“Beggars All”: On Abandoning the Progressive and Legalist Mode of Salvation

I don’t think I’ll ever understand the impulse towards perfectionism; not in light of the Gospel, that is. And yet it is rampant, especially as given non-stop expression on “Christian social media” (I’m mostly thinking of X/Twitter). There are always these extremes on a continuum. There are those who think to be anti-legalist is to be progressive and loose to everything. On the other hand, there are those who think to be holy (saved) is to be legalistic to the point that all of what they say about others never applies to them; as if they have perfectly arrived; as if they just are one of the elect and everyone else is reprobate, or at least highly suspect. But both centers stem from the same type of “meism.” As if the human agent is the determiner, on either side, of what is good, and beautiful, and free. This, I take to be, the perfectionist impulse; which really is just a performative mood wherein a person, one way or the other, simply must assert their own self-contrived standing before God and others. Either they assert their “freedom,” or they assert their ”legalism”; both being given ground by the homo incurvatus in se.

We aren’t saved based on being so-called “free” or so-called “constrained by our obedience.” We are justified before God because He who knew no sin assumed our unrighteousness that we might become the righteousness of God in Him; it is because of His poverty that we are made rich in the beautiful garments of righteousness which He has robed us with. All our righteousness is like filthy rags; that doesn’t end once we become Christians. We live, moment-by-moment, afresh anew, by His righteousness for us; by His re-creating for us and in us and with us. We remain simul justus et peccator (‘simultaneously justified and sinner’), as such, we live by His mercy and grace as He always lives to make intercession for us.

Are there standards of righteousness and holiness that we bear witness to as Christians? Yes, but this by the Holy Spirit in Christ in us, and not just against the broken world out there, but the broken world “in here,” in our own fallen and broken hearts. We ought to call out unrighteousness and evil, exposing the darkness with the light of God’s Word, but in so doing we really are only exposing our own wretched hearts, outwith Christ’s heart for us. This ought to at least humiliate us to the point that we remain obedient, even to the death of the cross. And the ground of this obedience is funded by God’s eternal life of humility for us, as He freely chose to become us in the humanity of Jesus Christ (Deus incarnandus). We certainly do have freedom in Christ, but it is a freedom circumscribed by being for God, and not for ourselves. It is a freedom to be holy as He is holy. It is a freedom to bear witness to the world that the Son has set us free, free indeed.

I’m not suggesting that we ought to be looking for some type of balance between being libertine or legalistic. I am suggesting that we abandon that whole paradigm altogether. God’s righteousness in Christ confronts us in the living color of His flesh and blood life for us in Jesus Christ; indeed, as He continuously breathes and hovers over us, from within, by the Holy Spirit. His work is ‘out of nothing’ (ex nihilo), which means that our daily lives are totally contingent upon His Word and Way, and not ours. There is nothing inherent to this world system that supplies us with the sustenance we require to live in the free life that God has brought us into by yoking Himself with us in His freedom for us in Christ. We have a new creation life that comes from outside of us, as an ‘alien life,’ as if manna falling from the heavens in the morning dew each and every day. This freedom, this righteousness we have been given through union with Christ, and thus participants in the triune life Godself, is not a possession of ours, as if a self-possession; we, instead, are a possession of this righteousness’s. This cannot be stressed enough: our lives, as Christians, as human beings, are fully and continuously, moment-by-moment, contingent on God’s Logos. We bring nothing to this arrangement except our dissolute selves, which the Creator, the Sustainer, indeed, the Father in His eternal relationship with the Son, has entered into, in the Son’s assumption of flesh, taking the depth of our fallenness, which He alone can see, into the bones and marrow of His humanity, allowing that to have its final and just result in the human life lived in obedience unto the Father, finally eventuating in death, even death on a cross. We couldn’t and cannot do that. It takes the homoousios Theanthropos (GodMan) to do that for us. And while that event, in itself, is once and for all, it is an event that has ‘perfect tense’ reality insofar that we gain our reality before God, continuously, as events-in-happening, moment-by-moment, through God’s reality for us in His Melchizedekian life as the Son of David, our High Priest, who sits at the right hand of the Father always living to make intercession for those who will inherit His eternal life.

Since our lives are contingent in the above way, we have no space for boasting except in the fact that our God is indeed the living and triune God who has not left us as orphans. This ought to change the way we approach the world, others, and ourselves. We, as Luther was wont to say (paraphrase), “are beggars all.”

Calvin against the Calvinists: Alasdair Heron and Thomas Torrance on Calvin

Here is a quote from TF Torrance on how he believed John Calvin contributed to the theological world, and thus how he would think on how “Calvinists” have used Calvin in the wrong ways, and for wrong ends; essentially muting the seismic Calvin into the tremor Calvin that is only allowed to shake to rhythms presented by classic Calvinism of today and even yesterday. True, Richard Muller and other post-Reformed orthodox Calvinists like David Steinmetz have placed Calvin in Context, but whose context? You should read the whole essay that I pilfer this quote from, from Heron; he might provide you with a rounder understanding of Calvin, and then of course Torrance’s appropriation of Calvin.

It belongs to the great merit of John Calvin that he worked out the difficult transition from the mediaeval mode of thinking in theology to the modern mode, and placed the theology of the Reform on a scientific basis in such a way that the logic inherent in the substance of the Faith was brought to light and allowed to assume the mastery in human formulation of it. Calvin has not always been interpreted like this, yet if he has been misunderstood, perhaps it was his own greatness that was to blame. Calvin made such a forward advance in theological thinking that he outstripped his contemporaries by centuries, with the result that they tended to fall back upon an old Aristotelian framework, modified by Renaissance humanism, in order to interpret him. Thus there was produced what history has called ‘Calvinism’, the rigid strait-jacket within which Calvin’s teaching has been presented regularly to succeeding generations.[1]

[1] Thomas F. Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction, 76 cited by Alasdair Heron, “Participaito” Vol. 2, p.46 fn. 2.

Nala’s Salvation: Against Her “Christian” Legalistic Critics

Legalism continues to be rife on the theological interwebs. An OnlyFans porn star (at the top of the “game”) just gave her life to Christ (she grew up as a Baptist pastor’s kid, like me). I watched her whole interview, where she shared her life story and testimony, on the Michael Knowles show (2:20 minutes). She has gotten lots of pushback and skepticism, particularly on the website formerly known as Twitter. There is a high profile (on said website) Jewess who has been saying vile things about this former star. But she’s a Jewess and not a Christian; so, definitionally she wouldn’t understand the nature of God’s grace (at least not yet). But then there have also been “Christians” pushing back at this sister. I want to highlight one of these fellas. Of course, this guy has written a book on “biblical masculinity,” has a podcast on the topic, and unfortunately, has quite a few followers on X and probably other social media platforms. What he says about this young sister makes my blood boil; it is as antiChrist/antiGospel that someone can get (let his message be anathema). Here is part of what he said:

Nala’s entire life has been a lie. She has profited in multi-millions from the twin society-crushing evils of Feminism and the Sexual Revolution. She has led countless men astray for pay, selecting for her profession a task built on values that are explicitly anti-family, anti-Law, and therefore anti-Christ and anti-Logos. She should be revolted at the multi-generational forces that twisted a creature made in God’s image into this demonic mockery of a human female. God didn’t just save her from hell. He saved her from years of her own sin-enslaved wretchedness, which spread virally over the internet touching the lives of potentially millions in exchange for cash. Honorable men with grit under their nails and sweat on their brow and scars on their arms engaged in months of backbreaking labor to make less than she probably did for one weekend’s parade of digital sin. You do not understand the truly cosmos-rending chain of confession, repentance, mercy, grace, and salvation well enough if you think baptism and a few words on camera suffice to expunge the stain on the earth, let alone herself, that she has created. A repentant heart would scrape off all remnants of that clownish makeup to reveal the unadorned face of the woman underneath, as God sees her, and beg the men she exploited for forgiveness. She would stare into the image of the photo below with horror and never wish for one second to be mistaken for that death-cult parasite again. She would decry from the mountaintops the fallenness of the world that allowed and even encouraged her digital prostitution, and tear her garments witnessing the wickedness in her bones and bloodstream that seduced her into this line of “work.” Work which she then relished in perfecting her craft to infernal excellence, I might add. She would strip herself of artificial beauty and clothe herself in modesty then disappear into her husband’s home and hearth, next seen by the public with a small pack of children, and a tearful song of Romans 8:28-29 on her grateful lips. In so doing, she would model the true path home for women. We live in a Christ-hating nation that despises God with every fiber of its being, making a middle-class, single-income household all but impossible as an explicit attack on the institution of the family and especially the role of the father. And suddenly I’m supposed to believe we’re all celebrating a sinner being saved? On the network that just fired a female commentator, in part, for daring to say, “Christ is King”? Please. Candace Owens, who showed at least a flash of true courage, should be furious. Nala has stepped onto the public stage and been thrust into a default position of spiritual leadership, as many celebrities sadly are the moment they whisper the name of Christ to a camera. Thus I criticize her as a leader. “Give her time”? How about instead we bring on a repentant believer who has already had time? I propose Rosaria Butterfield. Maybe Nala should give herself time. Maybe the media should give her time. Maybe the legions of female sinners and their white knight cheerleaders should at this very moment be ushering Nala off the stage forever, for her own good, rather than clapping like seals in the hopes that she’ll legitimize their poorly-discipled, halfhearted repentance for sins. Because she won’t. She literally can’t. Not until Feminism and the Sexual Revolution that produced her (and women like her) are ripped up root and branch from the salted earth of the American family, burned, and the ashes cast into the brook Kidron. (2 Kings 23:6) But that’s not what we really want, is it? Women today desire to be led… but only where they were already planning on going. Others want this to be a “meat sacrificed to idols” moment. 1 Corinthians 8 is the world-befriending Christian’s dog-eared chapter, isn’t it? “It’s not that bad. I’m under grace not law.”[1]

All this gal is doing is sharing her testimony. When a person is “born from above” they are born again of an imperishable seed; the seed of Christ’s life blossomed to the right hand of the Father for them/us. This guy, Will Spencer, thinks we need to “wait and see.” Is that what Jesus did with the Samaritan woman at the well; or many other female sinners, inclusive of prostitutes? No, once the re-birth is realized in someone’s heart, they become participant with Christ (participatio Christi), and partakers of the divine and triune being of God. Nobody can separate Nala from Christ, not even her. She’s entered into an indestructible life that is not contingent on her obedience, but Christ’s for her (which in fact is what the Gospel is all about).

This guy, Will, is simply a product of a nomist subculture that has swallowed much of the North American evangelical community whole. It is through the “retrieval” of precisianist and juridical categories, as those are found particularly developed in the Post Reformed orthodox theologies of the 16^th and 17^th centuries, that this legalistic subculture, of the type this Spencer guy is fomenting, has come to have root. And yet, most of these cats aren’t aware of their informing theology. They simply receive it, and run with it. They don’t recognize, critically so, its historical and philosophical beginnings; and as such they simply conflate these mercantilist categories with the biblical Gospel. As a result, we end up with this “wait and see” attitude in regard to having certainty if someone is saved or not. This is absurdum! But this is simply a projection of their own uncertainty and lack of assurance before God. Barth was right when he wrote the following with reference to Calvin’s thinking on assurance of salvation:

How can we have assurance in respect of our own election except by the Word of God? And how can even the Word of God give us assurance on this point if this Word, if this Jesus Christ, is not really the electing God, not the election itself, not our election, but only an elected means whereby the electing God—electing elsewhere and in some other way—executes that which he has decreed concerning those whom He has—elsewhere and in some other way—elected? The fact that Calvin in particular not only did not answer but did not even perceive this question is the decisive objection which we have to bring against his whole doctrine of predestination. The electing God of Calvin is a Deus nudus absconditus.[2]

It is this ill-formed doctrine of election that hangs over all of these legalists’ heads; it’s actually rather tragic. Not only can they not find rest in Christ for them, but then they project that unrest and uncertainty on anyone else who confesses Jesus as Lord; like Nala. If Jesus isn’t both the object and subject of God’s election, then election simply hangs in the balances of the decretum absolutum (absolute decree). And it is this type of election, the type grounded in an unrevealed, secret and arbitrary decree of God, that leaves these types of legalists floundering in their salvation. But, often, such people believe they’ve hit some sort of magical mark in their lives, finding a level of assurance that they indeed are one of the elect of God (because they haven’t sinned in certain ways like they used to; so based on their performance). But they’re still “waiting to see” if other new converts really have come to Christ based upon some subjective and abstract standard of judgment vis-à-vis the performance of said new converts. That’s what this Spencer guy and others are now doing to Nala. Historically this exercise is called experimental predestinarianism, which entails exactly what it says.

I have written more than I intended. Let me leave Will Spencer and his cohorts with a parable of Jesus’. It speaks against the type of performance and legalistically based salvation he unfortunately has been “discipled” into.

“For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. ² When he had agreed with the laborers for a denarius for the day, he sent them into his vineyard. ³ And he went out about the third hour and saw others standing idle in the market place; ⁴ and to those he said, ‘You also go into the vineyard, and whatever is right I will give you.’ And so they went. ⁵ Again he went out about the sixth and the ninth hour, and did the same thing. ⁶ And about the eleventh hour he went out and found others standing around; and he *said to them, ‘Why have you been standing here idle all day long?’ ⁷ They *said to him, ‘Because no one hired us.’ He *said to them, ‘You go into the vineyard too.’

⁸ “When evening came, the owner of the vineyard *said to his foreman, ‘Call the laborers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last group to the first.’ ⁹ When those hired about the eleventh hour came, each one received a denarius. ¹⁰ When those hired first came, they thought that they would receive more; but each of them also received a denarius. ¹¹ When they received it, they grumbled at the landowner, ¹² saying, ‘These last men have worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden and the scorching heat of the day.’ ¹³ But he answered and said to one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for a denarius? ¹⁴ Take what is yours and go, but I wish to give to this last man the same as to you. ¹⁵ Is it not lawful for me to do what I wish with what is my own? Or is your eye envious because I am generous?’ ¹⁶ So the last shall be first, and the first last.” –Matthew 20:1-16

 

[1] Will Spencer | Renaissance Man, accessed on X 04-08-2024.

[2] Karl Barth, CD II/2, 111.

Boldness Before God in Christ’s Election

More strongly than Calvin, Beza thinks when dealing with the “elect” [“electi”) [sic] of particular persons with particular names. He directs his interest toward what is going on inside them, their questioning and receiving answers, their unsettledness followed by quiet resolution and then more unsettledness in their souls, the entire process of strange ups and downs, back and forths, which constantly goes on there. -Karl Barth, The Theology of the Reformed Confessions, 121-2

This is what happens when election is thought of in “Latin” terms, in abstraction from both its objective and subjective ground in the Godman, Jesus Christ. This type of dualism, or competitive relationship with God, necessarily works from a turn to the subject mode of navel gazing on my innards as a step prior to looking to God in Christ. It results in a vicious circle of uncertainty before God; the exact opposite of what the author to the Hebrews said we should do in constantly coming boldly into the throne room of God.

An Athanasian Reformed Reading of John 6:44-45: On Unconditional Election and the Effectual Call

There was a debate, very recently, between Dr. James White and Dr. Leighton Flowers with reference to John 6:44-45. The theological locus under disputation was on the Calvinist doctrines of unconditional election and the effectual call. White argued the positive position, i.e., affirming unconditional election and the effectual call; whilst Flowers argued the negative, i.e., denying unconditional election and the effectual call. For the purposes of this post, I am just going to assume the reader understands the entailments of said doctrines, and cut right to the chase in offering the Athanasian Reformed (AR) (Evangelical Calvinist) reading of John 6:44-45. I believe it is the better more theologically acute way one must exegete John 6:44-45, among many other passages, in light of Christological orthodoxy. In other words, I will suggest (not argue here) that everyone reads the text of Scripture through theological lenses; and since that’s the case, it is best to exegete Scripture from good theological premises, rather than bad ones. I would simply assert here that both White and Flowers, respectively, offer a reading of John 6 that are based on bad theological premises.

Here is the passage in the English translation (NASB95):

⁴⁴ No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up on the last day. ⁴⁵ It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught of God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father, comes to Me.

White argues that all who are drawn of God will necessarily come to God (so, what he takes to be a prima facie argument for unconditional election vis-à-vis the effectual call). Flowers argues that the drawn ones who come to God are those who have not only heard, but have actively learned from the Father, and through this, said drawn ones freely choose to come to God based on their innate human freedom to do so (he believes the capacity comes, situationally, as people hear the call and learn from God of His way for them; but this based on an ontic capacity built into the human agent to accept or reject the call of God). So, in nuce, we can see how White clearly is thinking from the typical Calvinist emphasis on God’s sovereignty, and how Flowers, respectively, ends up emphasizing the human agents’ intact libertarian freewill to say yes or no to God’s offer of salvation.

The Athanasian Reformed alternative sees the eternal Son of God, as both the electing God and elected (archetypal) human for all of humanity. So, we can affirm unconditional election and the effectual call, but only under radically reified terms. So, for the AR, we maintain that what does the necessary work here, theologically, is a robust affirmation of a doctrine of the vicarious humanity of Christ (which is really just the Chalcedonian and Nicene understanding of the homoousious; i.e., that Jesus is both fully God and fully human in His singular person as the Christ). In this sense, the eternal Logos is both ‘unconditionally elect’ and ‘effectually called’ insofar that He freely chooses to become us that we might become Him by the grace of adoption (think of II Cor. 8:9 and the mirifica commutatio ‘wonderful exchange’). In this frame, Christ, God’s personal grace for the world, from within the triune Life, as the mediator between God and humanity, as our High Priest, enters into the sinful reprobate status all of humanity is born into; putting it to death at the cross; and rising anew as God’s humanity for the world, the second and greater Adam, the ‘firstborn from the dead,’ God’s ‘firstfruits,’ whereby humanity, in Christ’s humanity, the only genuine humanity coram Deo (before God) has been truly humanized in and from the humanizing humanity of Jesus Christ. As He, in His vicarious humanity said Yes to the Father for us, we by a correspondence of His faith, by the same Spirit’s breath now have the freedom of God to say yes and amen to God, acknowledging all that God has provided for us in His salvation for all of humanity (which is first His humanity for us).

So, for the AR, total depravity/total inability, to use those terms, is indeed a real problem for a humanity incurved upon itself (homo incurvatus in se). But what is different for AR is that on the one hand grace isn’t an abstract quality given to the elect, like created grace is, as maintained by the classical Calvinists (like White); on the other hand, grace, and being unilaterally placed into God’s grace is a necessity if fallen humanity is going to have the capacity to indeed seek God and receive His salvation for them. Further, contra the Arminian, or Flowers’ so-called provisionism, fallen humanity, again, is in need of God’s unilateral movement of placing us into His re-created and elect life in Christ, if in fact we are going to be able to speak of a genuine human freedom. So, against the Provisionists, AR maintains that in order to be truly human before God, that is to have genuine human freedom for God, that that must first be provided for all of humanity in and through God’s disruptive gracious humanity as that penetrates our dead humanity, giving us a new and real human life in His.

Hence, God’s unconditional election is inclusive of all of humanity, since the only humanity to be assumed in the incarnation was the fallen humanity. Jesus was “effectually called” (and I put that in quotes because AR does not affirm the Aristotelian causal theory that classical Calvinists do), freely coming for us, taking all of humanity with Him, as the second Adam, to the right hand of the Father. Why all of humanity does not finally affirm God’s election for us in Christ, seeing that all of the conditions for salvation have already been fully actualized in God’s humanity for the world, remains an aspect of the surd-like and inscrutable mystery of sin. All are elect in Christ, but not all finally come. We know why people do come, but sin keeps us in the dark in regard to why some don’t ultimately repent and acknowledge what God has already done, provided, and actualized for them in the real humanity of Christ.

In closing, with reference to John 6 and its grammar: verse 44 says, “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him.” Here, the doubly consubstantial life of Jesus, who is both the eternal Son, who is fully God, and who is also fully human, is theologically present in this clause. That is to say, in the analogy of the incarnation, the ‘Me’ and the ‘Father’ (insofar as the person and works of God are indivisible) are in reference to God’s life, and at the same time, in reference to God’s life of salvation actualized for the world in the man from Nazareth, Jesus Christ. Theologically the “draws him,” with reference to the ‘him,’ remains in the singular, insofar that the [hu]man who was first drawn of God, was God’s particular humanity for the world in Jesus Christ. He will indeed be “raised up on the last day” whereby every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord; and all of humanity, all of those who have repented, out of Christ’s repentance for us, will be exalted in consummate form with Him as the new creations we have become as participants in Christ’s new and resurrected humanity for us.

In a canonical way it is fitting then to close this post with reference to another Apostle, Paul:

May it never be! How shall we who died to sin still live in it? ³ Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? ⁴ Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. ⁵ For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection, ⁶ knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin; ⁷ for he who has died is freed from sin. -Romans 6:1-7

What we have been referring to as election and the vicarious humanity of Christ also finds biblical reference to Paul’s theological motif of ‘in Christ’ theology. It is really a doctrine of union with Christ that we are concerned with, and what is the entailment of a proper doctrine of pre-destination and election; insofar that what salvation involves first involves God’s choice to be for us in the humanity of Jesus Christ. And this free election of God’s becomes what we grammatically call the hypostatic union wherein God and humanity are united as God becomes humanity that we might become partakers of the divine nature in and through the person of Jesus Christ. But you see then how this involves a doctrine of unio cum Christo (union with Christ).

The Captivity of God: Against Scholastic and Philosophical Theology

Just to reiterate, once again, the way scholastic theology, particularly with reference to Thomas Aquinas directly, and the scholastic trad after Thomas (whether Catholic or Protestant) indirectly, affects the way contemporary orthodox theologians do theology, let me share a passage from David Kelsey as he sketches the entailments of scholastic methodology vis-à-vis the ‘revelation’ found in Holy Scripture. In this instance it is with reference to the way that Aristotelian metaphysics are deployed in an effort to explicate the loci deposited in Holy Scripture. What is of import for our purposes is to notice how God’s Self-revelation becomes a predicate, by way of explanatory apparatus, of a purely philosophical construct developed by way of the human powers of reflecting on “being-as-such.”

The first question Thomas takes up in Part 1a of the Summa concerns the distinctive nature of theology or “sacred doctrine.” There is a “science” whose subject matter is God, viz., “divine doctrine.” What is distinctive about that “science” is that it argues from first principles that are scripturally revealed. Such “divine doctrine” is fundamentally different from the philosophical science of metaphysics whose subject matter is not God, but being-as-such. The first principles of metaphysics are discovered, not in revelation, but by rational analysis of the most general features of the concretely actual instances of “being” that human experience encounters. It can study God only indirectly as the “first cause” implied by the existential contingency of all concretely actual instances of “being” that we experience. God does not fall under “being-as-such,” i.e., is not one sort of “instantiation” among others of “being-as-such.” That is why the science of metaphysics cannot study God directly. On the other hand, the questions about God that follow the first two questions in Part 1a of the Summa are directly about God, i.e., are “divine doctrine” and not “metaphysics.” That holds true even though, based on scripturally revealed first principles, they nonetheless freely make analogical, use of the conceptuality that is developed in the “science” of metaphysics to analyze “being-as-such.”[1]

It is an interesting set of gymnastics one must engage in in order to finally arrive at the punch line: in the end sacra doctrina becomes an explicate of a humanly discovered metaphysics. Even though, as Kelsey notes, because the theologian feels compelled to, God cannot ultimately be known by way of a naked metaphysics, and yet, the theologian, in their frailty, must use the next best thing towards speaking and thinking God; i.e., the discovery the profane philosophers have ostensibly made in finding the ‘first principles.’

This continues to be the way evangelical, Reformed and Lutheran theologians attempt to renew the Protestant churches. They place an ad hoc value on what has come before, as if it is the only orthodox way possible for the churches to be refreshed in the good news of the Gospel. And yet, as Kelsey illustrates through his sketch, by way of implication, God’s Self-revelation is held captive to the discoveries of the pagans; i.e., that is in regard to thinking ‘being’ as actus purus (‘pure act’). As a Bible reader I don’t recognize the god discovered by the philosophers as the God Self-revealed in Jesus Christ; as God who is my Father.

I understand that the machine known as Protestant orthodoxy will never go away. But it is important, at least from my lights, to continue to call it out, and offer alternative ways to think and speak God directly from His Self-revelation in Jesus Christ; from the “rationality” inherent to the Gospel Hisself; from the concrete actualism that we in fact have been provided with by God through His Self-given cruciformed life for the world in Jesus Christ. If guys and gals want to do philosophy of religion and scholastic theology, great. But don’t deceive yourselves and others into thinking that it comes close to touching the surface, with providing an actual point of contact between the living God and humanity. The only concrete place of that happenstance is found in the hypostatic union of God and humanity in the Man, Jesus Christ. It is His life that sets the terms, the categories, the emphases by which the Christian can come to truly (kataphysically) and  evangelically know the triune God.

The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our sons forever, that we may observe all the words of this law. –Deuteronomy 29:29

[1] David H. Kelsey, Human Aguish and God’s Power (United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 215–16.

TF Torrance on the Real Protestant Reformation: Against the Barretts and Carters Out There

Matthew Barrett, Craig Carter, and many others are attempting to renew the church through retrieving their reading of the Protestant Reformation. All they are really doing is retrieving Roman Catholic neo-Thomism, and the attending medieval categories therein, as the balm of Gilead they believe such retrieval will accomplish for the failing evangelical church. And yet this is the irony: they are simply promoting a substance metaphysics, and the decretal God therefrom, which the OG reformers were intent on dismantling in the name of Christ and revelation. TF Torrance underscores these matters for us:

That is what happened at the Reformation. The very foundations of medieval Roman theology were subjected to searching criticism in the effort to purge it of alien conceptions of deity and nature, and to restore in its fullness the biblical doctrine of the living, acting God as Creator and Father. The result was an immense upheaval which substituted a more dynamic and active way of thinking for that of the medieval schoolmen, and it was that foundation that made possible the equally great mutation in scientific thinking from static to dynamic and kinetic questions, resulting in a corresponding change in terminology. Thus as professor E. A. Burt has written: ‘It is obvious, from a causal observation of the medieval and modern methods of attacking the difficulties of metaphysics, that a radical shift has been made in the terminology used. Instead of treating things in terms of substance, accident, causality, essence and idea, matter and form, potentiality and actuality, we now treat them in terms of forces, motions and laws, changes of mass in space and time, and the like.’ These changes derived from the new science, and it is significant that the men chiefly responsible at first for initiating these changes were men like Bacon and Newton whose scientific work was so closely tied up with their faith, and their explicit rejection of Aristotelian notions of deity and nature.[1]

Reading popular renditions of Reformation history, like those being produced by Barrett, Carter et al., one would never realize that in fact the Protestant Reformation was all about upending the [substance] metaphysics that propelled the very ecclesiastical system the OG reformers were intent on deconstructing. And so, when popular writers today tell inquisitive Christians that the Reformation actually entailed the same metaphysics that underwrote the Roman Catholic church, these unbeknowing folk simply ingest it as the truth. But as TFT is demonstrating, that couldn’t be further from the truth. The original Protestant Reformation, at a depth dimensional level, was all about introducing the church of Jesus Christ to a radical theology of the Word; wherein the old superstructures that helped provide the Roman church with its fundamentum were scrapped by way of appealing to the power and reality of Holy Scripture, in the prosopon (face) of Jesus Christ.

The Calvinists and Arminians continue the struggle, one against the other, from the very Aristotelianism that the OG reformers were intent on scrapping vis-à-vis a direct line to the mediator between God and humanity in the ‘man, Christ Jesus.’ What people like Barrett and Carter are doing is a hyper disservice to folks who have no critical resource. Because they conflate the works of the so-called 16^th and 17^th century Post Reformation orthodox reformers with the work of the OG reformers, they end up flattening things, thus not recognizing that the real sword of the Reformation was in fact a rejection of the very metaphysics that Barrett et al. are intent on retrieving for the evangelical masses. This is not serious scholarship, and ought to be abandoned posthaste.

What TFT rightly notes is that if someone is really committed to Protestant reformational reality, rather than the ecclastics of the ‘schoolmen,’ that they will repudiate the metaphysical and “revelational” foundations upon which retrievers of Post Reformed orthodox theologians are promoting today. This isn’t simply a matter of choosing this system over that one, so on and so forth. It is a matter of recognizing that in fact the way reality ought to be conceived of, particularly by Christians, is how that is given in God’s Self-revelation and exegesis, as that is provided for in Jesus Christ. This is not an easy task, or for the faint of heart. This whole theological milieu represents a complex; particularly, because terminology is often used equivocally. The OG reformers, and those following, will use language like ‘Trinitarian theology,’ right alongside folks like Barrett et al. And yet, the former are attempting to think this from a principial commitment to a Christ conditioning that cuts across the metaphysics that the latter appeal to; that is in regard to articulating a doctrine of God, in a God-world relation.

[1] Thomas F. Torrance, Theological Science (Oxford/London/New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 65.

The Work of Christ is the Person of Christ: Against Dualistic Classical Theology

When the work of Christ is separated from the person of Christ, all you can be left with are either pure Pelagian or semi-Pelagian doctrines of salvation; as that becomes funded by some functional type of an adoptionistic christology (e.g., Ebionism etc.) This is why TFT refers to the Latin Heresy: he is referring to theologies, Western-Augustinian ones, that ultimately don’t think salvation, as both objectified and subjectivized in the Monarxia of God in the person of Jesus Christ. When this or that individual person is understood as being “elect” of God, based on an arbitrary and hidden decree of God, behind the back of Jesus, all a person can hope for is that they are indeed one of the elect, and hope that their good works (whatever those are supposed to be) are enough to demonstrate to their own hearts, and the hearts of others, that they are indeed one of those elect for whom Christ died. They have zero possibility of subjective self-knowledge of whether or not they are saved, even up until the end (ask William Perkins), because it is “their salvation,” and not God in Christ’s salvation for them. They have no rest, or possibility for actually resting in the finished work of Christ. They live in the shadow of the decretum absolutum (the supposed absolute decree of God’s predestination of certain people to salvation, and others [actively or passively] to eternal reprobation). Skubalon

The Lion-Lamb God versus the God of Classical Theism and orthodoxies

I think part of the problem is that there is a lot of theological insecurity out there, so there is a desire to find stability and safe-haven in a bulwark of theological enterprise that has time and development behind it. The problem with that approach, though, is that time isn’t God. A major aspect of the incarnation of God in Christ is the Revelation that God’s stability is filial and vulnerable. There is a sense of vulnerability and nakedness before God that characterizes God’s relationship with us, and thus ours with Him. Attempting to find repose in the God who isn’t just a Lion, but a Lamb crucified, doesn’t always seem that inviting to those who are pressed here and there by the polemical winds of mass theological confusion out there. So, for some Protestants, Reformed or Lutheran orthodoxy seems inviting, even if the theological proper foundation behind said orthodoxy is philosophically based (Thomist-Aristotelian-Scotist) rather than genuinely biblically based.

But this betrays the supposed formal principle of at least the Reformed iteration of reformational theology: i.e., the Scripture Principle. People can claim that the refuge they’ve found in some form of Protestant orthodoxy is indeed “biblical,” but when in fact the characteristics of said biblicism have been sublimated by an actus purus god, can it really be said any type of sound, biblical stability has been found? It seems to me a sense of history, time, and an ostensible Divine Providence, therein, has become the refuge; more so than the God who has Self-revealed Himself, His character in the cruciform shaped God that He indeed is.

God, Our Father; Not Our Judge: The Judge judged

When God is understood as the unmoved mover, the Great Law-giver in the sky; when God is known to work through decrees, in a God-world relation; when God is understood as a pure being (or pure act actus purus); when God is known to have ad hoc favorites among the massa of humanity; there is no place for disobedience.

The above is to say the following: if God is first understood as the Judge rather than the Father, if He isn’t known as the Judge judged, as the Father of the Son by the Holy Spirit, then all that is left, to understand who is in and who is out, is whether or not a purported Christian follows the Law to a T (in emulation of Christ’s active obedience for the so-called elect). But if God is, indeed, understood to be our Father, as He surely is, according to Scripture; then, there is plenty of room for disobedient children. The Old Testament is replete with examples like this, as is the New Testament. Not that this is the ideal, of course. But if a person’s “assurance” and reality of salvation is contingent upon an outward display of obedience (for all to see); if this is the summum bonum, that is, to be constantly striving to live up to a righteousness that was already out of reach to begin with; then, indeed we are all most to be pitied among men.

My only point with this post is to underscore the fact that the way we think God, in a doctrine of God, has radical consequences towards the way we view the world, and our lives within that world. If I understand my relationship to God to be based, primarily, upon a filial relationship, rather than a forensic one, I will know that no matter what happens He will never leave me or forsake me. The nomists don’t have this understanding of God, and so they are always uncertain on whether or not they are actually going to make it. They can’t run to God as their abba Father, I mean in their piety they will say they can; but in reality, bubbling underneath the whole paradigm, God remains a Monad, a singularity who is pure act. In this frame, these folks, in the background, constantly have this gnawing fear that God, in the end, might decide in all of his arbitrary might, that they weren’t in fact one of the elect; that He had only given them a temporary faith, that appeared real, all their live long days, but in fact was only a temporary faith. These folks won’t have recourse to cry out to God as their dearly beloved Father, they simply can only slump back into the dregs of performance, and hope that God, the Judge, in the end, in fact did die for them in the humanity of Jesus Christ.

To think God, biblically, is to think the following: “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy Name . . ..” This is the basic ground of who God is for us, in His eternal life, as He freely elected to become human in the Son, that we might become sons and daughters in the grace of the hypostatically unioned life that the Man from Nazareth actually is. When God is for us, because God is our Father, as co-heirs with Christ, who can be against us? There is no decree, no artificial covenant (of works/grace), that stands behind the back of Jesus Christ. When we see the Son we see the Father without remainder. Take heart bruised reed, there really is a real hope of life eternal in the God who is our Father of the Son in the bond of the Holy Spirit. Rejoice!