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

Jane Austen
(A Biography)

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

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

Against Christianity

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

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Politics Theology: God and freedom again

Smith’s article sums up David Burrell’s argument that we cannot have freedom at all without a Creator as a final cause.  Burrell writes:

“if I cannot be pushed to will something, but only drawn to do so, not even God can cause me to do something freely, if we are thinking of an efficient cause.  Yet God, as my sovereign good, could so draw my will as to bring me freely to consent to the end for which my nature craves. So freedom is less a question of self-determination of what otherwise remains undetermined than it is one of attuning oneself to one’s ultimate end.”

In thinking of God as “cause” of all that comes to pass, has Reformed theology been sufficiently clear about what sort of cause He is?

Theology: Ten-stringed lute

Augustine from a sermon on the two tablets: “the Decalogue pertains to the two precepts, that is, those of love for God and neighbor. Three strings belong to the first precept because God is Trinity. While to the other precept, that is, love for the neighbor, there are seven strings: how one should live with other human beings. . . . Let us join these seven to those three pertaining to love for God, if we wish to sing a new song on the ten-stringed lute.”

Politics Theology: Use and Enjoyment

One of Gregory’s contributions is to show the central relevance of Augustine’s distinction of use and enjoyment to political thought.  He notes early on that “Arendt recognizes that Augustine’s greatest question may not be that he became a question to himself.  Rather, the ‘magna quaestio’ he asks is ‘whether humans should enjoy one another or use one another, or both’ – or put differently, ‘whether one person should be loved by another on his own account or for some other reason.’”

Bible - OT - Deuteronomy Theology: The Lord is Unsplit

The shema is often taken as a declaration of monotheistic faith, or at least of henotheism.

In ANE context, it may have another aspect to it.  Yitzhaq Feder (Blood Expiation in Hittite and Biblical Ritual (Writings from the Ancient World Supplements/Society of Biblical Literature)) analyzes a Hittite rite for founding a new temple for the Night Goddess, who has both chthonic and astral associations.  The ritual text prescribes as follows: “As soon as he finishes the tuhalzi ritual in the old temple . . . they pour fine oil into a tallai vessel.  Before the deity he speaks thus: ‘Esteemed deity, protect yourself but split your divinity.  Come to the new temples!  Take for yourself an honored place.  And when you make your way, take that place.  Then they pull the deity from the wall 7 times using red wool. Then he places the ulihi and the talla vessel of fine oil.”

In an essay in Magic and Ritual in the Ancient World (Religions in the Graeco-Roman World), Richard Beal explains: for the Hittites “the way to have two separate cult centers for the same deity was to have that deity divide his or her divinity and then to  have that allomorph of the original physically moved and/or coaxed through a repeating pattern of variations of ritual actions into the next construction.”

Perhaps this is the mentality behind the high places of ancient Israel – not a new deity, nor a transfer of Yahweh, but a split divinity.  But Israel’s confession is, Yahweh our God is Unsplit.  To be One God is to have One House; the shema is a declaration of liturgical and sanctuary monotheism.  And to be One God is to have One Name given under heaven whereby we must be saved.

Theology: Active/Contemplative

I discuss the ancient question of the active and contemplative life over at http://www.firstthings.com/

Theology: On not knowing what we do

Stanley Hauerwas (War and the American Difference: Theological Reflections on Violence and National Identity) offers a neat definition for American freedom: It is the modern “attempt to produce a people who believe that they should have no story except the story that they chose when they had no story.”  Hauerwas’s test question is, “Do you think you ought to be held accountable for decisions you made when you did not know what you were doing?”  By and large, Americans answer No, because “you should only be held accountable when you acted freely.  And to act freely, you had to know what you were doing.”

In a few strokes, Hauerwas shows how deeply corrosive this is.  ”It makes marriage unintelligible” since “no one can fully know what this commitment will entail” when the promises are made.  It “makes it unintelligible to try having children,” since “you never get the ones you want.”  Trying to fix this problem by waiting for children until you are “ready” makes this worse, since children so born “come to believe they can only be loved if they fulfill their parents’ desire.”  It’s only in the last few decades that Americans have really solved the challenge: You can’t be held accountable for marriage, and so divorce should be easy; since you can’t be held accountable for having children when you’re ignorant of what’s coming, abortion should be legal and safe.

It is religiously and politically corrosive too:

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Theology: Not Just Nothing

Bavinck affirms that evil is a privatio boni, but is not satisfied to leave it there: “Sin is a no-thing, can only be a privation or corruption of the good.  Sin is a defect, a deprivation, an absence of the good, or a weakness, imbalance, just as blindness is a deprivation of sight.  The idea of sin as privation, however, is incomplete; sin is also an active, corrupting, destructive power.  Sin is a privation of the moral perfection human persons ought to possess and includes active transgression; it is an active and corrupting principle, a dissolving, destructive power.  Having no existence on its own, sin is ethical-spiritual in nature, thought it always comes to expression in concrete terms.  It is a deformity, a departure from God’s perfect law by rational creatures who can know and do God’s will.  The characterization of sin as privation, accordingly, by no means excludes its being also – viewed from a different angle – an action.  It is not a ‘substance’ or thing, but in its being deprived of the good, it is an activity, just as the hobbling of a crippled dog is still an activity, a defective ‘walking.’”

Theology: Perspectival Bavinck

Bavinck notes the traditional division of providence into preservation, concurrence, and governance, but then adds: “These do not divide the work of providence into materially and temporally distinct and successive parts for they are always integrally connected.  From the very beginning, preservation is also government, and government concurrence, and concurrence is preservation.  Preservation tells us that nothing exists, not only no substance, but also no power, no activity, no idea, unless it exists totally from, through, and to God.  ’Concurrence’ speaks of the same providence as an activity that affirms and maintains the distinct existence of creatures, and ‘government’ describes the other two as guiding all things in such a way that the final goal determined by God will be reached.  And always, from beginning to end, providence is one simple, almighty, and omnipresent power.”

A great example of a) Bavinck’s resistance to reifying abstractions – the distinctions of the doctrine of providence are angles of vision on the unified action of the living God and b) Bavinck’s wonderfully Trinitarian, perichoretic imagination.

Theology Theology - Ecclesiology: Confession

A splendid Dostoevskyan passage from Bonhoeffer’s ethics speaks for itself.

“The place where this recognition of guilt becomes real is  the Church. . . .If my share in this  is so small as to seem negligible, that still cannot set my mind at rest; for now it is not a matter of apportioning the blame,  but I must acknowledge that precisely my sin is to blame for  all. I am guilty of uncontrolled desire. I am guilty of cowardly  silence at a time when I ought to have spoken. I am guilty of  hypocrisy and untruthfulness in the face of force. I have  been lacking in compassion and I have denied the poorest of  my brethren. I am guilty of disloyalty and of apostasy from  Christ. . . . It is not a morbidly  egotistical distortion of reality, but it is the essential character  of a genuine confession of guilt that it is incapable of apportioning   blame and pleading a case, but is rather the acknowledgement   of one’s own sin of Adam.”

Using the Ten Commandments as a guide, he then analyzes the guilt of the church:

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Theology: Disunion and judgment

For a man in the disunited state of sin, each individual is a standard and criterion of good and truth.  Thus, Bonhoeffer argues, the essence of fallen man is to be a judge.  Obviously, this is a false judgment, since it does not arise out of union with God.

Reversing common sense, Bonhoeffer says that false judgment doesn’t arise from evil motives.  Rather, the primal stance of being a judge is hte source of evil.  It is not the case that “precisely when a man  discerns his own foible in another man that he is impelled to  condemn him with particular severity; in other words the  spirit of judgement brings forth particularly poisonous fruit  when it springs from the soil of inward mendacity, desperate  indignation and resigned laxness with regard to a man’s own  weakness.”  At least, that is not the deepest truth of fallen humanity.  Rather, taking a stance as judge of one’s fello men is to assume and perpetuate disunion, to destroy the possibility of reconciliation and love.

Jesus comes, however, to judge, to just righteous judgment.  There is a judgment that arises from union with God in Jesus, and leads to reconciliation: For the disciple, “judgement will consist in brotherly  help, in lifting up the falling and in showing the way to  the straying, in exhortation and in consolation (Gal. 6; Matt.  18.15ff.), and also, if the need arises, in a temporary suspension   of fellowship, but in such a manner that the spirit may  be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus (I Cor. 5.5). . . . It will be a  judgement of reconciliation and not of disunion, a judgement   by not judging, a judgement which is the act of reconciling.”

Theology: Conscience

Bonhoeffer (Ethics) sees conscience as a manifestation of the “disunited” man after the fall.  Instead of finding knowledge in union with God, conscience draws us to ourselves.  We want to know the truth and the good by reference to ourselves as the origin.  Conscience “derives the relation  to God and to men from the relation of man to himself.  Conscience pretends to be the voice of God and the standard  for the relation to other men.”  From this “right relation to himself,” the conscientious man wants to “recover the right relation to God and to other men.  In short, “this  good, which consists in the unity of man with himself, is now  to be the origin of all good.”  Self-knowledge becomes the measure and goal of life.

The result is only further fragmentation: “Knowledge now means the establishment of the  relationship to oneself; it means the recognition in all things  of oneself and of oneself in all things. And thus, for man who  is in disunion with God, all things are in disunion, what is  and what should be, life and law, knowledge and action, idea  and reality, reason and instinct, duty and inclination, conviction   and advantage, necessity and freedom, exertion and genius,   universal and concrete, individual and collective; even  truth, justice, beauty and love come into opposition with one  another, just as do pleasure and displeasure, happiness and  sorrow.”

Theology Theology - Creation: Learned ignorance & Poetry

Bavinck says, in defense of the necessity of anthropomorphism, that “We simply must acknowledge that even thought our finite understanding of God is limited, it is no less true!  We possess exhaustive knowledge of very little; all reality, including the visible and physical, remains something of a mystery to us.  Our talk of spiritual matters, including those of our own souls, is necessarily metaphorical, figurative, poetic.  But this does not mean that what we say is untrue and incorrect.  On the contrary, real poetry is truth, for it is based on the resemblance, similarity and kinship that exist between different groups of phenomena.  All language participates in this rich interpenetration of visible and invisible.  if speaking figuratively were untrue, all our thought and knowledge would be an illusion and speech itself impossible.”

Theology Theology - Creation: Speech, Justice, Love

The Farrer quotations come pouring in.  OK, trickling.  Here’s one from a reader, Jeff Peterson:

“Man, once endowed with speech, starts making an inventory of the universe. The speaker, having labelled everything else, labels himself, and becomes an item on his own list. He is now no more than a pebble on the beach, a part of the description he constructs; he falls under the net of an impartial rule, an equal justice binding on himself as much as on his neighbour. That justice is the child of speech, is evident; less evident, perhaps, that charity is; but no less true. If I talk, I can give a description of the world in which I am not the centre. But equally, if I talk, I can give a description in which my neighbour is; can make him a focus, an eye, a heart, a man round whom the universe revolves; another self, an object of sympathy and concern. He is the centre of things, just as much as I; but if so, neither he, nor I, nor any other man is the centre. Speech makes a further advance, and spins a story in which our fellow creatures and we are equally the characters; and having reached that level, is found to be saying over, however haltingly, the speech of that creative Word, who commands the existence, and assigns the parts of us all.”

Theology Theology - Trinity: Infinite God

As Robert Jenson and Michel Rene Barnes have emphasized, Gregory of Nyssa’s theology (in, eg, Against Eunomius) centers on a meditation on God’s infinity.  Greeks were reluctant to say that God is infinite, since an infinite thing cannot, by Hellenic lights, have a nature.  A nature is what defines, limits, circumscribes something.  An infinite something cannot be anything at all.  The problem is epistemological too: If something is note defined and delimited, it cannot be known.  Knowledge grasps a fixed and finite set of characteristics.

For Greek thinkers, this is connected to the timelessness of God.  Time brings development, change, movement beyond present limits.  Since God is timeless, he is finite, limited.  In-finite is the one negative that cannot be applied to God.

For Gregory, though, God is infinite.

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Bible - OT - Isaiah Theology: Empire, Exile, and Monotheism

Isaiah says more about the uniqueness of God than any other Old Testament writer (especially Isaiah 43-45).  Why did Yahweh wait so long to say this?

Did he perhaps have to set up empires, deliver His people into exile, and then send them back before He could persuade the world that there was One Lord, Savior, Lawgiver?  Was the exile and restoration somehow the first real proof of monotheism?

Theology: Ninety-Five Steps

Christian Smith’s How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps is fairly predictable.  His criticisms of evangelicalism are on target in the main, and his Catholic arguments are pretty standard.  Smith is careful about his audience: He is addressing “normal science evangelicalism,” and he knows that other varieties of Protestantism exist.  Unfortunately, like most Catholic apologists, he doesn’t really spend much time talking about those other varieties.  His arguments glance off of liturgical Protestants who are not “allergic” to Mary or ignorant of church history or hostile to the medieval church, Protestants who are already disenchanted with the linear and overly cognitive approach to Christian faith among some evangelicals, Protestants who have already read their share of Newman, Vatican II, and John Paul II and like de Lubac more than many Catholics do.  Targeting normal evangelicals makes his job considerably easier.

Along the way, though, Smith makes some intriguing observations.

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Theology: God’s diverse will

Bavinck has these wise words about God’s will: “We can make as many distinctions in the will of God (as it relates to his creatures) as there are creatures; the free will of God is as richly variegated as that whole world is.  Most important is the fact that God is father to all his creatures but not in the same way.”  Ultimately, the “actual will of God is the will of his good pleasure” and “this will is identical with God’s being and efficacious.”

Theology: Scholasticism and liberalism

In a Mars Hill Audio interview, Ellen Charry observes that the Protestant theologians of the seventeenth century, even before the Enlightenment, had a tendency to detach truth from historical reference.   The truth of theology was seen in the coherence of the system of truth found in Scripture, rather than a truth of reference to historical events.

Charry’s comment was a passing one, no doubt a drastic oversimplification.  Protestant scholastics, after all, defended the historical reliability of Scripture as well as its systematic coherence.  But, the comment seems worthy of investigation, since it might provide a historical link between Protestant scholasticism and the development of liberal theology.

Theology: Presbyterians and Independents

Like our interpretations of ancient rabbinic debates, our interpretations of church historical debates often deal with theological content abstracted from the political circumstances that actually gave rise to the content.

In his classic The Puritan Origins of the American Self, Sacvan Bercovitch points out that debates between Presbyterians and Independents regarding free will were really about the question of England’s national destiny.  Both sides used the “leading nationalist expositors of Revelation,” but they diverged on the “relation of human willing to divine will”: “One side of the debate, led by the Independents, maintained that the divine agency was all-sufficient. . . . England would be carried into the glorious future on the crest of prophecies fulfilled, whether their countrymen liked it or not, irrespective of human initiative.  The other side of the debate, led by the Presbyterians, insisted on man’s participation in the process of fulfillment. . . . Stressing God’s current signs of favor or displeasure, they advocated concrete improvements, discipline in church and state, an adequate sense of responsibility.”

Theology: God Ever New

God is a spring.  So says Gregory of Nyssa: “As you came near the spring you would marvel, seeing that the water was endless, as it constantly gushed up and poured forth.  Yet you could never say that you had seen all the water.  How could you see what was still hidden in the bosom of the earth?  Hence no matter how long you might stay at the spring you would always be beginning to see the water.  For the water never stops flowing, and it is always beginning to bubble up again.  It is the same with one who fixes his gaze on the infinite beauty of God.  It is constantly being discovered anew, and it is always seen as something new and strange in comparison with what the mind has already understood.  And as God continues to reveal himself, man continues to wonder; and he never exhausts his desire to see more, since what he is waiting for is always more magnificent, more divine, than all that he has already seen.”

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