Saturday, July 16, 2011

Two REALLY Bad Ideas from Reformed Scholasticism.

I've been reading one of my Christmas presents, Heinrich Heppe's Reformed Dogmatics As Illustrated from the Sources.  It's a compilation of 16th and 17th century Reformed scholastics similar to Heinrich Schmid's Doctrinal Theology of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (which I'm certain many of you are familiar with).  It's very interesting, although he does occasionally make historical interpretations that I'm certain would not entirely please Richard Muller.  In it,  Heppe fleshes out some ideas that I was aware of, but have previous not understood how problematic they were.  They are the following:

1. The Covenant of Works:  This is the idea that prior to the Fall, God set up a covenant between himself and Adam.  Interesting that the Bible never says anything about covenants prior to the Fall!  Anyways, the covenant was that if Adam didn't eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil for a certain period of time, then he would go to heaven and have eternal fellowship with God.  In other words, the law in the primal state actually worked as a way of interacting with God.  The gospel is not, therefore, the restoration of the primal relationship of grace, but rather plan B after the law failed.  By contrast, both Luther and more recently David Scaer have described the primal state as one where human were placed in what one might be called the "circle of grace."  Everything was given freely and the law as an external command only existed to give humans a "channel" to express their gratitude for God's goodness.  In other words, the God's grace wasn't something earned and the commands in the garden were not a "test" (a term the Reformed scholastics like to use), but rather the divine-human relationship of grace was already fully actualized.  Of course, it was possible to step outside that circle of grace, just as David Scaer points out (using a kind of weird analogy) it's possible to electrocute one's self if you don't follow the warning label on an electric shaver and you use in the bathtub.  That is to say, you don't achieve the goal of not being electrocuted, you are in that state.  By not following the directions a boundary is crossed.  In the case of Adam and Eve, once one crosses that boundary of grace and enter into the demand and condemnation of the law, they couldn't get back in unless God puts them there.  If you try to get back one your own, then that's self-justification and you simply make yourself more sinful by contradicting God's condemning word against you.

2. Communicable and Incommunicable Divine Attributes:  Interestingly enough I've been eying Michael Horton's systematic theology for a while (I'm presently trying to increase my knowledge of Reformed theology) and one the first chapter is entitled "Communicable and Incommunicable Divine Attributes."  What is the idea here?  The idea here is that God's majesty can only communicate itself to a certain extent to creation.  Whereas creatures can be good, wise, and beautiful, they cannot be omnipotent or omnipresent.  If they were, then God would just made a second God.  This is rooted in the Thomistic concept of the analogy of being.  According to Aquinas, our language about God is based on analogy with our language about creatures.  So, when we say God is "good," we are speaking in analogy to how Coca-Cola, Soft Ball, and Hot Dogs are good.  These things really are ontologically good, but God is infinitely more "good" than these things.  Hence, the goodness we experience in creatures is similar, but not identical to the goodness of God.  There's of course a number of problems with this, but the biggest is that it makes creation into a worse version of God.  Creation is in a sense fallen just by being created along side God as something like his goodness, but inferior to it.  Primarily the Reformed used their idea to reject the Lutheran concept of the communication of the attributes of glory to the man Jesus (genus Majestaticum).  Within their own scheme, Jesus possesses a human nature that is good and wise (among other things), but not omnipotent or omnipresent, etc.  Jesus does not have these qualities because of his participation in the divine person of the Son, but rather according to his humanity he possesses a created similitude to the God.  We can observe then how they misunderstand the Lutheran position.  For the Reformed scholastics, the Lutherans are saying that the human Jesus is transmuted into the divine essence.  Following Aquinas' metaphysics, they can only understand the divine essence as communicating itself through created similitude.  So the Lutheran claim that the fullness of the divine glory being communicated to the human nature must to their ears sounds like the Lutherans are arguing that the human nature is created as a second-second person of the Trinity!  What the Lutherans are of course actually saying is not that at all, but rather because of the unity of the person of Christ, the divine nature which divinizes and saturates the human nature so as to gives it a personal participation in the possibilities of the divine essence.  This continues not to be understood by either them or the Catholics.

7 comments:

  1. Dr. Kilcrease, your wrote an excellent, informative piece. I find it very, very helpful.

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  2. Didn't Bayer or Paulsen or Forde also discuss this Gospel centered understanding of paradise? Where did Scaer discuss this? I recently discussed these ideas both in a talk I gave at a retreat and in a sermon at Church.-

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  3. Gregory- Paulson does a little bit in his "Lutheran Theology" book. Forde not so much. Bayer definite does in this book:

    http://www.amazon.com/Freedom-Response-Lutheran-Controversies-Theological/dp/0199249091/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1311114890&sr=1-4

    Scaer discusses it in an article from LOGIA in the mid-90s called "Law and Gospel in Lutheran Theology."

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  4. I have read Lutheran Theology. And a couple of Bayer titles. I even think I read that Scaer title on the internet.

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  5. Are you familiar with Palamism? How does your understanding of the communication of attributes compare to the Palamite claim that the human natures is made to partake of all the Divine Energies?

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  6. Matthew, I am. First, I agree that human are made participates in the divine nature through Christ. Secondly, I would disagree with Palamas that there is a legitimate distinction to be made between the divine essence and energies. I find nothing in Scripture supporting this.

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  7. Dr. Kilcrease: In A Dialogue on the Two Natures, Vermigli raises the argument against the Lutherans that if there is actually a union between the Divinity and the Humanity, it is impossible to have only a part of the Divinity, because the Divinity is simple. Thus if we can say that the humanity is immense, we must also say that the humanity is uncreated, eternal (not merely aveternal), equal with the Father, and simple. But that seems to be nonsense.

    Orthodox would be able to answer this objection by saying that by the assumption of human nature, all the Divine energies are communicated to humanity (in general for them), but the Divine essence is not, and maintaining a verbal distinction between the uncreated energy which the person (uncreated or created) participates in, and the person who participates in the energy.

    But I am curious how a Lutheran would answer this objection. If God is simple, how can there be a union between God and man, unless all of God is united, and thus the humanity of Christ is uncreated, and eternal, and in fact, God.

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