The Eternal Submission of the Son: John ‘the Baptist’ Webster Calls Her Proponents to Repentance

Wayne Grudem, Bruce Ware, Owen Strachan et al. are all proponents of what is called Eternal Functional Subordination (EFS) or Eternal Submission of the Son (ESS) in regard to the Son’s relation to the Father. They claim to get this idea from biblical exegesis. But what is clear is that they actually get it from reading a prior socio-anthropological commitment into the Bible, as they see it, in support of their hard complementarianism as that relates to male-female relationships (particularly in the marriage bond). At a theological level, because they want to further bolster their socio-anthropological perspective, what they end up doing is conflating the economic reality of God’s triune life (ad extra) with God’s so called immanent life (ad intra); thus conflating processions and origin of relation with God’s missions as that is revealed in salvation-history. The result of this conflation (of collapsing the immanent into the economic tout court) is that the Son is eternally subordinate to the Father, in the ESS view, and the result is that we end up with some form of subordinationist theology proper; whether that be akin to something like Arianism or Monarchianism or Tri-theism (pick your poison).

In contradistinction from the ESS proponents, and in line with orthodox and historic teaching (meaning with reference to the ecumenical church councils and the Trinitarian as well as the Christological grammar produced) John Webster offers some prudential counsel on why we should reject the ESS position and call it what it is: heresy (he doesn’t use this word, but I infer it from his lengthy treatment of this topic of which the following is only one point of many). Here is Webster speaking directly to the eternal generation of the Son, and how that precisely does not support any sort of eternal subordination of the Son to the Father but in point of fact actually grounds the missions of the God-head without collapsing or conflating the processions into the missions in absolute terms (i.e. it honors archetypal and ectypal knowledge of God).

No subordination of the Son is entailed by his generation by the Father. There is certainly active and passive in their relation: the Father begets, the Son does not, but has his personal subsistence by virtue of the Father’s act. But the passive generation attributed to the Son, his being generated, is no less an ontological perfection than the Father’s active generation. Once again, generation and consubstantiality support each other.

At a relatively straightforward level, generation does not involve the Father’s temporal priority over the Son, because eternal generation is not temporal beginning. Begetting is ‘above all “when” or ‘beyond the sphere of time’. The Son is from but not after the Father. But this opens into a larger point about the Son’s perfect deity. In being generated by the Father, Hilary tells us, the Son retains ‘the fullness of that Godhead from which and in which he was born as true and infinite and perfect God’. This extends a point made earlier, namely that the relation unbegotten:begotten is of a different order from the relation creator:creature, since begetting is not making. The extension consists in denying the identity of being unbegotten with the divine essence. Gregory of Nazianzen pushes the point against opponents who claim that ‘if the Son is the same as the Father in respect of essence, then if the Father is unbegotten, the Son must be so likewise’. ‘Quite so’, he says, ‘if the essence of God consists in being unbegotten’. But it does not: ‘Unbegotten is not a synonym of God’. Unbegottenness is in fact the personal characteristic of the Father, not a property of the common divine essence; and so the Son’s being begotten does not exclude him from deity.

Using a slightly different idiom, Aquinas argues that to speak of the Father as principle (principium) is not to think of him as superordinate over the other two persons for principle means ‘not priority but simply origin’. This means that it is proper to speak of the unregenerate Father as ‘a principle not from a principle’, and of the Son as ‘a principle from a principle’ by virtue of his generation, without disturbing the eternal co-equality of Father and Son. In the terminology of post-Reformation divinity, the Son is still autotheos. He is this, not in respect of his person (which he has from the Father) but in respect of the common aseity which he has as a sharer in the one divine essence. The Father is a se in his person (as the principium of the triune life); the Son is a se only in his divine essence. ‘The Son is God from himself although not the Son from himself.’

In terms of trinitarian doctrine, this affirmation that begottenness is a divine perfection offers protection against what Tom Weinandy has called ‘emanationist sequentialism’: origin and order in the triune life are not a matter of ‘priority, precedence and sequence’. There is a proper reciprocity between Father and Son, in which the Father’s personal character as Father is confirmed and glorified by the Son. Certainly, the Father is a nemine, from no one; but he is not solitary, for he is the eternal Father of the eternal Son, and so ‘the Father is glorified through the Son when men recognise that he is Father of a Son so divine.’ In Christological terms, it reinforces the core conviction of Nicaea, that the ‘ek’ in ‘God from God, light from light, true God from true God’ does not alienate the Son from the life of God, and that the Son’s coming down from heaven is truly the presence of the perfect God.[1]

In light of such sustained consideration one wonders how the evangelical contingent of ESS or EFS proponents can continue to live life unrepentant. I don’t expect them to repent, even if they were to read such eloquent consideration of such a beautiful doctrine as we find in the eternal generation of the Son in his utter begotteness. The unfortunate thing is that the evangelical’s commitment to constructing cultural idols (complementarianism, egalitarianism, etc.) is allowed to shape the conclusions of their biblical exegetical projects; which then makes their projects eisegetical. This is unfortunate because such voices have large places in the broader mainstream of the evangelical churches across North America and beyond.

You might be wondering why this ultimately matters. Because Christians are people of the truth, and we want to make sure the God we worship is the God Self-revealed in Jesus Christ (i.e. working out the inner-logical reality of that as far as we can) rather than one constructed upon social or other whims that end up hybridizing him thus turning him into a human projection rather than the God of God who he is for us.

I think many of these EFS proponents think they have out-lasted the social media or blog cycle, as far as attention span. Nope, some of us are still watching; we see you, and continue to call you to repentance. You are living in doctrinal sin, and thus have a root of theological sinfulness fomenting your life and ministries to and for others; and even for yourselves. We are still watching, and my five-hundred readers will continue to be made aware of your intentional sinfulness when it comes to this most important doctrinal consideration. So I say again: Repent!

[1] John Webster, God Without Measure: Working Papers In Christian Theology: Volume 1 God And The Works Of God (London-New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015), Loc 839, 848, 857, 866 kindle version.

Not All Modern Theology Fits the Socinian Mode Contra Post Reformed orthodox Impulses

In some ways I think the following represents the battle that Protestant orthodox, so called, see themselves in. There isn’t a one-for-one correspondence, per se, between the combatants, but I think the corollary, by way of ethos, is present enough in order for the historical battle between the Socinians and the orthodox to provide the sort of role-playing that I think many orthodox see themselves in as they battle modern theology (developments occurring primarily in the 18^th and 19^th centuries and how those have been taken up by the mainliners et al following) currently. You might wonder what I am referring to. Let me quote something from Richard Muller and then follow with some concluding thoughts.

The problem of antitrinitarian exegesis was, certainly, the most overtly intense of the issues faced by the Reformers and their successors, given the Protestant emphasis on the priority of the biblical norm. For the various antitrinitarians consistently rejected tradition in the name of their own exegesis of Scripture. In addition, in the seventeenth century, there was a partial coincidence, given the textual problems of such texts as 1 John 5:7 and 1 Timothy 3:16, between the Socinian position and the views of various text-critical scholars. The orthodox found themselves in the very difficult position of arguing a traditional view of the Trinity against an antitrinitarian exegesis that appeared, in a few instances, to represent the results of text criticism and, in a few other instances, to represent a literal exegesis of text over against an older allegorism or typological reading — at the same time that, in many of its readings, it appeared to be a contorted and rationalizing attempt to undermine not only the traditional but also the basic literal sense of the text. This latter characteristic of Socinian exegesis cut in two directions: on the one hand, it could be presented, as was typical of the Socinian argumentation, as on a par with the text-critical results used in the Socinian reading of other passages, giving warrant to the antitrinitarian reading at least by association; on the other hand, it could be seen as an excessive result of the newer hermeneutical approaches, creating and otherwise unwarranted suspicion of certain kinds of textual criticism on the part of the orthodox. In either case, the orthodox task of building the primary justification of the doctrine of the Trinity on exegesis was made more difficult.

There were, therefore, three basic issues to follow in the discussion of the trinitarian thought of the Reformers and the Reformed orthodox — namely, the careful use of a well-defined patristic vocabulary, increasingly tuned to the particular needs and issues of Reformed thought, the intense battle over the exegetical ground of the doctrine in both testaments in view of the biblicistic assault on the doctrine from the Socinians and other antitrinitarians, and the struggle to find a suitable set of philosophical categories for the understanding and explanation of the doctrinal result, given the alteration or at least the fluidity of the conception of substance. At the heart of these lay the exegetical issue, given the Reformation emphasis on the priority of Scripture over all other norms of doctrine and alteration of patterns of interpretation away from the patristic and medieval patterns that had initially yielded the doctrine of the Trinity and given it a vocabulary consistent with traditional philosophical usage.[1]

Unfortunately for those in the current iteration of Post Reformed orthodoxy (and its softer evangelical corollaries) they often flatten modern theology out to the point that it ALL ends up falling prey to playing the Socinian and other antitrinitarian role. Much of what is called ‘theology of retrieval’, done by Post Reformed orthodox practitioners is an attempt to correct and even rebuke the purported ills brought upon the evangelical churches by the advent and development of modern theological categories. Note John Webster on theologies of retrieval (who I respect, but take some issue with in regard to the sort of negative hue he gives modern theology [which he knows very well given his many years with Barth and Jüngel]):

For such theologies, immersion in the texts and habits of thought of earlier (especially pre-modern) theology opens up a wide view of the object of Christian theological reflection, setting before its contemporary practitioners descriptions of the faith unharnessed by current anxieties, and enabling a certain liberty in relation to the present. With this in mind, we begin by considering the study of history as a diagnostic to identify what are taken to be misdirections in modern theology, and then the deployment of history as a resource to overcome them.[2]

Are there certain theologians in the modern period that might fit the Socinian mode? Yes! But not all and this is the rub. Obviously, for me, Karl Barth and Thomas Torrance represent modern theologians who not only critically and constructively engaged with the deep past, but they also were beneficiaries of some of the important movements of thought we find developed in the modern period as well. In short: not all modern theology can be or should be relegated to the Socinian mode of the Post Reformed orthodox period; but this seems to be a general characteristic in regard to the way many ensconced in this camp approach those of us who recognize that modern theology is not in fact only something that needs to be ‘overcome.’

 

[1] Richard A. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: Volume Four: The Triunity of God (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2003), 62.

[2] John Webster, “Theologies of Retrieval,” in The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology, edited by John Webster, Kathryn Tanner, and Iain Torrance (Oxford/NY: Oxford University Press, 2007), 585.

Thinking About God’s Aseity Alongside John Webster: And Its Impact on Mental Health

Divine aseity as a doctrine and reality has helped me almost more than any other theological locus I can think of. That might seem strange given my apparent predisposition towards kataphatic theology, or theology based solely on God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ. But it is this white-hot purifying reality that seemingly God himself has brought me back to over and over again. When the Lord really got a depth hold on me say back in 1995ish (moving me beyond my childhood faith—which was real), he used reality and existence as his means. I became hyper aware, even fixated upon reality and unreality, to the point that it caused me anxiety of the sort I would rather never repeat again. But the reality is is that he learned me into his reality, the reality that all other perceived and physically observable reality pales compared to his real reality. It is the childish idea of getting fixated on the thought that God always just has existed; with no external cause or source, he just is. I say childish because this idea operates under the assumption that God is of a sort—qualitatively—that fits into the created class; as if if we could burrow deep enough we’d finally come to some sort of ‘beginning’ for God. This is childish; we ought to move into meatier ideas about God. Aseity offers a meaty way to think God, but not comprehend him nor circumscribe him with our own powers; aseity simply identifies a reality about God—from his gracious Self-revelation—that recognizes our inability to surmise such a being. This is a purifying reality.

In order to gain better traction on what Divine aseity entails let’s hear from a theologian who I would call a theologian of Divine aseity, the late John Webster. In the following he describes and defines for us the entailments of God’s aseity. I’ll follow with some further reflection based upon Webster’s insights:

Second, it indicates that God’s originality and fullness constitute the ground of his self-communication. He is the one who, out of nothing other than his own self-sufficiency, brings creatures into being, sustains and reconciles them, and brings them to perfection in fellowship with himself. A theology of God’s aseity is an indication of the one who is and acts thus, who is the object of the church’s knowledge, love and fear, and whose praise is the church’s chief employment.

The concept of aseity tries to indicate God’s identity; it is not a definition of God but a gesture towards God’s objective and self-expressive being. The task of the concept is not to establish conditions for conceivability but rather to have rational dealings with the God who is, and is self-communicative, anterior to rational work on our part. God is objective and expressive being, presenting himself to us and making himself perceptible, intelligible and nameable (this is part of the meaning of ‘revelation’). Consequently, in theology aseity is a positive or material concept, determined by the particular form of God’s self-expressive perfection. Its content is grasped as regenerate intelligence, prompted by divine instruction, considers God absolutely and relatively, in his inner being and his outer works. Because of this, theology will not over-invest in whatever generic sense may be attached to the concept of aseity (or of any of the other divine attributes). This, not because of intellectual sectarianism, a desire to segregate theological use in an absolute way from all other speech about deity – after all, aseity, like nearly all Christian theological concepts, is a borrowed term with a wider currency. Rather, theology is simply concerned to ensure that its talk of aseity concentrates on that which is proper to this one.[1]

Do you see how as a limiting doctrine, insofar as it recognizes the type of capacities we have as creatures to think God, this might have a purifying impact? It places the Christian supplicant up against the mighty reality of God. Personally as I ponder this reality the created order gains a proper order; maybe not in a fully spelled out sense, but in the sense that the whole world, as Isaiah notes, is nothing more than a ‘drop in a bucket’ before God. Living in the reality of God’s aseity takes the pressure off of me to perform and sustain, and places that burden on the shoulders it should be placed. Aseity recognizes that God is God and I am not, and it’s a relief. Aseity contradicts the original lie of Genesis 3; a lie that has placed untold burden on humanity, a burden that makes it seem like each individual human being must assert its own inner-divinity. Aseity takes that away from the creature and recognizes that God alone is big enough to bear the burdens of holding the world together; even our own worlds that seemingly fall apart the moment we wake up each day.

For the Christian aseity does not suggest a nebulous reality greater than can be conceived; instead aseity is particularized in the God-man for us, Jesus Christ (thinking about how the Deus absconditus is Deus revelatus – the ‘hidden God’ is the ‘revealed God’). In other words, aseity, for the Christian comes to us in personal terms. The Son introduces us to the Father by the Holy Spirit and we enter into his reality by grace becoming participants and partakers of the divine nature wherein recognition of just who this God, our God is. He truly is. It is this personal reality that makes thinking aseity possible; in other words, God’s Self-revelation sets the conditions for coming to recognition that God just is. Just is in the sense that he just is without explanation; he’s just there, and he’s said he’s just there for us—and he said this in such a way that his self-sufficiency in his inexplicability is the basis upon which he has freely chosen to be for us apart from needing us to be who he is for and with us.

An aside. Like I noted above, I struggled with serious anxiety and depression for many years; much of that had to do with precisely this issue: the issue of reality and existence. When we can start to live and move in the reality of God’s aseity, in the face of Jesus Christ, so many of the pressures we place upon ourselves simply melt away. I would suggest that much of what our culture popularly and even academically identifies as mental-illness in the 21^st century context is a result of the human condition and its inner-impulse and propulsion to be God without having the a se resource to actually pull such a feat off. Coming to the brink of my own beginning and end by living in the recognition that God, who has no beginning or end, becomes the strong shelter, the everlasting arms I constantly flee to to find refuge. When I can come to that place, as the prophets speak of, that I am just silent before this God who just is, it is here that the shalom of God comes to be experienced. I am not suggesting that mental and other issues are magically ‘cured’ by coming to live in the realization of God’s a se life, but I am suggesting that without this recognition the conditions for personal liberation and healing (in a genuinely theological proper way) will not be present.

 

[1] John Webster, God Without Measure: Working Papers In Christian Theology: Volume 1 God And The Works Of God (London-New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015), Loc 283, 290, 296 kindle version.

God is God, the Basis of Theology: Taking Away Lament and Polemic as Places to Do Theology From {According to John Webster}

I want to offer a quick quote from the late John Webster on how two loci, according to Webster, ought to function (or not) in the practice of systematic theology; I think this has application for living the Christian life in general (which would make sense since for the Christian to live the Christian life is engaging in theology from moment to moment conscious or subconscious). In the context Webster is speaking to the domain or ‘sphere’ wherein theology ought to have voice; he believes it ought to have a public character, indeed as it is the discipline of self-criticizing what it means to live in and from the Gospel. In other words, if theology is the necessary corollary of living in and from the Gospel, and if the Gospel itself is God’s demonstration of love that he is for the whole world and not against it, then theology itself will have a public character to it; insofar as the universal application can be derived from its particular scandalization in and from the God-man, Jesus Christ.

The two loci that Webster lifts up for some constructive criticism, as that has to do with the ‘doing of theology’ are: Lament and Polemic. You’ll notice that Webster sees a healthy place for both of these in theological discourse, but what he warns against is an unhealthy absolutization of either; he warns of their corrosive nature if not held in the proper valence.

A critique of this conception of systematic theology would most properly be undertaken, not in prolegomena, but in the course of material dogmatic exposition, and cannot be pursued at this point. But it worth remarking that the contrariety of the conception of systematic theology explored in what follows ought not to be allowed to generate an enduring posture of lament for a lost dogmatic culture. Lament is fitting on some occasions, but as a permanent attitude it can do damage, breeding intellectual vices such as vanity or pessimism, inhibiting a clear-sighted  view of the situation and drawing theology away from its contemplative vocation. Likewise, polemic arrests and coarsens the mind when allowed to become habitual. What should hold lament and polemic in check is a gospel-derived awareness of the necessary pathos which attends theological work, the roots of which lie in the fact that the world is at enmity with the church and is reluctant to learn about the divine wisdom with which the saints have been entrusted. Yet even a due sense of pathos ought not to overwhelm the tranquil pursuit of theology, made possible and fruitful, not by the capacities of its practitioners or the opportunities afforded by its cultural settings, but by the infinite power of divine goodness shedding  abroad the knowledge of itself. That movement, in its boundless depth and its capacity to overcome the mind’s estrangement from its creator, constitutes the principles of systematic theology.[1]

For Webster theology, by way of order (taxis) has a soteriological location; but prior to that locus is God. If so, in the complex of a holy God confronting an unholy world, and an unholy world attempting to confront a holy God, a theological-valence will occur wherein the giver of life himself succeeds in communicating himself to such a world such that the world can finally come to hear him as he invades its sinful and putrid state recreating space for it to hear his Word just as it is confronted by it (or Him!). Within this setting Webster is calling for sobriety when we might want to tend towards lamenting the apparent loss that the in-roads of theological discourse might be having in the world (i.e. from a pragmatic point of view), or by doubling down into a posture of attack and polemic against an unbelieving world; both postures that are resultants of a desperation that in the light of God, and who he is by way of being and capacity, and who he has become for us in Jesus Christ, should not be. Can there be moments of lament, and moments of polemic when occasions call for such? Yes. But these should not be allowed to become our existential warp and woof as we live our lives in and from the theological grist of God’s reality for us in Christ.

What I take away from this most is that God is God and we are not. We should not lament nor polemicize when God does not require such in his economy of overcoming and reversing the way things might appear to us. So theology, if God is God and we are not, ought to be done from a posture of ‘walking by faith not sight.’ We ought to trust, as Christians, that God is not challenged by the puny sub-capacious ways of this world; God does not need us, we need him, whether we are able or willing to recognize this or not. I fear that the church, particularly certain sectors, and the sub-cultures they foster and construct, live in just the opposite direction of this. If we do theology as if God is God, then it will take on a proper orientation and character. The questions asked will be of the right order and not produced by an inconsolable lament about how things should be, but aren’t; or a by a militant polemic to forcibly make things the way we think they should be, but aren’t. Because God is God theology has an order and reality to it that is not contingent upon us, but instead one that makes us contingent upon it; the reality.

 

[1] John Webster, The Domain of the Word: Scripture and Theological Reason (London: T&T Clark International, 2012), 135.

‘Thy Word is Truth, Sanctify Them by Thy Word’: Reading Scripture Theologically Rather than as Nature Lovers

My last post has highlighted what it looks like when a hermeneutic isn’t explicitly or intentionally related to a genuinely Christian reading of Holy Scripture. The results of engaging in biblical interpretation in this way allows for an un-tetheredness from the reality of the text of Scripture which allows the interpreter to impose whatever their chosen flavor of hermeneutic or philosophy might be (i.e. something like a reader response approach to Scripture wherein cultural fluctuations, and personal predispositions determine the way the text is read and understood).

In contrast to this John Webster offers an alternative (and historical) treatment and ontology of Holy Scripture wherein Scripture’s theological reality—the reality of the triune life as revealed in Christ—is given the regulative power it ought to have for Christians. You will note, starting a reading and reception of Scripture this way recognizes from the get go that the Bible comes couched within its own explicitly framed confessional position wherein Christ and the God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are the ‘domain’ wherein Scripture finds its orientation and thus meaning. In other words, to approach Scripture this way is to do so with the full recognition that we as Christians are determined to be, as a people, by the inner depth reality of Scripture itself. What this does is to give the keys (i.e. the authority) to the reality of Scripture to the Giver of Scripture; it is to recognize that Scripture is a work of God and that God’s work cannot, and shan’t not, be torn asunder from the person of God’s life in Christ. As such when we read Scripture it is not an epistemological source-bed wherein an unentangled unSpirit filled person can simply enter in and read off a series of historical facts (or myths, whatever the case might be); no, to approach Scripture this way, through its Self-determined reality vis-à-vis God in Christ, means that the reader is entangled in the telos of Scripture; is enmeshed in an interpenetrative way with the reality of Scripture, such that Scripture, its reality, is reading us more than we are reading ‘it.’ This is why John Webster places Scripture in the realm not only of soteriology, but more pointedly in the frame of sanctification (Jn 17.17). Scripture isn’t ‘open’ to whatever mode, whatever way we want to fashion it; nein, Holy Scripture, is, for the Christian, the holy ground wherein the Christian engages in a dialogue with the living voice of God afresh and anew, and in that process is transformed from glory to glory (cf. II Cor. 3.18).

Stephen Fowl summarizes some of this for us as he offers a sketch of Webster’s theology of Scripture. Fowl writes, particularly engaging with Webster’s thought on how Scripture came to be read naturalistically rather than theologically:

This recognition becomes difficult to square with a doctrine of revelation if that doctrine is divorced from its subsidiary role in relation to the doctrine of God. As Webster argues, just such a divorce occurred in the history of modern theology. Rather than a doctrinal assertion related to God’s triune identity, theologians came to think of revelation as an epistemological category requiring philosophical rather than theological justification. “Understood in this dogmatically minimalistic way, language about revelation became a way of talking, not about the life-giving and loving presence of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ in the Spirit’s power among the worshipping and witnessing assembly, but instead of an arcane process of causality whereby persons acquire knowledge through opaque, non-natural operations.” Once one moves in this direction it becomes easier to understand why some attempts to defend the divine nature of Scripture tend to focus their attention on establishing either the incorruptibility of the text or the benign nature of the processes by which the texts of Scripture come to us. The most extreme manifestation of this concern is found in those theories or doctrines of Scripture that require some form of divine dictation where the human authors of Scripture simply record the words the Spirit speaks to them.[1]

In other words, when philosophical epistemology becomes the warp and woof of a theological conceiving of a doctrine of Scripture, what is produced is some form or some emphasis upon the quality of Scripture itself (as an end in itself); i.e. inerrancy. What is lost in this endeavor is a proper focus on Scripture’s ontology; in other words, Scripture’s character and ‘place’ is lost when we fail to see it within the domain of God’s life in Christ, by way of its ordering, and instead we place it as a cipher between ourselves and God. Scripture in this case, when understood as an epistemological source, becomes an artifice of social analogizing rather than the holy ground that it actually is vis-à-vis God as its giver and speaker. Do you see the problem? God becomes the tail and we the dog who wags the tail; Scripture’s place is displaced to the point that it is contingent upon whatever philosophical program we want to impose upon it; whatever pet theological paradigm or hermeneutic we want to bring to it to enhance or degrade its inerrant properties. This should not be so.

Let us close with a quote from Webster that clarifies all of this that much more closely:

First, the reader is to be envisaged as within the hermeneutical situation as we have been attempting to portray it, not as transcending it or making it merely an object of will. The reader is an actor within a larger web of event and activities, supreme among which is God’s act in which God speaks God’s Word through the text of the Bible to the people of God, as he instructs them and teaches them in the way they should go. As a participant in this historical process, the reader is spoken to in the text. This speaking, and the hearing which it promotes, occurs as part of the drama which encloses human life in its totality, including human acts of reading and understanding: the drama of sin and its overcoming. Reading the Bible is an event in this history. It is therefore moral and spiritual and not merely cognitive or representational activity. Readers read, of course: figure things out as best they can, construe the text and its genre, try to discern its intentions whether professed or implied, place it historically and culturally — all this is what happens when the Bible is read also. But as this happens, there also happens the history of salvation; each reading act is also bound up within the dynamic of idolatry, repentance and resolute turning from sin which takes place when God’s Word addresses humanity. And it is this dynamic which is definitive of the Christian reader of the Bible.[2]

This represents the type of approach we will take if we read Scripture as it ought to be read; viz. theologically.

 

[1] Stephen E. Fowl, Theological Interpretation of Scripture (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2009), 8 kindle.

[2] John Webster, “Hermeneutics in Modern Theology: Some Doctrinal Reflections,” Scottish Journal of Theology, 336.

How the Inner Life of God gives Structure, Depth, and Purpose to Creation in the Triune Economy of His Life for the Other

I like how John Webster relates a discussion about the inner (immanent) and outer life (economic) of God as Triune, as a kind of telic means for grasping how we conceive of creation itself—and all its contingent and creaturely realities as they find their ontic orientation in and from the ground of all reality in God’s life as Creator as He upholds it all by His sustaining Word—in such a way that creation has depth beyond itself as it is situated in and from the economic life of God and His gracious action upon the surface of the earth. With such understanding we can imagine a Trinitarian structure to creation’s orientation, as creation’s contingency away from God (in her independent integrity), once again, over and again only has resource for understanding her depth as she looks towards God[1]; the non-contingent reality who breathes life into her moment by moment. Webster writes:

How may this economy be described more closely? (1) The divine economy is grounded in the immanent perfection of the Holy Trinity. God’s dealings with creatures, in which he makes possible for them to know and love him, are a second, derivative reality. In more directly dogmatic language, the economy is the field of the divine missions: the Father’s sending of the Son and the Spirit to gather creatures into fellowship with himself and to uphold them on their way to completion. But this outpouring of love in the divine missions is the external face of the inner divine processions, that is, of the perfect internal relations of the triune persons, the fountain from which the external works of God flow. The opera Dei externae are suspended from the opera Dei ad intra. The importance of this is not simply that it respects the divine aseity, and safeguards the distinction of uncreated and created being. It is also that, by grounding the economy in the inner life of God, it indicates that the creation has depth. Creation is not simply contingent temporal surface, arbitrary action. It has a willed shape; it assumes its form under the pressure of the divine intention, and is maintained by unbounded divine benevolence. And so creatures and their acts – including textual and intellectual acts – are referred back to the anterior reality of God, a reference in which alone their substance and continuing operation are secured.[2]

Here we have an occurrence of thinking in a Rahnerian key of the economic is the immanent, but spoken of in such a way that we clearly avoid any worries about entering panentheistic territory; but more importantly, we have a better way of thinking about how the eternally Triune life of God gives creation depth and order in and from the order that co-inheres between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And further, how in the economy, as God’s gracious movement towards the other, the world gains a gravitas that is charged with all the wisdom and bounty of God’s overflowing life of love.

[1] I have taken this thinking of ‘contingency away from God and towards God’ from T.F. Torrance in his book Divine and Contingent Order.

[2] John Webster, The Domain of the Word: Scripture and Theological Reason (London/NY: T&T Clark International, 2012), 117.

*repost. originally posted on October 17, 2017.

Against Being ‘Curious’: In the Augustinian and Websterian Mood, A Pastoral Reflection and Exhortation

I am not going to say much, other than that this helps me. I am a sinner, and I still sin, frequently in fact. The only difference between me and the world is that I am a saved sinner (simultaneously justified and sinner); nevertheless, I still think in ways that terminate nowhere else but in the self, and by absolutizing material reality in a way that never gets back to material reality’s origin. Like the world I think foolishly (at points), and like ancient Israel, I have my high places. So what helps me, and maybe it will help you too, is Webster’s discussion of the vice of curiosity. Here is what he has written:

Curiosity involves the direction of intellectual powers to new knowledge of created realities without reference to their creator. In curiosity, the movement of the mind terminates on corporeal properties of things newly known, without completing its full course by coming to rest in the divine reality which is their principle. In effect, curiosity stops short at created signs, lingering too long over them and not allowing them to steer intelligence to the creator. So Augustine against the Manichees:

Some people, neglecting virtue and ignorant of what God is, and of the majesty of the nature which remains always the same, think that they are engaged in an important business when searching with the greatest inquisitiveness and eagerness into this material mass which we call the world … The soul … which purposes to keep itself chaste for God must refrain from the desire of vain knowledge like this. For the desire usually produces delusion, so that the soul thinks that nothing exists but what is material.

Curiosity, Augustine says elsewhere, is ‘eating earth’, penetrating deep and dark places which are still time-bound and earthly. Or again, in another idiom, curiosity is the ‘lust of the eyes’ (1 Jn 2.16), so called, Augustine says, because its origin lies in our ‘appetite for learning’, and ‘the sight is the chief of our senses in the acquisition of knowledge’. It is that ‘vain and curious longing in the soul’ which, ‘cloaked under the name of knowledge and learning’ is in reality a greed for ‘new experiences through the flesh’, a disordered ‘passion for experimenting and knowledge’ – flocking to see a lacerated corpse, attending a theatrical spectacle, letting contemplation be distracted by watching a lizard catch flies. Curiosity terminates on surfaces.[1] 

I fall into the trap of curiosity more than I would like to admit! But I seek, by the Spirit, to live a life of (as Torrance would say) ‘repentant thinking’. Living a life that moves and breathes from the Spirit’s breath, the breath that animates the humanity of Jesus Christ for us. There is a depth dimension to Christianity and this life that most Christians will never experience in this life (and I am not supposing that the alternative is an elitist gnostic kind of Christianity!), because we are too curious and not contemplative and critical enough in our daily walks with Christ. As James writes “¹⁴ but each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed. ¹⁵ Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.” Curiosity is the desire that terminates in sin and death. We so often give into this curiosity, and hardly ever do the hard work of actual Christian contemplation. We go the way of the world, we are just too curious.

 

[1] John Webster, The Domain of the Word (London and New York: T&T Clark A Continuum Imprint, 2012), 196.

*I originally posted this May 3, 2013.

How the Inner Life of God gives Structure, Depth, and Purpose to Creation in the Triune Economy of His Life for the Other

I like how John Webster relates a discussion about the inner (immanent) and outer life (economic) of God as Triune, as a kind of telic means for grasping how we conceive of creation itself—and all its contingent and creaturely realities as they find their ontic orientation in and from the ground of all reality in God’s life as Creator as He upholds it all by His sustaining Word—in such a way that creation has depth beyond itself as it is situated in and from the economic life of God and His gracious action upon the surface of the earth. With such understanding we can imagine a Trinitarian structure to creation’s orientation, as creation’s contingency away from God (in her independent integrity), once again, over and again only has resource for understanding her depth as she looks towards God[1]; the non-contingent reality who breathes life into her moment by moment. Webster writes:

How may this economy be described more closely? (1) The divine economy is grounded in the immanent perfection of the Holy Trinity. God’s dealings with creatures, in which he makes possible for them to know and love him, are a second, derivative reality. In more directly dogmatic language, the economy is the field of the divine missions: the Father’s sending of the Son and the Spirit to gather creatures into fellowship with himself and to uphold them on their way to completion. But this outpouring of love in the divine missions is the external face of the inner divine processions, that is, of the perfect internal relations of the triune persons, the fountain from which the external works of God flow. The opera Dei externae are suspended from the opera Dei ad intra. The importance of this is not simply that it respects the divine aseity, and safeguards the distinction of uncreated and created being. It is also that, by grounding the economy in the inner life of God, it indicates that the creation has depth. Creation is not simply contingent temporal surface, arbitrary action. It has a willed shape; it assumes its form under the pressure of the divine intention, and is maintained by unbounded divine benevolence. And so creatures and their acts – including textual and intellectual acts – are referred back to the anterior reality of God, a reference in which alone their substance and continuing operation are secured.[2]

Here we have an occurrence of thinking in a Rahnerian key of the economic is the immanent, but spoken of in such a way that we clearly avoid any worries about entering panentheistic territory; but more importantly, we have a better way of thinking about how the eternally Triune life of God gives creation depth and order in and from the order that co-inheres between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And further, how in the economy, as God’s gracious movement towards the other, the world gains a gravitas that is charged with all the wisdom and bounty of God’s overflowing life of love.

[1] I have taken this thinking of ‘contingency away from God and towards God’ from T.F. Torrance in his book Divine and Contingent Order.

[2] John Webster, The Domain of the Word: Scripture and Theological Reason (London/NY: T&T Clark International, 2012), 117.

What Does Holiness Have to Do With Theological Reflection and Epistemology?

The author to the Hebrews writes this: “¹⁴ Make every effort to live in peace with everyone and to be holy; without holiness no one will see the Lord.” We might want to read this as a purely eschatological reality, but even in the context it is clear that it is a present admonition. It is an eschatological reality, of course, as that breaks in on us from the eschaton of God’s Triune life; but its experienced reality is one that comes through walking in a submitted and repentant life of obedience and faith in God in Christ. In other words, and this is something I once argued back in a talk I once gave in the past, if we want to genuinely behold God in Christ, holiness is required. The Good News, of course, is that this has been provided for in Jesus Christ; as we participate in and from his life for us which is seated at the right hand of the Father, we indeed behold God; we experience tastes of beatific vision now. This, I think, is a basic aspect for accomplishing the theological task for all Christians; that we think God from the holiness that his life provides for us. This is where a genuine theological epistemology is grounded for the Christian, mediated for us in and through the set-apart life and vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ for us. But without living in a submitted life, one of ongoing repentance before God (a theme so important for TF Torrance’s theology i.e. repentant thinking), this truly hampers (or potentially negates) the work of the theologian; both personally and collectively for the church.

There are geniuses among us; it’s possible to construct genius sounding theological constructs, and to produce materially rich sounding theological grammars. But one must ask: At what point is genius doing the work, and at what point is actual engagement with the holy living God taking place? This is a question I will be contemplating for years to come. Is it possible to be living in constant unrepentant sin, and at the same time be thinking with and from the holy Triune-life of God?

The following is a post I wrote some years ago, but it touches on the issue of holiness and Christian theological reflection. I thought I would share it again as a kind of kick off for me in regard to contemplating the relationship of holiness to theological reflection and epistemology.

Theology is a practice in knowing God with all that we are. While this can only remain a provisional, as the old school would say ectypal endeavor it is something we have been called to as Christians set apart unto God in Jesus Christ. But it is also important to remember that theology is not something that we have initiated, that seminaries and post-doctoral programs have invented. God is the one who initiates true theology; He in himself is the true Theologian as Augustine has said: “God alone is a theologian, and we are truly his disciples.” And so genuine Christian theology starts from God, and our knowledge is contingent upon His graciousness to invite us unto His banqueting table and participate in the meal of holy fellowship that He alone can freely provide for, which He has in His Son, Jesus Christ, God with us.

What viewing theology like this does is that it orients things properly; it takes the keys away from the rationalist who believes that their mind is prior to God’s Self-revelation and action, and it places theological reflection, again, in the domain of God’s holy Word for us, provided for in the election and Incarnation of God (Deus incarnatus), in Jesus Christ. We by nature have unholy thoughts; we by nature are removed from God; we by nature cannot recognize that God has spoken (Deus dixit); we by nature would not approach God even if we could, and if we could we couldn’t because to approach God is to come before Him on holy ground. Moses presented himself before God at the burning bush, only because God condescended and presented Himself, first, to Moses; and in this presentation He initiated the invite to Moses, to come before Him. Modern theological thinking tends to forget this. With the continuing influences of Cartesianism (cogito ergo sum ‘I think therefore I am’), Lockeanism, Kantianism, Schleiermacherianism, etc. we tend to forget that we cannot approach God unless He invites us. The good news is that He has invited us to know Him, to speak with Him, to love and cherish Him, but only on His terms; and His terms or term, is Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the holy ground upon which and through whom we have access to God. It is through the broken body of Jesus Christ that the veil between the holy of holies and the outer part of the temple has been torn through. As such, all of our arrogant unholy pretentions about how we conceive of God are contradicted by how God has invited us to think of Him through His personal Self-revelation and exegesis in His Son, Immanuel, Jesus Christ. We come to Him on His predetermined terms not our terms; if we want to come on our terms and name those terms “Jesus Christ” or the “Holy Trinity” we will unfortunately only be worshipping our own self-projections of who we think God is based upon our own self-generated machinations. John Webster clarifies further:

Once again, therefore, we find ourselves running up against the contradictory character of theology as an exercise of holy reason. One of the grand myths of modernity has been that the operations of reason are a sphere from which God’s presence can be banished, where the mind is, as it were, safe from divine intrusion. To that myth, Christian theology is a standing rebuke. As holy reason at work, Christian theology can never escape from the sober realization that we talk in the terrifying presence of God from whom we cannot flee (Ps. 139.7). In Christian theology, the matter of our discourse is not someone absent, someone whom we have managed to exclude from our own intellectual self-presence. When we begin to talk theologically about the holiness of God, we soon enough discover that the tables have been reversed; it is no longer we who summon God before our minds to make him a matter for clever discourse, but the opposite: the holy God shows himself and summons us before him to give account of our thinking. That summons – and not any constellation of cultural, intellectual or political conditions – is the determinative context of holy reason. There are other contexts, of course, other determinations and constraints in the intellectual work of theology: theology is human work in human history. But those determinations and constraints are all subordinate to, and relativized by, the governing claim of the holy God, a claim which is of all things most fearful but also of all things most full of promise.[1]

Christian theology is an enterprise initiated and ingressed by God. When we attempt to talk about God, we must first recognize the fact that ‘God has spoken’ (Deus dixit) first, and that He continues to speak everyday in the same way that He has always freely chosen to speak for us, to us, and with us through Jesus Christ. We are always on holy ground when we speak of God, who alone is wise, immortal, invisible who alone dwells in unapproachable light. I fear that we forget this very often. I fear that we have gotten too comfortable talking about God and the things of God as if He hasn’t first invited us to speak of Him and with Him on His terms. I fear we have domesticated God to the point that when we speak of God we might not really be speaking of Him at all, but instead from a place, a divine spark, as it were, in our minds that we believe has access to God based upon some other terms than those He has given for us through Jesus Christ. It is a holy endeavor to speak of God, but only as we speak from within the domain He has provided for that to happen from does this holiness truly pervade anything we might think we have to say of Him. If the ground and grammar of our theological discourse is not from God in Christ in a principial way, then it is a fearful thing.

[1] John Webster, Holiness (Grand Rapids, Michigan/Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2003), Loc. 157, 162, 167 Kindle.

Miscellanies on How I See Myself as a “Conservative” Traditional Christian Thinker

Let me try and nuance a delicate issue. I say ‘delicate’ because if I’m not careful this could come off sounding arrogant. I mean I’m nobody special, I’m just little Bobby Grow (well I’m actually 6’ 3’’), shooting off blog posts from my little corner of the world in the Pacific Northwest; but I still like to stop and think about where I’m at on the continuum of Christian theological identity. So that’s what this post will be about. I will talk, briefly, about where I see myself lining up relative to other Christian thinkers out there, and fortify that a bit with a quote from John Webster on how holiness and theology work together.

Many people, I’m sure, think I’m a liberal simply because I like some of Karl Barth’s theological motifs and themes. Of course, once some of these same people find out that I am even more enamored with Thomas Torrance their perspective on me softens a bit, I think. I grew up as a Conservative Baptist evangelical; attended evangelical institutions of lower and higher learning; and continue to largely inhabit the evangelical sub-culture in North America. So I see myself as a strange brew in some ways. When it comes right down to it though my traditional ways are still very much present. I mean politically my alignment has definitely moved; not towards Democrat from Republican. More like from conservative Republican to agnostic in regard to any political party or agenda; and actually I’m pretty antagonistic towards most political agendas these days, whether that be the “right” or “left.” But this again works against me in some ways; since so much of my sub-culture, i.e. evangelicalism, has conflated itself with the agenda of conservative Republicanism, many of these folks will probably still see me as a liberal. But of course my stance on what “conservatives” think makes them conservative and evangelical are probably right there with them; i.e. I’m against abortion, same-sex marriage (or homosexuality in general—and when I say against, I mean in the way the church and the traditional reading of Scripture has been against this—I’m not against these people, I see them as sinners just like the rest of us); but then I’m more pro-life and at this point, meaning anti-war, and interested in non-violence (as an ethos at least) than many of them.

But the above is just the political stuff. When it comes to theology I’m still quite trad, but conditioned from a more Torrancean and John Websterian direction. When it comes to Scripture I hold to the infallibility of Holy Scripture (meaning I don’t think inerrancy is a good way to frame a doctrine of Scripture — so I believe more about Scripture, and its aims, not less than what inerrancy will allow for). I believe the tradition of the church is something that is very important in regard to developing a biblical hermeneutic (meaning I think we should be all about retrieving the voices of the past in the history of the church in order to resource them for the present to help us approach Scripture in sober and humble ways). I believe in all the basic doctrines covered in the Apostle’s Creed (and other important ecumenical creeds such as Nicaea, Constantinople, Chalcedon, et al.). I’m no theological liberal; I just want to clear that up right now. I read Karl Barth as an evangelical Christian (thinking of evangelical in its historic understanding), and not as a social or theological liberal. And I think Thomas Torrance and John Webster offer some of the best ways into the theology of Karl Barth in order to engage with his theology constructively. I’m a reader of and learner from John Calvin, Martin Luther, the Patristic theologians, and a host of other important and orthodox teachers from the past.

Most importantly I believe that the task of theology is one where it should be done from a posture of doxology (worship) and the realization that theology is really a matter of sanctification; i.e. of pressing further and further into the holiness of God’s Triune life. To help me explicate this point, let me refer us to John Webster:

Once again, therefore, we find ourselves running up against the contradictory character of theology as an exercise of holy reason. One of the grand myths of modernity has been that the operations of reason are a sphere from which God’s presence can be banished, where the mind is, as it were, safe from divine intrusion. To that myth, Christian theology is a standing rebuke. As holy reason at work, Christian theology can never escape from the sober realization that we talk in the terrifying presence of God from whom we cannot flee (Ps. 139.7). In Christian theology, the matter of our discourse is not someone absent, someone whom we have managed to exclude from our own intellectual self-presence. When we begin to talk theologically about the holiness of God, we soon enough discover that the tables have been reversed; it is no longer we who summon God before our minds to make him a matter for clever discourse, but the opposite: the holy God shows himself and summons us before him to give account of our thinking. That summons – and not any constellation of cultural, intellectual or political conditions – is the determinative context of holy reason. There are other contexts, of course, other determinations and constraints in the intellectual work of theology: theology is human work in human history. But those determinations and constraints are all subordinate to, and relativized by, the governing claim of the holy God, a claim which is of all things most fearful but also of all things most full of promise.[1]

As usual, Webster articulates what I’m really after here in the cogent and prescient way that he is known for. The reason I still see myself as a traditional, even conservative Christian thinker (and dare I say, theologian) is because I, along with Webster, think that what it means to do theology properly is from the realization that that only happens as the holy God, and his life works on me, as I participate in and from his life through Jesus Christ. At the end of the day I think this is what makes a Christian theologian conservative and even traditional; I think the best of the theologians in the history of the church had this reverent posture before God. It doesn’t mean they were always right, but it does mean that they always deferred to God; that they approached his written Word in ministerial rather than magisterial ways; and they always saw their life under God rather than over God. This is the approach I still strive for, and I think it’s the approach that many liberals and non-traditionalists mock. So be it.

Well, in this rather off the cuff post hopefully I have communicated something that is intelligible. I rambled quite a bit (what else are blog posts good for?), but hopefully you’re catching the drift of my heart. And if you’re not what I would consider a “conservative” or traditional thinker, at least in the ways I think of that, why not give it a try? I think the trad way, when properly understood, meaning Christologically radicalized (there’s the Torrance influence!), is the richest of ways to do and think theology; it’s theology not just for self-edification, but for the edification of the church of Jesus Christ. These are the theologians the church needs; it doesn’t need theologians who point people away from Jesus, but radically to him—and to the Father and Holy Spirit.

[1] John Webster, Holiness (Grand Rapids, Michigan/Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2003), Loc. 157, 162, 167 Kindle.