, and less by the analytical mode and tone it has taken, that the “debate” itself may never have happened to begin with. It is surely important to attempt to apprehend the mystery of God’s ineffable Triune life, and it is surely important to follow the pattern of God’s inner-life as revealed in Jesus Christ (which I believe the pro-Nicene theology has done), but when we press the edges of that apprehension too far we end up saying more than we are capable of saying; we lose sense of the fact that God will share His glory with no one. That said, there are “orthodox” contours of thought articulated by the church catholic that indeed set the boundaries and thus grammar by which Christians have a certain rule to follow when attempting to speak meaningfully about God as Triune. But we would do well to remember that just as the early church did, this all must be prayerfully held within a sense of deep awe and worship of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; co-equal, co-eternal, with no subordination whatsoever in the inner-life (ad intra).

Apart from my digression on EFS, what I really wanted to emphasize through this post is how central and important the ‘analogy of relation’ is for evangelical Calvinism; how important it should be for all Christians, even if they don’t identify as evangelical Calvinists (God forbid it!). If you really contemplate the implications of all of this all you can do is worship.

 

[1] Rowan Williams, “A History of Faith in Jesus,” edited by Markus Bockmuehl, The Cambridge Companion to Jesus (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 221-22.

[2] Thomas F. Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God: One Being Three Persons (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), 139.

T.F. Torrance Responds to the Eternal Functional Subordination Debate

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I was just scanning one of my old blogs (yeah, I have about five to six other blogs that I used to run that nobody has access to anymore but me), and I just came across fortuitously (I wasn’t even looking for this) a post I originally entitled: Top Down Father-Son relation versus Bottom Up: Avoiding the Social Trinity. In the post I reference Thomas Torrance in regard to his thinking about how we ought to conceive of the ad intra/ad extra relation between the Father-Son. In other words, Torrance speaks to the mythology, and indeed, heresy that is produced when we tommytorranceattempt to read God’s Self-revelation in the economy of salvation-history (i.e. in the Incarnation) back into the immanent or ontological (ad intra) life of God. Torrance argues, appealing to the Arian heresy, and within a context of Athanasius’ theology, that we cannot speak analogously of the Father-Son relation that co-inheres between the Father and Son in the divine life vis-à-vis human father-son (children) relationships in the creaturely realm. God’s life, in other words, is technically speaking, sui generis, or unique; it is his life that is regulative of our speech and thought patterns, analogically, but we cannot univocally read that thinking (e.g. of parent-child or by extrapolation husband-wife relations) back into the Godhead; thus the reality of analogical conceptualization when we think God. This is what Torrance fleshes out further for us. Here is the post I originally wrote for another one of my blogs back in 2011.

Torrance is discussing the impact that dualistic Hellenism has had upon Western-thought-forms; namely the precedence that classical thought has given to the optical mode of thinking and verification (so the obsession with empericism, etc.). TFT is highlighting the impact that this methodology and epistemology can have upon our construal of God’s “Father-hood” and “Son-hood,” and how Christian/Patrisitic theology, primarily through Athanasius’ influence, eschewed this “Hellenising” effect by reifying it through Christian ontology.

The contrast between Christianity and Hellenism could hardly be greater than at this fundamental level, where biblical patterns of thought governed by the Word of God and the obedient hearing of faith (υπακοη της πιτεως) conflict sharply with those of Greek religion and philosophy. The issue came to its head in the Arian controversy over the Father – Son relation at the heart of the Christian Gospel. Are the terms ‘father’ and ‘son’ to be understood as visual, sensual images taken from our human relations and then projected mythologically into God? In that event how can we avoid projecting creaturely gender into God, and thinking of him as grandfather as well as father, for the only kind of father we know is one who is son of another father? To think of God like that, in terms of the creaturely content of images projected out of ourselves, inevitably gives rise to anthropomorphic and polymorphic notions of deity and in fact to polytheism and idolatry. However, if we think from a centre in God as he reveals himself to us through his Word incarnate in Jesus Christ, then we know him as Father in himself in an utterly unique and incomparable way which then becomes the controlling standard by reference to which all notions of creaturely fatherhood and sonship are to be understood. ‘God does not make man his pattern , but rather, since God alone is properly and truly Father, we men are called fathers of our own children, for of him every fatherhood in heaven and earth is named.’ Unique Fatherhood and unique Sonship in God mutually define one another in an absolute and singular way. As Athanasius pithily expressed it in rejection of Arian anthropocentric mythologising: ‘Just as we cannot ascribe a father to the Father, so we cannot ascribe a brother to the Son’.[1]

I know I said I wasn’t going to post on the eternal functional subordination debate anymore, but I have re-thought that; I think I needed a cooling off moment, since that was all I was posting on for about a week or so.

If Bruce Ware, Wayne Grudem, et al. followed Torrance’s lead, along with the early church councils, they would not hold to positions that ultimately lead to tri-theism; or where God’s triune life is thought of as three distinct persons/subjects, with three distinct wills.

[1] T. F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 69-70.

Theology and Cancer: Genuine Christian Theology and How it Comforts Through Revelation

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Cancer and theology: my friend Todd Billings has written a book on the relationship between cancer and theology; motivated by his own diagnosis with an incurable cancer known as multiple myeloma. As many of you know I too, back in late 2009/2010, was diagnosed with an incurable/terminal (typically) cancer known as desmoplastic small round cell tumor (sarcoma), or DSRCT. Both Billings and I have miraculously survived our respective cancers, and by God’s grace carry on.

fallleavesThroughout the rest of the post I would like to reflect on cancer and theology, and how they relate and even can inform each other. I am prompted to write this post because of a mini Facebook discussion I had yesterday with my friend, Derrick Peterson. He had written a blog post himself on proofs for God’s existence. Eventually in the conversation I brought up cancer, and how God had worked through that in my own life to assuage and in fact rebuff serious doubts I’ve struggled with about God for many years. The type of doubts I had were not unhealthy doubts, but doubts I believe that God in Christ allowed to come upon me to push me deeper into Him. Nonetheless, I had them, and they were very strong; they caused depression and anxiety; and I just wanted them to go away, so I studied and prayed a lot (we are talking over a season of probably fifteen years). But I am starting to digress, let me move into the post now, and try to bring cancer and theology together.

Christian Theology

The first question, if we are going to talk about cancer and theology is to try and define what in fact the entailments of a genuinely Christian theology actually are. This will be an important step, because in order to understand how theology can inform and relate to cancer, we need to have a solid understanding of what Christian theology is. To help us develop what genuine Christian theology is Scottish theologian Thomas Torrance will have the honors as he is describing Karl Barth’s way of doing theology as well as his own:

Because Jesus Christ is the Way, as well as the Truth and the Life, theological thought is limited and bounded and directed by this historical reality in whom we meet the Truth of God. That prohibits theological thought from wandering at will across open country, from straying over history in general or from occupying itself with some other history, rather than this concrete history in the centre of all history. Thus theological thought is distinguished from every empty conceptual thought, from every science of pure possibility, and from every kind of merely formal thinking, by being mastered and determined by the special history of Jesus Christ.[1]

This is the way I approach theology as well. It is to understand that Jesus Christ in a principled and even absolute way must be the center for knowing God for us; since as the Apostle John makes clear, that was a fundamental part of Jesus’ mission.[2] There are other ways of doing theology out there that don’t do theology this way; as we have noted elsewhere on this blog, classical ways for doing Reformed theology (and I am Reformed, so I will camp on this) are much more abstract and speculative—i.e. they don’t necessarily start with Jesus Christ in an intense way for doing theology. This is not to say that the piety of some of these practitioners does not attempt to make up the difference in some of these other ways of doing theology, but they are not directly given shape by starting with Jesus in the ways that Barth and Torrance do (as does Athanasius).  In other words, I would contend that starting theology with Jesus in a principled way starts with the triune idea that God is love; it does not work its way discursively towards that reality as some classical theologies might be wont to do.

At base then, at least for me (as an evangelical Calvinist, and student of Karl Barth and Thomas Torrance), theology is Jesus; theology is objective in the sense that God is God, but genuine Christian theology moves the object into the subject (without losing its objective character) in Jesus Christ. In other words, genuine Christian theology is by definition, personal and relational. It is both of these because theology is not an idea, or simply a discipline, but genuinely Christian theology is a personal subject, it is the triune God Self-revealed and exegeted in Jesus Christ. It is this type of revelation that makes theology so inextricable to something like cancer; cancer is personal. So it is fitting, if God who is wise in Himself, if He is going to reveal Himself to us in Christ, does so where we are; hidden in the midst of our squalor and various forms of human suffering brought on by the fall of humanity into the abyss of sin.

To drive this reality of a genuine Christian theology home even further, let’s hear from Karl Barth directly as he writes about what Martin Luther called a theology of the cross versus a theology of glory. This will serve as the bridge that brings my desire to talk about cancer and theology together. Barth writes at length:

[I]n contrast Luther tries to draw attention to the vacuum, to the fact that passion (suffering) stands at the heart of life and speaks of sin and folly, death and hell. These fearful visible thing of God, his strange work, the crucified Christ — these are the theme of true theology. A preaching of despair? No, of hope! For what does that break in the center mean? Who is the God hidden in the passion with his strange work, and what does he desire? Explaining Heidelberg Thesis 16, Luther pointed out that the strange work leads on to the proper work, that God makes us sinners in order to make us righteous. The gap in the horizontal line, the disaster of our own striving, is the point at which God’s vertical line intersects our lives, where God wills to be gracious. Here where our finitude is recognized is true contact with infinity. He who judges us is he who shows mercy to us, he who slays us is he who makes us live, he who leads us into hell is he who leads us into heaven. Only sinners are righteous, only the sad are blessed, only the dying live. But sinners are righteous, the sad are blessed, the dying do live. The God hidden in the passion is the living God who loves us, sinful, wicked, foolish, and weak as we are, in order to make us righteous, good, wise, and strong. It is because the strange work leads to the proper work that there can be no theology of glory, that we must halt at the sharply severed edges of the broken horizontal line where what we find is despair, humility, the fear of God. For despair is hope, humility is exaltation, fear of God is love of God, and nothing else. The center of this theology, then, is the demand for faith as naked trust that casts itself into the arms of God’s mercy; faith that is the last word that can be humanly said about the possibility of justification before God; a faith that is sure of its object — God — because here there is resolute renunciation of the given character of scholastic faith (infused, implicit, and formed) as an element of uncertainty; faith viewed not as itself a human work but as an integral part of God’s strange work, sharing in the whole paradox of it.[3]

For Barth, and now for me, genuine Christian theology, as the Apostle Paul so eloquently declares is the wisdom of the cross (see I Cor. 1.18-25). God in His ineffable wisdom humbles himself to not only become a man, but humbles himself to the point of death, the death of the cross (see Phil. 2.5-10). God reveals Godself, hidden in the manger, in the body (which was His own human body) of a growing boy, and finally in the public ministry of Jesus Christ culminating in his death, burial,  resurrection (see I Cor. 15.1-4), ascension (see Acts 1; Col. 1–2), and coming again (see I Thess. 4; Rev. 19–22). When theology starts with God’s life revealed in the eternal Son, Jesus Christ, it cannot but help but to be meaningfully personal and cruciform in shape, since this is the shape that is most fitting for God become man by His own free and gracious choice; and this concordant with His character (in His inner triune life in se).

Cancer

Cancer is one of the most visceral fearful things, it seems, in our society of which people hope they never have to face. The sad reality though is that statistically more than fifty percent of all North Americans will receive some sort of cancer diagnosis in their life time (probably most towards their aging years, but that is also unfortunately changing quickly). I had to face it, and many of you (God forbid it!) might well have to face it yourself; if not, someone you know closely will in their life time. So cancer, among other ills produced by living in a fallen world, is an inevitability (although I think through proper diet most of cancer could be eradicated) that we will face one way or the other.

As I described theology above, that was not an abstract exercise for me; that is real life. When I received my “terminal” incurable cancer diagnosis it was the God revealed in Jesus Christ, in the cross and resurrection where I found immediate hope, confidence, and comfort. I did not have to work through an abstract apparatus of theology in order to work my way to God; because of the theological moorings I already had I knew He was ever present in this real time of trouble. I already knew that the God who I desperately needed was a humble, but all powerful God, who is able to enter into the depths of death and sin, and overcome it because of the inner-strength of His triune life of love. I knew that God first loved me, because He wasn’t a God who just talked the talk but He walked the walk before I was ever born or thought of (at least humanly speaking). I knew that I had an immediate and direct access to God because He had made clear to me in His Self-revelation in Christ that He had already come to me by enfleshing Himself with humanity and entering into all my suffering and despair. I found comfort in knowing that not only was God all powerful, but that His almightiness was shaped by immediate and personal love. I knew that He had power over death, because while He might appear to be hidden in the cross, for those with eyes of faith it was there where I could see Him most brightly.

Conclusion

When I started this post I had mentioned that discussion I had had with my friend Derrick about God and doubt. God revealed Himself, and met me so strongly in the midst of cancer that many of the doubts I had dealt with prior (for around fifteen long years) were crushed. It was through encounter with the living God in Christ, as I woke up every morning only to remember that “oh yeah, I have an incurable cancer in my body,” that this God of the cross broke in quickly on that fearful thought and made clear that nothing could separate me from the love of God in Christ Jesus. This is how good theology ought to work. It shouldn’t, at base, be an elaborate, even scholastic web of intellectualisms; instead it should be able to bring knowledge of God in the spaces of life where we would least expect to find Him.

 

[1] Thomas F. Torrance, Karl Barth: An Introduction to His Early Theology 1910-1931, 196.

[2] See John 1.18.

[3] Karl Barth, The Theology of John Calvin, 46.

 

Why The Eternal Generation of the Son is Important: Thesis 1: “The Holy Trinity is the Absolute Ground and Grammar of All Epistemology, Theology, and Worship.”

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The following represents Thesis #1 from our  book: Evangelical Calvinism: Essays Resourcing the Continuing Reformation of the Church. Foreword by Alasdair Heron. Eugene, OR.: Pickwick Publications, 2012. There are a total of 15 Theses in this particular chapter (which happens to be chapter 15 in the book); and they have been co-written by Dr. Myk Habets and myself — some of them represent more of one us (as author) than the other, and some reflect more of a good blend between the both of us. Myk and I are just finishing up
trinitypaulmolnar1Evangelical Calvinism: Dogmatics&Devotion, Vol. 2; it should be available some time this year, 2016 (I will let you know).

I wanted to share this thesis because of the ongoing debate about so called eternal, functional subordinationism (EFS). I have posted two posts here and here. More importantly though patristic scholars par excellence, Lewis Ayres and Michael Barnes have posted on it here and here. I have links in my first post to the original posts that have set this off online, but since Ayres and Barnes have chimed in the debate should be drawing to a close soon (I doubt that will happen though, since this EFS has apparently gotten a big foothold in many conservative evangelical schools and thought processes. My guess is that most or many will not even pay attention to or have access to this ongoing debate here online). That said, I think our Thesis One offers some good points towards introducing a good pro-Nicene Trinitarianism (with constructive engagement), and at the same time illustrates why the eternal generation of the Son vis-Ă -vis the Father is so important to maintain. And why any subordination (especially of the ‘eternal’ sort) is so deleterious to who God is, who and what the Gospel is, and how those two are tied inextricably together towards providing grounds for eternal life (for us), and knowledge of God in the eternal Son in Christ as we participate in the Gospel life of the Son who has been eternally by nature or ‘being’ (ousia) one with the Father in eternal felicity by the Holy Spirit’s action within the Divine triad. 

Thesis One

The Holy Trinity is the absolute ground and grammar of all epistemology, theology, and worship.

Athanasius was fond of saying that it is better to “signify God from the Son and call him Father, than to name God from his works alone and call him Unoriginate.”[1] And he was right. The triune God is known exclusively through the Son of the Father by the Spirit. In Jesus Christ is revealed very God of very God. God is in his own being what he is as God’s revealing Word and saving Act toward us. Through Christ and the Spirit we are given access to God as he is in himself. This access to God is, in part, in the form of knowledge of God as he is in himself, in his internal relations as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The epistemological strength of the homoousios works here with full force for it represents the consubstantial relation between Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, and God himself. As the image of God, identical with his reality, knowledge of the Incarnate Son through the Holy Spirit has a unique and controlling finality in knowledge of God.

To know this God, who both condescends to share all that we are and makes us share in all that he is in Jesus Christ, is to be lifted up in his Spirit to share in God’s own self-knowing and self-loving until we are enabled to apprehend him in some real measure in himself beyond anything that we are capable of in ourselves. It is to be lifted out of ourselves, as it were, into God, until we know him and love him and enjoy him in his eternal Reality as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in such a way that the Trinity enters into the fundamental fabric of our thinking of him and constitutes the basic grammar of our worship and knowledge of the One God.[2]

In order to further explicate such a Trinitarian theology the recent proposal of Thomas Weinandy proves useful. Without denying a biblical sense of the Father’s monarchy, Weinandy argues that a proper understanding of the Trinity can only be attained if all three Persons, logically and ontologically, spring forth in one simultaneous, nonsequential, eternal act in which each person of the Trinity subsistently defines, and equally is subsistently defined, by the other persons.[3] This drives Weinandy to present a thesis that, “may seem subtle, yet [is] one that I believe radically transforms and revolutionizes the Christian understanding of the Trinity.”[4] His thesis is simply that:

The Father begets the Son in or by the Holy Spirit. The Son is begotten by the Father in the Spirit and thus the Spirit simultaneously proceeds from the Father as the one in whom the Son is begotten. The Son, being begotten in the Spirit, simultaneously loves the Father in the same Spirit by which he himself is begotten (is Loved).[5]

This trinitarian construct highlights the Father’s monarchy without any subordinationist tendencies. To do this a mutual coinherence or perichoresis of action within the Trinity must take place whereby the Persons are who they are because of the action of all three. While the Son and the Holy Spirit come forth from the Father this is not some prior ontological action but rather in the coming forth all three persons are who they are, and they are so precisely in reciprocally interacting upon one another, simultaneously fashioning one another as themselves.[6]

It is this God whom we seek to speak of. “In and through the presence of the Holy Spirit supervening upon the revealing and saving events of his incarnate Son, God really does impart himself to us and actually makes himself known to us within the conditions of our creaturely forms of thought and speech, but without any compromise of his sheer Godness or any diminution of the Mystery of his transcendent Being.”[7]

The purpose of life is a transforming relationship with God in which the Spirit calls and enables us to become children of God in and alongside the Son and to join in his self-surrender to the Father. As Clark Pinnock writes, “God has not left us outside the circle of his life. We are invited inside the Trinity as joint heirs together with Christ. By the Spirit we cry ‘Abba’ together with the Son, as we are drawn into the divine filial relationship and begin to participate in God’s life.”[8] McLeod Campbell beautifully describes adoption as “orphans who have found their lost father.”[9] The logic is that believers participate in Christ, the eternal Son of the Father, and so participate in that filial relationship in the Son (John 8:19). It is the intimate relationship between the Father and the Son which is communicated to humanity through the Spirit of the Son (Rom 8:29). It is in this sense that we may define salvation as “sonship.”

Worship then must be defined as epiclesis and paraclesis, the invocation of the Paraclete Spirit and his coming to help us. In our worship the Holy Spirit comes from God, uniting us to the response, obedience, faith/fullness, and worship of Jesus Christ (also our Paraclete), and returns to God, raising us up in Jesus to participate in the worship of heaven and in the eternal communion of the Holy Trinity.[10] As James Torrance explains:

When we see that the worship and mission of the church are the gift of participating through the Holy Spirit in the incarnate Son’s communion with the Father and the Son’s mission from the Father to the world, that the unique center of the Bible is Jesus Christ, “the apostle and high priest whom we confess” (Heb 3:1), then the doctrines of the Trinity, the incarnation, the atonement, the ministry of the Spirit, Church and sacraments, our understanding of the kingdom, our anthropology and eschatology, all unfold from that center.[11]

Such is the trinitarian vision we have for theology generally, and for the contents of this little book specifically.

To echo the sentiments of many before us, in thinking and speaking of the Trinity we cannot but clap our hands upon our mouth and fall down before the Lord God in worship. The Holy Trinity is infinitely more to be adored than expressed, so that appropriate and faithful thought and speech about it cannot but break off in sheer wonder, reverence, thanksgiving, and praise.[12]

[1] Athanasius, Contra Arianos, 1.34, cited in Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 49, and often elsewhere.

[2] Torrance, The Ground and Grammar of Theology, 155.

[3] Weinandy, The Father’s Spirit of Sonship, 15. Note the affinities with Calvin’s formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity. See Warfield, “Calvin’s Doctrine of the Trinity,” 187–284; Torrance, “Calvin’s Doctrine of the Trinity,” 41–76; and Letham, The Holy Trinity, 252–268.

[4] Weinandy, The Father’s Spirit of Sonship, 17.

[5] Ibid.

[6] See further in Habets, “Filioque? Nein. A Proposal for Coherent Coinherence,” 161–202.

[7] Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God,” 151.

[8] Pinnock, Flame of Love, 153. Pinnock’s entire chapter on “Spirit and Union” (149-183) shows an obvious but unreferenced reliance upon T.F. Torrance’s theology.

[9] Cited in Kettler, “The Vicarious Repentance of Christ,” 540.

[10] Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction, 250.

[11] J.B. Torrance, Worship, Community and the Triune God of Grace, 9.

[12] Charles Partee and Gannon Murphy develop a number of these themes in their respective essays earlier in this volume.