theologia crucis

The Eleonore Stump Lecture: No Predestination in Aquinas?

2012-01-28T05:15:00.000-08:00

Yesterday the Thomistic philosopher Eleonore Stump came to my school to give the Thomas Aquinas day lecture. She described what she considered Aquinas' solution to the problem of suffering (basing herself primarily on the Angelic Doctor's commentary on Job). According to Stump, Aquinas holds that suffering is good for us because it eradicates sin within us. We may be temporarily unhappy (happiness being the goal of life in Thomas and Aristotle), but it will lead us to heaven. In heaven, we will know God and therefore enjoy supreme happiness. Hence, temporary unhappiness is justified for the sake of supreme happiness.

In the Q & A section, I asked her about predestination in Thomas. Aquinas very clearly asserts a hard double predestination in the Summa. If you doubt me, just read this:

http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1023.htm

My question was this: OK, some people suffer because it leads them to God (of course, this would be unnecessary without sin, but that's another issue!), but Aquinas clearly asserts that God predestines people to hell. So then, how does you solution compute with that? People God predestines to hell aren't going to suffer in this life as a means to go to heaven. They're just going to suffer here and then suffer more in hell.

I found her response unusual. First she stated that there was no "predestination" in Aquinas because God is outside of time and therefore there's no "pre." Well, yes, everyone in orthodoxy Christianity agrees with this-especially those theologians who accept election. I don't see the point here. "Predestination" is more of an analogical human turn-of-phrase for God's action in eternity. The issue is: does God elect or not? And Aquinas pretty clearly states that he does.

The second thing she said was that God does not act upon the human will as an efficient cause, but only as a formal cause. To translate this for you Lutherans familiar with Luther in Bondage of the Will, God determines the human will through the "necessity of immutability" (i.e., God gives a new heart to human beings, which they freely act out of it by trust and loving him) and not by the "necessity of compulsion" (God does not somehow "manhandle" us from heaven into having faith). You can see my point here already: No one (and this includes Calvin and Augustine along with Luther) who teaches the doctrine of predestination believes that God acts on human being in salvation by a "necessity of compulsion." Therefore, when she denies this in response to the issue of predestination, she was either setting up a strawman argument (since no one holds the position that she was rejecting) or was somehow unaware of how the Augustinian tradition (within which Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin stand) understands divine and human agency.

Then she asserted what she considers to be Aquinas position: God offers grace to everyone. When God offers his grace, he removes the sinful inclination from the human will. This places the human will in a state of neutrality between good and evil. If the person in this state of neutrality at least does not resist God's grace, then God gives then sufficient divine grace to will the good and therefore converts them.

The difficulty is several fold: First, Thomas along with Luther, Calvin, and Augustine denies that the human will can in any sense be neutral. A will that is neutral is one that is empty of content, and something that is empty of content does not exist. In fact, one of the odder parts of her book on Aquinas is when she cites Aquinas saying precisely this and then proceeds to assert the opposite in the next paragraph. Even if she was correct about Aquinas, it would be an incoherent position. In a state of neutrality, there would be no will to allow itself to be brought in accordance with God's saving purpose, much less resist it. Secondly, because God gives human being the capacity to will the good, they do not trust and love God unfreely, rather they simply do what they want to do. If a good tree bears good fruit, then a good will does good things freely, not by compulsion. In the same way, an evil will does evil things out of its own nature. This is basic Augustinian stuff- it was all worked out in the Anti-Pelagian writings and set down in the Council of Orange. Hence predestination does no abrogate the human will or its freedom in the sense of imposing a form of compulsion on it. Luther only talks about the "slave will" because he is polemically contrasting his position with Erasmus' "free will." Nevertheless, what he means by "slave will" is merely the will determined by the necessity of immutability- which is what the Augustinian tradition has historically referred to as "free will"- i.e. having the ability to do what you want to do and not the ability to do "whatever."

The NT Wright Lecture at Calvin

2012-01-24T12:22:00.000-08:00

NT Wright came to Calvin and I was as privileged enough to see him. He talked about how we get the Gospels wrong because we think that there about going to heaven when we die or building an earthly utopia. Instead, the Gospels are about "God becoming King." What this means is that in Jesus God has rescued us from sin and so we are now free to implement God's kingdom program by helping the less fortunate and reforming society in other ways. This of course, he points out, does not destroy the necessity of the second coming. NT eschatology (as his Doktor Vater George Caird and his C.H. Dodd would say) is inaugurated eschatology. The second coming completes the implementation of the kingdom begun in the Church by the power of the Spirit. Implementing the kingdom, it would appear, is about implementing a special divine law revealed in Jesus.

There is of course much good in this, but I find the language of "God becoming king" problematic. Moreover, I also think it strikes at what's fundamentally wrong with Wright's approach. For one thing: Why does God need to become king? As Luther notes, his kingdom will come- but we pray that it will come to us in grace. This is the difficulty. God already rules in his power and glory, but in a way that will destroy us insofar as we are sinful. Wright seems to attribute our situation of wrath to an absence of God's presence and rule. When God's kingship is absent (it would seem) things go haywire. Better use the law to implement his authority and then everything will be put right (excuse the pun)! But that's not the problem. God is already applying the law. He did so with Israel in the form of exile, and, (as Wright likes to emphasize) its continuing exile in the Second Temple period. So, the story of the Gospels is not about God applying is sovereignty (after he's taken a time out) but rather is power condescending to humanity in the form of grace. It's not about the application of God's rule, but rather about God's rule in grace.

Discontinuity of the Self in Justification: Kant's Take.

2012-01-16T06:54:00.000-08:00

Here's a citation from McGrath's book on Justification. It's his description of Kant's understanding of Justification. Does this sound like anyone we know? (I'm giving a paper on him at the symposium, hint, hint!):

"Kant’s solution to this difficulty [the problem of guilt] is, in fact, apparently irreconcilable with the general principles upon which his moral philosophy is based, particularly the axiom that an individual is responsible for his own moral actions. No individual can be good on behalf of another, nor can the goodness of a morally outstanding individual be permitted to remove the guilt of another. The basis of Kant’s rejection of the concept of vicarious satisfaction (stellvertretende Genugthuung) is the principle that guilt, like merit, is strictly non-transferable. It is therefore remarkable that Kant’s solution to the difficulty noted above is based on the assertion that the individual who turns away from his evil disposition to adopt a good disposition may be regarded as having become a different person: the old disposition is moralisch ein anderer from the new. The discontinuity between the old and new disposition is such that Kant denies that they may be predicated of the same moral individual. This conclusion appears to rest upon the assumption that the disposition itself is the only acceptable basis of establishing the identity of the moral agent. Having established this point, Kant takes the remarkable step of asserting that the new disposition ‘takes the place’ (vertritt) of the old in respect of the guilt which is rightly attached to the latter disposition."

Luther and Aquinas on the Human Will.

2012-01-13T12:41:00.000-08:00

In studying both the Summa and Bondage of the Will, it has occurred to me that due to the influence of Augustine Luther and Aquinas have essentially the same idea of divine omnipotence and the human will. Both agree that the human will is not some sort of neutral capacity that starts out as a blank slate and then just decides whatever it wants. Human beings have a nature. They act out that nature when they will things. A evil person wills evil freely, though he cannot but will evil insofar as he is evil. Just as an apple tree gives off apples freely, though it is in its nature to do so, so a person acts out their nature without coercion.

The difference comes from what one considers the basis of human willing: i.e. faith vs. love. For Aquinas, the human will is driven by the love of the good. God is the supreme good, but temporal realities are good to. Sin is failing to will God as the supreme good and therefore choosing a more limited version of the good. Nevertheless, humans are still choosing the good, they just are doing so in an inadequate manner. For Luther, the whole issue is faith as trust. God should be trusted above all things, but instead humans trust in other creatures and in themselves.

This means that for Luther sin is much more radical thing than it is for Aquinas. There is something of a zero-sum game between belief and unbelief. One either trusts in God or one doesn't. Trusting in creatures is not some how moving in the right direction. Rather it is antithetical to a proper relationship with God. For Aquinas, by desiring temporal goods one is still sort of moving in the right direction. One is willing the good, but not as well as one could.

Materialism is Fideism.

2012-01-03T05:00:00.000-08:00

When I talk with Materialists (that is, people who claim that there natural or material causes and are therefore Atheists) they usually justify their unbelief in spiritual realities (primarily God) by stating that "you don't have to prove a negative." In other words, they are saying, they are merely denying the existence of God. It's like denying the existence of Trolls. I am justified in outright denying the existence of Trolls unless some radical piece of data comes to light that contradicts that belief. So, they are claiming, the burden of proof is on Theists to show that God exists.

The difficulty with this claim is the simple fact the none of our beliefs are held in isolation from one another. For example, if I do deny the existence of Trolls then I am positively saying something about our sources of knowledge within the created world. Since many peasants have a folk belief in Trolls (in a variety of different cultures), then I am making the claim that a proper basis of belief is not traditional folk belief, but rather is something else. That is a positive assertion, rather than a negative one. Moving to the question of God's existence; saying that God does not exist presupposes a Materialist metaphysic (i.e., only material entities and causes exist) and therefore actually isn't a negative at all, but a positive assertion that there is nothing beyond the material world.

Most Atheist/Materialist types don't get this because of how they think about their belief system and the nature of knowledge. What they assume is that a world of purely material causes is somehow obvious and that belief in anything beyond it is irrational. Hence, they think that Theists simply randomly and irrationally assert the existence of something beyond the world when they have no justifiable way of making said assertion. It is a pure act of "faith" (as they understand the term), which means for them, irrational belief in something one cannot prove.

There are several difficulties with this view of things, not least is that the Materialist worldview is actually one possible in a post-Christian culture (the Japanese are still Animists, even though they have developed high technology). Genesis 1 empties the universe of gods and goddesses in the way that other ancient cosmologies don't. If you reject YHWH, then all you have left are material causes and laws. Hence Atheism and Materialism presupposes "faith" in a particular worldview that has historically not been "obvious" to no one outside of our post-Christian culture.

Now comes the second problem: namely Atheism/Materialism have no ability to give an epistemic account of themselves. In other words, as Alister McIntyre has pointed out, worldviews only work insofar as they are able to give an account of themselves as believable. Theists are able to give an account of themselves. Theists claim that they can know that God exists because he 1. accounts for the existence of the laws of nature and of morality (which are easy to explain with a God, but not without one). 2. That God has revealed himself to humans. Humans who know of God's existence do not randomly assert that there's something beyond the world of material causes, but rather explain their knowledge of God by stating that he has in a sense broken through the veil of material causes and made himself known. Something beyond our immediate experience is knowable because he has entered into our experience.

Therefore the difficulty of Atheism/Materialism lies in the fact that it has no way of giving an account of itself epistemically the way that Theism can. First, it asserts the laws of nature and morality hold good without a law giver. Whereas in all other cases where we can visibly discern the structure of the casual order, design and order presupposes a law-giver and designer, according to Atheists, we are to believe that when it comes to the created order as a whole, there is one a huge exception. Secondly, it cannot give an account of how it knows that there are only material causes. Whereas Theists have the mechanism of supernatural revelation that makes the unknowable knowable, Atheist have no such mechanism. For Materialists to know that there are only material entities and causes, they would, (so to speak) have to climb into heaven and find it empty. This is something that they clearly cannot do and therefore they cannot account for their lack of belief in the supernatural. Their argument is circular: Material entities and causes alone exist, because we can only know material causes and entities.

This being said, the structure of belief in Materialism and Atheism is actually identical with the fideism that they accuse Theists of. Without actually being able to give any account of the basis of their belief, Atheists and Materialists randomly assert that there is no God and that there are only material causes, when they have absolutely no ability to give an account of how they know this. For this reason it is Materialism which is actually fideism, and not Theism.

2011 Reading List.

2011-12-31T05:05:00.000-08:00

A shorter list this year (only 61- down from 78 last year). Several reasons for this. First, more teaching duties. Secondly, I completed writing one book and am almost finished with a second. Lastly, many of these books are considerably longer than my normal reading. For example, the Charles Hodge systematic theology alone was roughly 2,700 pages long. I invite all my readers to add their own lists. I'd be interesting is seeing what you read!

1. The City of God- St. Augustine.
2. On the Church- Johann Gerhard
3. Foundations of Dogmatics, vol. 1- Otto Weber
4. Foundations of Dogmatics, vol. 2- Otto Weber
5. The Shalom Church- Craig Nessan
6. Truman- David Mcculloch
4. The Stripping of the Altars- Eomon Duffy
5. Systematic Theology, vol. 1- Charles Hodge
6. Systematic Theology, vol. 2- Charles Hodge
7. Systematic Theology, vol. 3- Charles Hodge
8. The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology fo Pilgrims on the Way- Micheal Horton
9. Introduction to Christianity- Joseph Ratzinger
10. Foundations of the Christian Faith- Karl Rahner
11. The Glory of the Lord, vol. 7- Hans Urs von Balthasar
12. Theo-Logic, vol. 2- Hans Urs von Balthasar
13. The Federalist Papers- Madison, Hamiliton, Etc.
14. Righteous Indignation- Andrew Breitbart
15. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare- Stephen Greenblatt
16. Oprah: The Unauthorized Biography (yes, I read this)- Kitty Kelly
17. Freud: A Very Short Introduction- Anthony Storr
18. The Bondage of the Will- Martin Luther
19. Victory according to Mark- Mark Horne
20. The Division of Christendom- Hans Hillerbrand
21. Pater Bernardus- Franz Posset
22. The Real Luther- Franz Posset
23. The Roots of Obama's Rage- D'nesh D'souza
24. Divine Complexity: The Rise of Creedal Christianity- Paul Hinlicky
25. Jesus: A Brief History- W. Tatum Barnes
26. Luther for Armchair Theologians- Steven Paulson
27. Lutheran Theology- Steven Paulson.
28. Love Wins- Rob Bell
29. The Case for a Creator- Lee Strobel
30. The Case for the Faith- Lee Strobel
31. How to Read the Bible- James Kugel
32.Reformed Dogmatics as Illustrated from the Sources- Heinrich Heppe
33. The Case for Christianity: St. Justin Martyr's Arguments for Religious Liberty and Judicial Justice- Robert Haddad.
34. A History of Doubt- Jennifer Michael Hecht
35. Decartes' Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason- Russell Shorto
36. The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee- Sarah Silverman.
37. Canon and Creed- Robert W. Jenson
38. No Apologies: The Case for American Greatness- Mitt Romney
39. Introduction to Scholastic Theology- Ulrich Leinsle
40. The Four: A Survey of the Four Gospels- Peter Leithart
41. The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions- Karen Armstrong
42. Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith- Jon Krakauer
43. Demonic: How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America- Anne Coulter
44. The King's Cross: The Story of the World in the Life of Jesus- Timothy Keller
45. Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, and Hope in Western Literature- Peter Leithart
46. Defending Constantine: The Twilight of the Empire and the Dawn of Christianity- Peter Leithart
47. The Freedom of a Christian- Martin Luther
48. The Babylonian Captivity of the Church- Martin Luther
49. Letter to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation- Martin Luther
50. Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology- Lewis Ayres
51. Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion- Janet Reitman.
52. A Short Systematic Theology- Paul Zahl
53. The Westminster Handbook to Martin Luther- Denis Janz
54. Churchill- Paul Johnson
55. Augustine and the Trinity- Lewis Ayres
56. The Revolution: A Manifesto- Ron Paul
57. Commentary on Luther's Catechisms: The Creed- Albrecht Peters
58. The Interpretation of Dreams- Sigmund Freud
59. The Secret Teachings of Jesus Christ- Brian McLaren
60. Light in Darkness: Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Catholic Doctrine of Christ's Descent into Hell- Alyssa Lyra Pitstick
61. Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus' Great Discovery to the War on Terror- Michael Allen and Larry Schweikart

Odd Trends in Contemporary Reformed Trinitarian Theology.

2011-12-29T05:09:00.000-08:00

As is well known, the Reformed reject the Lutheran doctrine of the communication of attributes within the hypostatic union. The Lutheran position is very hard to deny because 1.) it rests on such incredibly clear biblical passages (not least the narrative of Jesus' resurrected life in the NT) 2.) Ecumenically, it has wide patristic support and is simply an further explication of the teaching of the enhypostasis-anhypostasis Christology of the fifth ecumenical council (something that Reformed have historically agreed with!).

Regarding this last point, Gerhard points out that since the human nature is anhypostasis, it can only be spoken of as the human nature of the Logos- even in the abstract. Hence, the divine glory is communicated to it hypostatically in that it participates in person of the Logos and therefore also his the eternal reception of himself from the Father. In that the Logos receives within his hypostasis the fullness of the glory of the divine ousia, so the human nature which subsists within the person of the Son also receives it through its unity with the divine person of the Son. Hence, this communication of glory is, as Gerhard notes, "hypostatic" rather than substantial (which would be Docetic) or accidental (which would be Nestorian).

The logic of this position is undeniable if you buy into the catholic-ecumenical theology of the first six ecumenical councils. Calvin, wishing to get around the idea of hypostatic reception of the divine glory while at the same time maintaining the doctrine of the ancient Church developed an unusual Trinitarian theology. Interestingly enough in his recent systematic theology, Michael Horton endorses Calvin's rather strange position.

Calvin makes the argument that the divine nature is incapable of self-communication. Well (you will ask), how can that be? Obvious the Father (the font of divinity) communicates himself in the Son and the Son and the Father do so in the procession of the Spirit. Calvin responses by saying that communication in the form of begetting and procession are a function of the person and not the divine nature. The divine nature is what all three persons share in common. You can see where this goes! For this reason, the later Reformed orthodox could claim that the even though the human nature participated in the hypostasis of the Son, he did not receive the divine glory of God's ousia. This is because the divine person became incarnate and not the divine nature. If the divine nature became incarnate, they claimed, then all three person would be incarnate.

Let's examine what's wrong with this. Most fundamentally it seems to strangely make the divine nature a fourth thing along side the persons. Actually, in terms of classical Trinitarian theology, Thomas Aquinas' description of the relationship between the divine persons and the ousia is probably the best. The divine persons are "subsisting relations." In other words, what makes a person a person within the Godhead is his relationship of begetting and procession to the others. The person "subsist" in these relations. Moreover, since the Father is the font of divinity, the divine nature is not something abstract alongside the persons, but possesses its reality in and through the subsisting relationships. In other words, there is no separating the divine persons and nature the way Calvin wishes to. The divine nature only possesses its actuality through the concrete subsisting relations of the Trinitarian persons. Hence, participation in second person of the Trinity is necessarily participation in the divine nature which is exists in its fullness in the Son as he possesses his reality through his relationship to the Father and Spirit.

Now it gets weird. A small minority modern Reformed Trinitarian thinkers have taken Calvin's odd Trinitarian theology to a next level. These folks would be: Charles Hodge, Robert Reymond, and Loraine Boettner. According to these theologians, there are no relationships of procession or begetting in the Trinity. Reymond in particular makes the rather bizarre claim that "Father" and "Son" language simply refer to unity of substance (what about the Spirit then?). All claim that "begetting" and "procession" language refers to temporal activity and not eternal relationships. Begetting would then be the act of Incarnation, whereas procession would be the sending of the Holy Spirit. Boettner claims that apply such language to the eternal reality of God confuses the immanent with the economic Trinity. Of course, without collapsing the immanent and economic Trinity into one another (as modern theologians after Hegel have tended to do), one may legitimately ask doesn't God's temporal activity reflect his eternal being? If not, then why not? Is he different in himself than he is in his Word and work?

How then are we to conceive the unity of the Trinity apart from subsisting relations? All of these thinkers seem to think of the Trinity as three persons somehow fused together into a single entity without any relations to subsist in. True to the Reformed fixation on the concept of covenant, Reymond talks of a "covenantal" relationship between the persons (this has lead to charges of Tri-theism from other Reformed theologians). This is an especially odd way of thinking insofar as it also calls into question the simplicity of the divine nature. In other words, because of divine aseity, God isn't made of up other stuff compounded together to make God-God (unlike creatures!). If God is "made up" of three persons existing alongside one another in some sort of undefined ontological unity (rather than subsisting through self-communicating fecundity of the single divine nature itself) then God would in a sense seem to be compounded rather than simple.

Although most contemporary Reformed theologians have rejected these views, it is not hard to see how Calvin's odd Trinitarian theology led to these conclusions. Unless we view the divine nature as existing in and through the persons and there subsisting relations to one another, it is hard to conceptualize the unity of the divine substance or the logic of the distinctions of the persons. Moreover, if one accepts the classical Trinitarian theology in this description of the divine being, it is difficult to see how one could reject the Lutheran understanding of the hypostatic union and the communication of glory.

The Analogy of Being.

2011-12-15T07:24:00.000-08:00

In light of the last post my wife and I have been having a discussion regarding the analogy of being. Here is my position in outline.

First, let's define the analogy of being. The analogy of being presupposes that there is a similarity between God and his creatures. God of course does not exist as his creatures exist. He is infinite, eternal, and non-contingent. Nevertheless, he can be said to exist, as can his creatures even if there existence is profoundly different. Hence there is an analogy of being existing between them. Moreover, God's attributes (wisdom, power, goodness, etc.)though infinite and eternal, can be observed as existing in analogous manner in creatures who also possess them. There is a similarity with a still greater dissimilarity between God's reality and his creatures. Such a claim about God allowed the Medieval theologians (particularly Thomists) to claim that their doctrinal statements about God's nature were realistically true, while at the same time allowing for divine mystery.

My difficulty, which I expressed in the last post, is that to my thinking that this amounts to a theology of glory. In other words, the knowledge of God is a matter is seeing past created thing and into God's eternal being. This allows creatures to "see" God (for ancient philosophy the act of cognition is identified with seeing and not with hearing) and thereby attempt to correspond to God's glory. For Thomas in particular, the human creature is supposed to see God's being and thereby gradually become similar to it by the power of grace.

My alternative is not to talk about creatures as analogues for God, but as divine "masks" in accordance with Luther. This is not a Barthian rejection of natural theology, but a revisioning of natural theology by Luther in terms of divine presence and action, rather than ontological likeness and distance.

Luther often speaks in terms that sound (without actually meaning to be) pantheistic or panentheistic. For example, Luther talks about how God channels his goodness to his creatures through created means. When the "fool eats bread, he does not realize that he is eating God in the bread." Luther says that God "wraps himself up" in his creatures. The point here is not that God somehow is identical with the substance of the bread, but rather that God's goodness is active and present through the bread. The bread (or any other creatures) is a mask of God's presence and action. The created entity is a medium of God's goodness in that God can be recognized as creating, sustaining, and acting through the bread to give his goodness to his creatures. It is not analogical of God's goodness because there is no distance of "likeness and unlikeness" between God's creative and sustaining action and its manifestation in the creature. God's graciousness is literally and concretely manifest in that he gives the good through the bread, not a similitude to the good. Moreover, since one only comes into contact with the good that God is giving in, under, and with the creature, it is is impossible to strip away the creature to get to God's naked goodness inside. Hence, the creaturely mask is not as an "image" or analogue for God's goodness. It does not bid us to draw our minds away from the created medium to God "above" the medium (which is the point of analogy), but rather God's actual presence in the bread. I take this to be what Paul means in Romans 1 when he states that God's power and glory are known "in that which was made" (ESV). We can say this with regard to God's activity in creation as we do with regard to redemption. For example, we do not say that the Lord's Supper "reflects" God's willingness to forgive or the presence of Christ, but rather it is these things. In a similar manner, in the OT, the covenant was circumcision.

This is all very consistently with Lutheranism's insistence that the "finite is capable of the infinite." As Gustaf Wingren points out, God's creatures are not alien to him in that made them precisely for the purpose of acting through them. Analogy supposes that the finite can only "reflect" or "echo" the infinite by similitude. For Lutherans, the infinite God can be known truly and directly through the created medium in that it is capable of serving as a vehicle of his infinity. This also corresponds to how Lutherans understand the Incarnation. For Lutherans, the man Christ is the presence of God, whereas for the Reformed and Catholics Christ's humanity reflects God. Denying the genus majestaticum, both Reformed and Catholics talk about the "creatured gifts" (i.e. created analogues of God's divinity in Jesus' humanity) given to the man Jesus.

For this reason, our language about God should be characterized as "sacramental" and not analogical. God cannot, as Luther states, be spoken of apart from the masks of his creaturely coverings. Whenever we speak about God, we are speaking about his presence and activity wrapped in his creatures, not his eternal and hidden being. This is why the analogy as a theological method ultimately does not work. It ignores the means through which God has made himself present to us and seeks to look into his hidden being through the creaturely medium as if they were transparent.

Good Question from a Reader.

2011-12-13T15:21:00.000-08:00

Here's a good question from a reader on the last post:

"Is there any correspondence between "how" and "what" God is? I'm thinking about goodness, or holiness - are these only describing how God is but never what he is?"

My response is as follows:

Good question.
Well, what do we mean when we predicate those things of God? What we mean is that under his masks he acts in accordance with these terms. For example, we may say that God is just. What tells us this? Well, his just action through his masks- smashing Pharaoh for example. How does he do this? Through the plagues and through a Word of attached to them telling us what he means to accomplish by them.
Notice though that the mask is never pulled away. We never "see" God as just or holy. We listen and he tells us that what he is doing is such. This is why his actions under his mask may seem bad to vision, but we "hear" God's Word about the event and we trust and believe that under the covering that they are good and just.
Case-in-point: Jesus. Go through the Gospels. Every step of the way Jesus looks to those who do not believe his Word as though he is a sinner. His mother makes what is, to human reason, a dubious claim of virgin birth (we can only infer what most people thought!), he is baptized with sinners, he associates with sinners. He claims to be God (the sin of Adam) and he is condemned to death- that's what happens to sinner! But all along, God testifies of what he really is under his covering of sin and death "my beloved son, etc."
When we believe these words, then we suffer God's action and are able to trust that he is what he says he is. Nevertheless, that only comes about on the basis of trusting in his self-testimony. God is always, as Luther says in the Genesis commentary "wrapped up" in a covering. We deal with God in the covering alone this side of eternity.
Some theologians have attempted to use the "how" to infer the "what" through analogy (Aquinas and Barth). For them, we can "think-after God" (nachdanken). We can, they say, pull away the mask and talk about God in himself. That way God's actions in creation which so often seem contradictory (wrath and grace) can be smoothed out into a unified system of nature being completed by grace. Nevertheless, this is the theology of glory. Faced with what Luther called the "nude God," we can only seek to self-justify. This is why theologies that work on the basis of analogy are necessarily legalistic.

A Good Insight from the Church Fathers.

2011-12-13T05:59:00.001-08:00

A good insight from the Fathers: Basil of Ceasarea says that we cannot know what God is, but we can know how God is: i.e., Trinity, redeemer, creator, etc. Johann Gerhard says much the same thing. This works well with Luther's insistence that when we deal with God we deal only with him under his masks (larva Dei). Dealing with him under his masks, we can very easily talk about how he is by his actions. Nevertheless, we cannot pull away his masks in this life and see what is he. That will only happen in heaven.

The End of Sacrifice.

2011-12-06T15:29:00.000-08:00

Peter Leithart has recently written a book in defense of Constantine. What Leithart thinks is significant about Constantine is that he ushered in an political order that did not have sacrifice. In fact he banned sacrifice all together. All civilizations were sacrificing civilizations up to that point. The myth of origins of most civilizations was an act of cosmic sacrifice. The gods of order usually killed a cosmic monster and his or her body became the universe. Similarly, the city or nation itself was often built on an act of primal violence. Cain killed Abel and then founded the first city (something that Augustine notes). So too, Romulus killed Remus and founded Rome. The point is that order only happens when there's violence. Violence means subduing the other so they'll behave and do what you want. On a political level, this means beating people into submission or killing them so that they won't revolt against you. The social practice of sacrifice in political settings embodies this reality. It's interesting that as Leithart notes the Christian in many cases were killed in ways that resembled the Roman act of sacrifice. So, in other words, the Christian were sacrificed to keep the political order going.

Religiously, sacrifice usually means forcing the gods to do what you want them to do by subduing them through a pleasing offering. The irony here is that the gods in many civilization (particularly ancient Sumer) were thought to get sleepy from eating the oblations. Hence, the logical extension of the pacification of the gods is to make them literally sleep- or perhaps even die. To my mind this seems to express the essence of Original sin. Humans wish to be God, so they try to pacify the God. The ultimate act of pacifying God would be to kill him- hence the crucifixion!

Christianity is different for two reasons. First, Christianity says that the world is not rooted in violence, but in God's peaceful act of giving (creation ex nihilo). Secondly, sacrifice does happen, but at the end of history and not that the beginning. In other words, in a sense the pagan myths are right. Human community after the Fall does have to be rooted in some group of orderly people forcing disorderly people to be orderly. Moreover, evil really does need to be punished. Hence the curse and condemnation of the law. In the punishment of sin in the cross, the point is to restore the primal peace between God and humans. Sacrifice is an interim measure to deal with evil, it is not the very basis of reality. Of course the sacrifice of cross does found a community, but one based on the end of sacrifice and therefore the end of the project of human self-justification.

Robert Jenson on Atonement: Part 2

2011-12-03T05:01:00.000-08:00

More of a discussion on Jenson. This deals specifically with his atonement theology.

In light of his history of divine self-actualization, the meaning of the work of Christ comes into focus. Humanity’s true destiny is integration into the life of the Trinity: “God will let the redeemed see him: the Father by the Spirit will make Christ’s eyes their eyes. Under all rubrics, the redeemed will be appropriated to God’s own being.”[14] Therefore, the work of Christ is cast not so much as atonement for sin or defeat of demonic forces, but rather as God’s self-identification with sinful humanity and his reconciliation with them through their integration with the divine being. In response to Jenson’s descriptions, one is at times more than tempted to see specters of Hegel’s “Speculative Good Friday.”[15]

In entering into a more general discussion of atonement, Jenson first rejects both Anselm and other theories of substitutionary atonement. For Jenson, atonement must be about our reconciliation with God, rather than his reconciliation with us.[16] Nowhere, claims Jenson, does the New Testament speak about God’s reconciliation to us; rather it consistently speaks about our reconciliation to God.[17] Similarly, subjective theories of atonement (here Jenson mentions Schleiermacher) are problematic in that they make the communication of consciousness the real goal of redemption. Such conceptions of the work of the work of Christ make no distinction between reconciliation as a subjective and objective event.[18] For the tradition of Protestant Liberalism, Jesus died merely following his vocational duty to communicate his religious consciousness. Ultimately then, it is completely irrelevant whether he died on the cross or “in bed.”[19]

Lastly, Jenson reviews Gustaf Aulén and his promotion of the conquest motif. Aulén’s theological construction is doubtless appealing due to its richness. Most attractive to Jenson is that it makes the resurrection a true victory.[20] According to Jenson this makes the conquest motif superior to Anselm’s theory of atonement where resurrection is irrelevant because all is already accomplished on the cross.[21] Nonetheless, Jenson believes that Aulén’s theory is deficient for two reasons. First, it constructs a theory from “bits of Biblical and Patristic language,” while abandoning the actual narrative of Jesus’ Passion we discover in the Gospels. Instead, the conquest motif replaces the Gospel-narrative with a new and invented story of Jesus’ struggle against demonic forces. Secondly, this theory suffers from the weakness of being unable to give a coherent answer to the question of why God bothers to enter into the struggle of redemption in the first place. What sense does it make for Jesus to do battle with Satan, when “victory is easily attained.” This also creates the similar problem of how what Jesus “does for himself” (i.e., defeating the demonic forces) becomes “actual”[22] for us.

Over against these theories of atonement, Jenson proposes a modified version of Gerhard Forde’s view that we will discuss in future chapters. Crucifixion is what it actually “costs” God to remain a loving and forgiving Father. Jesus reveals the Father to us and identifies with us in our sin and brokenness. He wishes for us to share in his relationship with this loving Father. We do not want to share this relationship in that we “do not want there to be a Father.” The ultimate result of this rejection is the crucifixion of Christ by sinful humanity. In that Jesus is raised from the dead in the power of the Spirit, humanity’s sinful status is made manifest. We are truly the wicked vineyard keepers of Jesus’ parable. Nonetheless, the Son finds “his own identity in the totus Christus, in the Son identified with us.”[23] This theme of the totus Christus (originating in Augustine[24]) is extremely important to Jenson. Classically, the terms refers to Christ and the Church together as single body and subject, a theme that Jenson exploits in the development of his ecclesiology. The concept has been especially important for modern Roman Catholic ecclesiologies which Jenson often appears to be channeling.[25] By Jesus’ suffering crucifixion, he identifies to the end with the effects of human sin that are present in the members of his mystical body. He moves to identify with the very depths of human existence and thereby integrates sinful humanity into the life of God.

This brings Jenson to the nature of sacrifice. The idea that Christ’s death was a sacrifice is an important idea in the Scriptures and also in the history of the Church. What therefore, asks Jenson, is the meaning and significance of this concept? According to him, we should not exclusively identify sacrifice with propitiation. Rather, we should look at sacrifice as a kind of prayer, a “prayer spoken not only with language, but with words and gestures.” Christ’s death was a prayer whereby he gave himself over to us in love and prayed for us to the Father. Through participating in him, his one prayer incorporates many prayers of his body, the people of God. His resurrection represents not so much his acceptance, but rather of his body the Church as it subsists in him as the totus Christus. In the power of his resurrection, Christ now becomes the true priest able to baptize with the Spirit. The Church is reconciled “only when we are actually brought together with him and his Father in one community; that is, in that their communal Spirit becomes that of a community in and by which we live.”[26] The resurrection therefore structures the being and identity of the Son, thereby manifesting him as the true Logos of creation. Echoing Pannenberg, for Jenson, the resurrection confirms Jesus’ status as the originator and goal of creation, thereby making him the true Logos of creation.

The demonic forces of the old creation are also defeated by this death of the Son. Although Jenson does not deny that that Jesus was one performed exorcisms and who strove with actual demons, he believes that it is more important that Jesus’ victory was primarily over the unholy alliance of the high priest and the Roman procurator. This being said, Jenson is reticent about how exact this victory is accomplished.[27] One may infer that Jenson believes that Jesus’ resurrection overcame and defeated the sinful actions of these governing authorities, but he does not directly state this.

Ultimately, for Jenson, the sacrificial and conquest motifs are but minor and passing themes. The main accent consistently falls on the theme of the Son’s integration of humanity into the trinitarian relationship. This can be observed in how Jenson deals with the resurrection and the overall concept of sacrifice. Reconciliation primarily consists of Christ identification with humanity. By his resurrection and giving of the Spirit, draws humanity into the inner life of God. In the power of the Spirit, the visible Church becomes something of the prolongation of the Incarnation: “The Church is ontologically the risen Christ’s human body.”[28] Indeed, Jenson goes so far as to state “the Church is the risen Christ’s Ego.”[29] Thereby the bond of humanity established in the Incarnation is universally communicated through the ministry of the Church.

Robert Jenson on Atonement: Part 1

2011-11-29T15:06:00.000-08:00

Here's part of my discussion of Robert Jenson's Christology and doctrine of atonement from the book. Enjoy.

We will now turn to the theology of the American Lutheran theologian Robert Jenson (1928-present).[1] Jenson has a very long publications record over many decades. Nevertheless, instead of describing each of his works in detail we will primarily focus on the ultimate synthesis of his thinking in his Systematic Theology (1997-1999). Examining this work will suffice insofar as Jenson thought has remained relatively consistent over the decades. Also, his treatment of the issue of atonement in his Systematic Theology constitutes one of the longer discussions of the subject present in his writings.

Much like Pannenberg’s theology, Jenson’s theology is focused on a quasi-Hegelian concept of divine self-actualization within the history of salvation. By contrast to the former though, Jenson emphasizes that theology is an inherently ecclesial task.[2] That is to say, Jenson wishes to find the internal, ecumenical coherence of the historical proclamation of the Church with the foundational biblical narratives of redemption. As we might recall, Pannenberg is primarily concerned with the coherence of Christian truth claims with those of the wider human community. For Jenson, Christian theology operates within the communal narrative of the people of God, founded in the biblical history of Israel and the Church.[3] The people of God engaged in the theological task are able to identify and explain the reality of the one God through their participation in his ongoing narrative. Foundational to this ongoing narrative is God’s self-definition and identification through the exodus of Israel from Egypt and the resurrection of Jesus.[4]

Since for Jenson the structure of being is itself inherently narrative, the fullness of God’s being and life only possess their proper character from the standpoint of the total story of creation and salvation: “Since the Lord’s self-identity is constituted in dramatic coherence, it is established not from the beginning but from the end . . . .”[5] For this reason: “The biblical God is not eternally himself in that he persistently instantiates a beginning in which he already is all he ever will be; he is eternally himself in that he unrestrictedly anticipates an end in which he will be all he ever could be.”[6] Oliver Crisp describes concept of Jenson’s God thus: “It is rather as if God exists through time by projecting himself backward in time from his future to his past and present.”[7] For this reason, the knowledge of the Triune God is properly discerned from the biblical narrative itself wherein God has actualized his being through projecting its reality backward from the fullness of its completion form present in the future eschaton.

The biblical God identifies himself with Israel to the extent that he becomes an actor within its ongoing historical drama.[8] The Israel’s history under the old covenant already anticipated its eschatological fulfillment in Christ. Indeed, Christ was already present as the “narrative pattern in the history of Israel.”[9] God chooses to be the God that he is by eternally willing himself to be the man Jesus. Therefore the pre-incarnate Christ is less defined as a hypostasis subsisting within the relations of timeless Triune life, and more as an eternal movement of God towards of the terminus of the earthly life of Jesus. This movement is determinative for the whole structure and coherence of the Triune being: “What in eternity precedes the Son’s birth to Mary is not an unincarnate state of the Son, but a pattern of movement within the event of Incarnation, the movement to incarnation, as itself a pattern of God’s triune life.”[10]

In light of the fact that the movement towards Incarnation eternally defines the very being of the Son, it logically follows that the Son finds himself exhaustively defined by the narrative of Jesus’ earthly life. In Jenson’s theology, there is no room for the extra calvinisticum, or even (it would seem) for a logos asarkos existing for himself apart from any consideration of the Incarnation. In keeping with this theological proposal, Jenson follows Luther and the Swabian Lutherans of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in ardently supporting of the absolute omnipresence of Christ’s humanity.[11] It nevertheless must be stressed that Jenson only affirms certain aspect of classical Lutheran Christology. In other areas he significantly deviates from the earlier tradition, as for example in his aforementioned in rejection of aseity of the Son apart from the Incarnation.

Moreover, Jenson’s Christological proposals are somewhat ironic insofar as it is his stated intention from the beginning of the work to create an ecumenically oriented theology.[12] Contrary to his intention though, he has in respect to his Christology reproduced the accent of his particular tradition in an even more pronounced and less ecumenically-friendly form than many his co-religionists. Recognizing this point, his student Colin Gunton has suggested that he might consider drawing up a Christology along more ecumenical lines.[13]

Pneumatological Arianism in the Reformed Tradition.

2011-11-22T16:21:00.000-08:00

Horton on Divine Causality.

2011-11-19T05:06:00.001-08:00

Horton makes a good observation. Historically, many Christian theologians have been struck by the false dilemma of divine determinism or quasi-deism. This arises from Christians taking over Aristotelian concepts of cause. God is conceived of as a cosmic mechanic, pulling the gears and levers of creation. God is either applying force (wherein you are unfree and determined) or he is letting the machine run by itself (deism). A more biblical manner of conceiving human freedom and divine causation is to conceptualize it as God's effective speech. God speaks forth his Word and it gives creature their own capacities which they act out of. The Word is creative and formative of freedom, while not coercing the creature. For example, in Genesis 1 God states that vegetation of the earth should bring forth fruit and so they do. The Word creates plants as beings that do this sort of thing. They do so spontaneously out of their own nature. Nevertheless this nature is created and formed by God's creative address. We can see the same principle at work in the question of free will and grace. Rome, thinking in mechanical terms, always insisted that the Reformation's monergism was coercive and destructive of the human will. The Reformers (Luther in particular) always conceived the Word as living and effective. Human beings are determined in their freedom so that they are re-created by God by his effective address as beings who out of their own spontaneity trust and love God.

Gustaf Wingren on the Work of Christ.

2011-11-17T15:33:00.000-08:00

Werner Elert on Atonement.

2011-11-10T16:09:00.000-08:00

Here's a section of my dissertation which I am revising for publication. This portion deals with Werner Elert's understanding of atonement.

We will begin our discussion with the Erlangen theologian and Luther scholar, Werner Elert (1885-1954).[1] In order to examine Werner Elert’s contribution to the question of atonement, we will look primarily at one of his shorter works, entitled Law and Gospel (German title:Zwischen Gnade und Ungnade). Among the theologians that we will study, Elert tends to be by far the least willing to revise the position of the Lutheran confessors and scholastics. In distinction to many of his contemporaries (as we will see in the next section, Aulén being foremost among them), Elert has a relatively positive assessment of the Lutheran theology of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries on the question of atonement, as evidenced by his treatment of them in his magnum opus, The Structure of Lutheranism (German title: Morphologie des luthertums).[2]

In this shorter work on law and gospel, Elert attacks Karl Barth and the theology of the Barmen Declaration for reducing all of God’s words to ones of grace.[3] According to Elert, Barth’s contention that the fact that God even speaks to us is grace, will destroy the integrity of the biblical message: “[The] statement of the Decalogue about God visiting the iniquities of the fathers upon the children has some significance. “God threatens to punish” is the way Luther interprets this, and without a doubt he is correct.”[4] This does not mean that these words of judgment are intended to be an end in itself. Law is always ordered towards promise, insofar as the second use of the law is the chief one. Nonetheless, law is not grace and grace is not law.

Elert moves on to discuss the distinction between law and gospel that he sees rooted in the ministry of Jesus. In the Gospels, Christ comes to both fulfill and intensify the law.[5] Nevertheless, though Christ’s ministry may perform this work of the law, his proper office is one of reconciliation. Any use of the law that Christ engages in is ultimately in the service of the gospel.[6] Christ used the law in order to uncover unrighteousness, thereby demonstrating to his contemporaries that not one of them was righteous. Those who claimed to be righteous were able to play at being righteous before true righteousness could be revealed through the proper preaching of the law.[7] By contrast, in the service those who were thought of as unrighteous, Christ crossed many social and cultural boundaries, and thereby showing grace and mercy to the weak.[8]

The ministry of Jesus therefore had three consequences. First, the sinners who encountered Jesus had to recognize that he was not a sinner. Purity, truth and innocence cannot therefore be conveyed to us by dogmas or commandment, but must rather ultimately comes in a person, that is, the person of Christ: “They are the criteria of human personhood, and there is no other person in whom they assume visual form for us than the person of Christ.”[9] The second consequence is that there becomes evident an absolute difference between Christ and those who associate with him. Humanity comes to recognize in Christ that they are wholly sinful in relation to him: “It is a total difference, the difference between the whole Christ and the whole man- as a sinner.”[10] The third consequence is that in light of the first two revelations, humans who through faith in his word come to unite themselves with Christ are sinners “in truth.”[11] That is, a person is something “in truth” according to Elert, when he or she ceases to engage in the hypocritical attempt to be something that they are not and finally admits the reality of who they are. Hence, mere contact with the person of Christ thereby fulfilled the convicting function of the law.

In light of these implications and distinctions, Elert moves on to discuss how we should understand the death of Christ. Humanity is caught up in what he refers to as “nomological”[12] existence. Nomological existence means that humanity exists under the law and its ethos of retribution and self-justification. Christ within his ministry transcended such a law by reaching out to sinners without consideration of their guilt. Those who adhered to the ethos of the law and sought their own self-justification through it were those who administered the death of Jesus.[13] They killed Christ in order to “help the law against the promise.”[14] Nonetheless, Christ’s death was also an act of God’s retributive wrath, since the law without the gospel not only determines humanity in a cycle of self-justification, but works God’s wrath against sin.[15]

The cross both exposes and judges humanity’s nomological existence: “[The] death of Christ is judgment. God is here administering justice according to the law of retribution. Here the nomological being of mankind is not only exposed in its falsehood, but because expiation must occur right here, it is mortally wounded.”[16] The law is undone by its being fulfilled once and for all. In this sense, the death of Jesus can function as both law and gospel. It is a fulfillment of the promise of God to redeem from the power of law as foreshadowed in the suffering servant songs.[17] Considered in itself alone though, it is only law in that it represents an absolute judgment of sin by God.[18] Only through the resurrection does God vindicate that Jesus’ enactment of a new order of forgiveness.[19] In this order of grace, the voice of the law is utterly abolished. In fact “the law no longer has any voice whatsoever.”[20]

Though Elert’s position appears to be similar to Luther, the Lutheran confessors and the seventeenth-century scholastics, there are some notable differences. For Elert, there is more of an emphasis on Jesus’ earthly ministry than in the theologians whom we examined earlier. Also, in contrast particularly to Chemnitz, there is little reflection on the role of the hypostatic union in relation to the redemptive work of Christ. Otherwise, Elert largely upholds the traditional Lutheran doctrine of atonement, albeit in an incomplete manner.

[1] See the following works by Werner Elert: Werner Elert, Das Christliche Ethos: Grundlinien der lutherischen Ethik (Tubingen: Furche,1949); idem, Der christliche Glaube; Grundlinien der lutherischen Dogmatik (Berlin: Furche-Verlag, 1960); idem, Eucharist and Church Fellowship in the First Four Centuries, trans. Norman Nagel (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1966); idem, The Structure of Lutheranism: The Theology and Philosophy of Life of Lutheranism, Especially in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. Walter Hansen (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1962); idem, Zwischen Gnade und Ungnade(München: Evangelischer Verlag, 1948). See the following pieces on secondary literature on Elert: Matthew Becker, “Werner Elert in Retrospect,” Lutheran Quarterly 20 (Autumn 2006): 249-302 Friedrich Duensing, Gesetz als Gericht; eine luthersche Kategorie in der Theologie Werner Elerts und Friedrich Gogartens(München: C. Kaiser, 1970); Sigurjón Arni Eyjólfsson, Rechtfertigung und Schöpfung in der Theologie Werner Elerts (Hannover: Lutherisches Verlagshaus, 1994); Lowell Green, The Erlangen Theology (Ft. Wayne, IN: Lutheran Legacy, 2010); Jörg Kailus, Gesetz und Evangelium in Luthers Grossem Galaterkommentar sowie bei Werner Elert und Paul Althaus: Darstellung in Grundzügen und Vergleich (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2004); Wolf Krötke, Das Problem Gesetz und Evanglium bei W. Elert und P. Althaus (Zürich, E V Z Verlag, 1965); Notger Slenczka, Selbstkonstitution und Gotteserfahrung : W. Elerts Deutung der neuzeitlichen Subjektivität im Kontext der Erlanger Theologie (Göttingen : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999).

[2] Elert, Structure of Lutheranism, 106-17.

[3] Werner Elert, Law and Gospel, trans. Edward Shroeder (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967) 4-5. (This is a translation of Zwischen Gnade und Ungnade). Elert is responding the follow work by Barth: Karl Barth, “Gospel and Law,” in Community, State and Church: Three Essays, ed. Will Herberg (New York: Doubleday, 1960), 71-100.

[4] Elert, Law and Gospel, 6.

[5] Ibid., 18-9.

[6] Ibid., 19.

[7] Ibid., 20-21.

[8] Ibid., 21-25.

[9] Ibid., 23.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid., 28.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid., 29.

[17] Ibid., 29-30.

[18] Ibid., 30.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Ibid.

The Irony of Karl Rahner.

2011-11-06T05:02:00.000-08:00

A quick word about Karl Rahner. I'm at present re-reading his "Foundations of Christian Faith." Rahner is by far the most important Catholic theologian of the 20th century, and basically ran the theological project of the Second Vatican Council.

Now here's the irony of Catholicism's elevating Rahner. Rahner's basic claim is that social/philosophical/theological thematization of the content of the faith is something secondary. It is, rather an objectification of an experience of the "Holy Mystery" which is the ineffable ground of being present within all humans. It is present to all human beings since all human beings possess divine grace as an existential (the so-called "Supernatural existential"). That is, it is part of their existence, while not beings part of their nature. It is the waters they swim in, so to speak.

Ok, so, the real sealing point of your system (Catholicism) is that you claim that you have the ability on an institutional level of mediating salvation. You claim you can do that through your institutions exclusively. So what do you do? You put a guy in charge of re-formulating your theology that says that cult, institution, and dogmatic formulation are secondary realities to the inner, individual, non-institutional experience of grace. Moreover, you put a guy in charge that says that divine grace is everywhere and therefore your institution may have the biggest concentration of it, but by no means has it exclusively. So, in other words, you decide to formulate your new theology in such a way that pretty much eliminates the major sealing points of your theology. Kinda a bad idea.

Hence the irony of Rahner. Rahner wants to make Catholicism more believable by ceasing to be Catholic. Lutherans can learn something by this example.

An Interesting Suggestion about the Passion Chronology from Andrew Steinmann.

2011-11-05T04:56:00.000-07:00

Issues, etc. has been running a series of interviews about the chronology of Scripture. Andrew Steinmann of Concordia Chicago has been the guest and based his discussions on a book on the subject that he recently wrote. I'd like to read it, but it's 80 bucks and I can't get it via ILL at this point. Hopefully I will be able to obtain a copy in the future.

In any case, the most recent interview was on the chronology of the Passion narrative. Steinmann addressed the question of whether or not John has Passover on a different day than the Synoptics. He makes several interesting suggestions:

First, the statement that John makes that the Sabbath was a great Sabbath because it was the first day of the feast of unleavened bread should not make us think that Passover was on Saturday. The terms "feast of Passover" and the "days/feast of unleavened bread" were used interchangeably with one another the first century among Jews. This does not mean though that they were the same feast, since later comes after the former and is a distinct feast. Moreover, since the feast of unleavened bread is after Passover in the Jewish calender, all John is actually saying is that Saturday is the first day after Passover (i.e., the first day of the feast of unleavened bread!)- he's not saying Saturday is Passover. If we accept this interpretation, then John agrees with the Synoptics that passover was Friday that year.

Secondly, we are told by John that the high priest and other ruler didn't want to go into see Pilate because they were afraid of defiling themselves before eating the Passover. This would suggest in the minds of many interpreters that Passover was that evening and therefore on Saturday. Nevertheless, Steinmann makes the point that John highlights the fact that they came to see Pilate very early in the morning, that is, before sun-up. What John is suggesting here, he argues, is that the rulers did not eat the Passover the night before because they were too busy arresting Jesus and putting him on trial. Therefore, since the OT claimed that members of Israel had to eat the Passover in the evening/night or they would be cut off from the people of God, it was their intention to quickly have Jesus crucified so that they could eat the Passover before sun-up. They did not accomplish this and hence John is telling us that they are now cut off from Israel.

Lastly, in terms of the year, Steinmann points out that the year must be 33 A.D., since this was the only one of two years that Passover fell on Friday between 26-36 (the years of Pilate's tenure). 30 would be too early, because Jesus was baptized in late 29 (15th year of Tiberius). This is interesting because it coincides with Paul Maier's correlation of the events of the Passion narrative with political developments in Rome and the strained relation between Pilate and Tiberius after about 32. Hence, the overall chronology fits perfectly with other historical and political factors that we know.

The Ectasis of Being Part II: Concepts of the Self and the Doctrine of Justification

2011-11-01T15:26:00.000-07:00

In the first part of our discussion of ontology we noted that the Christian metanarrative, rooted in the doctrine of the Trinity and creation ex nihillo necessitates a view of being that is ecstatic. In other words, the category of being as conceived by Christians cannot be centered in itself, but in the other. The person of the Trinity find themselves not in themselves, but in their subsisting relations. Creation as described in the history of Genesis 1 finds its being in the narration of God's speech. We connected this also to the doctrine of justification. If we find ourselves external to ourselves, then salvation and righteousness must itself be something external to us in Christ. Trent is therefore gravely mistaken because it posits that righteousness becomes a predicate of our being and thereby centers the sinner in him or herself. Since sin in its essence is the delusion of being centered in one's self, then the doctrine of justification presented in session six of Trent exacerbates the problem of sin rather than solves it.

In light of this insight and the fact that I will be sitting on a panel in Ft. Wayne on the issue of Reformation and modern views of justification, I have been thinking about the basis of both medieval Catholicism and Liberal Protestantism's view of justification. What I think that I would suggest is that both take their cue from their foundation ontological claims, claims that are in fact in conflict with the ecstatic nature of being that I previously described.

Notably, Catholicism operates from the perspective of substance ontology. Substance ontology is in and of itself not bad. At its most basic level substance ontology merely claims that there is an inner reality to things that makes them what they are and that our language can realistically (or critically realistically) portray this fact to us. The difficulty comes when such discourse becomes to reified, which happens in Catholic thought. When this is the case, the self is conceived has being made up of qualities internal to it and therefore can only be what it is coram Deo if those predicates are actualized within it. Hence, Aquinas insisted that God cannot love sinners. Why? Because God is goodness itself and if he doesn't find a certain number of qualities within the sinner that prompts his love, he's incapable of loving the sinner because of his fundamental qualities as God. Granted, God will help the creature acquire these qualities, but that is mercy and not love.

Liberal Protestantism has the same difficulty. It should be noted that due to the influence of Pietism, Liberal Protestant largely operated with a similar understanding of justification as moral regeneration that Catholics do. Nevertheless, in contrast to Catholicism, for Liberal Protestants, the accent was always on the meaningfulness of certain forms of theological knowledge. This arose because of certain shifts in philosophy during the early modern period.

After Decartes, modern philosophy understood the ontic structure of the human (and reality in general) not on the basis of the category of substance but rather on the basis of the duality of matter (which Decartes described as "extension") and consciousness. To make a long story short, if the self is defined by its consciousness, then it is essentially centered in itself, rather than ecstatic. In other words, if I am defined by my consciousness then I am a defined by a particular faculty found within me. That being the case, for reconciliation to be something real for me as a person or as Forde puts it "actual," it must therefore be an event in my own consciousness. If the content of reconciliation is defined as "the Son of God dying for me 2,000 years ago" then it cannot be an event within my own consciousness, and thereby becomes an abstraction. If it is described as my own experience of reconciliation, then it can be real. Now, with the experience of reconciliation necessarily comes moral regeneration. This is a logical consequence of the assumption stated above, because if reconciliation is an experience then it must be the overcoming of the barrier of sin. If the barrier was not overcome on the cross, then it must be overcome inside the the person, and, da--da-da!= justification automatically becomes moral regeneration.

My Critique of Forde on Justification and Atonement: Part II (This time with the footnotes!!)

2011-10-27T14:51:00.000-07:00

Moving beyond issues directly pertaining to atonement and justification, a second major area of concern and difficulty is Forde’s underling understanding of the relationship between the old and new creations. As is clear from our earlier discussion (particularly with regard to penal substitution), Forde is absolutely adamant that the relationship between the old and new beings must be thought of as a wholly disruptive death and resurrection. For him, atonement and justification are apocalyptic events that annihilate the old being of sin and is replaced it with a new being of faith. Sinful humanity resists this movement of death and resurrection because it wishes to hold onto the continuity of the old being and its autonomy.[1] In one of his later book, Justification by Faith: A Matter of Death and Life, Forde quite specifically attacks the idea of a purely forensic justification on these grounds.[2] Much as penal substitution allows for the expression of God’s merciful saving will stand in an internal coherence with his holiness, so too a purely forensic account of justification (the “legal metaphor” as he puts it) allows the old being under the condemnation of the law to stand in continuity with the new creature of faith. Since the idea of imputed righteousness presupposes that the person of faith is the same subject as the one who once stood under the power of sin, a purely forensic justification allows the sinner forgo the total death dealing apocalyptic break of the cross.[3] Put another way: the imputation of righteousness is simply unnecessary if the old sinful subject has ceased to exist and been replaced.

From this, much of the difficulty with Forde’s doctrine of justification and atonement becomes evident from the perspective of the article of creation. According to Forde’s description, what appears to be the case is that creation is not so much redeemed, but is in fact replaced.[4] The old creation is not purified and redeemed by the cleansing blood of Christ, but rather annihilated. Though it is certainly not his intention to impugn the goodness of the created order, by using such language Forde seems to place himself perilously close to the Flacius’ similarly unintended heresy.[5] After all, such an account of the relationship of the old and new creation would appear to assume the very thing that Flacius asserted, namely, that sin is the substance of human nature after the Fall and not merely an accident adhering in it.

In order to combat this charge, Forde would likely appeal to the sometimes rather hazily defined concept (common in many late twentieth century Lutheran theologians, notably Gerhard Ebeling[6]), of “relational ontology.”[7] According to this manner of thinking, the ontic reality of a thing or person is not constituted by an unchanging essence within, but rather by the relationships they enter into, the most fundamental of which is their relationship to God.[8] Therefore, claiming a total discontinuity between the old and new beings is not somehow to assert that the substance of a creature is evil and therefore needs to be replaced by a new substance. Rather, it is to claim that through the effective address of the gospel a total and wholesale reversal of the existential relationship between God and the sinner occurs.

On one level, Forde’s insight here is something that confessional Lutherans should heed. The relationship of the sinner to God is not one of degrees, but of kind. The divine-human relationship constituted by the condemnation of the law is the very opposite of that of grace and justification. The life-orientation of the sinner is precisely the opposite of that of the person of faith. Lutherans should not be lulled (as some in fact have[9]) into accepting a Thomistic account of divine grace completing nature.[10] God’s power, present and active in the preached Word completely turns the sinner around. Divine grace does not work to activate the sinner’s hidden potencies.

Nevertheless, Forde’s rhetoric of total discontinuity fails on another level. First, his choice of language often seems to suggest that the creature’s total being is constituted by the relationship of sin and condemnation. In fact, Forde often boldly speaks of his wholesale contempt for the notion that we are “continuously existing subjects,”[11] i.e., that there is any continuity between the old and new beings. Nonetheless, if indeed, we are not continuously existing subjects, what becomes of our status as God’s good creatures, of which as the Formula of Concord states, sin is merely an accident disruption?[12] If essence of humanity is conceptualized relationally, must it not be defined at an even more fundamental level by the creator-creature relationship and not merely by the relationship of sin and condemnation? Indeed, as the history of the Fall suggests, this more fundamental relational status as God’s good creatures is precisely what defines us as sinners. As Luther at the very least strongly implies in his description of the first article of the creed,[13] sinful humanity perpetually receive the goodness of creation from its creator God, but nevertheless remain untrusting and ungrateful.

Beyond its inability to coherently maintain the creator-creature relationship in light of redemption, Forde’s rhetoric of wholesale disruption fails in other regards as well. Chiefly, the rhetoric of total reversal stands disconcertingly out of step with God’s trustworthy as it is proclaimed and revealed in the gospel. In other words, if God’s redemptive act destroys creation, rather than redeems and purifies it, then has he not been faithless to that which has come before? If he acts in such a way as to be faithless to his original creation by simply replacing it, why would the believer expect God to be faithful in his promise of the gospel?

The problematic nature of Forde’s fixation on the paradigm of discontinuity also manifests itself in his understanding of the relationship between forgiveness and the law. For Forde, as we noted earlier, by an act of fiat God spontaneously forgives sinners. God may, it appears, simply abandon his word of law and its clearly articulated threats of retribution present throughout Sacred Scripture (Dt 27:26, 32:35, etc.). Nevertheless, the question remains: what assurance does the believer possess that God will not abandon his word of gospel just as he did his earlier word of law?

Part of the answer to this question is that Forde tends to subsume idea of the law as commandment into the larger reality of the law as negative existential relationship.[14] If God so chooses, he may reverse this relationship and thereby abrogate the law in favor of the new relationship of grace. Moreover (as we have previously seen), despite his rhetoric to the contrary, ultimately God really does need the law to be fulfilled in order to save.

Nevertheless, neither answer is sustainable from the perspective of the Scripture or the symbolic writings of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. As is abundantly clear from these authorities, God has two separate words of law and gospel. Through his redemptive work of atonement and justification by the blood of Jesus, God reveals his trustworthiness by fulfilling the threats and promises of both. Indeed, as the Apostle Paul puts it, by his act of redemption in the cross and the empty tomb, God revealed “his righteousness . . . [as the one who is both] just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus” (Rom 3:26 ESV).

In light of the biblical and confessional authorities, perhaps a better way of conceptualizing the relationship between the old and new creations might be on the basis of an analogy of the fifth ecumenical council description of the relationship between the two natures in Christ. According to this council, Christ’s divine person is a proper hypostasis or center of identity within which his non-personal humanity (anhypostasis) is incorporated and subsists.[15] In a similar manner, as David Scaer has correctly observes,[16] God’s new act of redemption always incorporates within itself that which has come before. Nevertheless, the new creation is not somehow the fruit of activating hidden potencies in the old creation (i.e., the Thomistic “grace completing nature”). Rather, the new creation is its own independent reality, in a similar manner to the divine person of Christ. Ultimately though, because God is faithful to his previous words and works he always incorporates previous act into his new one. For this reason, new creation thereby makes itself the proper hypostasis of the anhypostasis of the old creation.[17] Hence, Jesus took upon himself the flesh and condemnation Adam in order to redeem. In the resurrection, his corpse was incorporated into his body of glory (See 1 Cor 15:35-8). Similarly, the sacraments of the new creation contain within themselves the elements of the old creation (bread, wine, water). Lastly, and most importantly, the law is contained within and ultimately fulfilled in the gospel (Rom 3:26, 8:3-4).

This being said, although it is important to recognize the unity of the old and new creations, Forde must be nonetheless commended for insisting that Bible describes the advent of the new creation as an eschatological judgment. Although the old creation is by no means abrogated by the new, in being purified from sin it does not escape God’s judgment. Therefore, in the Incarnation of the second Adam, God the Holy Spirit purified the flesh of Mary from the sin of the first Adam. In the crucifixion, God concentrated all sin in the flesh of Christ and reduced him to a corpse in order to redeem the whole world (Isa. 53:4, 2 Cor 5:21, 1 Pt 2:24). Nevertheless, this judgment does not annihilate, but rather cleanses creation from the accidental vitiation of sin. Jesus’ body which bore burden of human sin, becomes for those who have faith the medium through which we die and are resurrected to new and infinitely abundant divine life.

[1] This emphasis can also be found in Forde’s students. See Mark Mattes, "Beyond the Impasse: Reexamining the Third Use of the Law," Concordia Theological Quarterly 69, no. 3-4 (2005): 278. Mattes writes: ". . . there is no continuity between old and new beings. This is because the new being lives from faith in Jesus Christ alone."

[2] Forde, Justification By Faith, 18-9.

[3] Ibid.,13.

[4] I thank Rev. David Ramirez for this particular way of expressing the problem with Forde’s description of redemption.

[5] FC, SD, I; CT, 859-881. FC, Ep. I; CT, 779-85. For sources on Flacius and his misstatement regarding original sin, see the following: F. Bente, Historical Introduction to the Lutheran Confessions (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1965), 144-5; I.A. Dorner, History of Protestant Theology, Particularly in Germany, 2 vols., trans. George Robson and Sophia Taylor (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1871), 1:370-83; González, 3:124-5; Richard Klann, "Original Sin," in A Contemporary Look at the Formula of Concord, ed. Robert Preus and Wilbert Rosin (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1978), 115-7; Robert Kolb, Bound Choice, Election, and the Wittenberg Theological Method: From Martin Luther to the Formula of Concord (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2005), 118-20; idem, "Historical Background to the Formula of Concord," in in A Contemporary Look at the Formula of Concord, ed. Robert Preus and Wilbert Rosin (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1978), 29-33; Ivan Kordić, "Croatian Philosophers IV: Matija Vlaèiæ Ilirik – Mathias Flacius Illyricus," Prolegomena 4, no. 2 (2005): 229; Oliver Olson, "Matthias Flacius," in The Reformation Theologians: An Introduction to Theology in the Early Modern Period , ed. Carter Lindberg (Malden, Mass: Blackwell, 2002), 87; Pelikan, 4:142-4; Wilhelm Preger, Matthias Flacius Illyricus und seine Zeit, 2 vols. (Erlangen: Blassing, 1859-61), 2:310-412; Otto Ritschl, Dogmengeschichte des Protestantismus, 4 vols. (Göttingen and Leipzig: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1908-1927), 2:430-54; Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, 3 vols (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1881), 1:271-4; Seeberg, 2:367-9; August Detlev Twesten, Matthias Flacius Illyricus, eine Verlesung. Mit Autobiorgraphischen Beilagen und einer Abhandlung über Melanchthons Verhalten zum Interim von Hermann Rössel (Berlin: Bethage, 1844), 20-22; Heinrich Vogel, “On Original Sin, The Flacian Aberration” in No Other Gospel: Essays in Commemoration of the 400^th Anniversay of the Formula of Concord, 1580-1980, ed. Arnold Koelpin (Milwaukee: Northwestern Publishing House, 1980), 126-31

[6] See the following writing by Gerhard Ebeling: Dogmatik des Christlichen Glaubens, 3 vols. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1979); idem, Einfuhrung in Theologische Sprachlehre (Tübingen: Mohr, 1971); idem, Evangelische Evangelienauslegung: Eine Untersuchung zu Luthers Hermeneutik (München: Evangelischer Verlag Albert Lempp, 1942); idem, Frei aus Glauben (Tübingen, Mohr, 1968); idem, Die Geschichtlichkeit der Kirche und Ihrer Verkundigung als Theologisches Problem: Drei Vorlesungen (Tübingen: Mohr, 1954); idem, Kirchengeschichte als Geschichte der Auslegung der Heiligen Schrift (Tübingen: Mohr, 1947); idem, Luther: Einfuhrung in Sein Denken (Tübingen: Mohr, 1964); idem, Luthers Seelsorge : Theologie in der Vielfalt der Lebenssituationen an Seinen Briefen Dargestellt(Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997); Lutherstudien, 3 vols. (Tübingen, Mohr Siebeck, 1971-1989); idem, The Nature of Faith, trans. Ronald Smith (London: Collins, 1961); idem, The Problem of Historicity in the Church and its Proclamation, trans. Grover Foley (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967). Idem, Psalmenmeditationen(Tübingen: Mohr, 1968); idem, The Study of Theology, trans. Duane Priebe (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978); idem, Theologie und Verkündigung; ein Gesprach mit Rudolf Bultmann (Tübingen: Mohr, 1962); idem, The Truth of the Gospel: An Exposition of Galatians, trans. David Green (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985); idem, Das Wesen des Christlichen Glaubens (Tübingen, Mohr, 1959); idem, Wort Gottes und Tradition; Studien zu einer Hermeneutik der Konfessionen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1964); idem, Wort und Glaube (Tübingen: Mohr, 1960).

[7] See Gerhard Forde, Pat Keifert, Mary Knutsen, Marc Kolden, Jim Nestingen, and Gary Simpson, “A Call for Discussion of the ‘Joint Declaration on the Doctrine on Justification’” Dialog 36, no. 3 (Summer, 1997): 226-227. Note that the authors view the issue between Lutherans and Catholics on the issue of justification specifically pertains to substance vs. “relational” ontology.

[8] See Ebeling, Dogmatik des Christlichen Glaubens, 3:195-200. Ebeling describes the movement of justification from a state of non-being (Nichtsein) to being (Sein). Also see Wilfried Joest, Ontologie der Person bei Luther (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1967), 14, 37, 362.

[9] See description in Mark Mattes, "The Thomistic Turn in Evangelical Catholic Ethics," Lutheran Quarterly 16 (2002): 65-100

[10] See description in Jacques Maritain, Integral Humanism, trans. J. Evans (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), 291-308.

[11] Gerhard Forde, “Radical Lutheranism,” in A More Radical Gospel: Essays on Eschatology, Authority, Atonement, and Ecumenism, eds. Mark Mattes and Steven Paulson, (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2004), 15

[12] FC Ep, I; CT, 779-85.

[13] SC II.1; CT, 543. Luther writes: “believe that God has made me and all creatures; that He has given me my body and soul, eyes, ears, and all my limbs, my reason, and all my senses, and still preserves them; in addition thereto, clothing and shoes, meat and drink, house and homestead, wife and children, fields, cattle, and all my goods; that He provides me richly and daily with all that I need to support this body and life, protects me from all danger, and guards me and preserves me from all evil; and all this out of pure, fatherly, divine goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness in me; for all which I owe it to Him to thank, praise, serve, and obey Him. This is most certainly true.”

[14] See summary description in Forde, The Law-Gospel Debate, 192. See my own discussion of this fact in Jack Kilcrease, "Forde's Doctrine of the Law: A Confessional Lutheran Critiique," Concordia Theological Quarterly 75, no. 1 (2011): 151-180.

[15] For the text of the fifth ecumenical council see Heinrich Denzinger, The Sources of Catholic Dogma, trans. Roy Deferrai (St. Louis: B. Herder, 1954), 85-90. See discussion of the content of the fifth ecumenical council in Martin Chemnitz, The Two Natures in Christ, trans. J. A. O. Preus (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1971), 68-72; Aloys Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition, Pt. 2, vol. 2 (Louisville, Ky: Westminster-John Knox, 1995), 341, 387, 402- 10, 419-62, 463; John Meyendorff, Christ in Eastern Christian Thought (Washington: Corpus Book, 1969), 38-40, 59-64; Pelikan, 2:29-30.

[16] See David Scaer, " "Sacraments as an Affirmation of Creation," Concordia Theological Quarterly 57, no. 4 (1993): 241-63.

[17] See LW 34:140. Luther himself comments in The Disputation Concerning Man (1536): “Therefore, man in this life is the simple material of God for the form of the future life. . . [j]ust as the whole creation which is now subject to vanity [Rom. 8:20] is for God the material for its future glorious form.” Emphasis added.

The Ectasis of Being.

2011-10-17T06:00:00.000-07:00

According to the Christian account of reality, being is inherently ecstatic. Foundational to the Christian worldview is the Trinitarian account of the divine being. In this description of God, the divine being is constituted by the mutual definition of the persons of the Trinity. The Father is only the Father because he is the Father of the Son. The reverse is also true. Hence, the account of the being of the persons of the Trinity offered by such a description is one in which the reality of each person finding its reality in the other. The Father is only the Father because external to himself he finds himself in the reality of the Son.

This goes hand-in-hand with the narrative of Genesis 1 and its account of created being. First, in this narrative created being is radically de-centered from earlier ANE accounts. There is no suggestion, for example as in the Enuma Elish, Hesiod, or Plato, that there exists some sort of pre-existent matter that God imposes his will on. Rather, it is the Word of God and God's own narration of reality that constitutes its being. Therefore the being of creation is external to itself in God's own effective address. Much as the persons of the Trinity find their reality external to themselves in the other persons of the Trinity, creatures find their reality external to themselves in the Word of God.

Moreover, such narration of reality takes the form a narrative structure. This narrative structure suggestions that creation is actually a story. This is reflected in how we normally talk about the identity of a thing. If you ask me, "Who are you?" I will, as a rule, tell my life story. Even the identity of an infant is defined by the narrative reality they are born into. A German baby born in 1950 cannot escape the reality of the Nazi regime from at least somewhat determining his or her reality. Therefore, creation must have a story to begin with or it will lack identity. It would have no identity if it were simply plopped down by God as a series of distinct substances in a particular order. This in part helps us answer Augustine's question regarding why God took 6 days and didn't simply create everything at once. Creation is a story, that possesses its narrative reality external to itself by God effective narration.

This ultimately helps us bolster the account of justification offered by the Lutheran confessions. What the Thomistic account of justification falsely assumes is that humans are centered in themselves. It assumes that for God to recognize me as just, I must have justice as a predicate internal to my being. If though, creation is ecstatic and is constituted by Christ, who as the New Testament authors state, is both God's final narration of reality and the a human being living perfectly in accordance with God's narration, then this cannot be correct. Rather, what forensic justification proposes is that my being is not centered in myself but external to myself. My life is, as Paul puts it, "hidden in God in Christ." Therefore, my righteousness is not to be found within myself, that is as a predicate of my being. Rather as the Bible's ecstatic account of created being shows, it is to be found in external to me in Christ and his narrative.

The Image of God and Coram Relationships.

2011-10-15T05:03:00.000-07:00

Horton points out division between the Reformed and Lutherans, and Lutherans and other Lutherans on the issue of the image of God. The question is: Does the Fall destroy the imago Dei? Luther and the Lutheran confessional writings identify the image of God as being the original holiness and righteousness of God possessed by humans prior to the Fall. Since humans lack righteousness coram Deo and because Paul says the image is renewed by our sanctification, the logical conclusion is that the image of God is removed by the Fall. This does not mean that human nature has ceased to be human, but that the accidental relationship of original integrity has been removed by the Fall.

The Reformed and many Lutheran theologians like Gerhard and Quenstedt agree with Luther and the Lutheran confessions on this issue insofar as it relates to human righteousness before God. Nevertheless, they disagree that the image of God is completely destroyed. This is not because they hold that there is some sort of remnant of original righteousness that could establish our relationship with God. Rather, it is because for them the image of God is also tied up in the knowledge of the law of God and the ability of human reason to exercise dominion in creation. This, again, does not mean that there is something of a point of contact between fallen human nature and God's grace. Rather, it is simply a recognition that humans possess an ability to engage in civil righteousness coram Mundo, and this is an expression of the divine image.

I personally think that these positions are in fact reconcilable if understood in terms of coram relationships. I think that accommodating both views is also necessary exegetically. Obviously in Genesis 1, the image of God and the original righteousness are tied up with humans serving as God's viceroys in creation. The Fall has not abrogated that role, just made it more difficult. Moreover, the Noahic covenant, when talking about murder teaches that murder is wrong because it defaces the image of God in humans. This presupposes that there is still a presence there, especially inter-human relationships.

Therefore, perhaps a good way of stating the answer would be that coram Deo, the image of God is utterly destroyed. This is what I think the Lutheran Confessions mean. Their point is not that humans have no ability to act morally regarding civil righteousness, but rather that God does not recognize his image in humans and therefore cannot count them as righteous. It is this image coram Deo that is renewed by faith and sanctification. Coram Mundo, humans can recognize the imago Dei in other humans through exercise of civil righteousness and the technical goodness that this involves. Nevertheless, such a remnant is not recognized coram Dei and in no way contributes to our relationship with God.

Horton's Historical Mistakes.

2011-10-09T05:04:00.000-07:00

The Michael Horton systematic theology is quite good. He goes most places I would go with theological method. Nevertheless, I think he should have had some better proof-reading. I'm detecting quite a few historical mistakes here. Actually some fairly obvious ones. For example, Origen did not believe in reincarnation (he specifically rejects it in his commentary on Matthew). Joachim of Fiore did not found the spiritual Francicans- so on and so on. I do not blame him, I blame the publishing industry for cutting back on copy-editing.

Michael Horton on Communicable and Incommunicable Attributes.

2011-10-08T06:32:00.000-07:00

Horton organizes his discussion of the divine attributes with the distinction between communicable and incommunicable attributes. For example, eternity is non-communicable, whereas wisdom or goodness is reflected in creatures, and therefore communicable. Historically Lutherans have stated that all attributes are communicable insofar as they are communicated within the hypostatic union. We must be clear though that said communication is hypostatic (as Gerhard puts it), rather than analogical. In this sense Lutherans can agree with the Reformed that creatures cannot possess the incommunicable attributes by way of created similitude of the analogy of being, whereas they disagree within them regarding the hypostatic communication of the attributes within the person of Christ. This also explains how the Reformed misunderstood the Lutheran teaching regarding the genus majestaticum. Since their could only conceptualize communication in the form of created similitude, they assumed that the Lutherans meant a transmutation of the human nature into a second-second person of the Trinity.

My Response to Forde: Part 1

2011-10-07T15:18:00.000-07:00

We will now turn to a brief assessment of Forde’s teaching from a confessional Lutheran perspective. The first and most important issue to be tackled in this evaluation is the nature of atonement and its inner relationship to the article of justification. What Forde’s interpretation of the doctrine of atonement makes clear is that there is a necessary relationship between the article of the work of Christ and that of justification. In other words, if one rejects the notion of Christ’s vicarious satisfaction of the law (both actively and passively) the entire soteriological apple cart is, so to speak, upset and the forensic nature of justification is lost. Put succinctly: If Christ does not fulfill the law on our behalf, then someone else must, and that someone is necessarily us. This is evidenced by the fact that without fail those who reject vicarious satisfaction (for example, the aforementioned Abelard and Socinians) posit the fulfillment of the law by believers in some sort of watered-down form. In Forde’s case, the believer does not fulfill the law by his or her own efforts per se, but is rather recreated by God’s effective address as one who has fulfilled the law by faith. Thereby God is “satisfied” and his wrath is silenced.

Nevertheless, beyond the brunt fact that this description of justification is in total disagreement with the confessional and biblical authorities, Forde’s description of justification lacks coherence with his own theological presuppositions in at least two ways. First, in his discussion of penal substitution, Forde endlessly complains that to believe that God needs bloody sacrifice order to save makes him into a cosmic ogre. Ultimately though within Forde’s own doctrine of atonement, God does apparently need the law to be fulfilled or divine wrath will never cease. The redemptive fulfillment of the law is simply moved from external location (in Christ) to internal one (within the believer). Moreover, despite Forde’s attacks on the Lutheran scholastic doctrine of atonement, the structure of the fulfillment of the law in his theology and theirs remains roughly the same. For Forde, the law is fulfilled by the old, unbelieving creature being killed by the law (this corresponding to the Lutheran scholastic concept of passive righteousness), and then being raised up into the power of the new creation by the gospel (corresponding to the concept of active righteousness).

Though we cannot explore the sources of Forde’s thought within this context, perhaps it is not too bold to suggest that we detect here a lingering Kantian preference (endemic for so much of post-Enlightenment Protestant dogamtics) for the phenomenal over the noumenal.[1] Just as for Kant one cannot know the “ding an sich,” so too Forde considers the idea of an objective lex aeterna to be an abstraction and therefore must focus on the existential impact of the law alone.[2] Correspondingly, he considers the idea of vicarious satisfaction to represent a mere “abstract payment,”[3] rather than the more concrete fulfillment of the law actualized internally through the existential impact of the cross on the consciousness of the believer.