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The Glory of Kings: A Festschrift for James B. Jordan
Fyodor Dostoevsky
(Christian Encounters Series)
Athanasius
(Foundations of Theological Exegesis and Christian Spirituality)
The Four: A Survey of the Gospels
Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom
From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John
Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture
1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary
The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter
A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons
Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature
Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen
The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism
A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel
From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution
Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy
Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper
A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament
Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature
Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays
Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life
The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church
Nyssa: “Do you see the circle of glory among those who are alike? The Son is glorified by the Spirit; the Father is glorified by the Son; again the Son has his glory from the Father and the only-begotten thus becomes the glory of the Spirit. For with what shall the Father be glorified but with the true glory of the Son, and with what shall the Son be glorified but with the majesty of the Spirit.”
Anatolios glosses this with: “The human glorification of God is not merely an acknowledgement of the intrinsic worth of the divine being but rather a participation in the self-glorifying being of the Trinity. Christian worship is thus a matter of being included within ‘the circle’ of the mutual glorification of Father, Son, and Spirit.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, December 22, 2011 at 4:06 pm
During the fourth century, the church had in an intense debate about the nature of the Son who became flesh. Does the Father choose to create a Son, as Arius believed? Or is having a Son essential to the Father’s very existence as God?
These debates seem tedious and irrelevant. Can anyone really know? Does it really matter? It mattered to the church fathers. They believed the entire Christian faith hinged on getting this right. Unless they got this right, they lost the gospel.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Sunday, December 18, 2011 at 7:10 am
Anatolios sums up a wonderful exposition of Nyssa’s epistemology with this: “The distinctive character of Gregory’s epistemology . . . lies not so much in delimiting the extent of information that can be gleaned by the mind (he insists there is no limit) as in locating the act of knowledge radically within the movement of receptivity and wonder. . . . Authentic and understanding contact with reality accepts its own irreducible stance of receptivity with regard to the always prior self-presenting dynamism of the being that is known. Instead of claiming to supercede or overreach that dynamism, the one who seeks to know stretches herself out toward the unfathomable depths of the active source of a being’s self-presenting dynamism of power. . . . The crucial distinction is that between a comprehensive knowledge in which the mind masters its object and the doxological knowledge enacted in worship. The former claims to enclose the known object by the mind’s grasp; the latter seeks to stretch out (epekteino) into the infinitely open expanse of divine glory.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, December 17, 2011 at 12:48 pm
Anatolios is careful not to claim that Nyssa is “fashionably postmodern,” but by characterizing Eunomius’s viewpoint as “logocentric” he acknowledges some “irresistible, if fragmentary parallels” between Nyssa and postmodern sensibilities about the signifying of signs.
For Eunomius, the signifier “Unbegotten” “really makes present the divine essence.” Gregory responds by denying that we can gain “such a simple, commanding grasp of an essence,” whether we are seeking to know God or other people or ourselves: “the act of knowing is not an act of comprehension in the sense of enclosing a reality with teh pwoers of the mind.”
In place of Zeno’s notion that comprehension is “a hand closed tightly over an object that it grasps,” Gregory proposes more mobile, temoporal, dynamic: “knowing for Gregory is more dynamically conceived as ‘approaching’ or ‘traveling’ in the path projected by the object of knowledge. . . . Gregory’s crucial metaphor for knowing is ‘journey.’” Abraham is the model knower, whose quest leads him “upward from sensible things to the divine infinity.”
I don’t like the “upward mobility” image, but the notion of knowledge as a journey is exactly right, especially insofar as it privileges the knowledge that comes at the destination, i.e., insofar as it is an eschatological epistemology. (Like – I can’t help saying – Derrida’s!)
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, December 17, 2011 at 12:30 pm
Anatolios summarizes the soteriological consequences of the modalist-leaning theology of Marcellus of Ancyra this way: “Marcellus’s doctrine of God depicts divine being as a monologue – God is singular, monas; in his own being, he is silent; in relation to creation, he utters his Word. . . . Jesus Christ, as the human incarnation of the Word, encompasses that dialogue in his own being. But since, for Marcellus, dialogue is not internal to God, neither can Jesus Christ, as a dialogical being in his divine-humanity, be wholly reintegrated into divine life. Rather, in the end as in the beginning, God’s life will again be simply a monologue. The dialogue of the union of humanity and divinity in Jesus Christ must once again be resolved into the monologue of divine life.”
Anatolios is right to emphasize that this shows that “the deep structure of trinitarian faith involves grounding the God-world difference in an intra-divine difference – not merely as a postulate of abstract metaphysical calculations but as the indispensable basis of the christological narrative and its soteriological import.”
And there are other, fairly massive implications:
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, December 17, 2011 at 11:37 am
Anatolios argues that one of the differences between theologians of the unity of will like Arius (Father begets Son by will) and theologians of the unity of being like Alexander and Athanasius (Son is of the Father’s very being) is the location of mystery. Arius located the apophatic limit in the Unbegotten “Father” himself. Alexander, by contrast, said that Son was equally incomprehensible with the Father.
But more intriguingly, the mystery is not located in the Father and Son separately, but in the ineffable reality of their relationship, of the eternal begetting and being begotten. This relation is simultaneously, however, the point of access for knowledge of the Father, since then Father is known in the Son: “Knowledge of God is thus in the first place a transaction between the Father and the Son, and the mystery of God is identified with that relationship itself rather than exclusively with the Unbegotten. Positive access to the knowledge of God is coincidental with access to the mutuality of that relation, which in turn is predicated upon a correct confession of the true nature of that mutuality.”
One of the implications of this relocation is that the mystery of God is less to do with “metaphysics” and instead is located in the relationships of the Persons. What is incomprehensible about God is not merely or mainly His transcendence but His love: The mystery of God is the mystery of the world, which is the mystery of love. Mix in Heidegger’s “Why is there something?” question, add a dollop of Augustinian pneumatology, and we’re on to something.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, December 17, 2011 at 11:03 am
Anatiolios offers this explanation of Athanasius’ defense of homoousios: “the meaning of the Nicene homoousios is contained in its function as a guide to a certain way of reading Scripture. An immediate hermeneutical consequence of this principle is that efforts to understand this term primarily by recourse to secular usages of ousia and cognate terms are misguided. Neither the council fathers of Nicea nor Athanasius himself were working with any determinate technical sense of ousia or homoousios. Moreover, they were not attempting to signify the divine essence by directly invoking an objective reference, whether the being of God or some creaturely analogue. The meaning of homoousios thus resides not in its inherent capacity to invoke an objective referent of its own, but rather in its assigned function of regulating how scriptural language as a whole refers to God and Christ.” The word does “successfully refer to God,” but it does so because it “regulates the reference of the whole nexus of scriptural paradeigmata in the direction of the radical ontological correlativity of Father and Son.”
Anatiolios is exactly right about Athanasius, and comments, as he recognizes, raise some important methodological questions: “Do the scriptural patterns of naming Christ and the scriptural way of telling the story of Christ equally permit two rival interpretations, so that endorsing one and rejecting the other amounts to a heteronomous determination of the meaning of Scripture?” Is Scripture ambiguous, a wax nose, that actually does leave open the question of the Son’s ontological status? Athanasius answers No: “He argues that the Nicene homoousios provides the only correct interpretation of scriptural language . . . . The regulation of scriptural language provided by the homoousios arises from within scriptural language and narrative considered as a whole – not from without.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, November 30, 2011 at 2:42 pm
Khaled Anatolios points out in his Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine
Athanasius is challenging the “framework of debate” that contrasts “trinitarian conceptions of unity of being versus those of unity of will.” He and his opponents both accept that creation is a result of God’s will, but Athanasius presses the point: “if the Son is the agent of the divine willing of creation, he must be integral to divine being in order for this willing to be properly owned by the divine being.” The sovereignty of God’s will, in short, is only properly affirmed Trinitarianly: God’s sovereignty as Creator “is ultimately only affirmed by recognizing the Son’s sharing in divine being.”
Question: Have Calvinists always recognized this?
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, November 30, 2011 at 2:23 pm
Jesus says, “I am the arche and telos” (Revelation 21:6). ”Beginning and end” is too colorless, too geometric. Jesus is not the two points at either end of a line segment.
Better to render this more “dynamically” and “organically” (forgive the hurrah words): Origin and destination; initiative and completion; source and goal; plan and execution, planner and overseer; starting block and winner’s prize; dawn and dusk; blueprint and building; call and dismissal; etc.
Jesus is not the ever-receding beginning, or the ever-approaching end, but both source and goal together, not just economically but ontologically. At a stroke, this proves Jenson right.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, October 27, 2011 at 4:12 am
My friend, Ralph Smith, has published several excellent books on the Trinity (Paradox and Truth: Rethinking Van Til on the Trinity
He makes his case first by examining a handful of explicit Father-son passages in Deuteronomy (1:31; 8:5; 14:1-2; 32:5-6, 18-20). More cleverly, he examines two sets of allusions that run through the entire book.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, October 14, 2011 at 2:53 pm
When Panikkar writes, “neither the name Father nor the name God is the proper name of the Absolute. They are simply the names by which we designate him. . . . independently of us, in himself and for himself, what is He? Ultimately such a question does not even make sense. . . . God’s re-flection is no longer the Father” – he has taken leave of any recognizable Christian Trinitarianism.
But the argument has the virtue of clarifying the fact that we are faced with two choices: Either a God who is related and re-flected in Himself, a God who is eternally God of, or we a god of whom we can know or say nothing. Trinity is the only alternative to nihil.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 1:27 pm
There are problems all over the place in Panikkar’s Trinitarian theology, but there are some lovely, profound passages, like this: “A non-trinitarian God cannot ‘mingle’ much less unite himself with Man without destroying himself. He would have to remain aloof, isolated. No incarnation, descent, and real manifestation of any kind would be possible. He would cease to be God if he became Man. A non-trinitarian Man cannot hump outside his little self, cannot become what he wants and longs for without destroying himself. He would have to remain aloof, isolated. No divinisation, glorification, redemption of any kind would be possible. He would cease to be Man if he became God. Man would stifle himself just as God would die of self-consumption if the trinitarian structure of reality were not the case.”
And: The doctrine of the Trinity “connects the immanent mystery with the ‘economic’ God . . . in which the destiny of the whole world is at stake. It is not mere speculation a bout the depths of God; it is equally an analysis of the heights of Man. It is a ‘revelation’ of God inasmuch as it is a revelation of Man.” Nicely done: Trinitarian theology as true humanism.
And finally this, justifying the title of this post: “There are languages which do not have the verb ‘to be’ and others which do not possess the word ‘being.’ In some there is no definite distinction between nouns and verbs. No known language lacks the ‘I, Thou, He/She/It’ with the respective plural forms. It is in this ultimate and universal structure that the Trinity is reflected. . . . The Trinity appears then as the ultimate paradigm of personal relationships (and neither substantial nor verbal).” I like this, so long as we keep in view Jenson’s qualifications about I/Thou and as long as we allow that the personal relations are always already enacted, and therefore the pronomial God is, just for that reason, also verbal.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, September 28, 2011 at 4:37 pm
Why did Jesus refer to the Father as “my God”?
Perhaps to head off reasoning such as this (Panikkar, The Trinity and the religious experience of man;: Icon-person-mystery
Yes, an absurdity, but a Trinitarian absurdity, fighting as always against Nestorian reasonableness.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, September 28, 2011 at 4:29 pm
Like all Trinitarian theologians, Jenson is finally ecstatic: “Our enjoyment of God is that we are taken into the triune singing. Perhaps we may say that we are allowed to double the parts. And here too we must insist on concreteness. That the proclamation and prayer of the church regularly bursts into beauty, indeed seems to insist on music and choreography and setting, is not an adventitious hankering to decorate. A congregation singing a hymn of praise to the Father is doubling the Son’s praise, and the surge of rhythm and melody is the surge of the Spirit’s glorification of the Father and the Son.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, September 26, 2011 at 11:44 am
In the first volume of his Systematic Theology, Jenson notes that the reason why the church has been “lured” by impassibility is the conviction, which Jenson emphatically affirms” that God is “not subjected to created time’s contingencies” and that no “aspect of history could be outside the Lord’s control.”
The issue for Jenson is not whether this is true. He affirms it. The question is “How does God transcend time’s contingencies?” and Jenson’s answer, as always, is to avoid “metaphysical” accounts and point to the gospel. God doesn’t transcend time’s contingencies and transcend suffering by avoiding them but by gaining victory of them.
Jenson writes, ”God the Son suffers all the contingencies and evils recorded in the Gospels, and concludes them by suffering execution. God the Father raises him from the dead; nor do we have any reason to think of this act as dispassionately done. So and not otherwise the Father triumphs over suffering. God the Spirit is the sphere of the triumph. And ‘triumph’ is the precise word: the Father and the Spirit take the suffering of the creature who the Son is into the triune life and bring from it the final good of that creatures, all other creatures , and of God. So and not otherwise the true God transcends suffering – whatever unknowably might have been.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, September 26, 2011 at 11:06 am
Jeremy Begbie has pointed out that, though a physical phenomena, music has different spatial qualities than solid objects. Music is present in a place, but it’s not localized in a way a visually perceptible object is. I can give my attention to listening to the sound, but I can’t say it’s “here” or “there” or “not here.” ”What I hear occupies the whole of my aural space,” so that the acoustic world, with very slight variations, stays the same no matter what direction I turn. Aural space is a space, since I can eventually move far enough away from the sound source that I no longer hear it. But it is a space where objects are not locatable, and therefore provides a neat set of illustrations of theological realities.
Begbie uses musical categories to speak of perichoresis:
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, September 20, 2011 at 9:56 am
Jenson has a neat summary and response to the Palamite distinction between energies and essence. Gregory, he notes, aimed to defend “Byzantine monastic teaching that the sanctified truly participate in God; that grace is not a mere matter of God’s effects upon us or our knowledge of and obedience to him, but is rather his ontological self-sharing with us.” Jenson thinks this is just fine.
But, “Palamas thought he should also reserve some final reality of God from creaturely participation,” and therefore introduced the distinction of energies and essence. Palamas could find the distinction in the Cappadocians, but there “these distinctions are flexible” and nowhere do the Cappadocians think of God’s ousia as anything but the divine life itself. Palamas uses Nyssa’s distinction to “differentiate God as he can be participated in from God as he remains immune to this.” As a result, “the ousia is not the deity of the identities and their mutual energies but has become ‘God himself,’ the chief reference of discourse about ‘the one God.’” For Gregory, “this entity is immune even to the life of the creature who is hypostatically one with the Son; also the events told by the gospel narrative do not tough it.”
The “disaster,” as Jenson calls is, is the notion that “God himself is a static essence.” And the irony is that “Orthodoxy is here driven to a bluntly modalist doctrine: God himself is above the biblical narrative, which applies only to his activities.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, September 19, 2011 at 7:36 am
In his Systematic Theology: Volume 1: The Triune God
This is a problem, as Jenson’s typically deft summary of Hegel’s “Lord and Master” shows: “If you and are to to be free for one another, each of us must be both subject and object in our converse. If I am present in our converse as myself, I am a subject who have you as my object. But if I am not also an object for you as subject, if I in some way or degree evade reciprocal availability to you as one whom you in turn can locate and deal with, I enslave you, no matter with what otherwise good disposition I intend you.”
Jenson wants to know how we escape this dilemma, how the I-Thou doesn’t collapse into an interpersonal form of Foucault’s panopticon, me elusive in my tower watching you as the object of my gaze. He doesn’t think that we can escape this on purely I-Thou grounds: “Most postmodern thought, carrying out Hegel’s insight under the tutelage of horror, has given up such questions except as rhetorical, and supposes that in fact all personal converse is openly or hiddenly a struggle for domination” – open struggle often seen as superior because more honest. Secular postmodernism thus has an uncanny similarity to pneumatically-deprived Trinitarianism.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, September 19, 2011 at 7:16 am
Timothy Gorringe (A Theology of the Built Environment: Justice, Empowerment, Redemption
Barth of course has a Trinitarian account of spatiality: “The origin of all space, according to him, is to be found in the Trinitarian relations. It is the fact that God is present to Godself [ugh! again PJL], that there is a divine proximity and remoteness, which is the basis and presupposition of created proximity and remoteness. God’s omnipresence is to be understood primarily as a determination of God’s love, in so far as God is not only one, unique and simple but as such is present to Godself [dittos] and therefore present to everything which by God is outside God.” In Barth’s words, ”God’s omnipresence is the perfection in which he is present, and in which he, the One, who is distinct from and preeminent over anything else, possesses a place, his own place,which is distinct from all other places and also preeminent over them all . . . God’s presence necessarily means that he possesses a place, his own place, or . . . his own space . . . If God does not possess space, he can certainly be conceived as that which is one in itself and in all. But he cannot be conceived as the One who is triune, as the One who as such is the Lord of everything else.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, September 14, 2011 at 4:21 pm
The Cappadocians described the personal distinctions within God by reference to “relations of origin.” Father, Son, and Spirit are what they are from eternity past.
Pannenberg, Moltmann, Jenson all want to reverse this: Father, Son, and Spirit are what they are in eternity future. God’s eternity is not the persistence in the way he started but His power to achieve al His aims.
Does the Cappadocian emphasis on origin arise from a residual tragic metaphysics?
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, September 12, 2011 at 7:42 am
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