On the Goal of Wokeness: To Destroy

The goal of “wokeness” (which is really Postmodern relativism) is to destroy the idea that there are any stable realities or truth; or Truth, as the case may be. It functions like an acid, that once released, eats away at everything it comes into contact with. It has telos, or purpose, ironically. Rene Descartes, at least in an early modern sense, kicked off this type of corrosive chemical, through his methodological skepticism, most commonly understood in the anecdote cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am). This turns the subject into the self as the ground from whence all of reality must be thought. No longer on the external reality of God’s triune life (a reality that is mind-independent/extramental), but upon the monadic singularity of the human subjects own, idiosyncratic thoughts about reality; whatever those might be. In the end, then, what wokeness really is, biblically construed, is idolatry; it is self-worship, and whatever we project ourselves and our desires upon “out there.” For wokeness it is as if “In the beginning I created the heavens and the earth.” Wokeness is really just a modern, or postmodern expression of the fallen heart (see Gen 3). It is the collapsing of the true and living God, with all that He is in Himself, into each of ourselves individually, and celebrating our supposedly “unique” divine identities that we have come to realize as those who have “come of age.” Sluffing off the mythos and superstitions of the past, and understanding that the past was really just too naive to recognize that who they were describing and thinking as God, was really just a self-projection. This is how we have arrived at the “secular age,” in nuce (see Charles Taylor).

The Particularity and Concreteness of Christ: Against Cultural “Christianities”

A genuine Christianity is not pluriform, it does not have multitudinous realities at its core. It is not a cluster of beliefs that likeminded people rally around. A genuine Christianity—its inner reality—is in fact a person; it is God for us in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. When people exit or walk away from this or that perceived form or expression of the “Christian existence,” they aren’t walking away from Christianity’s inner reality, per se, if in fact they believe that to be exhaustively represented in the form of that, as they have come to experience that, in this or that Christian tradition. In other words, if someone believes, when they walk away from Christianity, that they have done so by walking away from their immediate experience of that, they are sorely in error; and in error, in such a way that it potentially could have, or will have eternal consequences.

There are certainly damaging and erroneous forms or expressions of a self-proclaimed Christianity, but much of those are simply socio-cultural constructs masquerading as THE form of Christianity; at least in the way that it is presented to and received by its adherents. If someone has a personal relationship with the living God in Christ, walking away from Christianity becomes a much different thing than walking away from an experience of a so-called Christianity.

Make sure, if and when you walk away from something, you know what in fact you are walking away from. And just as important, make sure you understand what you are walking into as an alternative.

On Christian Dogmatics versus evangelical-Reformed Apologetical Theology

… dogmatics offers a means of producing a portrait of the economy of grace, and of humankind and its activities in that economy, free from anxieties about foundations and therefore at liberty to devote itself to the descriptive task with Christian alertness, charity and joy.[1]

Christian Dogmatics — the church’s orderly understanding of scripture and articulation of doctrine in the light of Christ and their coherence in him.[2]

If the Church is going to do Church theology, what both Webster and Torrance, respectively, are signaling above, is of the upmost importance to grasp. When Christians do theology, by definition, we aren’t first doing apologetics. That is to say, the Christian, as a disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ, is already assured of their Master’s reality; they aren’t trying to prove His existence and reality prior to speaking about Him. Indeed, the Christian, as Torrance rightly presses, is doing their theological work in ‘light of Christ.’

Too often in evangelical theology (inclusive of Post Reformed orthodox theology) apologetics becomes normative for the rest of the theological task. Following someone like Thomas Aquinas in the Prima Pars of his Summa Theologiae, evangelicals/Reformed get caught in the snare of reassuring their readers that God’s existence is a reality, and that His reality is given credence by the philosophical prolix they offer up through their respective wits and machinations. But as Webster rightly underscores this creates an anxiety, indeed it starts with an anxiety, that ostensibly can only be laid to rest after the respective theologian assuages it with their virtuoso capacity to essentially “speak God” for God; that is before Deus dixit, ‘God has spoken’ for Himself in His living Logos for the world, Jesus Christ.

We are to come boldly to the throne of God’s grace in time of need; this is the genuine Christian way of doing theology. One of moment-by-moment dependence on the Word of God. Waiting expectantly for God to speak, afresh anew, through the vibrant and glorified vocal cords of the risen Christ; the Father’s Son seated next to Him at His Right Hand by the Holy Spirit. The Christian theologian is in a constant dialogue with the living and triune God. They are praying without ceasing, as they encounter the risen and ascended Christ throughout the pages of canonical Scripture. The Christian’s existence, in this way, is one where they are “at liberty to devote itself to the descriptive task with Christian alertness, charity and joy.” Most evangelical theology, whether it be of the scholastic or analytic sort is not done within this type of organic frame of con-versation between God and her people in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. As such there is a failure to make genuine contact with the center of God’s life for the world; and thus, it becomes impossible to have a genuine knowledge of the living God as we don’t go directly to His exegesis for us in the bosom of the Father (cf. Jn 1.18).

Let’s be lively Christians rather than pedantic ones caught up in the web of our own abstract wits. Let’s be concrete theologians who do theology from the wood of the crucified and risen and ascended and coming, Jesus Christ. There is wisdom in this way; that is the way of the cross. There is God’s wisdom in this way, even if others consider this way foolish and weak. Be a theologian of the cross where we are nourished by the broken body and shed blood of Jesus Christ, rather than by empty platitudes by those genuflecting on Mt. Olympus to a god of actus purus (‘pure being’).

[1] John Webster, Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 2003).

[2] Thomas F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ.

Kierkegaard, Confronting the Danish god of Hegel and the god of the Philosophers Writ Large

God is not “a datum or factoid that is best understood with the scrutiny of a scholarly mind.”[1] And yet, enter the fray of theological social media, enter the faculty lounges across many seminaries and divinity schools, or simply attempt to learn of God with more depth by reading theology books unawares (i.e., without critical resource to know otherwise), and you will end up coming up against a notion of God that has nothing do with the God Self-revealed in Jesus Christ. Whether that notion be informed by the scholasticism of Aristotelian or scholastic vintage, or it be of more modern flavors, of the type that Hegel provides; what the would-be thinker and knower of God comes up against is an atheistically impersonalist god (that’s a rip against the critics of a so-called theistic personalist God). This god is either the self-projection of a universalistic self-moved and collectivist mind of the society at large; or, it is the god of the philosophers, writ large, that, in the end simply ends up being a negation of the finity of human being extrapolated out to a prior pure being who stands at the head of all being (namely, in this frame: God). But again, this is not how the Christian has ever known God; that is, the Christian, de jure, only has first come to know God as Son of the Father; they have come to know God evangelically, and/or kerygmatically.

The aforementioned was essentially Kierkegaard’s critique of the God being worshipped in his own Daneland back in the day. A god, by Kierkegaard’s estimation, who had taken shape under the pressures of Hegelian formation. Here is how father and son, Alan and Andrew Torrance, engage with Kierkegaard on this front:

For Kierkegaard, God was not being taken seriously for who God is. When one considers what Abraham was willing to sacrifice, what the martyrs were willing to give up, he thought it was shameful that persons were not willing to sacrifice far more in the name of God. Instead, God was reduced to a concept to be used in service of the so-called progress of society; this was a cultural Christianity’s God, treated as a conceptual postulate by philosophers, a part of Christian doctrine by theologians, and the inaugurator of religious culture by society.

By contrast, how did Kierkegaard view God?

God is the sole bestower of grace. He wants every person (educated up to it through proclamation of the requirement) to turn, each one separately, to him and to receive, each one separately, the indulgence which can be granted to him. But we men have turned the relationship round, robbed or tricked God out of the royal prerogative of grace and then put out a counterfeit grace.

For Kierkegaard, God is first and foremost a personal agent who delivers us from error, who calls us to die to ourselves and be born anew. Humans are called to relate to God as one who cannot be reduced to an object of their speculation—a datum or factoid that is best understood with the scrutiny of a scholarly mind. Instead, faith in God must be characterized by a humble recognition of its inability to command God in the way that a person might develop an intellectual command over worldly phenomena. In sum, what the Hegelian theology of Denmark invited, in Kierkegaard’s less-than-subtle judgment, was (functionally) an “impious, pantheistic, self-worship,” according to which God ends up being worshiped as an object of society’s mind. What had emerged was the disastrous confusion of a worldly vision of progress with Christianity’s development. This happened because society, particularly its “upper” echelons, had become so absorbed in immediacy that it was failing to revere God, allowing God to be worshiped as something akin to the Spirit of the immanent order.[2]

Kierkegaard’s understanding of God, as encountered in the Gospel Hisself, contradicts the folk god, the culturalist god, the nationalist god, the god constructed purely by the immanentist social imaginary wherein God is sublated by “our being” (as the priority) to His. This is the constant temptation of the ‘flesh’: viz., to shape God into our image, instead of us submitting, mortifying, and being transformed into His (who is the Christ).

Not only does Kierkegaard’s critique have infliction towards the modern and the Hegelian, but it also contradicts any notion of godness wherein God is thought of out of the speculations of our own imaginations and abstractions. Either God is cruciform, and thus concrete for us, in shape, or He is not the Christian God. That is the plain and simple of Kierkegaard’s critique, and it is one that I gladly sign onto; and have signed onto for many decades now. May God be true, and every man a liar.

 

[1] Alan J. Torrance and Andrew B. Torrance, Beyond Immanence: The Theological Vision of Kierkegaard and Barth (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2023), 48.

[2] Ibid.

The Miracle of the Gospel against Worldviewism

When we think of ‘worldview’ as an analytic tool, in order to categorize various belief systems worldwide, we often think, as Christians, that we have a spot in that type of indexing. But I am not ultimately a proponent of thinking of the Christian reality in the philosophical terms presupposed for thinking in terms of a worldview. Even so, insofar as this discipline of intellection goes, it can be helpful in at least providing a sense of order in regard to thinking about the various juxtapositions of the various ‘belief systems’ that populate the world, and its peoples. But at the same time, when the Christian gets into the ‘meatier’ things what ought to become evidently clear is that the Christian reality, who is the Christ and the triune God, are incapable of being subject to the sociological strictures used to adjudicate belief systems. The Christian reality gets behind such maneuvers; it is basic to the very fabric of seen and unseen reality; it has no analogues in the created order; it is a miracle of sui generis and novum magnitude.

For the remainder of this article, I want to provide a good word from Karl Barth on the problem that thinking about the Christianity reality, in terms of worldview, presents the Christian with. This type of thinking might contradict dearly held beliefs about the very structure of reality, for some. But I think that what Barth is getting at is, indeed, the most faithful telling the Christian can hear in regard to thinking about both protology and eschatology with reference to their center in Jesus Christ. What will be observed, as I develop this a bit further, is the primordial nature of the Christian reality; such that its reality has no competitors, as if in a dualistic duel.

Robert Dale Dawson writes, with reference to Barth’s theology of the resurrection, and the primal significance and reach such theology has towards Barth’s thinking.

A large number of analyses come up short by dwelling upon the historical question, often falsely construing Barth’s inversion of the order of the historical enterprise and the resurrection of Jesus as an aspect of his historical skepticism. For Barth the resurrection of Jesus is not a datum of the sort to be analyzed and understood, by other data, by means of historical critical science. While a real event within the nexus of space and time the resurrection is also the event of the creation of new time and space. Such an event can only be described as an act of God; that is an otherwise impossible event. The event of the resurrection of Jesus is that of the creation of the conditions of the possibility for all other events, and as such it cannot be accounted for in terms considered appropriate for all other events. This is not the expression of an historical skeptic, but of one who is convinced of the primordiality of the resurrection as the singular history-making, yet history-delimiting, act of God.[1]

Dawson sets us up to read Barth well with reference to the problems that world-view presents its would-be practitioners with. The reader will notice how Dawson’s description of Barth’s thinking of “the primordiality of the resurrection as the singular history-making, yet history-delimiting, act of God” dovetails nicely with Barth’s thoughts in general, with regard to thinking the Evangel in the terms that world-view presupposes.

Barth writes at length:

. . . We conclude this introductory consideration with an observation which in the light of this applies to the Christian doctrine of creation as a whole.

Its theme is the work of God which is characterised by the fact that—because the covenant is its basic purpose and meaning and God in Jesus Christ is the Creator—it is divine benefit. The character of its theme, established in this way, is what distinguishes the Christin doctrine of creation from all the so-called world-views which have emerged or may conceivably emerge in the spheres of mythology, philosophy and science. It differs from all these by the fact that it is based on God’s revelation. But this is not merely a formal difference. It is also material. The Christian doctrine of creation does not merely take its rise from another source. It also arises very differently from all such world-views. It not only has a different origin, but has a different object and pursues a different course. The divine activity which is its object can never become the theme of a world-view.

The truth of this assertion is seen at once from the fact that none of the world-views so far known to us has attained to the concept of creation by following to the end the way from noetics to ontology and genesology, but has usually remained stuck either in noetics or at most in ontology. The philosophical equivalent for the theological idea of divine creation would have us to be at least that of a pure and basic becoming underlying and therefore preceding all perception and being. But the world-views normally take their point of departure within the circle of perception and being, subject and object, and are content to describe it according to the relationships determined by a particular view, the variations and differences, progressions and retrogressions, between the individual systems being so great that on the one hand the universe seems to be more like a great thought, and on the other more like a great machine. In some cases the basic problem of becoming, the question of the whence of the universe, whether it be conceived as thought or machine, is not even noticed but naively ignored. In others it is not overlooked but consciously left open, with a resigned or emphatic assertion of its inherent unanswerability. In others again there may be an attempt to answer it, but only in the form of a geneseologically deepened noetics or ontology, so that it is not really answered but only distorted. For the problem of becoming as opposed to that of knowledge or being is a new and independent problem which cannot be answered by any interpretation of knowledge and being and their mutual relationship. It must be viewed independently if it is to escape the suspicion that it has not really been viewed at all.[2]

The reader might better be informed now, at the very least, as to why Barth rejects the discipline and categorization that world-view offers as an analytic tool; at least in regard to thinking the Christian reality. I am, once again (surprise!), in agreement with Barth on this. His rejection of worldview thinking, of course, fits well with his rejection of natural theology; indeed, his rejection of natural theology naturally (pun intended) leads to a rejection of thinking in terms of worldviews.

When it comes to the evangelistic task (gift), personally, I make use of whatever tools seem necessary for that particular engagement. Speaking in terms of worldviews, initially, might be helpful towards grabbing some sort of intellectual footing among the people we are seeking to reach for Christ. But for me, really, the better way is to go the way of Barth; at least when proclaiming the Gospel to people. People (all of us) need to be confronted with the unapologetic and weightiness of the living God; that’s what a genuine presentation of the Gospel does (and comes with). It is the ‘natural man’ who wants to reason their way to whatever they want to reason themselves to. But the Gospel, and its eternal reality, is not natural. The Gospel is supranatural even as it comes veiled in the natural of the human body. It is in this way, on the analogy of the incarnation, that the Gospel (God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ; for ‘revelation is reconciliation’) is in the world, but not of it. God is genuinely and fully human in Christ, but human in the sense that He is, in Christ, the archetype, the firstborn of creation, humanity (cf. Col 1.15). He is the One for the many. Even this movement itself, its unilateral ingress, ought to show the seeker the Way, the order of God; indeed, the order of the Gospel itself. The order, as Dawson, with reference to Barth, and Barth himself have shown is of a primordial nature vis-à-vis the creation (and re-creation) of the world. There is no “worldview” that can account for that since the world has no view without first being created and re-created ex nihilo, as it were, in and from the resurrection of God in the humanity of Jesus Christ. Worldviewism can attempt to give account for these heights via propositions and generalizations, but the Gospel itself ultimately resists such attempts; the Gospel represents, to use philosophical jargon: the scandal of particularity. The claim of the Gospel is that there is only One living God, and that He is for us, for the world in Jesus Christ. The claim of the Gospel is that Christ alone is the way, the truth, and the life; that is the primordiality of the whole thing. The Gospel, and all of its implications, is the MIRACLE.

[1] Robert Dale Dawson, The Resurrection in Karl Barth (UK/USA: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007), 13.

[2] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/1 §42 The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 335-36.

In Offense to Theological Polemics: With Reference to Calvinism and Jargon

The polemics surrounding the age-old Calvinist-Arminian debate are putrid. I was just involved in such antics, once again, on Twitter. It reminded me, actually of the (now) old theoblogosphere. Much of the blogosphere was populated by the same people who now populate theological Twitter. There is a lot of noise made, but without understanding. As such said debate[s] end up being interminable, and soul-rotting. There is an endless exchange of uninformed, unresearched, and unread jousting that never leads to light, only heat. I have participated, over the decades, in untold exchanges like this. They are never edifying, and always reduce to name-calling.

The Apostle Paul engaged with the pseudo-Apostles in Corinth, and at a certain point, in order to counter them, he went down to their level, and said: if I must speak as a fool, here are my accolades; top that! Did this ultimately shut the pseudos up? No, it probably enflamed them even more. But it made an important point: actual knowledge, experience, and even training do in fact matter; even if such training is not an end, but only an instrument. Even so, it is an instrument to be used for the edification, and not the tearing down of the saints. That’s why Paul was willing to speak as a fool: he had his opponents “beat” at the lowest common denominator; the denominator that his would-be opponents had elevated to the sine-qua-none of their relative chops. Paul was not phased by that, in fact, at that level, “the intellectual chops level,” he had no challengers. But Paul wasn’t compelled by that, he was compelled by the love of Christ.

Paul was so Christ concentrated that he wouldn’t be sidetracked by the pedantics surrounding him. He would engage, for a moment, for a reason, and then keep moving as he was energized by the resurrection power of Christ. He knew what the goal was, and he consummately pressed onward, forward to the high and heavenly goal of the prize and reward in Christ Jesus. I want to imitate Paul as he imitates Christ. There is foolishness, en masse, out there in the interweb. I’m not immune to such foolishness; I’m not “smarter” than said foolishness; I’m not on the outside looking in at the foolishness. I’m just as much a participant as anyone else. But by the Spirit I pray to have some semblance of perspective, even while in the heat of the foolishness. That I have enough Spirit induced wherewithal to repent, afresh anew, from Christ’s repentance for me, and keep moving forward to that final reward of consummate beatific vision.

As an aside though, let me press something I have pressed many times prior: the usage of so-called theological jargon is not inherently wicked. That is to say, that jargon, or precision language, when used contextually and meaningfully, is a help to the task of theological communication. Jargon is pregnant language waiting to be unpacked for various audiences. Jargon is like the handle on a drawer. Those who can recognize what a particular handle opens don’t necessarily need all of its contents exhaustively explicated. But in other audiences maybe they have never even seen the room where the chested drawers are. Maybe they need to become acquainted with the room, before they ever get to the chested drawers, and its various handles. That said, some people actually live in those rooms; they are familiar with its parts; they know what is in each drawer. Being sensitive to audiences is important, indeed. But the internet has a way of equalizing everything, such that the teachers and students look exactly the same. As such, I’ve found, at least in open metas, it is not ideal to try and be a teacher. A person can selectively be a student, if they have the proper critical apparatus in place. But often there is so much unchecked anonymity online that an actual pedagogical environment is not fostered, it is really nowhere to be found. Everybody is an expert online, especially on Twitter.

But this is kind of why I have always operated the way I have, even here at the blog. I used to have other blogs (like actual sites, not posts) where I was attempting to speak and write as a teacher. But that takes a lot of effort, time, and energy, that unless I’m getting paid to do it, I don’t have the wherewithal to in fact do that. Plus, the audiences are all over the place. I have scholars, students, lay people, and everyone in-between reading here. I ultimately, and this years ago, decided to just write the way I process things at an initial or raw level. That is to say, I write, typically, here at the blog in a way that is intended to help ME learn. I understand I am writing for the “public,” but I don’t actually let that curtail the way I am engaging with whatever topic or theologian that I am. So, I do have the jargon in my posts; but the jargon is used contextually, and in a way that makes sense to me (usually). If I had more time and energy, I would like to break things down further; actually, open the drawers and talk about its contents in more detailed and accessible ways. And sometimes I think I achieve that, even here at the blog. But if I do, it isn’t necessarily intentional. I’m typically trying to break things down in a way that make sense to me. Hopefully, in so doing, they, over time, begin to make sense to others as well.

Anyway, just some streamy thinking on polemics, jargon, and rationale, once again, with reference to the philosophy of my blogging. I’m really no longer interested in jousting within the never-ending Calvinist-Arminian debates (but that doesn’t mean I won’t use that debate as a springboard to go deeper with it, and behind it). I genuinely seek to be Christ concentrated in all that I do. Even if I get sidetracked, I always seek to get back on the Christ concentrated road, all the way to glory. And I’m sure the jargon will continue in my posts, but hopefully in such a way that will challenge others to expand their own lexicons, and learn along with me as I write.

The Absence of God and the Rejection of the Self-Projected God: A Word to the Atheists and Theologians Alike

I happen to believe this. So, what do I happen to believe, you ask? That atheists, when they say they reject God, aren’t rejecting the living God because they can’t without first knowing God; and they can’t first know the living and real God without the Spirit; and if they had the Spirit they would be a Christian; but since they don’t have the Spirit they aren’t Christians; and thus have no capacity to reject the real God. They instead only have the capacity to reject a god who is really just a projection of themselves; no matter how many Christians they are surrounded by. Even if they can intellectually “know” about the God Christians claim to know, they themselves cannot make this claim since the Spirit is required to know this God; to have eyes to see and ears to hear His voice. Since they are not this capacious, they may well be atheists; but they are atheists only insofar that they are rejecting the gods that the philosophers and they themselves have projected. If my premise seems tautologous, it is; but only insofar as God is the beginning and end of the circle. Barth agrees with me when he writes:

The God whose existence or manifestness they doubt or deny is not God at all. And so too His absence, as they think they should assert it, is not God’s absence at all. In order to be aware of God’s absence they would first of all have to know God and therefore God’s revelation. All general intellectual difficulties and impossibilities respecting knowledge of so-called supernatural things assert nothing at all in face of the negation of all other knowability of God which is achieved by God’s revelation itself. God does not belong to those supernatural things which may be believed and asserted to-day, doubted and denied to-morrow. And so, the difficulties and impossibilities respecting knowledge of these things, which the sceptic and atheist fancy they should take so very seriously, have nothing whatever to do with the hiddenness of God for man or man’s blindness for God. The seriousness of the fact that God is not free for us, not to be possessed, first begins with the revelation which delimits this fact, yet also illumines and confirms it in its factuality.[1]

This has tacit relationship to Anselm’s fides quarens intellectum (‘faith seeking understanding’), but is also a bit distinct. Barth’s point here is more publically critical than that. It is more in line with Ludwig Feuerbach’s critique of cultural religionists who worship a god of their own self-projection; it is a constructively critical appropriation of that line of thought.

This has impact on a variety of things, one of which is the way we as Christians engage with non-Christians. As an evangelist it makes me think I shouldn’t be in the business of proving God’s existence to atheists or agnostics, but instead simply proclaiming the Gospel to them which is the power of God. Indeed, this sort of anti-natural-theological/law thinking kicks against the North American evangelical sub-culture in some stinging ways. But then, on the positive side, in the same sub-culture there is this sort of emphasis on simply proclaiming the Gospel to whoever will hear, and allow the seed to fall where it will.

Barth’s critique does indeed have implication towards the way the Christian theologian does their theologizing; no doubt. It is a matter of where the theologian starts their theologizing. Thomas Torrance and Barth were of a piece when it comes to this, even if the way they emphasized certain things made them sound a little different one from another when it comes to a natural theology. Nonetheless, they both are theologians of the analogia fidei or analogy of faith tradition; the tradition that grounds knowledge of God in God Revealed and then given to and for us in the vicarious humanity of Christ in and through the faith of Christ which is the basis for our knowledge of God. We can also pick up entailments of Calvin’s ‘faith as knowledge of God’ in both Barth and Torrance in this instance. These are important things that continue to run over the heads of many theologians in the current evangelical climate. They simply go on their merry-way, and act as if such things really don’t matter; they continue to engage in a textus receptus way of theology, wherein they simply see themselves as inheritors of a by-gone Protestant theology that represents, for them, the only genuine way to be an orthodox, conservative, evangelical theologian. But they are wrong. And more significantly, what is of ultimate import, beyond figuring out if we are in line with an ad hoc conception of who the orthodox are or aren’t, is to simply be focused on doing theology that is most proximate to the Gospel reality itself. In other words, who cares, ultimately, what the genetics are; the Gospel itself is the only genealogy that really matters.

Anyway, atheists, theologians, and all of us ought to be wary of thinking we can have a genuine knowledge of God apart from the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. We ought to start everything from that point or not start at all.

 

[1] Barth, CD I/1 §13, 28.

Full Preterism, Partial Preterism, Gary DeMar, and Various Heresies

If you’re on theological Twitter you will have noticed an uptick in discussion surrounding a doctrine known as preterism. Gary DeMar, a thought leader who has always been on the fringe of the fringe of Theonomic (or reconstructionist) Postmillennial theology has apparently ‘converted’ to a heresy known as full preterism (which the kids nowadays are calling: ‘hyper-preterism’). This has caused some stirrings in the minority report of theonomic Christianity, and thus I thought I would highlight it once more. I originally wrote the following post in September 2013; it details and defines the basic differences between full and partial preterism. I offer further reflection on my post, as you’ll see (this isn’t the first time I’ve reposted this one). When I originally posted the following I was still progressive dispensational, premillennial, pre-tribulational with reference to my biblical eschatology. As you will see I identify how I developed further beyond the writing of this original post. Let’s read:

Briefly, I will provide a quick survey of Preterism (Latin=praeter, meaning beyond or past), and its inherent hermeneutical/theological problem. There are two camps within this particular belief system, either full preterist or partial preterist.

A “full preterist” believes, in relationship to the second coming of Christ that in fact it has already happened. They believe that Christ already came, when Rome destroyed Jerusalem in 70 A.D. They see this judgment, as the fulfillment of the resurrection prophesied by Jesus. Note Kim Riddlebarger’s analysis here:

. . . full preterists teach that the resurrection—which, they say, is not bodily but spiritual—has already occurred. To teach, as full preterists do, that Christ has already returned and that the resurrection occurred in A.D. 70 at the time of the destruction of Jerusalem is heresy, according to the apostle Paul.[1]

As noted above, the full preterist position is heretical because it undercuts the blatant scriptural teaching that the general resurrection will be bodily not spiritual (cf. II Tim. 2:17-18). But there is a variant teaching, that does not cross the threshold of heresy, it is an adaptation of “full preterism” known as “partial preterism.”

Partial preterism, contrarily, does not believe that the “resurrection” or second coming happened at 70 A.D.; although they do believe that Christ did “judge” Jerusalem at the 70 A.D. date. They believe that this judgment signified the end of the “Jewish Age”, and concurrently inaugurated the “age to come.” Note Riddlebarger:

Partial preterists, however, do not believe that the second coming and the resurrection occurred in A.D. 70, although they do believe Jesus did come back in judgment on Israel (a parousia), to bring about the end of the Jewish age (this age) and to usher in the age to come. According to many partial preterists, this view resolves the tension found throughout the New Testament between those texts which teach that Jesus and his apostles expected our Lord to return within the lifetimes of the apostles then living and again at the end of time when Jesus will return to judge the world, raise the dead, and make all things new.[2]

The interpretive problem this poses is one of positing a position that presupposes two returns of Christ (one local and one universal). The scriptures nowhere teach a local/universal two time return of Christ—only one return (cf. Acts 1:10-11; Heb. 9:27-28). The preterist position (full or partial) is an untenable position to forward, at least in its relationship to the clearer teaching of scripture (analogia fidei).

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As you can see at the end, I critique partial preterism as well, and I did so from my Dispy Premillennial perspective. I am willing to concede that there are some partial preterist elements going on especially as noted in the Olivet Discourse (cf. Mt. 24), and aspects of the book of Revelation (but I’d rather label what I hold as historist in a denotative way, and not in the connotative way that developed among the Calvinian Reformed and Lutherans who saw Roman Catholicism and the papacy as fulfilling the role of the Beast and the anti-Christ; I see the Roman Empire, in the context and historical situation of the book and theology of Revelation, as typifying the ‘kind’ of Beastly power that is characteristic of ages and peoples who are opposed to the purposes of God … I think even literarily this correlates well with a motif and theology of Babylon throughout scripture’s usage).

As far as Full Preterism, as I said, quite strongly, I see it as a full orbed heresy; why? Because it, by definition denies the bodily resurrection of all believers from all ages. According to scripture this transformation (Phil. 3.20-21) will happen when the last trumpet sounds, the dead in Christ will rise first, prior to those living at the time of Christ’s second coming (I Thess. 4 etc.); all of which will happen in a twinkling of an eye (I Cor. 15.) It contradicts the clear teaching of scripture and the angelical declaration that Christ will return in like manner; in like manner to his ascension, which was bodily. Acts 1.9-11 says,

⁹ After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight. ¹⁰ They were looking intently up into the sky as he was going, when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them. ¹¹ “Men of Galilee,” they said, “why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.”

This requires no argument, it is straightforward; Jesus will return just as he left, bodily, and visibly; not secretly or platonically spiritually. There are theological points associated with this, especially by the book of Revelation; but those points aren’t necessary to undercut the aberrant teaching that Jesus will not return bodily (of course how ‘bodily’ is understood for some varies; some hold to the ubiquity of Christ’s body, for example, but even this view must account for the particularity of Christ’s body as understood in context found in Acts 1) and a second time (as the epistle to the Hebrews also refers to more than once).

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Okay I’m back to 03-19-2023 😉. I find full preterism, not to mention theonomy in the main, to be so fringe and abstract that I don’t think about it that much these days. But when it rears its head for the younger generation’s consumption I feel compelled to rise up and speak a few words as a counter-voice. Let me also say this in critique of partial preterism (which can be ‘orthodox’): the primary problem with a full-throated partial preterism is that it is supersessionist, or believes that the Church has supplanted or ‘replaced’ ethnic Israel as the people of God. Superessionism is just as heretical as full preterism insofar that it believes God’s physical and spiritual promises made to the nation of Israel have been abrogated (they’d say fulfilled) by the generation of the Church. But this is antiChrist. Jesus will always be the Jew, the Man from Nazareth, Son of David. Orthodox theology cannot affirm a supersessionism and remain orthodox vis-à-vis the prima facie teaching and witness of Holy Scripture. Jesus is God’s Israel, as such the nation of Israel isn’t superseded by God’s economy in Christ, but brought to fruition. We might say the ‘purpose,’ the mediation of the nation of Israel was made whole, that it was expanded to include the promises made to Abraham (see Rom 4), and the patriarchs: i.e., that he and they would be the father[s] of many nations (see Gen 12; Jer 31; Ez 36 etc.). Again, remembering that Jesus will always be the Jew from Nazareth (the scandal of particularity is the scandal of the incarnation of God and the cross, both for the Jew and Greek).

With all of the above noted: Gary DeMar and his followers need to repent of affirming the heresy of full preterism. Full-throated partial preterists need to repent of supersessionism. And we must all affirm as catholic Christians:

I believe in God, the Father almighty,
creator of heaven and earth.

I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit
and born of the virgin Mary.
He suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried;
he descended to hell.
The third day he rose again from the dead.
He ascended to heaven
and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty.
From there he will come to judge the living and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic [universal] church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting. Amen.

 

[1] Kim Riddlebarger, A Case For Amillennialism: Understanding The End Times, 239.

[2] Ibid., 239-40.

Balaam’s Ass and Ludwig Feuerbach: Critiquing the Idol-God

Ludwig Feuerbach, a German philosopher (if his name didn’t give it away), offered a critique of religion, particularly the Christian religion, that ought to have weight as we self-criticize our own understanding of God. Karl Barth took Feuerbach’s critique to heart as he saw in it a critique of natural theology. Here is a key passage from Feuerbach that synopsizes his critique:

Religion, at least the Christian, is the relation of man to himself, or more correctly to his own nature (i.e., his subjective nature); but a relation of it, viewed as a nature apart from his own. The divine being is nothing else than the human being, or, rather, the human nature purified, freed from the limits of the individual man, made objective—i.e., contemplated and revered as another, a distinct being. All the attributes of the divine nature are, therefore, attributes of the human nature.[1]

For Feuerbach God is simply a self-projection of the inner-man. Ironically, what people like Feuerbach et al. are doing is simply living out the metanarrative of Genesis 3, and the original serpentine lie. That we can be like, or construct God or gods.

But here’s where this becomes relevant, particularly for Christians in the main. Insofar that Christians attempt to imbibe the culture, even if in the name of Jesus, they end up, like the culture at large, under the influence of someone like Feuerbach; self-projecting a notion of God who confirms them in their inner-desires. In other words, they are living the life of an idolater, even in the name of Jesus Christ (which is the actual way the LORD’s name is taken in vain). Further, when people abandon the Christian faith it is because they recognize or ‘feel’ (subconsciously) that the God they have been worshipping is no longer needed, since He already affirms all of their wants or desires anyway; or, because the God they are presented with comes from the self-projections of the philosophers, and thus cannot actually live up to what the Gospel claims to be as the power of God.

Barth was right to appropriate Feuerbach, since all Feuerbach was doing, from his materialistic vantage point, was confronting the idolatry of the human heart. If God can speak through Balaam’s ass, He can speak through Ludwig Feuerbach.

[1] Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), 14.

The Christian God is without Proof

“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

No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him. -John 1:18

For I would have you know, brethren, that the gospel which was preached by me is not according to man. ¹² For I neither received it from man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ. -Galatians 1:11-12

¹⁶ For we did not follow cleverly devised tales when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of His majesty. ¹⁷ For when He received honor and glory from God the Father, such an utterance as this was made to Him by the Majestic Glory, “This is My beloved Son with whom I am well-pleased”— ¹⁸ and we ourselves heard this utterance made from heaven when we were with Him on the holy mountain. -II Peter 1:16-18

The theme of the above passages ought to be apparent: the Christian God is absolutely a revealed God. Knowledge of the Christian God is not grounded in speculation, as we get from the philosophers about the actus purus (‘pure being’). The Christian God, particularly as we encounter Him in the burning book, the Bible, just is. In Holy Scripture Deus dixit (‘God has spoken’), and because He has first spoken, those with eyes to see and ears to hear, have a God who just shows up, and thus we have someone to respond to. We aren’t reliant on an active intuition, or an active intellect in our knowledge of God; we don’t epistemically precede Him only to come to know His ontology as a matter of self-discovery; we don’t speculate like Thomas Aquinas does in his Prima Pars with reference to proving God’s existence five different times. No, we are fully reliant upon the God who simply shows up without explanation; He speaks and does, and thus we have a God to respond to; a God who is allowed to explain who He is for us and with us. Like Job, we simply sit there in our pain and squalor and are confronted with the God who just shows up without explanation. This becomes the Christian’s way, and mode of existence all the days of their lives; viz. we wait on God to speak, and we respond to His speaking by the Spirit in Christ. Eberhard Jüngel captures the sentiment this way:

Regardless of this logical problem, however, Christian theology cannot ask the isolated question about the existence of God. For Christian theology is the explanation of what faith sees itself to be. So it presupposes faith in God and, of course, the existence of God. That is what distinguishes it from philosophy. Schleiermacher was right in demanding that dogmatics match the Scripture and the symbolical books, which ‘do not prove but simply assert’ the existence of God. ‘Dogmatics must therefore presuppose intuitive certainty or faith; and thus, as far as the God-consciousness in general is concerned, what it has to do is not to effect its recognition but to explicate its content.’ The faith which is presupposed by dogmatics is, however, by definition faith in God, revealed in Jesus Christ and revealed as a gracious God.[1]

This kicks against many an apologetic and theological effort to find God in the vestiges of the created order. But if the Christian is going to have a genuinely Christian notion of God it will wait and listen to God as He comes to us afresh anew over and again in the face of His dearly beloved Son, Jesus Christ. This runs counter to the analytically and scholastically minded, whether antique or modern. Nevertheless, this always already is how the genuinely Christian God has been known; that is, through His Self-exegesis in Jesus Christ. Any other attempts at knowledge of the Christian God will necessarily flounder and end up with syntheses that present us with a Feuerbacherian god of self-projection, no matter how hallowed its traditions are.

The industrial theological complex is bent on proving God’s existence as the preamble to their theologizing. It is determined to affirm a natural law, and natural theology wherein its centripetal movement is shaped by its own machinations and genius to think God abstract from God, and then name this abstraction the Christian God after the theologians and philosophers of religion have had adequate time to synthesize this abstraction with the God they finally get to in Holy Scripture. This is not the way, and it should be repented of post-haste.

[1] Eberhard Jüngel, Justification: The Heart of the Christian Faith (UK/USA: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2001), 46.