On Ryan Hurd’s Babylonian Captivity

Posted on April 10, 2026 by Bobby Grow

I’ve “known” Ryan Hurd for many years now; through online engagements and personal correspondences. I’ve only known Hurd in his classical Reformed context as that has taken place during his time at New Saint Andrews College, and then as he has been an instructor for Davenant Hall. My last correspondence with him was quite a few years ago; he and I were discussing his entrance into the PhD program in theology at the University of Kampen (he was just getting started then). There was no indication that he was wrestling with the types of ecclesiological matters that have now finally bubbled up in his recent announcement. In case you don’t follow online theological matters closely, Ryan just wrote a post for his Substack that announced his (and his wife’s) movement into Roman Catholicism. If you don’t know of Ryan his primary theological interlocutor over the years has been the ‘Angelic Doctor,’ Thomas Aquinas. Indeed, it was this hook that finally captured Hurd’s total intellectual and spiritual development. I have always contended that if you’re going to be a Thomist (follower of Thomas Aquinas), then for consistency’s sake you ought to be a Tridentine Roman Catholic (a Catholic after the Council of Trent). Ryan clearly arrived at that same conclusion. Here is a piece of what he wrote for his Substack announcement:

This occurred in my case. And here is where we find the reason for me becoming Catholic. Of course, there are always many reasons for a thing like this, a whole host and all very different. Actually, it is my impression that people often cannot point to really a single reason within the mass of them; but in my particular case, I can do so easily. The reason, for me, is precisely what initially determined me to the Catholic part on these contradictions. The name of that reason is Thomas Aquinas, and particularly his auctoritas.

Auctoritas is a condition of a person comprising both his knowledge in a science, as well as his moral goodness. The former is how you know that he is not deceived; and the latter is how you know that he does not deceive when he testifies as to which part is true. When such a person does testify, you assent to that part merely on account of that person’s condition (propter auctoritatem)–and then you proceed from there.

Over time, it happened that Thomas’s auctoritas became supreme in my intellectual experience. Obviously, it is not supreme absolutely speaking–Thomas would be the first person to tell you that. But it is so in my experience–especially as I have undergone the confirming process of (1) assenting initially merely because Thomas said so; (2) eventually found rationes; and then (3) locked the proposition down in a demonstration and achieved scientia. All throughout this, my learning process, I have never found Thomas wanting, not even close. He has never steered me wrong. And over time, my intellect has become habituated to proceed about contradictions in precisely this mode (I have articulated this elsewhere as simply what it means to be a Thomist).

As I became intellectually obliged to follow Thomas wherever he leads me, so withholding my assent became intellectually unjustified–even regarding those contradictions where, initially, I had no reasons for the Catholic part, or even my remaining Protestant doubts. Remarkably, I became obliged to conclude Catholicism, merely because Thomas had told me to do so. And in the end, I listened.[1]

Why have I maintained that to be a Thomist most organically leads to being a Tridentine Catholic? Primarily because of the hierarchical chain-of-being and theory of causation present with Thomas’ appropriation of the Aristotelian categories and causation. Steven Ozment writes,

The assumption that real relations existed between God, man, and the world made possible Aquinas’s confidence in a posteriori proofs of God’s existence; finite effects led necessarily to their origin, because they were really connected with it. The same assumption underlay Aquinas’s distinctive views on the “analogical” character of human knowledge and discourse about God. According to Aquinas, one could speak meaningfully of one’s relationship to God by analogy with one’s relationship with one’s fellow man because a real relationship existed between the values of people shared and those God had prescribed.[2]

It is this theory of real hierarchical relations finding their causal and actual force from the Unmoved Mover, God, that in my view entails an ecclesiological theory wherein the Catholic church fits best. Why? Because it makes sense that if there is One God, One primary cause, that in a chain-of-being movement from highest to lowest, that within that chain there be one Church, one people of God. And on analogy even within the structural framework of the said Church, there be a hierarchy of one (like the Pope represents) that works its way down into diffuse levels of leadership out into the various priests, so on and so forth. Indeed, just as in Thomas’ theory, he sees the angels with a similar hierarchical structure within the angelic structure itself. And again, this all starts with the actus purus (pure act) or Pure Being of the singular God.

Does this mean that the hierarchical theory of God’s being in action must necessarily lead to the Roman Episcopy? No. But the most organic iteration of it, I would argue, given the Dominican’s ecclesial space for reasoning, is in fact the Roman Catholic church. And of course, this is why the Nominalists and the via moderna posed such a problem for the prelates within the Roman city. For sure, as the nominalists maintained, there were no real or necessary relations between God and the world. If the ‘moderns’ were right about this we can see how the authority of the Roman church could easily be called into question. If God merely related to the world through covenants and ad hoc words (think of the potentia theology), then the centrality and the necessity for the Roman church to mediate God to the world, could not theologically make an argument for the authority of the papacy. But then this is why I think that to be an ecclesiological Thomist is to be Roman Catholic. Aquinas constructed his theory by deployment of and synthesis with the Aristotelian categories toward buttressing the authority and reality of the Holy Communion of Roma in view. Even if early on his theology wasn’t as enthusiastically endorsed as it finally became post and contemporaneous with Trent.

To draw this back in: Hurd, as I have briefly sketched, I think, is being consistent with the aims of Thomas’ ecclesiology and its coherence with the Roman ecclesiology and theory of church government and authority therefrom. There was once another Reformed fellow, in his case, a Presbyterian, named Jason Stellman; he too, within his Presbyterian (Aristotelian) theological commitments arrived at the same conclusion as Ryan Hurd. As a result, he also swam the river Tiber. Surely, there are many former Reformed folk who have made this move. And I would argue for similar reasons to Hurd’s. Ultimately, I have greater respect for people like Hurd who see that the pressure of Thomas’ thinking, if held consistently, ought to lead all of his adherents to Vatican City, Italy. Of course, there are better ways to be genuinely Protestant. And so, I would invite Hurd et al. to abandon Thomas’ project altogether and recognize what it truly means to be a biblical Christian. There are theological, dogmatic ways for doing that; and ways that do not require a sacrificium intellectus. But alas, that was never Hurd’s way to begin with; that is, to be Protestant.

[1] Ryan M. Hurd, Why I’ve Become Roman Catholic, accessed 04-10-2026.

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

Just Be a Philosopher Already: On Being a Thomistic Theologian

Posted on August 1, 2025 by Bobby Grow

For me I only have the capacity to follow a Dogmatic or Systematic theology insofar that I believe it is sticking to the theo-logic inherent to the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. This is what keeps it Biblical. This is what keeps it from adulterating and going beyond the 𝑡𝑒𝑥𝑡; that is, by going to its inner and upward reality in the Godman (Theanthropos), Jesus Christ. In other words, speculative theologies, ones that reason from the being of humanity to the being of God; ones that reason discursively about nature vis-à-vis God, as if nature holds vestiges of God; are balderdash to me! If that is all I had to go with theologically I would fully walk away from the theological endeavor. The Biblical witness, the Biblical attestation to its triune reality in the God revealed (Deus revelatus), can be the only line of theological reasoning the Christian can really take. Not in assertion, as if just claiming loudly, over and over again, “that we follow the Scripture Principle,” but in concrete fact; i.e., that Scripture indeed is the only source and ground of the theological engagement.

These theologians constantly touting Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle as the bee’s-knees of theological performance might as well do it right. They might as well become professional philosophers of religion, and at least learn how to think philosophically in nuanced and correct ways if they are going to elevate a philosopher-king as their theologian, rather than the actual Biblical witness. Instead, they lazily lay claim to the whole of church history, as if the Patristics, for example, were simply doing what Thomas Aquinas was doing with Aristotle in mediaeval times. Indeed, they sublate their bad philosophical takes as theology takes, as if they are ultimately takes provided for by Biblical exegesis.

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

Posted on June 13, 2025 by Bobby Grow

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

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

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

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

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

Problematizing a Development of Sacra Doctrina within the Church: With Reference to Peter of John Olivi

Posted on May 2, 2025 by Bobby Grow

Bernard McGinn writes the following with reference to the apocalyptic-theology-of-history present in the mediaeval theologian, Peter of John Olivi’s (c. 1248—1298) thought:

The invective Olivi directs against the evidences of the carnal Church is concerned not only with the ecclesiastical abuses of the day, especially with avarice and simony, but also, like Bonaventure before him, with the use of Aristotle in theology. The Provençal Franciscan also expressed belief in a double Antichrist—the Mystical Antichrist, a coming false pope who would attack the Franciscan Rule, and the Great, or Open Antichrist, whose defeat would usher in the final period of history. Characteristic of Franciscan apocalyptic is his emphasis on the role of Francis as the initiator of the period of renewal and his hope for the conversion of all peoples in the course of the final events.[1]

Olivi was a student of the infamous mediaeval theologian, Bonaventure. But I thought this treatment by McGinn on Olivi was telling. Telling in regard to the patterns and thematics of theological development. Telling, in regard to how theologies and emphases often repeat themselves in various and all periods of theological development throughout history. As McGinn highlights, Olivi was concerned with a “carnal Church”; he was concerned with the imposition of Aristotle’s categories upon Christian theology (which of course Thomas Aquians was famous for doing). We also observe, that for Olivi, according to McGinn, he saw that the Catholic church itself had corruption riddling it throughout; he saw the Antichrist coming from within the Church, not without. This latter development is interesting to me because it reminds me of Martin Luther’s view that the office of the Pope would finally produce the Antichrist (the Lutheran Church Wisconsin Synod still holds to this position in their confession). And then, we see in Olivi, a belief in something like a postmillennial understanding of the very end of history. He believes, according to McGinn, that the whole world will be Christianized prior to the second coming of Jesus Christ.

Many things stood out to me in this one paragraph on Olivi’s theology. The primary hook for me, and this won’t be surprising to my readers, is that Olivi was critical of Aristotle’s presence in the development of the sacra doctrina within the Church. Olivi, like his teacher, Bonaventure, believed that Aristotle could only serve as an artificial grammar for articulating Christian doctrine. Such sucralose, in the minds of Bonaventure and Olivi, respectively, had no place in affecting a theology for the Church, insofar that Aristotle himself thought a construct of God as a pagan.

It is important for Christian folks in the 21^st century to get beyond theology purely sourced from Twitter/X and other social media platforms. What the genuine student finds, if they study the books, is that things are much more complex and less concretized than they might want to think. There have been various strands of development, various traditions cultivated in the Church’s history that transcend the parochial and sectarian and absolutized divides we see today on the interwebs. I think this one paragraph alone on Olivi helps to illustrate that point.

Within evangelical/reformed theology today there is a movement towards retrieval. And yet what this has come to mean, especially through the work of someone like Matthew Barrett and Craig Carter, is that what is really being retrieved is one strand of development that is Aristotelian/Thomist heavy; as if ‘Christian Aristotelianism’ was the only development present within the mediaeval and early and post Reformed churches. This simply is not the case; again, as our passage illustrates.

Conversely, I am anti-Aristotelian myself (no shocker there!) Some might think that this is because of my appreciation for the theologies of Barth and TF Torrance alone. Again, this is not the case. I was anti-Aristotelian way before I ever read Barth and TFT. I was exposed to the Bonaventure-Olivi thread of development twenty-three years ago in seminary. This thread was developed further with the sparker of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther; he looked back to such threads in the via antiqua through his direct mentor, Johann von Staupitz, and before him, Jean Gerson.

Anyway, this post is somewhat of a smorgasbord of hits on various issues; something like a Miscellanies. But I hope, at least, the reader might be able to better appreciate the “problematized” nature of doctrinal development within the Church of Jesus Christ. In other words, I hope that folks might be alerted to the problem of reducing and then absolutizing one’s pet positions. Surely, we ought to be convicted about the theological things we believe. But those convictions ought to first take shape (in a spiraling and continuous way) through the caldron of toiling with the sources (ad fontes) of the history of interpretation and development of the sacra doctrina.

[1] Bernard McGinn, Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 205.

Disallowing Secular Unbelief to Dictate the Terms of God

Posted on March 25, 2025 by Bobby Grow

Secular, worldly unbelief. I think Christians often allow the bar to be set much too low. Much of Christian theology, for example, especially those that have taken shape in the natural theology forest, allow the skeptic’s unbelief to dictate the types of questions the theologians seek to answer. Primary of which are observed in Thomas Aquinas’ Prima Pars (first part) of his Summa Theologiae. Here, Thomas seeks to answer the questions of God’s existence, and whether or not it is coherent to believe that God exists (like a generic God; albeit, in Thomas’ context this would be applied to the Christian God simplicter, but that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case for him). Once Thomas felt that he had sufficiently answered the skeptic’s arguments, about what God is; he then proceeded onto other matters—which would entail the Trinity, the Church, Justification and all other theological matters. It isn’t really the order of theology, per se, that is problematic with Thomas’ method (although I would qualify and say: that the order is bereft because it starts with a Monadic conception of God; even so, it starts with God, just from the wrong place). But the fact that he feels compelled to first prove “a God’s” existence, and then only after that apply this “proven God’s” existence to some of the more Dogmatic questions of the Church has a highly disordering effect after all.

So, the above is an example of how I believe, at a high level, theology can take its cues and categories from the wrong unbelieving people; and then, of course!, end up with the wrong theological and biblical conclusions. But I think this happens to each and everyone of us, as Christians (at least those attempting to walk as intentional Christians), as we are constantly bombarded with the wares of our Secular Age. As the Apostle Paul counters, even as he is referring to the false teachings and antagonisms of the Pseudo-Apostles in Corinth:

Now I, Paul, myself urge you by the meekness and gentleness of Christ—I who am meek when face to face with you, but bold toward you when absent! ²I ask that when I am present I need not be bold with the confidence with which I propose to be courageous against some, who regard us as if we walked according to the flesh. ³For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh, ⁴for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses. ⁵We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ, ⁶and we are ready to punish all disobedience, whenever your obedience is complete.

I am looking at the principle embedded in the emboldened section in particular. Wherever these “speculations” are coming from, whether it be from Joe Pagan at work, or if it be Plato in the heavens, we are to discern such things for what they are, and “take it captive” unto Christ. The simple point I am drawing on is that it is a spiritual battle to ensure that the way we think God, as Christians, is only taken from, and in an immediate way, from God who has spoken to us (and speaks to us) in His Self-revelation in Jesus Christ. Even if there are hallowed traditions, some might call it the Great Tradition of the Church, without any further explication (i.e., it just is), these traditions themselves are always subservient to the reality of Holy Scripture, the theology of the Word, Jesus Christ. And this is the battle we face, on the daily, as Christians. This applies to all Christians, in one way or the other. We are faced with unbelief all around; that’s what this evil age entails. But we are to be more vigilant than theologians of glory, who seek to synthesize the wisdom of the world with the wisdom of the cross. Indeed, we are to be theologians of the cross; and by the wisdom of God, which is the cross of Christ, we are to recognize these false speculative and flighty ideas about God, even if they have many solid layerings and accretions of traditions behind them, in the name of the Church, and test them, in the face of Christ and the triune God, to see if they be so.

This is a prayerful way though.

The Early Aristotelianization of Reformed and Lutheran Theology

Posted on January 25, 2025 by Bobby Grow

Barth on the stillbirth of the Protestant Reformation. He underscores a reality that I have been, we have been writing about for years, in regard to the scholasticism Reformed and Lutheran. That is to note, the reception of the Aristotelian mantle that had, ironically, brought to formation the very Church, and her doctrina, that Luther was seeking to reform. Unfortunately, very early on in the second and third generation reformers (on both the Reformed and Lutheran sides) imbibed the theological categories that had originally led to the status of the Roman Church that Luther and others believed needed to be reformed from within.

Face to face with the difficulty of both schools, the Reformed no less than the Lutherans, made a formal borrowing at this point from a philosophy and theology which had been re-discovered and re-asserted at the end of the 16^th and the beginning of the 17^th centuries—the philosophy of Aristotle and the theology of Aquinas. The borrowing consisted in the adoption and introduction of a specific terminology to describe the two partners whose activities are understood and represented in the doctrine of the concursus [accompanying] in terms of a co-operation, the activity of God on the one side and that of the creature on the other. The concept which was adopted and introduced was that of “cause.” For it was by developing the dialectic of this concept that they both effected the differentiation of themselves on the one side and the other, and also decided the difference which already existed at this point within the Evangelical faith itself. This, then, is the controlling concept for the form assumed by Evangelical dogmatics in this and in all kindred topics.[1]

This theological arrangement, ended up thrusting people back upon themselves (as TF Torrance phrases it frequently), by thinking of a God-world relation from within a competitive frame. God above, the great decretal “causer,” and the human below, the striver attempting to meet the conditions of God’s causal-ness (this sounds something like what we see in a Federal or Covenant theology). In this frame we end up with a bilateral, yet asymmetric, relationship between God and humanity, such that God decrees certain things to obtain, whilst the elect of God must discern these things, and again, meet the conditions of the decree; of the covenant of works released through the so-called covenant of grace.

The aforementioned reflects just one example of how this ‘causal’ based relationship gets formulated and expressed. For Barth this would be a theology of the decretum absolutum (absolute decree of predestination, from within a classically construed Reformed theology, in particular). The Lutherans have their own expressions of this type of decretal theology. For a contemporary example see Jordan Cooper’s work.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3 §49 [098] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 97.

An Engagement with Philosophical Personhood in Theological Relief

Posted on January 21, 2025 by Bobby Grow

𝐼𝑛 𝑚𝑦 𝑝ℎ𝑖𝑙𝑜𝑠𝑜𝑝ℎ𝑦 𝑜𝑓 𝑟𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑔𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑐𝑙𝑎𝑠𝑠 𝑤𝑒 𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑎𝑙𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑑𝑦 𝑖𝑛 𝑤𝑒𝑒𝑘 2. 𝑇ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑤𝑒𝑒𝑘 𝑤𝑒 𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑒𝑛𝑔𝑎𝑔𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝐺𝑜𝑑’𝑠 𝑎𝑡𝑡𝑟𝑖𝑏𝑢𝑡𝑒𝑠, 𝑎𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑜𝑠𝑒 𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑝ℎ𝑖𝑙𝑜𝑠𝑜𝑝ℎ𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑦 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑠𝑡𝑟𝑢𝑒𝑑. 𝑇ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑤𝑒𝑒𝑘 𝑤𝑒’𝑟𝑒 𝑒𝑛𝑔𝑎𝑔𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑝𝑒𝑟𝑠𝑜𝑛ℎ𝑜𝑜𝑑, 𝑡𝑟𝑎𝑛𝑠𝑐𝑒𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑒, 𝑖𝑚𝑚𝑎𝑛𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑒, 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑜𝑚𝑛𝑖𝑝𝑜𝑡𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑒 𝑣𝑖𝑠 𝑎 𝑣𝑖𝑠 𝐺𝑜𝑑. 𝐻𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑖𝑠 𝑤ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝐼 𝑤𝑟𝑜𝑡𝑒 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑟𝑒𝑓𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑒 𝑡𝑜 𝑤ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑖𝑡 𝑚𝑒𝑎𝑛𝑠 𝑡𝑜 𝑏𝑒 𝑎 𝑝𝑒𝑟𝑠𝑜𝑛. 𝑊𝑒 𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑢𝑠𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑇.𝐽. 𝑀𝑎𝑤𝑠𝑜𝑛’𝑠 𝑏𝑜𝑜𝑘 *𝐵𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑓 𝑖𝑛 𝐺𝑜𝑑* 𝑎𝑠 𝑜𝑢𝑟 𝑡𝑒𝑥𝑡. 𝑆𝑜, 𝑚𝑦 𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑝𝑜𝑛𝑠𝑒 𝑖𝑠 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑟𝑒𝑓𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑒 𝑡𝑜 ℎ𝑜𝑤 ℎ𝑒 𝑑𝑒𝑓𝑖𝑛𝑒𝑠 *𝑝𝑒𝑟𝑠𝑜𝑛ℎ𝑜𝑜𝑑* (𝑖𝑡 𝑖𝑠 𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑢𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑦 𝑡𝑜𝑜 𝑙𝑜𝑛𝑔 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑜𝑢𝑟 𝑓𝑜𝑟𝑢𝑚, 𝑜ℎ 𝑤𝑒𝑙𝑙 𝐿𝑂𝐿).

Boethius

I disagree with Mawson out of hand on the entailments of what makes a person a person. Mawson, is taking a classical way, one we would find in Boethius, Aquinas et al. (most of the Latin tradition). To define the base ground of what it means to be a person, on terms of a purely intellectualist or rationalist ground, is to imbibe a philosophical/speculative tradition; indeed. Unfortunately, for my money, to use this type of speculative ground as one’s major premise, in regard to developing an anthropology, can only lead to a speculative conclusion. Indeed, it might be self-referentially coherent, as I think Mawson’s accounting is; but ultimately, in my view, the conclusion is only as sound as the first premise.

As a Christian theist I would argue that personhood ought to be defined by reference to the imago Dei/Christi (image of God/Christ). That is to say, in my view, to understand the entailments of personhood cannot (or at least, should not) begin with an abstract thought, but instead with the concrete givenness of God’s life for the world in the face of His Son, Jesus Christ (see Colossians 1.15). In this way, personhood’s definition finds an antecedent ground beyond the immanent frame, and has a ‘transcendent’ starting point not from within itself (as an immanent abstraction), but outwith itself in the personhood of the divine Monarchia, as the Father, Son and Holy Spirit (the hypostases/persons of the Godhead coinhere one in the other in a filial and eternal relationship of interpenetrating life). If this mysterious (yet revealed) life becomes the ground by which personhood comes to have definition, at the very least what it means to be a person, is to be in a community of love for the other; living a life of self-givenness, one for the other, wherein what it means to be a person isn’t defined by having “rationality” or “self-consciousness,” per se, but to be in person-al relationship one with the other. And what serves as the ground of this community-fellowship-based personhood, only can come first, as gift, as God has graciously invited us into participation with His triune-person-grounded life through Jesus Christ.

If I reject Mawson’s definition for personhood, which I do, of course, then his dilemma of attempting to provide nobility or sanctity for humans without brain-activity is non-starting for me.

Based on my first long response, in regard to the constituents of what makes a person a person, I would argue that the triune God is the personalizing person. So, in this frame, can someone be “more” of a person than someone else? That seems to make an attempt at quantifying what it means to be a person in terms of a quality (or substance) or something. God in Christ by the Holy Spirit, I would argue, is the person making person, in eternal relation; which would make Him the archetypal personalizing person maker. In this sense He is the Alpha and Omega. But since He graciously invites us into participation with Him through Christ, at a purely human level, there isn’t one person who is more person than another. God’s life is sui generis. All people are equal, insofar that all people are created in the image of God/Christ.

According to Scripture (John 4.24) ‘God is spirit,’ and spirit is not gendered, per se. That said, God has Self-revealed Himself as Father of the Son (as Athanasius is wont to press). In the Christian reality God enfleshed came as a Man, as the Son of God (the second person). The Bible refers to God in masculine terms, by and large (except with reference to the Holy Spirit); and for me that ought to be determinative for how we refer to God.

PS. a struggle, which I knew I was bringing to this course of study, is that I am already committed to a certain Christian orientation with reference to thinking God, and everything subsequent. I had attempted to study God philosophically, at a formal level, many years ago now, and found it wanting. Even so, I still think there is value in learning to contemplate and think deeply and rigorously with regard to anything (which is why I paid for the class).

In the Rut of General Theism: Against Neutral Theology

Posted on December 15, 2024 by Bobby Grow

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

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

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

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

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

‘The older Protestant theology was right to treat Aristotle as an adversary’

Posted on November 25, 2024 by Bobby Grow

There has been a resurgence, among Protestants, either towards affirming the classical theism of Thomas Aquinas (i.e., Christian-Catholic theology synthesized with Aristotelian categories) or rejecting it.[1] But even those, in the broader Reformed world who ostensibly reject it, still affirm it; insofar, that they operate with the philosophical-theological categories provided for by said Thomistic synthesis. I have, for decades now, been calling this Thomistic-Aristotelian mode of Reformed theology out. And yet, that machine will never really bust. It has tentacles reaching into the far reaches of the Christian world at this point. In the West, in particular, it has publishing houses, online warriors, pamphleteers, jargoneers, so on and so forth; which makes it exceedingly difficult to be critical of for the masses. Even so, I remain stalwart in my mission to bear witness to the world that there is only one “decree” of God, and his name is: Jesus Christ (and all that entails)! That is to say, rather than thinking God before meeting God in the face of Jesus Christ—as the reformed scholastics and their lesser descendants found in and among the Baptists and other 5 point environs—it is better to only think God after God has spoken, after God has first introduced Himself to us, for us, and with us in the prosopon (face) of Jesus Christ. For some reason, and I have many theories on this, this Reformed (and this isn’t just limited to the Reformed, there are also Lutheran iterations of this same mode) nut simply will not crack. I’d argue, primarily, that this is the case more for sociological rather than theological reasons. But that case will have to be developed at a later date.

Following, we will hear from none other than Reformed theologian par excellence, that heretic of old, Karl Barth. What did Barth, that theological charlatan, think of Aristotle, and how that impacted the array of theological developments following the Thomist synthesis. Here, here he is:

The more perspicacious of the older Protestant polemicists like A. Heidanus (l. c., p. 350f.) thought it right to mark off themselves no less from the theology and cosmology of Aristotle. For him the world is eternal and there can thus be no question of a creation. What then is his deity, his prime mover which is itself unmoved, his immaterial form, his actuality unburdened with potentiality, his reason which thinks itself (and therefore the best)? Does this πρώτον κινοῦν [first mover] move otherwise than as the principle and exemplary model of all other movement? Does it move otherwise than as the good and goal which has no other goal beyond itself, towards which everything else strives in virtue of the attraction which everything loved (and this unconditionally as the perfect and the imperfectly loved) exercises on that which loves, on which therefore everything depends and towards which everything must move? Does it even more, asks Heidanus, as a captain moves his ship, a conductor his choir or a field-marshal his troops? Is this prime mover of all things more and other than the law, the eternal prius, of their movement? That in which alone the Aristotelian world-principle would resemble the God of the Christian doctrine of providence is obviously the freedom of will and movement, the sovereignty and above all the inner self-determination of a God who confronts the world as its Creator and can thus approach its movement independently and determine it from without. But since the Aristotelian mover of all things is not their Creator, it is necessarily too exalted (or from the standpoint of the Christian doctrine of providence too poverty-stricken) to be capable of this movement in relation to the really distinct from it. The Aristotelian cosmos has a kind of god ordering it, unlike the Epicurean. But since this god is not the Creator of his cosmos, since he is not above but in it (thus finally resembling the Epicurean gods), the Aristotelian cosmos is also in fact one which is abandoned by God. The older Protestant theology was right to treat Aristotle as an adversary in this respect, and we can only wish that it had freed itself more basically and radically and generally from the spirit of this picture of god and the world, and the argumentations dictated by it.[2]

If you have followed my work (along with Myk Habets’) on Evangelical Calvinism over the years, the above should find lots of resonance with the themes put forward and developed vis-à-vis our critique of Aristotelian formed Reformed (and Lutheran) theologies, respectively. It is unnecessary, even within the history and development of Reformed theology and ideas, to presume that its only expression and iteration is under the unmoved mover offered by Aristotle and his theological tribe; even as Barth rightly notes in the above passage.

At the end of the day, dividing and “conquering” various theologies is not that difficult. Some might fear that my suggestion runs afoul of an untoward reductionism, but I would protest. Theologies done after Deus dixit (God has spoken) definitively and copiously without remainder in the vocal cords of Jesus Christ, in-breathed by the Holy Spirit, are diametrically different than theologies done prior to hearing that voice. Theologies based on hearing from the philosophers, about “godness,” prior to actually encountering God in Jesus Christ, will deleteriously suffer from offering and speaking of a god who looks and sounds like the god[s] of the Greeks rather than the God of the Man from Nazareth. This is surely a theological methodological issue, but one that shouldn’t come prior to God’s theology for us (so in that sense, a tautology) in Jesus Christ. I would aggressively argue that if a Christian is genuinely going to do Christian theology that it will only be as they dialogue and cohabitate, through the mediating and vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ, with the triune and living God. A genuine Christian theologian will first be a child of God, rather than a thinker for God. We must get this order right. We must first gestate in the bosom of the Father, with the Son for us, prior to maturating into thinkers and speakers and witnessers for God, if we are going to actually be thinking and speaking and witnessing for the true God. But alas, our egos would rather imagine that we have a place in this world, by virtue of just “showing up” in this world, to the point that humans come fully and naturally equipped with the antennae to think, speak, and witness for God on our own profanely imagined terms, rather than upon those provided first for us in the heart of the living and triune God.

These are stark and even deep matters; I hope that hasn’t thrown the reader off the scent of what matters. At the end of the day the Christian either is in point of contact with the real and living God or not. Ironically, those who have presumed the title ‘theologian,’ even for the millennia, often are the furthest away from representing the true and living God found attested to, purely and simply in the Bible. May God have mercy on us all!

[1] As an aside: I take it that anyone who affirms, at the basest level of Reformed theology, the 5 points of Calvinism up to and including Federal-Covenantal theology, to be appropriating the Thomist-Aristotelian synthesis; categorically, that is. Decretal theology (theology based on the so-called decretum absolutum [absolute decree of predestination, election-reprobation], in its classically Reformed iteration, necessarily is reposing in the theological lagoon provided for it by the Thomist-Aristotelian synthesis, to one degree or the other).

[2] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3 §48 [011] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 10 [emphasis mine].

What is Love? Against the Cultural and Psychological Conceptions in the Church

Posted on August 5, 2024 by Bobby Grow

Helmut Thielicke makes an excellent observation as he engages with the “conscience” as that is distilled in the epistle to the Romans. He notes that there really is no such thing as an autonomous conscience. For Thielicke the conscience, as understood biblically, is either going to be “ridden” by a fallen broken human nature, or it is going to be ridden and shaped by God’s triune life; there is no via media or Swiss neutral ground. And it is within this understanding, which we might say is the Pauline understanding, wherein Thielicke will argue that the point of contact between God and humanity is not resident within a native (to an abstract person’s) conscience, but instead it is only as God in Christ circumscribes our humanity with His; it is only as Christ condemns sin in His body for us that we come to have the capaciousness to know and be for Him.

Thielicke writes:

We see here at the same time the consequences of Roman Catholic anthropology, which we have already discussed in some detail in connection with the doctrine of the imago Dei. If the human person is not understood in relationship, but instead is given ontic autonomy as the bearer of demonstrable components of nature and of ontic substances of grace, then loving with one’s whole heart can no longer be understood personally in terms of existence in fellowship with God. It has to be understood instead as the ontically demonstrable content of the heart, as a psychodynamic state of being filled with loving impulses. The ontology of man leads at once to psychology, and indeed to a theological-speculative kind of psychology. Once we enter upon this path, we cannot avoid the conclusion that in terms of psychical structure man’s “infirmity”—i.e., the fact that soul is necessarily filled with shifting contents, with varied impressions and desires as well as with tasks and duties which claim our attention and devotion—man’s “infirmity” is completely incompatible with his being totally filled with love for God. Love for God as a psychical “content” then enters at once into competition with other potential contents of the soul. In any case love’s claim to be total is wholly illusory—until these competing contents of the psyche are eliminated in the uninterrupted and undeflected vision of God in the life to come. Thus the command to love loses its unconditional character the moment we enter the ontological-psychological plane of thought. For on that level it is no longer possible to grasp the personal category of love.

It is precisely at this point that we can find help in the formulation of Luther whereby the subject of faith—in this context we may with equal propriety say: the subject of love—is a “mathematical point” [punctum mathematicum]. Luther uses this extreme formulation to combat the fatal psychologizing of faith and love. He refuses to regard the subject of faith and love as merely an extended psychical tract filled with diverse forces and aspirations. There is thus no place for such questions as whether we are supposed to believe or to love at every single moment of our lives, or how such permanence is to be understood psychologically. Faith and love are characterized by their object, not by the psychical accomplishment of believing and loving. I confess him who loved me, and I believe in him who has given me his promises.

Thus the life of piety has as its goal not that all our time should be filled up with “conscious” faith and love, i.e., with conscious acts of believing and loving, so that everything else is dismissed from our minds as we move to at least approximate that total filling of the psyche. On the contrary, Luther recommends periods of prayer and devotion merely as “signs” that my time is under God, not as devices for filling up my time—at least partially—with thoughts of love and faith. The object of my faith , God’s love and righteousness, is still effectively present even when I “feel” nothing, even when I am “empty” or terrorized by doubt.[1]

As Thielicke presciently identifies (along with Luther): as the root goes, so goes the tree. If the root is rotten, the tree will be rotten. If the root is healthy and vibrant, the tree will be healthy and vibrant. You will notice that Thielicke is really critiquing the Roman Aristotelian (and insofar as that is picked up in Post Reformed and Lutheran orthodox theology) categories of thinking of grace in terms of habitus (disposition and its habituizing), and as substance and qualities. In other words, he is critiquing the Thomist synthesis wherein grace becomes its own independent substance resident in an abstract self-possessing humanity. He is rightfully arguing that when such categories are deployed, in regard to thinking about an ostensible notion of God’s grace, that the person under such notion-izing is flittering about in an inward curved movement of the soul upon the soul in a striving attempt to make their innards, their ‘feelings’ somehow correspond with what they speculate, what they perceive to be God’s love, God’s affection, God’s feeling. But according to Thielicke, to use a Torrancean (TFT) phrase, “this is only to throw the person back upon themselves.”

What Thielicke is offering as the alternative to the aforementioned is the biblical reality wherein humanity, and its conscience therein, is understood to be grounded in an alien conscience; but one that has been brought into union with us, insofar that God in Christ has brought us into union with Him, and His vicarious humanity for us. The problem that Thielicke vis-à-vis Luther is identifying is that the human propensity is to constantly think itself as the prius to all else; so the ‘turn to the subject’ that modernity has sophisticated for human consumption.

There are multiples of implications to all of the aforementioned, particularly as we think about the state of the Christian church in the West (and elsewhere). We can immediately see the effects of what happens when the church ingests a psychologized self wherein people, Christians in their spirituality, are reduced to performing for themselves and others. When genuinely triune love is not what constrains us, as that is truly actualized for us in Christ, then all that we ultimately have is a love within the ‘accidents’ of our being that we can strive to produce and express in “sacrosanct” efforts to demonstrate that while we were yet sinners we died for Christ’s sake. That is to say, as Thielicke has: that when love is thought of in philosophical rather than personalist terms what we necessarily end up with is a self-driven and cultivated notion of love that is not necessarily at the core of our beings coram Deo (before God).

[1] Helmut Thielicke, Theological Ethics: Foundations (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966), 342–43.

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Athanasian Reformed

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