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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Theology: God of the Living

John Paul II again: “the resurrection of Christ is the final and fullest word of the self-revelation of the living God as ‘God not of the dead but of the living’ . . . . It is the final and fullest confirmation of the truth about God, who from the beginning has expressed himself through this revelation.”

Theology: Understanding

In his discussion of The Idiot, Rowan Williams makes this profound psychological and pastoral observation: “To see the truth in someone is not only to penetrate behind appearances to some hidden static reality.  It also has to be, if it is not to be destructive, a grasp of the processes and motors of concealment, a listening to the specific language of a person hiding himself.  It is perhaps the difference between ’seeing through’ someone and understanding him.”

Theology: Defending subjectivity

Given that so much evangelical energy is spend defending “objectivity” and “objective truth” against postmodern subjectivism, it’s striking to turn to John Paul II and find him placing the emphasis on precisely the opposite side of things.  For John Paul, the great need of the church in the modern world is not to defend the objectivity of truth, but to defend the freedom, personality, subjectivity, and intentionality of human action.  Sexuality, specifically, cannot be reduced to “drives” and animal instincts; it is an embodied expression of self-gift, a form of knowing, a inter-personal event of reciprocal self-gift intended as such by a man and a woman, human persons.

No doubt, John Paul’s sense of the challenges of modernity has something to do with his setting within Catholicism, where “juridicism” and institutionalism are the distortions to be combated.  Still, evangelicals might be challenged by the late Pope’s writings to wonder if our emphasis on “objectivity” is playing into the hands of (especially scientific) modernity.

Theology: Sociology

A summary of some arguments from Part II of Milbank’s book.It is important to Milbank’s approach that he does not treat sociology as a “discipline” but as a worldview, philosophical standpoint, or theological perspective. He calls it a theology and a church in disguise, offering an account of history that is irreconcilable with Christianity’s.  He makes two subordinate points.

First, Milbank wants to show that theology entered into the construction of sociology, and he spends a good bit of one chapter reviewing several 19th-century Catholic social theorists and showing the continuity between their metaphysical assumptions that those of Durkheim and Comte.  Again, the point is that theology has helped to construct a secular sphere, and he locates a heresy regarding the role of secondary causes in the doctrine of providence.

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Theology: Once There Was No Secular

What follows is a summary of the first part of Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Political Profiles).

Once, Milbank begins, there was no secular.

And the appearance of the secular is not merely a matter of removing something superfluous, as sociology generally tells it in its theories of “desacralization,” the image of the stripping of a sacred covering so that some realm of pure humanity and nature is brought into the open.  That portrayal assumes that there is such a thing as a pure humanity, which is always there under the surface of the sacred and of religion, which has nothing to do with the sacred, and it assumes that humanism is the natural destiny of history, the inevitable telos toward which all human societies  move.  Both of these assumptions must be contested.

This is an important theme throughout Milbank’s book: there is no “natural” human ordering of life.

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Theology: Eckhart, pantheist?

No, says Milbank.  But then he often sounds pantheistic, to his contemporaries as well as to us.  How does Milbank defend him?  Here’s what I think I’ve figured out:

1) God is transcendent, and this means (in Milbank’s Cusan theology) that He transcends oppositions; there is a “coincidence of opposites” in God.

2) Specifically, it means He transcends the opposition of difference/identity.  If God were simply different from creatures, He would be another being on the same plane as other beings.  To put it in quasi-Hegelian terms, if He were simply bounded by other beings, He would not be infinite but finite.  So, we cannot simply say that God distinguishable from other creatures without taking away from His transcendence.

3) On the other hand, He is not simply “indistinct” or “identical” either.  That would also rob Him of transcendence.  As I understand Milbank’s deliberately paradoxical formulation, He is distinguishable precisely by being indistinguishable, different precisely in the fact that we cannot simply differentiate Him from creation.  We can’t draw a line, point to one side and say, “here is God,” then point to the other side and say, “and here is not-God.”  We can do that with finite, immanent creatures; not with the infinite transcendent God.

Theology: Analogy of Being

What should we say about the traditional notion of the analogy of being, rejected vigorously by the very different Reformed theologians, Karl Barth and Cornelius Van Til?  Some initial thoughts follow:

1) The Bible gets along just fine without saying God is “Being itself.”  So can we.  On the other hand, the Bible never says “homoousion” either, and yet we confess that.  “God is Being” is part of the Christian tradition, and so we need to grapple with it.  The question is, is what theologians are getting at with saying “God is Being” a biblical truth about God?

2) Van Til and other Reformed thinkers tend to take “analogy of being” and “God is Being” as a univocal statement.  That is, they take it in a Scotist (or, to hedge, in an allegedly Scotist) sense.  Being is the master category that encompasses both God and creation; God just has more of the stuff called being than the creation does.  This is a problem because a) there is something “bigger” than God and b) it puts God within a scale-of-being framework and therefore violates the doctrine of creation.

3) But this is not what Thomas and others mean when they say “analogy of Being” or “God is Being.”

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Theology: Idiots interview

I got interviewed by some idiots here: http://idiots.dunedain.net/

That is not an insult.  That’s what they call themselves.

Theology: Contingent God

In his commentary on the Song of Songs, Jenson makes the startling claim that “the Bible’s God is sheer contingency.”  He elaborates: “He is the one who chooses what he chooses because he chooses it; he is the one who is what he is because he is it; and for whom the coincidence of fact and reason is not necessity but freedom.  In consequence, his relation to Israel and the church can only be truly described with such alarming concepts as election or predestination – or love.”

Which makes one wonder: How did Calvinism, with its overt affirmations of predestination, ever get mixed up with determinism and necessity?

Theology: Timelessness

Donald Fairbairn (Life in the Trinity: An Introduction to Theology With the Help of the Church Fathers) writes, “In the mind of the early church, impassibility implied that God could not be adversely affected or damaged by anything we might do.  We cannot ruin the fellowship within the Trinity or disrupt the purposes of God or cause his will to fail.”

This is why the church fathers think of impassibility in connection with timelessness.  Timelessness does not mean that God is incapable of “entering” time and interacting in time.  He obviously did interact in time; that’s what incarnation is about: God the Word living a human life, which means a temporal life.

It means, on the one hand, that He is not damaged or derailed by the ravages of time (as we are), and that, since He always already possessed all fullness, He cannot become more than He was through time.

Theology: Human impassibility

The impassible suffered, the church fathers said.  Why?  To make passible humanity impassible.  As usual (”God became man, to make man God”), a neat chiasm.

But what can human impassibility mean?  Can it mean that we no longer feel?  That’s what it sounds like, but that’s hardly possible.  The church fathers were aware human beings have bodies, and, if not aware of the nervous system, knew that we sense pain and pleasure.   Does it mean that we escape passivity, that we, like God, are incapable of being acted upon?  That can’t work either.  To be created is to be passive in relation to the active God.  Whatever it means for humans, impassibility is a gift, and thus received.

For humans, impassibility must mean that we are no longer subjected to or dominated by what we suffer.  Martyrs are impassible; they suffer, and might even suffer the passion of fear, but that does not make them shrink back.  In Christ, they have become impassible.  In fact, one might draw an even closer analogy between divine and human impassibility: God’s impassibility is not mainly concerned with God’s feelings; He is compassionate and jealous and grieves and pities.  Impassibility has to do with whether He will fall under the control of such feelings, whether He will deviate from His purpose because He is angry or grieving.  And the answer is No: God cannot be derailed from His purpose.  So too human impassibility: Not that we lack feeling, but that, whatever we feel, we are not derailed from the works that the Lord has prepared for us to walk in.

Theology: Arian Predestination

In a 1976 issue of the Scottish Journal of Theology, F. Stuart Clarke examines Athanasius’ doctrine of predestination, and ends with the comment that Athanasius would have rejected the predestination doctrines of Augustine, Aquinas, Luther and Calvin “as being, in principle, Arian, because they do not recognise the full Godhead of the Son in election, but ascribe election to what Calvin calls a ’secret counsel’ (arcanum consilium) of God, a will of which Christ is the agent but not the foundation; not present, as Professor J. K. S. Reid says, when ‘God frames his purpose to elect.’  There is a parallel between this and the Arian doctrine of the person of Christ.”  He suggests that Athanasius would have seen the continuity between the Westminster doctrine of the decree and the Arian views of the person of Christ that arose in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  He doesn’t find mind to choose from in the tradition: “The Augustinian doctrine of predestination is, in principle, Arian; the Cassianite doctrine avoids Arianism only at the cost of ceasing to be a doctrine of predestination.”

Clarke’s account of the Reformed tradition is hardly fair; as Richard Muller has shown (Christ and the Decree), the Reformed tradition has always affirmed that election is “in Christ.”  Yet, Clarke may be right to wonder if, when the doctrine gets translated into preaching and popular teaching, that in Christ gets communicated just as strongly as the sovereignty of God’s will.  Popular Reformed theology could certainly take a cue from Athanasius, who declares that Christ the eternal Son is the “living will” of the Father, and as such His Advent is the advent of the decree, God’s choice, in human flesh.

Theology: Not Yet Sabbath

Jenson again, a propos of impassibility, but with wider application: “The temptation that regularly besets us is fundamentalist longing to think that this conversation has come to a satisfactory rest at some point in the past, whether with the Fathers or Thomas or Luther or Barth or whomever, so that we are dispensed form its labors.  Pointing out that this is indeed a temptation should not be regarded as an attack on the tradition; for – as especially much Catholic theology has recently insisted – the tradition is fundamentally the continuing enterprise itself, encompassing but never identical with its achievements to date.”

All contributions “must be partial and incomplete, including those of the Fathers or Thomas or whomever; and to suppose that any of them provides a Sabbath rest leads to ideology, not theology.”

Theology: Prayer and Providence

Robert Jenson (an essay in Divine Impassibility and the Mystery of Human Suffering) notes that Thomas teaches that “God’s foreseeing determines what is seen,” and specifically determines what is seen “with respect to their ordering to their good,” which is Himself.  He briefly notes the problems this raises for theodicy, which he regards as “in this life insoluble”: “faith in God’s universal ordering of creation to the good . . . will remain a great ‘Nevertheless . . .’ until the final vision.”  But he’s more interest in prayer: What role do our prayers have if God’s foreseeing is already determinative?

Jenson employs a musical analogy, borrowing from Jeremy Begbie: “a western composition’s total plot of tensions and resolutions has a bottom temporal level of meter-bars, and as many superimposed levels of ever more encompassing ‘hyperbars’ – phrases, themes, movements, etc. – as the music’s sophistication requires.  What time it is in a piece of music thus depends on which level of bars or hyperbars you are asking about.”

Back to prayer, then:

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Theology: For His Own Glory

Alvyn Pettersen (Athanasius) offers this intricate summary of Athanasius’ views on the question of whether God rescues humanity for His own glory or for the good of His creatures: “God created for humanity’s benefit.”  That is to say, God didn’t need creation.

Moreover, “the service of ‘those who do not exist’ [i.e., idols] is to humanity’s detriment.  God himself is not altered.  Certainly, the dignity due to God is indeed compromised by people’s ceasing to worship him; it is compromised in the same sense as a human monarch’s dignity, which, even while the monarch remains monarch, is denigrated by the people’s not recognizing that the monarch is monarch.  Status and recognition of status are not the same, and the indignity to the monarch in fact rebounds to the people’s and not the monarch’s detriment.”  God’s kingship is “not made less by its not being recognized,” but “their citizenship is indeed made the less meaningful.”  God’s wish that humanity recover and honor Him is therefore for the benefit of humanity.

Athanasius is saying that “Ignoring God is to God’s dishonor insofar as people who properly were created to live not only through God but for God now no longer live to God’s glory; but it is to their ruin.  What then looks like God’s jealousy for himself is in fact God’s jealousy for humanity’s godly well-being.”

Theology: Supralapsarian faithfulness

I’m feeling supralapsarian today, and here’s why:

As Barth said, God’s Yes to man precedes creation (in Barth’s terms, covenant precedes creation).  How could it be otherwise?  If God had said No at the beginning, how could we exist at all?

Once God says Yes, can He then change to No?  Can we say of God what Paul’s Corinthian opponents said of him: With God it is always “Yes and No.”  Or, “Maybe.”  Must we not say, on the contrary, that God’s Yes is Yes, and His No No?

Once Yes, always Yes.  Therefore: Supralapsarianism.

Theology: Two Axioms

One: There is no absolute dualism except that of Creator and creature.

Two: While “faith and reason” might be a reasonable discussion, debates on “reason v. revelation” rest on a category mistake.

It would be an exaggeration to say that all theological wisdom “hangs” on these two axioms; but much does.

Theology: Theanthropology

MC Steenberg’s Of God and Man: Theology As Anthropology from Irenaeus to Athanasius concludes with the claim that for Irenaeus, Cyril, Tertullian, and Athanasius, “it is in and through the human, the anthropos in which the eternal Son is known, that God is disclosed to the creature, and by which the creature comes to know his God. . . . A genuine engagement with the incarnation means that theology is anthropology, since the Theos reveals himself as anthropos, and it is in the human that man sees and knows God.”  Thus “the human creature forms . . . the framework for articulating theology – whether theology informing cosmology, behaviour, sacramentalism, dogmatic trinitarianism or any other area.”

For these fathers, theology, centered on the incarnate Christ, is about the “articulation of the God encountered in the human.”

Theology: Freedom

Barth did not see Nazism as a reaction to or restriction on the untrammeled freedom of choice celebrated by modern liberals.  On the contrary, it was itself the product of the same “false concept of freedom” that shaped post-Enlightenment Europe.

If freedom means life “in free competition of persons, systems, and ideas, under the motto, ‘Make way for the competent,’” then a “battle of all against everyone . . . which will never be without harshness and suffering” is already underway, and one has already begun a slide down “the slippery slope . . . at the end of which is authoritarianism.”

The solution is not to abandon freedom but “to be more liberal than the liberals” in advocating freedom rightly understood.

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Theology: Anselm’s God

Ask anyone who recognizes the name Anselm, and they will tell you that he was the formulator of a theory of the atonement in which God is an exacting accountant of honor.  Damaged honor has to be restored; and, tallied up, the damaged honor proves infinite, and so demands infinite restoration.  Anselm’s theory looks like that dreaded “classical theism” applied to the atonement.  Abelard’s God seems a good big cuddlier, and “subjective” theories of the atonement seem more personable than “objective” theories.

That’s a fairly radical misperception.  Abelard’s theory, and all the others that followed him, assume that the atonement was intended to affect us.   Anselm’s theory, on the contrary, assumes a God who is being acted upon.  On Anselm’s theory, God is at least as “interactive” as Abelard’s, maybe more so.

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