Tag: bible

Close Reading

Robert Jenson’s Systematic Theology: Eschatology as the Triune Unity

Alex Renner

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Robert Jenson was a masterful theologian who sought to think within the bounds of theologia and, within those bounds, to receive the Christian tradition in fresh if unorthodox ways. He writes this awesome statement: “This is sometimes the way of theology: to take a plain phenomenon of the gospel’s narrative that causes difficulty in certain conceptual connections and remove the difficulties by adjusting not the narrative but the connections.”[1] That was Jenson’s tendency: to adjust the form, not the content, of the Christian gospel, and so make it intelligible to contemporary ears.

My last post on Robert Jenson went over Jenson’s problems with the ancient ontological foundations of classical Christian doctrine. In his writings, he sought to overturn these foundations by substituting their Aristotelian or platonic makeup with that of Hegel. This substitution led him to criticize the ancient way of understanding divinity as simple, timeless and changeless, and to uphold a doctrine of divinity where God’s being is nothing other than event. The function of God’s being-as-event is to disallow any speech about God where God can be identified with anyone other than the God revealed and acted out as Jesus Christ, His Father, and His Spirit. For something or someone to be God means that He is this event: this biblical, Triune God-event.

For God’s being-as-event to be the interplay of Jesus, the Father, and the Spirit is for ontology itself to be constituted by eventfulness, and not by the prior abstracted reality of “being.” This poses obvious problems for the classical doctrine of simplicity. If God is not simple, and ontology is eventfulness, then how can the three – Father, Son, Spirit – be said to be “one God”? This is where my claim that Jenson’s explications nevertheless retain the content, if not the form, of Christian doctrine is proved true.

ST: The Oneness of the Three

Jenson writes, “Since the Lord’s self-identity is constituted in dramatic coherence, it is established not from the beginning but from the end, not at birth but at death, not in persistence but in anticipation. 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.”[2]

Here, Jenson is functioning on a definition of eternity as a time-bound reality. Eternity is not, as the classical thinkers say, a separate realm in which God lives in his essence. Eternity is rather that happening, that “dramatic coherence” Jenson calls it, where all that is theologically united lives, moves, and has its being. Eternity is that time where God and man live in harmonious ekstasis. In other words, eternity is that time where Father, Son, and Holy Spirit live as one God. How Jenson grounds these concepts, like I said, is not in some “before-ness,” some realm that is prior to the actual happening of God’s-being-one, but in “after-ness,” in the eternal realm of “anticipation,” where Father, Son, and Holy Spirit will be fully and completely the Triune God of Scripture in the unity of the Eschaton. It is the Eschaton that provides the glue that holds the whole scriptural reality – including the God at the center of that reality – together.

Jenson continues, “The triune God’s eternity is precisely the infinity of the life that the Son, who is Jesus the Christ, lives with his Father in their Spirit… About how God could as the same God have been other than Jesus the Son and his Father and their Spirit, or about what that would have been like, we can know or guess nothing whatsoever.”[3]

The Christian is not to think of eternity as a timeless void separated from the goings-on of this world, but as the flesh-and-blood life of Jesus Christ, the Hebrew preacher of first century Palestine, who, in calling the God of Israel his Father, was the Son spoken about in the Spirit-inspired Scriptures. This is what it means for God to be Trinity.

ST: The Spirit of the Future

For the Eschaton to be the place of God’s unity is for the Holy Spirit to so make it. The eschatological glue that holds things in God together, according to Jenson, can really be posited as a function of the Holy Spirit’s economia. It is the Spirit’s function to make true the reality that Jesus Christ and His Father are the one God of Scripture. It is the Spirit’s role to make true that which is believed by faith, that the Father, Son, and Spirit are one God.

Here is Jenson again: “The Spirit is the Liveliness of the divine life because he is the Power of the divine future. He is the one who, when he in time gives a ‘down payment’ on the Kingdom, gives precisely himself.”[4] The Spirit and the Eschaton, to Jenson, are never to be thought about as separated from each other precisely because as the agent of the future, the Spirit is. It is when the Church participates in the Eschaton – which, to Jenson probably amounts to what happens during the Sunday liturgy – that the Spirit is truly and fully present as the Spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ and His Father.

We will end this post with one last quote:

“The biblical God’s eternity is his temporal infinity… What he transcends is not the having of beginnings and goals and reconciliations, but any personal limitation in having form… The true God is not eternal because he lacks time, but because he takes time… God is not eternal in that he adamantly remains as he began, but in that he always creatively opens to what he will be; not in that he hands on, but in that he gives and receives; not in that he perfectly persists, but in that he perfectly anticipates… The dominating theological enterprise of the century, Karl Barth’s Kirkliche Dogmatik, has thus at its heart the drastic proposition with which we began: ‘God’s deity, into its furthest depths, consists therein… that it is event… The fundamental statement of God’s being is therefore: God is what happens between Jesus and his Father in their Spirit.”[5]

Soli Deo Gloria

[1] Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology, Vol. I: The Triune God (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997), 124.

[2] Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology, Vol. I: The Triune God (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997), 66.

[3] Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology, Vol. I: The Triune God (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997), 141.

[4] Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology, Vol. I: The Triune God (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997), 157.

[5] Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology, Vol. I: The Triune God (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997), 217-221.

Close Reading

Robert Jenson’s Systematic Theology: First Few Big Ideas

Alex Renner

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I just finished reading Robert Jenson’s magisterial Systematic Theology. It was a frustrating, beautiful, doxological, and blessed read. More than many books I have read over the last few years, this one has stirred my affections for (and questions about) Christ all over again. 

Having read over the summer the logic-laden The Humility of the Eternal Son by Bruce McCormack, who gives the highest praises to Jenson, I was on the lookout for a doctrinal study that encouraged a praise break or two in the midst of its theologizing. Jenson was the perfect for this.

Although in relation to the typical Protestant systematic it is rather tiny, Jenson’s Systematic Theology is deserving of a step-by-step series of blogs on some of its main ideas.

ST: Prolegomena

Jenson’s big idea, developed from Barth, is that God’s being as event disallows any sort of otherworldliness on the part of God. For God to be Himself as Jesus Christ, the Father, and the Spirit, is to be no more and no less than exactly what we receive in the biblical testimony. In other words, to play on a maxim coined by Torrance concerning Barth, there is no God behind the back of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as reported about in the Bible. For Jenson, this makes moot any point of ontological speculation concerning God’s being as separated from the narrated events of the life of Jesus Christ. To Jenson, the question What is God? can only be answered by appeal to the specificity of the Lord’s life, growth, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension. God’s being is nothing other than the event of Christ’s life.

With this, of course, comes a total reversal (and rejection) of classical categories of divine and human being. Jenson writes, “Were God identified by Israel’s Exodus or Jesus’s Resurrection, without being identified with them, the identification would be a revelation ontologically other than God himself. The revealing events would be our clues to God, but would not be God. And this, of course, is the normal pattern of religion: where deity reveals itself is not where it is. At Delphi, one hears Apollo’s voice but does not meet him; indeed, the very notion of meeting Apollo in his own guise would have been oxymoronic.”[1] Jenson is even more of an actualist than Barth. For Jenson, the only true sort of being is actualized, eventful, specific being. The entire tradition’s tendency to posit a God otherwise in existence then how he is specifically existent in Christ, the Father, and the Spirit, and also as precisely that God recorded in Scripture, has been a false trajectory to Jenson. Actualism secures the certainty of God’s identification, and disallows any God-talk separated from his living activity as this biblical God. The Post-Barthians are very adamant on this point. God does not exist except as this event.

He continues, “God is not only identified by Exodus and Resurrection; he is identified with them… For the doctrine of Trinity is but a conceptually developed and sustained insistence that God himself is identified by and with the particular plotted sequence of events that make the narrative of Israel and her Christ… For if a systematically developed discourse about God precedes the exposition of Trinity, there is danger that a nontrinitarian identification of God may be hidden in that discourse, to confuse all that follows. Western theology’s late-medieval and modern tradition has tended to treat first of God simply as he is God and only thereafter of his Trinity.”[2]

Jenson undoubtedly takes Barth a step further from where he himself was willing to go. There is debate on this point, but Barth does still speak about there being room for God to be Himself apart and without a creation. For Jenson, to even entertain the question of what God would be apart from His life with us in Christ is a moot point: God’s being is being-with-us. Period. There is no place to speak about God other than as actual in Christ. Here Jenson follows Barth in another way: by positing the doctrine of the Trinity as not simply the metaphysical makeup of the specific God Christians worship, but as the entire doctrinal matrix within which the whole body of Christian belief finds its intelligibility. Without the organizing principle of the Trinity to bestow meaning on each part of the Christian faith’s interconnected system, the faith becomes exactly what many (Christians and non-Christians alike) are convinced it is: an outdated, intellectually-stagnant group of mythological beliefs about a world and a God that no longer exists.

ST: The Being of God

Jenson’s entire project is geared towards dismantling the Ancient Ontology upon which the doctrines of Christianity have always been based. Jenson sees the reception of Christian doctrine – and centrally the doctrine of the Trinity – as unnecessarily tied to ancient Platonic and Aristotelian ways of philosophizing about the world. In a way, Jenson is completely orthodox: he maintains all of the traditional Christian doctrines “intact” in respect to their intellectual content. Yet, their metaphysical foundation has completely shifted. Now, it is not the ontological picture given by Plato or Aristotle that determines what can or cannot be said about Christ and his being true God from true God, but Hegel and Heidegger. The entire Systematic Theology is devoted to explicating Jenson’s new picture, where God’s being is event.

In support of this, he writes, “The analyses and formulas usually thought of as ‘the’ doctrine of Trinity – for example, ‘three persons of one divine nature’ – were devised during a particular if decisive part of the effort’s historical course: when the gospel’s identification of God had directly to interpret and be interpreted by the antecedent theology of Mediterranean antiquity. Had the mission’s initial history led through a culture other than that schooled by the Greeks, analogous but differently directed enforcements of God’s biblical identity would have had to appear, and the mission continues to require trinitarian reflection that derives from that then carried out more by analogy than by implication.”[3]

And: “‘Being’ is not a biblical concept, or one with which Christian theology must necessarily have been involved, had the gospel’s history been different than it is. If we could abstract from the actual history, we could, of the biblical God, say ‘God is good’ and ‘God is just’ and continue with such propositions at need, without making an issue of the ‘is.’ And the teaching that God is one could remain the simple denial that anyone but JHWH is God. But ‘being’ was a central concept of the theology with which the gospel came into essential conversation in Mediterranean antiquity. Thus the concept has become an inextricable determinant of the actual Christian doctrine of God.”[4]

I am convinced that Jenson proposes what can best be described as a missionary theory of theological language, one I was introduced to in college and which has stuck with me ever since. Jenson sees theological language as necessarily subject to change depending on the people to whom it is directed. The Church stays stagnant when it thinks its task is something other than to contextualize doctrinal statements to fit in to the social, political, and philosophical imaginations of those to whom it speaks the Gospel. This Gospel may and does offend those imaginations, but at the very least it must be comprehensible to the people it seeks to reach, even if, as is often the case, in reaching them it is despised and rejected.

This is probably the benefit I see in Jenson, overall. Although he rejects the philosophical undergirding of the ways Christian doctrine has been taught and understood in the past, he does so not out of a petty hatred for antiquity (that much is out of the question) but out of a concern to reach the people of the modern world. The content stays the same: the God revealed in Jesus Christ is still very much the Triune God of Scripture. It is the dressing in which he is presented that is changed. Yet, is not that exactly what missionaries do, change their language and forms of expression to show forth their God as beautiful to the people to whom they are called to witness?

[1] Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology, Vol. I: The Triune God (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997), 59.

[2] Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology, Vol. I: The Triune God (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997), 60.

[3] Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology, Vol. I: The Triune God (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997), 90.

[4] Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology, Vol. I: The Triune God (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997), 207.

Quotation

Robert Jenson on Protology and the Futility of Free-Floating Interpretation

Alex Renner

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Robert Jenson’s Systematic Theology Vol. I is a treasure trove of beautiful doctrinal insights. Near the end of his first section, he comments on what is needed to engage with the theological tradition in an honest way. Just like Webster argues in his magisterial Holy Scripture, Jenson posits that the only way a coherent doctrine of Scripture can be formulated and maintained is one grounded in the self-presentation of the God who is Trinity; i.e., the one who Jesus reveals in the Spirit by calling Him Father.

Here are two block quotes from Jenson sure to bless your soul and mind.

First, on Scripture:

“Whenever someone has tried to construe the unity of Scripture otherwise than by the identity of this God the book has fragmented, first into Hebrew Scripture and New Testament and thereupon into traditions and genres and redactions within each. And when communities other than the church – in modernity, the communities of various ideologies and particularly the surreptitious such community of supposedly autonomous scholars – try to appropriate the Bible for their own purposes, the book falls into mere shards – to which, of course, anyone is welcome… The modern attempt to interpret scripture ‘historically’ has been intrinsically self-defeating and has now defeated itself, since it has curiously supposed that to interpret the Bible historically we must abstract from the history for whose attestation the church assembled this collection in the first place, the Incarnation and Resurrection of Christ.”[1]

The free-floating scholars out there, who claim to represent the rational person’s engagement with the biblical material, fall into meaninglessness. This is rooted in the Modernist’s blindness to his own placement in a history and a community; it would be better, I suspect Jenson would say, if the independent scholar would fly the banner of Atheistic Fragmentation as the community from which he wrestles with the material instead of the banner of View from Nowhere. Then, the presuppositional commitments the interpreter truly does hold would come to conscious explication, and wouldn’t be hidden beneath the false belief in one’s own prescient objectivity over and above the text.

Then, protology. Here is where Jenson sets forth his (self-avowed) revisionist theological agenda, one in the vein of Barth’s methodology but one that also decisively breaks with Barth at important points. He writes:

“God is not only identified by Exodus and Resurrection; he is identified with them. Thus we may state the point of this chapter yet one more time: the God to be interpreted in this work is the triune God. For the doctrine of the Trinity is but a conceptually developed and sustained insistence that God himself is identified by and with the particular plotted sequence of events that make the narrative of Israel and her Christ. The primal systematic function of trinitarian teaching is to identify the theos in ‘theology’… For if a systematically developed discourse about God precedes the exposition of Trinity, there is danger that a nontrinitarian identification of God may be hidden in that discouse, to confuse all that follows. Western theology’s late-medieval and modern tradition has tended to treat first of God simply as he is God and only thereafter of his Trinity; the temptations posed by this ordering have recently been much discussed. The extent to which any particular theologian may actually have fallen to these temptations is doubtless often arguable. The present work seeks to avoid the temptation altogether, by breaking with this aspect of the tradition.”[2]

This point is one famously highlighted by Barth about the way in which to approach the theological task. Jenson and Barth argue that, instead of tripping up himself at the beginning of the race by forcibly inserting the God of ancient Hellenism into his doctrinal engagement with the Word of God, the theologian should instead consciously set out to exegete the Scriptures in a Christian way (i.e., in a Trinitarian way). The God of “general” Theism has no place here.

I am not finished with Jenson’s ST just yet. As I plow through it, however, I am struck by the way in which Jenson’s philosophical commitments alter his approach, sometimes in very strange color schemes. Nonetheless, his dependence on Barth shines through in some of the best possible ways… not least in his emphasis on the centrality of God as Trinity.

Soli Deo Gloria

[1] Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology, Vol. I: The Triune God (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1997), 59.

[2] Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology, Vol. I: The Triune God (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1997), 60.

Uncategorized

The Centrality of the Great Exchange in Maximus the Confessor’s Ambigua 1-4

Alex Renner

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Maximus the Confessor is known as the greatest seventh-century defender of a logically-consistent Chalcedonianism. As the “Confessor” part of his title indicates, Maximus held to the Apostolic Faith at a time when the entire empire opposed it (even if the empire did so unknowingly, which my reading of the history would tend to posit). His greatest contribution to the life-world of the Tradition was his staunch opposition to the notion of one will in Christ and his hard-line advocacy of diathelitism: that Christ, though a single hypostasis, contains two wills in accordance with His two natures. Maximus posited the diathelite position as what he saw as the absolutely essential outflow of an appropriate affirmation of a two natures Christology, and spoke to his interlocutors accordingly.

So, as one would expect, readers of Maximus’s works, particularly his Ambigua, cannot understand Maximus without understanding the theological controversies he considered so central to a living faith. In particular, Maximus is unintelligible without at least a cursory understanding of the doctrine of the Hypostatic Union: that Jesus Christ is both God and Man in mysterious union, as one, indivisible subject. In engaging with this doctrine, however, the responsible reader will note how Maximus – just like all the greatest of theologians – posits the hypostatic union as a reality quite non-static, as instead a glorious, living, active reality which has real and primary import for people living in this fallen world. Central to this doctrinal livingness is what has been termed the “Great Exchange,” that, as Maximus quotes Gregory Nazienzen writing, “He [the Son] receives an alien form, bearing the whole of me in Himself, along with all that is mine, so that He may consume within Himself the meaner element, as fire consumes wax or the sun earthly mist, and so that I may share in what is His through the intermingling.”[1]

This paradigm is quite literally everywhere in Maximus’s writings. For the purposes of this post, I will simply focus on his Ambigua 1-4 in his Ambigua to Thomas.

Maximus defines the Union thus, in #3:

“‘He who is now human was in composite’ and simple both in His nature and hypostasis, for He was ‘solely God,’ naked ‘of the body and all that belongs to the body.’ Now, however, through His assumption of human flesh possessing intellectual soul, He became the very thing ‘that He was not,’ that is, composite in His hypostasis, ‘remaining’ exactly ‘what He was,’ that is, simple in nature, in order to save mankind… It was, then, the Word Himself, who strictly without change emptied Himself to the limit of our passible nature.”[2]

Maximus defines the Eternal Son as “simple” in “both… nature and hypostasis,” which allows Him the divine freedom to act upon the creation without in turn being affected (i.e., the fathers assumption about the simplicity and aseity of divine being). From this position of freedom (a term I am taking from Barth), He then “became the very thing ‘that He was not,'” i.e., humanity, so that humanity could subsequently be taken up in Himself. Maximus ends this paragraph by tying this Great Exchange of divinity with humanity to the latter’s divinization. Here we see where the patristic mind like the one held by Maximus depart from contemporary accounts of soteriology and divine being. Bruce McCormack and the Post-Barthians would read Maximus here as beholden to a definition of divine being and salvation alien to the life-world of the Christian Scriptures. To McCormack, salvation can appropriately be spoken of as union with Christ (in line with his Reformed commitments), but the paradigm of deification brings along with it a whole host of doctrinal baggage concerning God’s nature (like God’s impassibility and simplicity) which he deems problematic. My first instinct is to want to agree with McCormack, but then I see how Maximus places Christ at the center of salvation – in an even more profound and scriptural way than even the Reformed – and I can’t help but exclaim with Maximus: “Yes! The Son did take on my nature, even though simple and impassible Himself!” There must be a stronger man in order for the strong man to be bound.

I am always pleasantly surprised and excited whenever I read in the Fathers some doctrinal point that a contemporary theologian takes such pains to prove or posit as if it had not been argued before in the history of theological reflection. Such is how I felt when, upon reading Ambiguum 4, Maximus claims – just like Barth! – that the location of our knowledge that God is good, that God loves humanity, and that God works to redeem humanity, cannot be found except where God makes those attributes plain: in Christ! Maximus writes:

“If, then, He emptied Himself and assumed ‘the form of a slave’ (that is, if He became man), and if in ‘coming down to our level He received an alien form’ (that is, if He became man, passible by nature), it follows that in His ‘self-emptying’ and ‘condescension’ He is revealed as the one who is good and loves mankind, for His self-emptying indicates that He truly became man, and His condescension demonstrates that He truly became man passible by nature.”[3]

God is the one whose nature is read off the skin of Jesus. God is the one who, in “‘coming down to our level'” and “‘ [receiving] an alien form'” showed Himself to be the good God who loves his created ones, and whose desire is to see them re-united with Him in perfect harmony. Not only that, but this God, “having absolved our penalty in Himself… gave us a share in divine power, which brings about immutability of soul and incorruptibility of body through the identification of the will with what is naturally good in those who struggle to honor this grace by their deeds.”[4]

Lastly, let us consider one final point Maximus makes at the end of his 4th Ambiguum. He writes:

“In doing lordly things in the manner of a slave, that is, the things of God by means of the flesh, He intimates His ineffable self-emptying, which through passible flesh divinized all humanity, fallen to the ground through corruption. For in the exchange of the divinity and the flesh He clearly confirmed the presence of the two natures of which He Himself was the hypostasis, along with their essential energies, that is, their motions, of which He Himself was the unconfused union.”[5]

The profundity of Maximus’s argument here lies in what he claims is shown forth “by means of the flesh.” Maximus’s claim that Christ “intimates His ineffable self-emptying” means that Jesus Christ proved Himself to be God in the manner in which He acted out his obedient ministry among men and towards the Father. He is proved to be God-taken-on-flesh, Maximus claims, in the en-flesh-ment itself, in God acting as Man and Man acting as God. It is the Man-acting-as-God half of that equation that takes the cake here for Maximus, and displays Maximus’s dialectical tendency to – also, similar to Barth – switch his foci between Son of Man and Son of God in one continuous, repetitive emphasis. Further, it is in the “exchange of the divinity and the flesh” that “He clearly confirmed the presence of the two natures of which He Himself was the hypostasis.”

When I read contemporary theologians complain of a tendency in the Church Fathers (that undoubtedly exist in some) to present theological realities as static, scientific things whose complexities must be analyzed, I look to Maximus the Confessor and those like him. Theologians like Maximus tear apart the notion some historians of doctrine give to the history of theological reflection that it is some dry, doxology-less, humdrum activity, and show it to be what it is meant to be: a beautiful, worshipful meditation on the reality of God as shown forth in Christ. Maximus writes, to end: “How great and truly awesome is the mystery of our salvation!”[6]

Soli Deo Gloria

[1] Gregory the Theologian, Or. 30.6 (SC 250:236, ll. 5-20).

[2] Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, Vol. I, ed. and trans. by Nicholas Constas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 19. 

[3] Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, Vol. I, ed. and trans. by Nicholas Constas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 25.

[4] Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, Vol. I, ed. and trans. by Nicholas Constas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 25.

[5] Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, Vol. I, ed. and trans. by Nicholas Constas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 27-29.

[6] Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, Vol. I, ed. and trans. by Nicholas Constas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 31.

Uncategorized

Bruce McCormack’s The Humility of the Eternal Son: Some Quotes and Thoughts

Alex Renner

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I am much too late to the game with Bruce McCormack’s study on Christology, The Humility of the Eternal Son. I am thankful to be done with it finally so that I can share a few quotes from the book and comment on the overall experience. The quotes I will be pulling from are from the very last chapter where he is summarizing his argument and responding to practical rebuttals to what he is proposing.

McCormack here, as hinted at in the subtitle, attempts a “repair” of the Chalcedonian Definition; as a faulty statement, he claims, about the full truth regarding Jesus Christ’s ontological makeup as both God and human, the Chalcedonian Definition has at its core a “logical aporia” (his term). By “logical aporia” he means a contradiction in the Definition which ultimately only pays lip service to the “side” of Jesus Christ that is fully human. McCormack explains this by writing that the Definition is funded by “Cyrilline” presuppositions concerning divine being. The fault in the Definition, grounded in these presuppositions, is that it claims the reality of Jesus is constituted by the Eternal Logos’s instrumentalization of human flesh. Although the orthodox theologians affirmed that – against Apollinaris – the Logos had taken on the entire reality that is human nature, in function they refused to concede that the Eternal Logos was affected by the union like the human nature was affected in being assumed by the Logos. The problem, ultimately, for McCormack, is how to situate the Christological subject. What constitutes, ontologically, the reality that is Jesus Christ? To McCormack, if the Logos is not affected by Jesus as Jesus is affected by the Logos, then the Definition’s claim that it safeguards the integrities of both natures is empty and groundless. This is so because “the attributes of both ‘natures’ must be ‘communicated’ to the Logos is he is to be the single Christological subject.”[1]

When I read the first chapter of this book, I felt both perplexed and excited. McCormack is telling his reader he aims to wade through the history of theological reflection, attempt a thorough investigation into a foundational doctrine of the Church, and then propose an essential reformulation of it. As someone interested in the history of theology, I was thrilled to slug through this book even though I had reservations about the prospects of its success. I get the sense that McCormack strays left of me, so to speak, in regards to his reverence for the Tradition. I will temper that claim, though, with an insightful remark of his:

“My point is this: we must be more ‘Chalcedonian’ than many of today’s defenders of Chalcedon are. We must not rest content with repeating words whose significance we have only dimly understood. We must do our Christology in the light of an appreciation for both the promise of Chalcedon and its limitations – and in that way, be truly ‘guided’ by it.”[2]

Amen and amen.

Perhaps the primary thought I came away with when reading this book – which is also how I have felt after putting down books by Torrance, Webster, et al. – is that this is an example of a theologian who has learned well from his master in the field, the inimitable Karl Barth. In McCormack’s (and Webster’s) case theirs wasn’t a direct, personal influence, but they nonetheless have been schooled in the fruitful halls of Barth’s post-metaphysical thought. Theological reflection, in the Barthian mode, is one I have always been convinced is creatively receptive. Theology is all the better for it.

What follows are a few quotes from his last chapter which do the work of appropriate theological speech:

“In the place of two discreet (substantially conceived) ‘natures’ subsisting in one and the same ‘person,’ I am going to posit the existence of a single composite hypostasis, constituted in time by means of what I will call the ‘ontological receptivity’ of the eternal Son to the ‘act of being’ proper to the human Jesus as human. ‘Ontological receptivity,’ it seems to me, is the most apt phrase for describing the precise nature of the relationship of the ‘Son’ to Jesus of Nazareth as witnessed to in the biblical texts we treated. I am going to argue further that it is the Son’s ‘ontological receptivity’ that makes an eternal act of ‘identification’ on the part of the Logos with the human Jesus to be constitutive of his identity as the second ‘person’ of the Trinity even before the actual uniting occurs. This is what I believe to have been missing in Jüngel and Jenson. The ‘Son’ has as ‘Son’ an eternal determination for incarnation and, therefore, for uniting through ‘receptivity.’ He is, in himself, ‘receptive.’”[3]

“Divine power, then, should never be understood in abstraction from what God actually does. It should be understood as the ability to accomplish all of that which God wills to do in the way God wills to do it – and nothing more. ‘Metaphysical compliments’ are excluded where the triune ‘being’ of God is understood to be constituted in purpose-driven trinitarian processions.”[4]

“The love that God is, is not love in general but a highly concrete and very specific kind of love. It is a self-giving, self-donating, self-emptying love. And it is the eschatological being of the Christian in Christ that they are called, even now, to imitate, to live from and towards, in their daily lives.”[5]

And finally:

“For what God is, God’s ‘essence’ is to be found in God’s livingness and nowhere else. Where God is concerned, we may not begin with the question of what God is or even with the question of who God is. We must begin with the question of the place of God’s livingness. Only there can we learn the answers to the questions of who and what God is.”[6]

Soli Deo Gloria

[1] Bruce McCormack, The Humility of the Eternal Son: Reformed Kenoticism and the Repair of Chalcedon (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 52.

[2] Bruce McCormack, The Humility of the Eternal Son: Reformed Kenoticism and the Repair of Chalcedon (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 29.

[3] Bruce McCormack, The Humility of the Eternal Son: Reformed Kenoticism and the Repair of Chalcedon (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 252.

[4] Bruce McCormack, The Humility of the Eternal Son: Reformed Kenoticism and the Repair of Chalcedon (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 267.

[5] Bruce McCormack, The Humility of the Eternal Son: Reformed Kenoticism and the Repair of Chalcedon (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 276.

[6] Bruce McCormack, The Humility of the Eternal Son: Reformed Kenoticism and the Repair of Chalcedon (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 296.

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The Onto-Relational Trinity: Why Your Trinity Diagrams Don’t Tell the Truth About Who God Is

Alex Renner

“One Substance, Three Persons.”

Such is the mantra used virtually across the board in many Western churches when tasked with describing the ontological makeup of God. Purportedly, the Christian God is Trinity: He is one God made up of Father, Son, and Spirit. How this is the case is usually chalked up to “mystery” and “unknowability” (two helpful terms to be sure but usually used as cop outs from further theological reflection). Queue the diagram which supposedly helps with the comprehension of such a mysterious reality:

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Pictured are three circles, each titled with the name of one of the Divine Persons, positioned around a fourth circle entitled “God.” Touching each circle are lines labeled “Is Not” connected at both ends between each person, and between each person and the “God” circle in the middle are lines labeled “Is.”

This diagram is not helpful, and here’s why.

Late theologian John Zizioulas, in his landmark book on Patristic theology and Personhood called Being as Communion, writes:

“The idea took shape in Western theology that that which constitutes the unity of God is the one divine substance, the one divinity; this is, as it were, the ontological ‘principle’ of God. But this interpretation represents a misinterpretation of the Patristic theology of the Trinity. Among the Greek Fathers the unity of God, the one God, and the ontological ‘principle’ or ’cause’ of the being and life of God does not consist in the one substance of God but in the hypostasis, that is, the person of the Father. The one God is not the one substance but the Father, who is the ’cause’ both of the generation of the Son and of the procession of the Spirit. Consequently, the ontological ‘principle’ of God is traced back, once again, to the person.”[1]

What Zizioulas does here, remarkably, is point out that in the theology of the Cappadocian Fathers – the most significant theologians of the Trinity other than Athanasius – the Person acts as the center of God’s substance, and not the idea of “substance” or “Being” as applied to God. In other words, instead of Being holding priority in Trinitarian language – as it did in the Western Church, over time – it should in fact be the Person-in-relation that holds priority, particularly the Person of the Father (who is the Ground, the Unoriginate Originator of the Son and Spirit). There is no fourth circle labeled “God” in God; there is no fourth thing in God in which the three participate. Such a conception – which is exactly what the diagram above is relating – makes Greek ontology, rather than the God revealed in Jesus Christ, prior in Trinitarian thinking. Remarkably, what this correction reaps for Christian theology is that it means Being in God is relational.

God cannot be conceived, the Fathers tell us, except as Being-in-relation, and, hence, Being-in-relation is who the God revealed in Jesus Christ is. There is no such “supreme being” in existence other than the one that Jesus Christ reveals, a claim contrary to the mountain of literature on Western monotheism’s supposed overlapping belief systems. There is no unmoved Mover who can comfortably be ascribed as the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. That God is the God of the philosophers, but not the Christian God. The Christian God finds His Being in the Person of the Father, who in eternity begets His Son and spirates His Holy Spirit. The Being of the Son and the Spirit, therefore, live as derived-Being, as Being-from, not as Originator-of like the Father. Yet, the Father, too, is Being-in-relation; there was never a time when the Father was not with His Son and His Spirit. The Father, though underived in His Being, is still Being-in-relation and not exclusively Being-in-Himself. All of this lends itself to what Torrance calls a “dynamic” conception of God’s ontology (which is really the biblical conception) rather than a “static” formula as attributed to the West’s thinking following Augustine.

Zizioulas continues, a few pages later:

“The manner in which God exercises His ontological freedom, that precisely which makes Him ontologically free, is the way in which He transcends and abolishes the ontological necessity of the substance by being God as Father, that is, as He who ‘begets’ the Son and ‘brings forth’ the Spirit… For this communion is a product of freedom as a result not of the substance of God but of a person, the Father–observe why this doctrinal detail is so important–who is Trinity not because the divine nature is ecstatic but because the Father as a person freely wills this communion.”[2]

Exactly, sir! Here here! In other words, we must look to the Father as the “fountainhead” – a title the Fathers gave Him – of divinity, the one Paul calls “God” (θεοs) explicitly in all of His Trinitarian introductions. The sense this makes of Paul’s statements cannot be clearer:

“Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 1:3)
“Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ” (Gal. 1:3)
“Grace and peace to you from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom. 1:7b)

Like Zizioulas argues, Paul always gives the Father the title “God,” not because (as the Arians believe) He is the only truly Divine Person but because Divinity rightly originates in Him. Jesus Christ is labelled “Lord” and the Holy Spirit “Holy” because of their rightful placement on the God-side of the God-world divide, but within that God-side there exist definite two-way relations which constitute God as Trinity: namely Origination (from the Father to the Son and the Spirit, received by the Son and Spirit), Generation (from the Father to the Son, received by the Son), and Procession (from the Father… to the Spirit, received by the Spirit).

The last significant thing Zizioulas writes in relation to this discussion he writes on page 46:

“The expression ‘God is love’ (1 John 4:16) signifies that God ‘subsists’ as Trinity, that is, as person and not as substance. Love is not an emanation or ‘property’ of the substance of God–this detail is significant in the light of what I have said so far–but is constitutive of His substance, i.e., it is that which makes God what He is, the one God. Thus love ceases to be a qualifying–i.e., secondary–property of being and becomes the supreme ontological predicate. Love as God’s mode of existence ‘hypostatizes’ God, constitutes His being.”[3]

Boom. Zizioulas here articulates what I have found so hard to find the language for: that John’s statement about God as love is not some fluffy though true affirmation of God’s character, but Love is Who He is. Seen in the light of this discussion on God’s relations, John’s statement makes all the more sense. In other words, “God is love” means “God is Trinity.” Therefore, the core nugget of truth at the heart of the Apostolic Christian Tradition – and hence the Gospel – is that God is relational in his very Being of Being, Zizioulas argues, and in Jesus Christ and by the Holy Spirit we are brought into that very relational heart of God, bid by the Father to become united to the Lord Jesus Christ by faith affected in us by His Spirit. May our theologizing, our communal experience as “eucharistic communities” (his term), and our very lives be shaped by the relational heart of the God revealed in Jesus Christ, who is Trinity.

Soli Deo Gloria

[1] John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985), 40-41.

[2] John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985), 44.

[3] John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985), 46.

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The Trinity Solves Everything: John Webster On Hermeneutics and Theology

Alex Renner

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The late John Webster was a shining example of a well-informed, biblical, and unashamedly Protestant theologian whose integration of Karl Barth’s theological emphases with patristic and Reformational insights made him one of the few theologians (after Torrance) whose writings are actually worth reading. I have only read one other book by Webster, which was his commentary on and summary of one of Barth’s lesser-known Lutheran mentees, Eberhard Jüngel. That is a fun and fascinating book in its own right. Never had I read a full-fledged treatise of his, however; but boy am I glad I did.

Webster’s Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch deserves to sit on the shelves of every serious-minded Christian theologian today. Though some might think it distasteful for its obvious Barthian influence, it does a fantastic job of putting forth a rock solid doctrine of Holy Scripture as grounded in and permeatingly-informed by the telos and centre of all Christian theology: the Christian doctrine of the Triune God. In the first chapter, Webster writes:

“In thesis form, the argument to be set out here may be stated thus: revelation is the self-presentation of the triune God, the free work of sovereign mercy in which God wills, establishes and perfects saving fellowship with himself in which humankind comes to know, love and fear him above all things.”[1]

Since Holy Scripture is the locus of God’s self-revelation, the doctrine of revelation is synonymous with (or, perhaps, goes alongside) the doctrine of Holy Scripture. Every doctrine, though, must flow from and return to the doctrine of God’s Triune Being. Webster’s point throughout his little treatise is to say what Barth says at the beginning of 2/I: that the God referred to in the biblical witness is never separated out and generalized from the uniquely-acting God in Jesus Christ and the history of Israel. In other words, there is no acting or revealing of God apart from His Being in Jesus Christ, i.e., apart from the Being of the Triune God. There is no biblical God apart from the Triune God.

He continues,

“Revelation, therefore is identical with God’s triune being in it’s active self-presence. As Father, God is the personal will or origin of this self-presence; as Son, God actualises his self-presence, upholding it and establishing it against all opposition; as Holy Spirit, God perfects that self-presence by making it real and effective to and in the history of humankind.”[2]

Then:

“The argument so far can be summed up by saying that a Christian theology of revelation becomes dysfunctional when its bonds to the doctrine of the Trinity disintegrate; consequently, that rebuilding a doctrine of revelation is inseparable from attention to the properly Christian doctrine of God.”[3]

Webster spends a significant amount of space in Holy Scripture performing two simultaneous movements. The first is the positive construction of his argument outlined above: that the doctrine of the Trinity is inseparable from any truly Christian doctrine of revelation, Holy Scripture, and the hermeneutical task. The second is the analysis and criticism of the ways in which Modernist thought has crept into the Church’s thinking concerning how we are to engage with Holy Scripture. The reason why this book was written – the reason Webster felt the need to reintegrate or reinstate the doctrine of the Trinity as the central theological paradigm – is that it was his perception that Modernist hermeneutics was hampering the Church’s ability to deal rightly (i.e., Christianly) with its own inspired Text. Such a theological instinct he shared with Barth.

Webster takes the scalpel right to the wart:

“For – to put the matter at its simplest – the tendency of modern intellectual culture to bifurcate [a word Torrance loved to use] the transcendent reality of God and the creaturely texts of the Bible can only be countered by appeal to a Christian doctrine of the trinitarian works of God… Such Christological-pneumatological considerations help prevent the theology of Scripture from being overwhelmed by a burden which has sorely afflicted the intellectual conscience of modern Western divinity (especially Protestant divinity), which continues to haunt us, and for which there has emerged no commonly agreed resolution.”[4]

Webster’s solution? Bring it back to the Trinity. Such has been the Tradition’s answer, and such should our answer be. If we read, like our forefathers in the faith, Holy Scripture as God’s Trinitarian self-revelation – nothing more or less than that – then we will put both the doctrine of revelation and the doctrine of the Trinity in their proper places in regard to our theological speaking.

Soli Deo Gloria

[1] John Webster, Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 13.

[2] John Webster, Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 14.

[3] John Webster, Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 17.

[4] John Webster, Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 18.

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The Theologian as Church Grammarian

Alex Renner

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In evangelical-theological literature right now, the idea that theologians are “church grammarians” is a hot one. The theologian, this literature says, is one who actively seeks to test, challenge, and refine the Christian church’s language about God so as to bring it in conformity with God’s being as revealed in Jesus Christ. Especially among those evangelical theologians open to the thought-world of figurehead theological thinkers like Barth, Torrance, Webster, et al., this idea holds a central prominence (for good reason). To me, this idea seems thoroughly helpful and downright correct.

See, after Karl Barth, the idea of the theologian as church grammarian has taken on a special role. What Barth did was bring this definition into clearer focus and consideration: to him, theologians of the past understood their task as something more akin to philosophical speculation, rather than as the construction and refinement of theological terminology that served the church’s mission to upbuild the saints and evangelize the world. At the end of the day, the theologian must not think either too little or too much of their task, since they are both 1) unable to speak univocally (i.e., completely in line with the reality) of God, and 2) commissioned by God with doing what point number one rightly claims is impossible: to speak rightly and truly (and humanly) about God as God has so revealed himself to humanity. For Barth, the theologian accomplishes his task when he so conforms Christian language to the God revealed in Jesus Christ that the church is able to rightly understand herself and her mission in light of God’s speech about her. In other words, the theologian is a good theologian when he conforms the church’s speech about God with God’s own speech about himself.

Keith L. Johnson, in his marvelous book about these very issues, writes:

“God himself must show us how to use [our theological language] rightly, and he does so in and through Jesus Christ…. Even as we know the truth about God, we always do so on God’s terms… We can rightly apply [our words about God] to God as long as we do so in line with the way God has done so in Christ. Our thinking and speaking about God will be true if our words correspond to who Christ is, what he has done and what he continues to do within created history. This means that our primary task as theologians is to bring the meaning of the words we use for God into conformity to Christ. We measure each one by his being, actions, teaching and promises… Our task as theologians is to apply the same treatment to every single word we use for God. Doing so is part of the way we ‘take every thought captive to obey Christ’ (2 Cor. 10:5)… As Barth puts it, by guiding our theological language, ‘Jesus Christ himself sees to it that in him and by him we are not outside by inside… He sees to it that what is true in him in the height is and remains true in our depth.’”[1]

Boom. The theologian is the one who takes the scrappily-taped-together wordage of the spiritual soldiers on the ministerial frontlines and fixes it, helping those same ministers see the benefit and coherence of Jesus Christ anew, in the words of scripture, tradition, and contemporary theological insights. May the theologian use herself for the glory of God and the upbuilding of her sisters and brothers.

Soli Deo Gloria

[1] Keith L. Johnson, Theology as Discipleship (Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2015), 80-83.

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Baptists, Barth, and Holding to Your Tradition

Alex Renner

Karl Barth, if you couldn’t tell, has played a monumental role in the recent refining of my theological speech concerning God and man. Yet, Barth has also helped me think through a special difficulty I perceive many young, low-church Christian men are also wrestling with: a pull towards the high churches (Anglicanism, Eastern Orthodoxy, etc.). In my own experience, this (primarily liturgical) pull originated after I dove headfirst into the theological writings of many of the patristic figureheads like Athanasius of Alexandria, Cyril of Alexandria, the Cappadocian Fathers, etc. Learning about the patristic theological vision (centered around things like theosis, a robust Trinitarian theology, a deep sacramentology, etc.) pushed me to rethink the tradition in which I have functioned as a Christian, since what I was hearing from the pulpit was not (wholly) what I was reading in the Fathers.

This crisis event led me to seriously consider (and almost act on) a decision to split with the Baptists. However, as time went on, and my theological readings continued and widened (all while sweating over a decision to leave), I further clarified my stances on certain issues concerning the sacraments, the Trinity, and Christian spirituality generally; surprising to myself, I didn’t come out as someone who would be completely out of place among the Baptist fold. Instead of giving in to the pressure of many higher church apologists today – who ruthlessly pursue young men of other Christian folds in order to usher them into their own “true” church – I decided to meditate further on the implications of discontinuity of belief and practice across Christian history. I also found other Baptists who were wrestling with the doctrinal dizziness of the historic Church, Baptists who were trying to appropriate richer, less-dismissive practices within the wider Baptist culture, and (yes!) Baptists who held a similar love and sympathy for theologians like Barth and Torrance.

Back to Barth. As a theologian constantly exposed to traditions different from his own (as an out-of-place, theologically Reformed instructor in primarily Lutheran universities throughout Germany), Barth was forced to deal with the central claims and distinctives of his own tradition of which he had been previously ignorant. Today, many young men who begin to wrestle with the claims of their own tradition, while simultaneously meditating on the doctrine of the Church past, see jumping overboard to another ship as the only valid option (because of numerous factors like the general rootlessness which young people feel, a quick-and-ready choosiness available to anyone and everyone, and a decidedly individualistic American spirit). For Barth, however, who was daily brought up against the looming Lutheran giants around him, the option of switching traditions was an inconceivable option. Barth, for all the allurements which the traditions surrounding him presented, remained decidedly Reformed. Over time, though, he began to tweak his own tradition’s understandings of its distinctives as he garnered more and more due influence across theological circles, and was criticized for it. Now, I don’t mean to compare myself with Barth as some theological pioneer or hero, but I take comfort in his story which has certain similarities with my own. Barth took the hard way: he stuck with those who had nurtured him in the faith and sought to influence the Reformed church according to problems he perceived needed fixing.

Contemporary (American) Baptists have many theological, ministerial, and liturgical problems. They are by no means guiltless when it comes to their annoying confusion over the significance of central doctrines of the faith (the Hypostatic Union, the Trinity) and their subsequent appropriation of those doctrines for the sole end of holding up their prized elucidation of penal substitution. They have an almost offensive disregard for and ignorant misunderstanding of traditional liturgical forms (although this is changing), and a biblicism that gets much of their language in trouble, especially when its mixed with isolated rural settings in which no one holds them accountable for their theological speaking. Baptists also have a tendency to idolize their leaders, and pastor-worship is by no means a small problem.

On the other hand, Baptists are virtually undisputed in regards to their evangelistic fervor, their love for the poor and the downcast, and their rigid and unflinching passion for the truthfulness of the Bible. As far as ministerial problems go, I would rather have an overdose of these issues than a mediocrity in any one of them. Perhaps the greatest lesson which Barth has imparted to me – other than doctrinal language I have found to be indispensable to a robust and informed theology – is embodied in his acceptance and appropriation of his own tradition. I’ll end with a quotation from the CD which Baptists, for all of their blemishes, firmly hold to heart:

“For who really knows what grace is until he has seen it at work here: as the grace which is for man when, because man is wholly and utterly a sinner before God, it can only be against him, and when in fact, even while it is for him, it is also a plaintiff and judge against him, showing him to be incapable of satisfying either God or himself? And looking back once again, it is the grace of God as mercy pure and simple, as a sheer Yes and Nevertheless, which reveals, and by which we have to measure, how it stands with the man to whom it is granted. It is not independent reflection on the part of man, or an abstract law, but grace which shows incontrovertibly that man has forfeited his salvation and in so doing fatally jeopardized his creaturely being – which reveals his sin and the misery which is its consequence. From the redemption which takes place here we can father from what it is that man is redeemed; from the pure fact of the salvation which comes to man without and in spite of his own deserts we may know the brute fact which he for his part dares to set against God. Because the ‘God with us’ at the heart of the Christian message has to do with that pure fact of the divine mercy, we must not fail to recognize but acknowledge without reserve that we, and those for whom God is according to this message, are those who have nothing to bring Him but a confession of this brute fact: ‘Father, I have sinned.’”[1]

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956), 6-16.