Tag: Christianity

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.

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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 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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Paul Tillich, Faith, and Theological Reflection

Alex Renner

The end of my last post includes a quotation from Paul Tillich’s Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality which puts forth Tillich’s position on the compatibility between philosophy and theology. The central thesis of this little book is that philosophy and theology can, in fact, coexist, and are, even further, codependent on each other’s relevance and success as human thought projects. As a lay evangelical theologian, I went into reading his work with a cautious skepticism (which I was right to do), but nevertheless found some insights – about both philosophical investigation and theological speaking – which I thought would best be to throw out there and discuss.

A personal note: later this summer, I plan on flying up to Wisconsin to complete an audited class on the patristic doctrine of Participation at an Anglican seminary. My interest in the patristic vision, generally, stirred my interest in this, and so you can imagine that when I got to Tillich’s section on Participation (and our current age’s rejection of the participatory outlook) my interest piqued. He writes,

“In terms of the history of philosophy, it is a nominalistic ontology which has determined philosophical empiricism from the high Middle Ages to the present moment. Being, according to this vision of reality, is characterized by individualization and not by participation. All individual things, including men and their minds, stand alongside each other, looking at each other and at the whole of reality, trying to penetrate step by step from the periphery toward the center, but having no immediate approach to it, no direct participation in other individuals and in the universal power of being which makes for individualization… one thing must be emphasized. It is a view of reality as a whole.”[1]

Indeed, Tillich! While I have serious reservations about the attempts by many contemporary theologians (most of whom stem from high-church backgrounds) to revive the sort of participatory outlook so-long espoused by the Christian tradition, Tillich does a great job here of outlining the general philosophical air we breathe now: one which chokes us on our own scientistic individualism.

In the next chapter, Tillich displays his presuppositions concerning the nature of religion (Christianity including), but says some thought-provoking things that have real theological implications. He writes, concerning man’s tendency to anthropomorphize:

“There is no type of religion which does not personify the holy which is encountered by man in his religious experience… In the moment in which something took on this [sanctified] role, it also received a personal face. Even tools and stones and categories became personal in the religious encounter, the encounter with the holy. Persona, like the Greek prosopon, points to the individual and at the same time universally meaningful character of the actor on the stage. For person is more than individuality. ‘Person’ is individuality on the human level, with self-relatedness and world-relatedness and therefore with rationality, freedom, and responsibility. It is established in the encounter of an ego-self with another self, often called the ‘I-Thou’ relationship, and it exists only in community with other persons.”[2]

What struck me about this section of the reading is the utter truthfulness of his argument. As one who places himself (generally) within the Reformed theological camp, I place a high value on the proposition that humans, when left to their own devices, will 100% of the time fashion idols for themselves. Calvin’s whole “The heart is an idol factory” meets me with a hearty Amen. Humanity does not and cannot go on long without worshipping anything and everything as long as it is not the God revealed in Jesus Christ. We fashion ideological, material, and emotional gods for ourselves like hotcakes: it is our basic function as corrupted beings. Yet, the Eternal Son’s incarnation as Jesus Christ proclaims an insane and wonderful truth to us, that neither does God seek to be an impersonal God to us; in matter of fact, humanity cannot even come to know or understand a God who does not condescend to our human ways of knowing, thinking, speaking, and being. There is a double edged sword brought out by reflection on Paul Tillich’s assertions here: humanity both cannot understand a God who would require them to either transcend or escape their humanity (since there literally is no way for us to know or be known except in ways appropriate to our mode of being), yet humanity continually and doggedly insists on making created puppet-gods who conform to who we believe god should be (which ends, every time, in an anthropomorphized idol).

While there are numerous other sections of the book that I could comment on, I think his page-long discussion of the nature of faith presents some good, final theological-meat to chew on:

“Faith, in the biblical view, is an act of the whole personality. Will, knowledge, and emotion participate in it. It is an act of self-surrender, of obedience, of assent. Each of these elements must be present. Emotional surrender without assent and obedience would by-pass the personal center. It would be a compulsion and not a decision. Intellectual assent without emotional participation distorts religious existence into a nonpersonal, cognitive act. Obedience of the will without assent and emotion leads into a depersonalizing slavery. Faith unites and transcends the special functions of the human mind; it is the most personal act of the person… Biblical faith is the faith of a community, a nation, or a church. He who participates in this faith participates in its sumbolic and ritual expressions. The community unavoidably formulates its own foundations in statements which reveal its difference from other groups and protext it against distortions. He who joins the community of faith must accept the statements of faith, the creed of the community. He must assent before he can be received.”[3]

Perhaps this sort of definition of faith is at the heart of my insistence that the center of all theological language be Jesus Christ; it is why I am an avid reader of theologians like Karl Barth, Thomas F. Torrance, St. Athanasius, and the Cappadocian Fathers. Faith, says these figures, is real faith when it is a movement of the Christian’s being, when the intellectual assent which comes through prolonged theological reflection has a purpose and a mission. When simply joined to the ever-lethargic-and-hardly-ever-for-a-noble-purpose school of (in the end, anthropomorphizing) philosophy, theology becomes corrupted by the boundaries of the theologians’ study, the place which should be the locus of ministry and outreach. When evangelicals are lambasted by other sections of the Church on the grounds of some form of anti-intellectualism, I almost want to shout back “Because we have seen how y’all do it, hold’ up in your studies while the widows starve in your pews!” I will proudly wear the badge of anti-intellectual if it means my theologizing must always, always, always have practical ministry application, which is exactly what an absolute Christocentrism will accomplish for the ministry-minded theologian.

Ironically, Tillich realizes the problem that biblical (Christian) theologians have with philosophical speculation’s attempt to wed itself to the theological task. He writes,

“The Bible often criticizes philosophy, not because it uses reason, but because it uses unregenerated reason for the knowledge of God.”[4]

[1] Paul Tillich, Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1955), 17.

[2] Ibid., 22-23.

[3] Ibid., 53-54.

[4] Ibid., 56.