The ‘Grammar’ of the Church: Inventing Christian Language

This is not the first, and I am sure it won’t be the last, but I am stealing a whole post (quote) from the venerable Jason Goroncy. I am sure some of you don’t venture over to Jason’s (which you should), and so I will reproduce a quote about theology that he has offered over at his blog (awhile ago). Here is the quote and my reflection afterwords:

‘Liberals are right that the language we use as Christians is not “literally” true; rather, it is figurative, poetic, imaginative language. But the orthodox are right in a more profound way: for the language of imagination – which is to say, biblical language – is the only language we have for thinking and speaking of God, and we receive it as the gift of the Holy Spirit. Theology deceives itself if it conceives of its task as translating the figurative language of scripture and piety into some more nearly literal discourse about God. The theologian’s job is not to tell fellow believers what they really mean; rather, it is to help the church speak more faithfully the language of the Christian imagination. The theologian is not a translator but a grammarian’. – Richard Bauckham and Trevor Hart, ‘The Shape of Time’ in The Future as God’s Gift: Explorations in Christian Eschatology (ed. David Fergusson and Marcel Sarot; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), 86. [Quote stolen from here]

I first came to think about what happened, for example, at the ecumenical councils as simply a matter of providing a right and proximate grammar for the demands of scripture’s theo-logic and God’s Self-revelation in Christ by way of Thomas F. Torrance (maybe six years ago). There are many people out in the world (usually cults like: Jehovah’s Witnesses, Unitary-Oneness Apostolic Pentecostal churches, etc.) who argue or are prone to believe that doctrines like the Trinity, and Hypostatic Union of the Divine and Human in the person of Jesus Christ have come to be as a result of inventive violation of the pure text of Scripture; with the result being that these later articulations of the Patristic church ended up hybriding Scripture and God’s life by foisting fabricated and artificial concepts upon God in Christ that Scripture does not allow for.

What Bauckham and Hart helpfully highlight is that this is a misperception. The early church, and theologians even today, are not supposed to be creating doctrines and interpretations that supersede Scripture and its Reality; instead they are tasked with the privilege of inventing grammar to help the Church of Christ better think and talk about the Triune God who they worship, and in ways that make most sense as we grow in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ. That is why the work of the theologian is never done, he or she is involved in the constant spiraling process of engendering grammar that is faithful to Scripture’s witness and Reality, Jesus Christ; and as the Church continues to grow into that knowledge the grammar needs to expand and build upon the faithful grammar provided in the yesteryears of our past.

I liked this quote, and I hope you find it encouraging as well.

*another repost.

The Christ Access to Biblical History and Hermeneutics

I think history is God’s history. And thus as Christians, why would we base our categories for engaging with the text of Scripture (and its historical location/locution) upon naturalistic assumptions about history, as if history does not have a Christological antecedent in God’s elect life for us; as if the ‘telos’ (purpose) of all creation, and all history is not Christ? As if what funds history is not God’s Triune and Providential life, but instead a metaphysical materialism wherein our universe is closed and natural history becomes absolutized and immanentized in way that becomes only accessible by empirical observation and reconstruction? Left to the natural mind (I Cor. 2), indeed, this would be the only access to biblical-history (and history in general) that we would have. But we have not been left to this (we are not orphans), and history is not naked; it is independently contingent upon God’s Triune life and His underlying speech, which is touchstoned in his everlasting Word, Jesus Christ. So the way the Christian engages with history, and the Bible’s location therein, is to access that through Christ; as if Scripture, and the history therein, is hung together, and contingent upon the contingency of the Incarnation of Christ for us. There is no neutral playground to engage the Bible from. And if the critical tools that we have developed over the years (esp. in the 19th century) are based upon naturalism, then in what way should these be viewed as the ‘primary’ means by which we are supposed to critically engage the text of Scripture as Christians? 

Real history is composed of human lives; and human life is metaphysics in act. To claim to constitute the science of history without any speculative preoccupation, or even to suppose that the humblest details of history could be, in the strict sense of the word, a simple matter of observation, is to be influenced by prejudices on the pretext of attaining to an impossible neutrality.[Blondel cited by Levering, p. 145]

I am not suggesting that the so called ‘critical tools’ have no value; but to me their value can really only be negative, in the sense that they illustrate their ineptitude to access the illumined reality of Scripture that only comes from the eyes of faith given vision by the Holy Spirit come conjoined with the vicarious humanity of Christ for us.

Sorry, this is just a quick teaser on a post I am planning on writing in the next couple of days .

My ‘Evangelical’ Approach: Barth, Horton, Van Til, Neder

As a still budding theologian, it is important to remain self-critical and self-reflective upon the dogmatism with which I hold my informing voices and subsequent trajectories that these voices might provide. One thing that delimits this capacity for me is lack of time to develop properly; nevertheless, insofar as I have the time to do so, I continue to develop into the theologian (Christian) that God would have me be. In the endeavor to do develop I continue to read (and seek collegial interaction) as much as I possibly can. As I do this I am exposed to voices that help keep me critical in the way necessary in order to actually develop instead of becoming static and driven by ecclesiastical tradition (which of course is not all bad—i.e. the ‘Tradition’).

A book I am currently reading that is helping me in this burgeoning process is the edited one by Bruce McCormack and Clifford Anderson, Karl Barth And American Evangelicalism. I just finished Michael Horton’s chapter on Barth compared with Federal Theology or Post-Reformed Orthodoxy (of whom Horton is one of its shining stars and champions). Horton provides, surprisingly to me, a rather irenic and balanced (because he keeps a tone that is still broadly appreciative of Barth) critique of Barth’s theology. Here is how Horton concludes his critique of Barth:

[L]ike classical Reformed theology, Barth’s system is logically coherent. However, unlike the former, the latter’s consistency seems more to me like something deduced from a central dogma than like a series of sub-plots that display an over-arching plot centering on Christ.Barth presupposes that the electing will of the single Subject, revealed in the single event of one covenant, executed in the one history that is eternal, encompasses every person. But what if God’s revelation in Christ, known in scripture, contradicts even one of these theses? [Michael S. Horton, Covenant, Election, and Incarnation: Evaluating Barth's Actualist Christology, in Karl Barth And American Evangelicalism, edited by McCormack and Anderson, 146-47.]

Horton’s overall critique of Barth is that Barth tends (if not falls head-long) towards Christo-monism; meaning that the integrity of ‘calendar-history’ is taken captive by ‘metaphysical-history’ (thus resulting in the post-metaphysicalism of Barth—my own observation). And this not providing for any kind of actual sequenciation in history, or this making history such a predicate of God’s life in Christ that there no longer remains any real meaning for created-history (no independent contingency so to speak).

As I read Horton, I take it as a contemporary re-presentation of his forbear at Westminster Theological Seminary, the ominous Cornelius Van Til. Bruce McCormack responds to Van Til’s reading of Barth in his Afterword to this volume entitled: Reflections on Van Til’s Critique of Barth. Being the sinner that I am, I already jumped ahead and read McCormack’s Afterword first (knowing the lineaments of Van Til’s critique of Barth as I do), and then I also have already read McCormack’s chapter So That He May Be Merciful to All: Karl Barth and the Problem of Universalism. Insofar as Horton imbibes his esteemed predecessor’s argument against Barth—and Horton does, but Horton, ironically (given the title of this book), takes the Evangelical tact of being softer in tone than does his Fundamentalist teacher, Van Til, who imbibes the fighting and declining spirit that Fundyism is known for)—McCormack somewhat shatters Van Til’s critique, and thus ‘indirectly’ he does the same to Horton’s (at the same time, he somewhat reinforces certain points that Horton makes against Barth’s ‘actualistic-monism’).

Something though that is important to keep in mind, is that while Barth was attendant to the orthodox categories of the Tradition; at the same time, he could be characterized as the evangelical par excellence. And it is this par excellence mode that has brought him into dead-lock with people like Horton and Van Til. The genius of the Protestant and Evangelical mood is that it asserts a predilection towards and dependence upon scripture alone. While it is ecclesially sensitive to the Tradition, it does not feel beholden to the Tradition in a way that trumps Scripture’s pronouncements and attendant theo-logic (even if that takes the form of dialecticism). This is the mode and posture that Barth intentionally takes as a Reformed theologian (in its ‘Spirit’ see his Theology of the Reformed Confessions). He ultimately does not take his cues from the Tradition (as viable as it still is for him), but Scripture. And so if someone is going to critique him, then they must do so from Scripture; and reread the Tradition through that lens (in a dialectic way, of course!).   So Barth moves in the Protestant Reformed, Christian Humanist spirit of ad fontes, ‘back to the sources’.

In the immediately following chapter to Horton’s, Adam Neder writes of Barth’s mode:

[...] while fully conversant with and significantly indebted to the vast resources of the church’s reflection on the person and work of Christ, Barth regarded himself to be primarily accountable to Holy Scripture, not church dogma, and thus asked that his Christology be judged, above all, by its faithfulness to the New Testament presentation of the living Lord Jesus Christ. Thus, one regularly finds Barth justifying a Christological innovation with the argument that the New Testament depiction of Christ requires it (or something like it) and that the older categories are inadequate to bear witness to this or that aspect of his existence. In other words, and quite simply, Barth understood himself to be free to do evangelical theology — free, as he put it, to begin again at the beginning. And this approach, it seems to me, is one that evangelicals have every reason to regard with sympathy rather than suspicion. [Adam Neder, History n Harmony: Karl Barth on the Hypostatic Union, eds. McCormack and Anderson, 150.]

This should make N.T. Wright proud. This also makes Barth, dangerous! For Barth it is not enough to parrot the Tradition; instead he is willing to venture into and from the dynamically charged life of God in Christ in a way that engages with and from the Tradition, but does so more on the terms of Scripture’s own deposit and witness (in conversation with the categories provided by the Tradition). Barth isn’t afraid to employ “new” philosophical consideration and category (a la Hegel, Kant, Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, et al); but these aren’t ad hoc employments, instead they are “used” in order to serve the presentation and articulation  of the Good News.

I could go on, but let me summarize why I just wrote what I just did, and why I started this whole thing out with the thought that I am continuing to develop myself.

As a young evangelical Calvinist theologian my primary concern is to simply grow in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ. As an Evangelical theologian my mode is to appropriate whatever emphases and categories that I can from the past and the present that best serve this kind of theological development. I don’t want to absolutize any period, or any person (including Barth or Torrance). And this is why I tend towards Barth and Torrance in mode; because they exemplify this kind of stylization in their own approach. They are evangelically driven by adherence to Scripture, they aren’t content with repristinating/repeating the history; they want to engage with it as the ongoing cacophony of the growing into the unity of faith that this all is (that is this interim period between the first and second advents of Christ). So I don’t absolutize Barth (he wouldn’t want us to), or Torrance, or Calvin, or Wright, or anyone else. My mode is Evangelical, and the best of that is what Barth exemplifies (even with his own overstatements and blind spots in place—which he has); it is to be subordinate to Scripture, and primarily its reality in Jesus Christ (so this makes me Reformed in its best sense as well).

Take this post for what it is, whatever that is.

*a repost from just recently

Those Stupid Theologians, What Do They Know? ‘The Shepherd’s Voice’

Sixteenth century Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza didn’t like Christian Dogmatics or her theologian’s very much; in fact he sounds, unfortunately, very much so like many today—of course his reasons were a little different from many today, but not that much, at least not in the way that Matthew Levering describes it. Here is how Levering describes Spinoza’s relationship with the theologian:

Yet, as Spinoza sees it, the salvation of these common people is seriously impeded by the nonsense taught by theologians. As Spinoza argues, with much evidence on his side, “people in general seem to make no attempt whatsoever to live according to the Bible’s teachings. We see that nearly all men parade their own ideas as God’s Word, their chief aim being to compel others to think as they do, while using religion as a pretext. We see, I say, that the chief concern of theologians on the whole has been to extort from Holy Scripture their own arbitrarily invented ideas, for which they claim divine authority.” Theologians not only do not live piously, loving their neighbor, but moreover their work, motivated by greed and lust for power, simply fosters controversies that result in the common people equally displaying hatred of neighbor. In their passion to be believed and followed, theologians claim that the most profound mysteries lie hidden in the Bible, and they exhaust themselves in unraveling these absurdities while ignoring other things of value. Having invented these false complexities in the Bible, theologians insist that others must follow their ideas, and “the bitterest hatred” and contention results among the common people. In light of the peril faced by the common people, Spinoza seeks to outline better principles for interpreting “what the Bible or the Holy Spirit intends to teach.” [Matthew Levering, Participatory Biblical Exegesis, 114-15.]

Wow, this hits so close to home. Being a student of Karl Barth, Thomas Torrance and other such theologians I have been accused more than once of the same kind of gibberish that Spinoza accuses theologians from his day of. In fact, this kind of accusation was actually just made toward me today.

There are speculative theologians around, but then there are also revelational theologians (of which tribe I am); theologians who follow what historically was identified as the via positiva (positive way)  and the kataphatic approach instead of the via negativa (negative way) and the apophatic approach. Revelational theologians, by and large, seek to work a posteriori from what has been given in God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ, who exegetes or explains (John 1.18) His life with the Father by the Holy Spirit. Thomas Torrance has identified this kind of positive way as theological science, something that he picked up from Karl Barth. Torrance describes this kind of mode in Karl Barth this way:

[. . .] Barth found his theology thrust back more and more upon its proper object, and so he set himself to think through the whole of theological knowledge in such a way that it might be consistently faithful to the concrete act of God in Jesus Christ from which it actually takes its rise in the Church, and, further, in the course of that inquiry to ask about the presuppositions and conditions on the basis of which it comes about that God is known, in order to develop from within the actual content of theology its own interior logic and its own inner criticism which will help to set theology free from every form of ideological corruption. [Torrance, Theological Science, 7 cited by Bobby Grow, Evangelical Calvinism: Essays Resourcing the Continuing Reformation of the Church Chapter 4, 102.

If only Spinoza would have been around later, he would have understood that the best of theologians think from Christ, and that Scripture is not a mystery waiting to be un-locked, but a hymn book waiting to be sung to its glorious reality, Jesus Christ.

It is this aspect that I would love to see many Biblical Studies folk and Theologians embrace; that is, that reading Scripture must be understood from its ultimate center (methodologically and in every way), in Jesus Christ (Jn. 5.39). And that doxology (worship) is the mode by which Scripture is most appreciated, as if the living voice of God in Christ can be encountered every time we crack its pages. This does not ignore that involving ourselves in this kind of koinonial (fellowshipping) exercise requires toil and hard work (II Tim. 2.15), and that there are critical tools available to engage in this process of encounter and sanctification; but it is to highlight that the purpose and aim of reading Scripture is only given shape by its Revealed reality and continual giver, God in Christ by the Spirit. And thus contra, Spinoza, and anyone else of like mind, approaching Scripture as a theologian is not intended as some sort of mysterious exercise of abstract speculation, but it is to repentantly and obediently to seek to hear from the Teacher and reality of Scripture in dialogical form. Because the sheep know their Shepherd’s voice and we listen!

Posturing Toward a Defense of Christian Church Tradition

It might seem odd that someone who likes Karl Barth as much as I do would write a post entitled the way this one is—of course I also like Thomas Torrance, which would make my title less surprising. Something of concern to me is that I see a wave among many Christians today who are almost completely rejecting the Tradition of the Christian Church—if the Trinity and Chalecdonian Christology weren’t a part of the Trad my guess is that Church Tradition would completely be ignored or even ridiculed as a Hellenistic imposition of thought upon the truth of Christian Revelation (which is typically understood as Scripture by most Christians). In fact, as I digress for a minute, it seems to me that many in the mode I am describing really only give the doctrine of the Trinity lip service because they feel they must; but again, in the back of their minds there is this still small voice that keeps harassing them that is saying something like: “the Trinity, the homoousion, and even concepts like hell are essentially results of hierarchical, patriarchal, colonial, imperalistic thought required by the Graeco-Romans, but not by Scripture (not really).”

Church Tradition is an imposition on Scripture … it is, and someone knows this for sure? And felt the need to let the rest of us know?

As a Protestant Christian (which still matters, this distinction that is), I affirm the idea that Scripture is the final arbiter of all things related to the once for all Faith delivered to the saints. And yet, I think this way from a theological tradition; that is as a Christian, I accept that Scripture itself, and its canonization, flows from the conviction that God has spoken, and that the Scriptures represent the Apostolic Deposit and most faithful witness to this reality (that God has spoken). And yet, notice, I read Scripture not de nuda, but I do so based upon a Christian and Churchly Tradition. So when I come across Christians today who basically trounce Church Trad in favor of the most contemporary readings of Scripture today—i.e. and not in conversation with the Trad, but instead talking about it in mocking tones—I have to wonder what kind of consistency this represents?

I am all for checking Church Trad by Scripture, and by its voice and reality, Jesus Christ; but I also believe that Scripture is coordinate with this voice, and not disparate from it. And so I don’t see two canons, but one.

Ultimately the test, indeed, is Christ. He is the measure, by His Scripture’s, by which Church Tradition (even the one that says that Scripture is Scripture) must be judged. But if we hold to a high polity that Jesus really has provided teachers for His Church (Eph. 4), then we won’t try to skirt Church Trad, but we will constructively engage with it. The best of Church Trad does not flow from imposing anything on the Scriptures or Jesus Christ, but instead it helps serve the Gospel by providing a grammar for it that allows us to make sense of things that stand right on the border of the ineffable and ultimate nature of our God.

Here is a good order and way to think about Scripture, Tradition, etc.

1. Scripture is the norma normans, the principium theologiae. It is the final arbiter of matters theological for Christians as the particular place in which God reveals himself to his people. This is the first-order authority in all matters of Christian doctrine.
2. Catholic creeds, as defined by and ecumenical council of the Church, constitute a first tier of norma normata, which have second-order authority in matters touching Christian doctrine. Such norms derive their authority from Scripture to which they bear witness.
3. Confessional and conciliar statements of particular ecclesial bodies are a second tier of norma normata, which have third-order authority in matters touching Christian doctrine. They also derive their authority from Scripture to the extent that they faithfully reflect the teaching of Scripture.
4. The particular doctrines espoused by theologians including those individuals accorded the title Doctor of the Church which are not reiterations of matters that are de fide, or entailed by something de fide, constitute theologoumena, or theological opinions, which are not binding upon the Church, but which may be offered up for legitimate discussion within the Church. [Oliver Crisp, god incarnate, (New York: T&T Clark International, 2009), 17.]

Uncle Karl: On Justification and Sins

A nice quote from Uncle Karl on justification:

[T]here is always something wrong and misleading when the faith of a man is referred to as his way of salvation in contrast to his way in wicked works, or his true way of salvation in contrast to his way in the supposed good works of false faith and superstition. Faith is not an alternative to these other ways. It is not the way which – another Hercules at the crossroads – man can equally well choose and enter, which he can choose and enter by the same capacity by which he might go any other way. Even in the action of faith he is the sinful man who as such is not in a position to justify himself, who with every attempt to justify himself can only become the more deeply entangled in his sin.

– Karl Barth, CD IV/1.616.

So Barth has a high view of humanity’s depravity or the homo incurvatus in se (inward curved). Indeed, as Thomas Torrance would say we are wicked and depraved ‘all the way down’ so the only cure is ‘grace all the way down’ in and through the vicarious humanity of Christ (pro nobis). It is wrong, according to Barth, to think  of being saved as a Versus of being destroyed; they aren’t symmetrical, but asymmetrical realities. It isn’t as if we have chosen one way over the other in and from ourselves; for left to ourselves we would choose to be philanthropists or supererogatory agents, and believe that we have chosen the good over the evil, and thus we have been [self] justified, as it were. Instead, as Barth’s quip highlights, if we seek to commit Pelagius’ sin, we only reinforce the very thing that continues to damn us evermore (and yet this is our only alternative precluding the contradictory [to ourselves] act of Christ); as Augustine might have it our concupiscence (‘self-love’). Instead as Luther might suggest, pressed into the conceptual service of Barth, we are simul justus et peccator (simultaneously ‘just’ and ‘sinner’); and it is in this moment that the love of God is demonstrated toward us (coram Deo/Christi)—when we are still in our sins.

6 For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. 7 For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die— 8 but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. 9 Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. 10 For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. 11 More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation. ~Romans 5.6-11 (ESV)

Collapsing God Into Creation: On Athanasius and Evangelical Calvinism

Khaled Anatolios, in his most masterful book Retrieving Nicaea, offers something on the Trinitarian theology of Athanasius that is simply splendid! He is getting at something, relative to the neglect of a central aspect of Athanasius’s theology that indeed is key to something that I have written in my chapter for our Evangelical Calvinist book; here is what I have written:

The conditio sine qua non of an Evangelical Calvinist understanding of God begins where God begins, with his Son. As Thomas Torrance makes clear, starting with God as revealed by the Son allows God’s triune nature to determine the way that we, as Christians, come to know him. That is, this is the proper way to think about the Christian God, trinitarianly; and we believe that this must lead to and from the conviction that God, as Athanasius held, has always already been Father and Son by the Holy Spirit before he ever becomes Creator.1 This becomes important, as Colin Gunton has explained in regards to the Nicene Council’s thinking; because “… By insisting … that God is eternally Son as well as Father, the Nicene theologians introduced a note of relationality into the being of God: God’s being is defined as being in relation. Such is the impact of the doctrine of the incarnation on conceptions of what it is to be.”2 The problem that arises if we fail to engage God on his (these) terms, if we start with God as creator before Father; is that the Son can come to be thought of as part of God’s creation, instead of the creator himself3 resulting in a project that simply looks at Jesus as another one of “God’s” works whereby we come to know God (as demiurge). Torrance makes this point vividly clear:

[I]n such an approach we can do no more than attempt to speak of God from his works which have come into being at his will through his Word, that is, from what is externally related to God, and which as such do not really tell us anything about who God is or what he is like in his own nature. That line of approach, as both Athanasius and Hilary insisted, is entirely lacking in accuracy or precision… . They differentiated themselves here sharply from the thesis of Basileides, the Gnostic of Alexandria, who taught, with reference to Plato’s statement that God is beyond all being, that we cannot say anything about what God is, but can only say something about what he is not. It was pointed out by Gregory Nazianzen, however, that if we cannot say anything positive about what God is, we really cannot say anything accurate about what he is not.4 [Myk Habets and Bobby Grow, Evangelical Calvinism, citing Chapter 4 by Bobby Grow, 95]

And here is what Anatolios has written in the same vein (and with more explanation on the theology of Athanasius, and a helpful elaboration of what I was thinking when I wrote what I did for my personal chapter in our book [quoted above]):

[T]he insistence that the creation of  the world is grounded in the generation of the Son is an aspect of Athanasius’s Trinitarian theology that has received remarkably little attention. But it is not an incidental detail for Athanasius. What is at stake is not only a certain vision of fecundity of the divine nature, as a merely abstract divine attribute. But it is also structural to Athanasius’s vision that both in the original creation and in the renewed and redeemed creation, God’s relation to the world is enfolded by the Father’s relation to the Son. Using the felicitous biblical image of God’s delight in Wisdom, Athanasius speaks of God’s delight in the world as derivative of and embraced within the intra-divine delight of the relation of Father and Son [Khaled Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea, 118]:

Therefore all the earth is filled with his knowledge. For one is the knowledge of the Father, through the Son, and of the Son, from the Father, and the Father rejoices in the Son and in this same joy, the Son delights in the Father, saying, “I was beside him, his delight. Day by day, I rejoiced in his presence” (Prov 8:30), except by seeing himself in his own image, which is his Word? Even though, as it is written in these same Proverbs, he also “delighted in the sons of people, having consummated the world” (Prov 8:31), yet this also has the same meaning. For he did not delight in this way by acquiring delight as an addition to himself, but it was upon seeing the works that were made according to his own image, so that the basis of this delight also is God’s own Image. And how does Son too rejoice, except by seeing himself in the Father? For to say this is the same as to say: “The one who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9), and “I am in the Father and the Father is in me” (John 14:10) [Athanasius,Contra Arianos, 2.82, cited by Anatolios, 118]

Athanasius’s Trinitarian theology developed, as does so much of theology, in a polemical context. He is countering the thought of both Arius, and one of Arius’ tribe members Asterius; both of these “arch-heretics” held, in their respective and nuanced ways, that Jesus was ultimately a creation of the unbegotten, ingenerate Father (who functioned as a demiurge between the Father and his creation). Both of these heretics were what can be called (as Anatolios labels it) ‘unity-of-will’ theologians V. ‘unity-of-being’; meaning that they made a distinction between God’s inner life (‘ad intra’) and his outer life (‘ad extra’), such that the latter was simply an expression of the Unbegotten God’s desire (to create for example). And neither one of these heretics saw any necessary relation between God’s ‘will’ (his outer workings) and his inner life, or his divine ‘being’. The consequence of this was that these heretics placed Jesus into the ‘will’ category of God, such that there was no necessary relation of being between the Father and the Son; and so then, the Son becomes a part of God’s generation and creation–even if, for Arius and Asterius, they believed that the Son was a creation of God who was pre-existent to the creation of the world.

It is this setting into which Athanasius is speaking. Instead of making a disjunction between the ‘essence’ or ‘being’ of God with his ‘will’, Athanasius sees these two realities of God’s life as coordinate and necessary corollaries. As such, the will of the Father to create flows from an intrinsic reality of his being; which is to say, that the Father’s being cannot be such without his relation to the Son (which is what makes him ‘Father’). It is in this prior relation that God’s will to create takes form and is coordinate, and it is this reality that Athanasius believes (with the Gospel of John, no less) must be affirmed in order to faithfully understand a God-world relation that keeps the ‘being’ and person of God in-tact, relative to the triune relation that inheres between the Father, Son, and later the Holy Spirit (and I mean later relative to the way that the Patristics dealt with the articulating the divine life and the homoousion).

The bottom line is that the Father has always been the Father of the Son before he became a creator, as Thomas Torrance so often liked to iterate. Hopefully now you can see a little more clearly, at least, where Torrance got his line of thinking from. My concern is that classic Calvinists, by their adoption of classical theism, and the integration of Aristotelian categories into their theological methodology (prolegomena), is that they have provided a doctrine of God that is more akin to the errors of Arius and Asterius by collapsing God in Christ into the creation rather than providing a proper order of things relative to a properly construed Trinitarian theology.

The classic Calvinist ordering of creation, covenant, redemption is an example of how the problem I am referring to inheres in their theological method. By placing creation prior to covenant (or God’s life), they have set up a situation wherein the creation can predicate the life of God as God enters into creation in Christ. Creation takes priority over Christ in this instance, such that the only way to safeguard God as untouched by creation (the Unbegotten God) is to posit a distinction between God’s ‘will’ and God’s ‘being’. In the incarnation Jesus would be functioning at the level of God’s will, which must be separate from God’s being in order to maintain that the creation does not ‘touch’ God’s inner being. The problem with this, obviously, is that now there is ‘a God behind the back of Jesus’ and Jesus simply becomes an instrument in the Unbegotten God’s hand in order to accomplish his desired will in the world.

I will have to get into this more later. Suffice it to say, that the depth of what I was only really sketching in my personal chapter in our book gets into the issues that I am discussing in this post.

A Critique of the ‘What Would Jesus Do? Society’

I really like how John Webster describes Barth’s understanding against the Liberal Protestantism of his day. Ironically, I think, that the way Barth understood the Liberal Protestants of his day, could (should) be the way (by and large) that we understand American Evangelicals of our day [please note: I am speaking in generalities, there are obviously many exceptions to this amongst American Evangelicals, just as there was exceptions to the Liberal Protestants in Barth's day]. In fact, I think this dovetails nicely with the post I just posted on Occupy Wall Street. It gets to the question of how it is that “good” honest hard working (even Christian) people can be duped into thinking that the aformentioned attributes serve as the garb that justifies their place in society (i.e. as good honest hard working folk). There is always room for conviction and self-”criticality;” I know we don’t like this, and I know that much of this ultimately bothers our sensibilities; but we are Christians, people of  love and truth (insofar as we participate in God’s life in Christ).

As I’ve already alluded to, the following is Webster commenting on Barth and his critique of the Liberal Protestants (which I am lifting and applying to American Evangelicals). This is intended to decenter our trust in ourselves, and instead cause us to throw ourselves at the mercy of God in Christ. This is intended to turn our lights on so that we can more critically see how what counts as Christian and Ethical (in America and the West), probably is not as ethical and Christian as we think. This is intended to highlight how it is that “we” so easily become the standard for what is good and right in the world instead of our Savior, Jesus Christ.

[A] large part of Barth’s distaste is his sense that the ethics of liberal Protestantism could not be extricated from a certain kind of cultural confidence: ‘[H]ere was … a human culture building itself up in orderly fashion in politics, economics, and science, theoretical and applied, progressing steadily along its whole front, interpreted and ennobled by art, and through its morality and religion reaching well beyond itself toward yet better days.’ The ethical question, on such an account, is no longer disruptive; it has ‘an almost perfectly obvious answer’, so that, in effect, the moral life becomes too easy, a matter of the simple task of following Jesus.

Within this ethos, Barth also discerns a moral anthropology with which he is distinctly ill-at-ease. He unearths in the received Protestant moral culture a notion of moral subjectivity (ultimately Kantian in origin), according to which ‘[t]he moral personality is the author both of the conduct with which the ethical question is concerned and of the question itself. Barth’s point is not simply that such an anthropology lacks serious consideration of human corruption, but something more complex. He is beginning to unearth the way in which this picture of human subjectivity as it were projects the moral self into a neutral space, from which it can survey the ethical question ‘from the viewpoint of spectators’. This notion Barth reads as a kind of absolutizing of the self and its reflective consciousness, which come to assume ‘the dignity of ultimateness’. And it is precisely this — the image of moral reason as a secure centre of value, omnicompetent in its judgements — that the ethical question interrogates. [John Webster, Barth's Moral Theology: Human Action in Barth's Thought, 35-6]

The ‘Human culture building itself up’ was the German one (for Barth) that ultimately expressed itself in German bourgeois society, and ultimately Nazi Germany. For Barth, for the Liberal Protestant, because of the collapse of the Christian self into the self as the moral self; there no longer remained space for Christ to break in and speak a fresh word of holiness over and against the established norms of what the Liberal Protestant had come to already think of what counted as such. In other words, Barth was against a What Would Jesus Do? society.

I am appropriating this critique from Barth (a la Webster) for the American Evangelical in particular. We have come to think that what counts as moral is captured by the symbol ‘Conservative’. It is this absolutized ‘Conservative Self’ that presumes that what it means to be moral, and Christian is to ask, simply, ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ This perfectly illustrates Barth’s critique of the German Liberal Protestant. For them, as for us, to be Christian, was to be nationalist, exceptional, and normal. It is this posture that negates any space for the Word of God to break in on all of these norms or the status quo; since the status quo is synonymous with being Christian. And it is this self-evidential situation which allows for atrocities to take place in the name of Christ; through the “absolute self.”

*A rererererepost .

‘What It Meant’ ‘What It Means’: Biblical Theology in Discussion

What the text of Scripture ‘meant’ and what it ‘means’ has been one rubric by which Biblical Theology (as a  movement) has sought to identify a working definition of what it means, in fact, to do Biblical Theology (especially in the 19th century and onward into the present). Without adequate attention to the history of this dialectic (between meant/means), we all too often can repeat history, and not appreciate the kind of material impact that uncritical acceptance of these kinds of formal questions can have on our own conditioned and particular interpretation of Scripture today. I have N.T. Wright in mind, but he is not the only one. What I want to consider further (and not much deeper than just posing a question and my own thoughts here), is if there has been thorough enough attention given to the someone like Wright’s own appropriation of his conditioned employment of past hermeneutical practice? In other words, I often hear many of Wright’s most vocal proponents repeating and building upon his material exegetical and historical conclusions; but I am just curious as to whether or not enough attention has been given to the actual methodology that Wright is indeed employing to come to the theological conclusions that he is coming to in his own project—as he attempts to mediate ‘what it meant’ with ‘what it means’?

My questions about Wright above could be applied to many contemporary Biblical Theologians of our day. I suppose I simply want to register my own hesitation in regard to whether or not enough critical self-reflection has been maintained among Wright’s & companies’ proposals in regard to bridging the gap between what it mean and what it means (and in fact if this gap ought to be bridged at all); and furthermore, whether or not this is indeed what Wright is attempting to do? And if so, how is he doing it? Does he have a well thought out prolegomenon (hermeneutical methodology) that indeed engages with these kinds of more formal questions; or is Wright & co. so focused on their material conclusions, that they simply presume upon a certain mode of: What it meant, must be what it means? This seems to me to be the mode that Wright & co. often operate in; a mode that does not attend strongly enough to some deeper and important methodological questions—I realize that I am generalizing quite heavily (esp. when I write Wright & co.), but I think some generalization here, at least in order to provide heuristic purchase, is necessary.

In light of some of these questions, I thought that I would do a series of posts that seek to engage with them a bit. Let me offer a quote from Gerhard Hasel as he offers something from D. H. Kelsey in regard to the dialectic of what it meant and what it means; Kelsey’s questions for this dialectic are meant to be critical, and in fact to problematize in such a way, that ‘what it meant’ ‘what it means’ is shown to be too reductionistic of way to attempt to relate meaning in the text of Scripture.

[I]t is evident that the distinction of modern times between “what it meant” and “what it means,” i.e., theological interpretation which is normative, is problematical in both its distinction and its task. D. H. Kelsey, for example, has stated succinctly that there are several ways in which both “what it meant” and “what it means” can be related to each other with varying results. First, it may be decided that the descriptive approach that seeks to determine “what it meant” by whatever methods of inquiry is considered to be identical with “what it means.” Second, it may be decided that “what it meant” contains propositions, ideas, etc. that are to be decoded and translated systematically and explicated and that this is “what it means,” even though those explications may never have occurred to the original authors and might have been rejected by them. Third, it may be decided that “what it meant” is an archaic way of speaking dependent upon its own culture and time that needs to be redescribed in contemporary ways of speaking of the same phenomena, and that this redescription is “what it means.” “This assumes that the theologian has access to the phenomena independent of scripture and ‘what it meant,’ so that he can check the archaic description and have a basis for his own.” Fourth, it may be decided that “what it meant” refers to the way in which early Christians used Biblical texts and that “what it means” is simply the way these are used by modern Christians. In this case there is a genetic relationship. Kelsey notes, “None of these decisions can itself be either validated or invalidated by exegetical study of the text, for what is at issue is precisely how exegetical study is related to doing theology.” If this is the case, then one must ask on what grounds one makes a theological judgment in favor of one over the other of these or other ways of relating “what it meant” to “what it means.” [Gerhard Hasel, Old Testament Theology: Basic Issues In The Current Debate, 37-8.]

Far from merely critiquing N. T. Wright, these questions take issue with all would be exegetes and theologues who see Scripture as something significant enough to take serious. And I am not trying to totally critique Wright by offering these questions; he is just the nearest, most public and popular and prominent Biblical Theologian of our day who makes himself readily available as foil for such considerations as I am offering in this post. My concern with Wright is what is asked by Hasel in the last clause above, “If this is the case, then one must ask on what grounds one makes a theological judgment in favor of one over the other of these or other ways of relating “what it meant” to “what it means.” I am not sure that Wright & co. attend themselves enough with this concern. It seems to me that he/they usually just presume upon whatever their theological predisposition is, and then act as if all they are doing is Biblical study; but then of course this begs the question that Hasel gives voice to.

I will continue this series of posts by following Hasel’s subsequent and developing thought in the directly subsequent paragraphs to the one I just shared. Stay tuned …

Hellbound?

I just finished watching the documentary by Kevin Miller, Hellbound? As some of you know I have already been thinking and reading on the issue of Christian Universalism for sometime (for at least a couple of years, if not longer). I wouldn’t say that this documentary, in particular, added anything to what I already have known about the issues involved in this debate (among Christians). My general impression of this film is that it was well-done, even if it did at points maybe caricature certain positions (like the Eternal Conscious Torment position), and privilege others (like Christian Universalism). But in the end, I think that Miller still struck a good tone with the documentary by hearing from multiple voices—although it would have been nice if he had consulted with a Barthian scholar, and got this type of more theological understanding of classical Christian concepts revamped in a methodologically Christ-centered fashion (especially in regard to understanding Jesus as both the elect and reprobate in his vicarious humanity for us). I think that they included the author of The Evangelical Universalist, Robin Parry, into the mix of voices was very commendable. If there is anyone, and any treatment of the text of Scripture that could persuade me of a Christian Universalism it would be Parry’s (along with some implicates from Barth and Torrance).

I think the most important point that was made in the film, and it is one that Parry hit home especially, is that what stands behind our exegetical and interpretive decisions primarily is a vision of God. What does it mean for God to be love? Is love defined by our own sentimentality and culturally conditioned conceptualization of that, or is there Revelation of God as Love that breaks in on our conceptions and reorients them to His? And how does Scripture, and the exegetical process dialectically and spiralingly chasten over-theologized conceptions of what Triune love might be? These are the tensions, that for me remain. And I think these tensions are illustrated over and again in Scripture; as we have the passages that are clearly universalist, and then we also have the passages that are clearly particularist (and according to Jerry Walls in the documentary, we have passages that are clearly annihilationist—although I am not so sure I agree with that as much). In fact, I think Walls’ sketch of the tension is probably the best most clairvoyant one in the film; he identifies (through the editors of the documentary) multiple passages that stand out in each category (that I just noted), and then highlights how the Tradition has tended to favor the particularist passages (so the ones that seem to suggest an eternal conscious torment view of hell), and used this set of passages as the clear ones (so the classical analogy of faith or as Grant Osborne has called it the analogy of Scripture approach) to interpret the less clear ones, which the Tradition would presume are the passages that are more universalist and/or annihilationist. And he notes that what the Universalist does with their set of passages is to inversely use these passages as the cipher through which to read the particularist passages of Scripture (that might seem to argue that hell is eternal conscious torment). They come back to Walls, and in the end, I think he ends up where I am at in posture; that is, that there remains an somewhat undecided tension between all of the passages (undecided relatively speaking, from the human perspective). And thus, he is hopeful and happy to be surprised by God in the eschaton, that in fact the Christian Universalists were right after all.

As I opened this post up with; much of the decision making on this comes back to our conception of God (in fact it all comes back to this). The reality is, though, that while I hold to the fact that God’s very nature and life is un-impeded free love for the other in His life, at the same time, the clarity of Scripture (given by Him) is, as I just highlighted, less clear about this issue than either the Dogmatic Traditionalist or the Dogmatic Christian Universalist might be. So I remain chastenedly hopeful, but would probably not be considered a Christian Universalist, proper. I live in the tension that is identified and articulated by Thomas Torrance, and I quote this often from him, and with this I close:

God loves you so utterly and completely that he has given himself for you in Jesus Christ his beloved Son, and has thereby pledged his very being as God for your salvation. In Jesus Christ God has actualised his unconditional love for you in your human nature in such a once for all way, that he cannot go back upon it without undoing the Incarnation and the Cross and thereby denying himself. Jesus Christ died for you precisely because you are sinful and utterly unworthy of him, and has thereby already made you his own before and apart from your ever believing in him. He has bound you to himself by his love in a way that he will never let you go, for even if you refuse him and damn yourself in hell his love will never cease. Therefore, repent and believe in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Saviour. ~T. F. Torrance, “The Mediation of Christ”, 94.