Tag: systematic theology

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The Word of God and the Word of Man, Reconsidered

Alex Renner

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“Jesus Christ is that Truth truthfully communicating himself, and enabling us truthfully to receive him. He is the Truth communicating himself in and through truths, who does not communicate himself apart from truths, and who does not communicate truths apart from himself. It is in this utterly unique way that Jesus Christ constitutes in himself the controlling and justifying Center of reference for all our statements about God, and as such he is the ultimate Judge of their truth or falsity.”[1]

T.F. Torrance’s set of biblical-theological essays touching on the nature of the Bible, the Word of God, and the appropriate place of biblical interpretation and theological reasoning, is titled Reality & Evangelical Theology: The Realism of Christian Revelation. In it, Torrance sets out to clarify his mode of theological reason, his style of writing, and his particular approach to the meditative study of the Scriptures in tandem with his Barth-derived notion of the Word of God. In my continuous study of Barth’s “Word” doctrine, Torrance could not have been a better guide and help.

Torrance’s continual emphasis throughout the set of essays is the divide which exists between God and man, and how when man views his own theological language – much of which could be right in line with how Christians have always spoken and in line with a semi-coherent wrestling with the message of Scripture – as univocally apprehending the (capital T) Truth of God which exists always and evermore before and outside of our linguistically-encapsulated notions of God’s Truth (i.e., in our creaturely realities), man takes his first step down the road to theological inconsistency and revelational emptiness. The divide which Torrance rightly recognizes as existing between God and man functions in his theological programme as a sort of parallel paradigm to the hypostatic union of Jesus Christ, with both human and divine realities existing side by side, yet with the divine side firmly in control of and sovereign over the human side. On the human side is human speech: our language, thought forms, and general speech patterns about God which over time we behave as if speaks univocally of the Truth of God towards which it points. On the divine side is the Truth of God, the ontological reality of God’s separately-existing being (identical with God Himself) which cannot and will never be captured by the limited notions of human thought forms and speech, but which sovereignly decides to so intervene within the partially-true events of human theological speaking to so reveal Himself in Jesus Christ to real people in their spatiotemporal existences.

The way the Barthian notion of the Word of God functions in Torrance’s theology is by both further supporting his other consistent claim that what God reveals is not something outside of Himself but is really and truly Himself and providing an objective referent against which the myriadly-colorful but far too often anarchic warscape of human theological speaking may be judged, analyzed, and sifted. Without some objective Truth to appeal to – apart from some magically-imbued theological power-structure like the Roman church – Torrance believes, our theological speaking becomes even more anarchic and ridiculous than it already tends to be. He backs up his claim, writing:

“It is the Truth itself and not any formulation of the church’s understanding of it that is the canon or criterion of true knowledge. The Truth of God may be known only in accordance with what it is independently in itself and as we on our part submit our understanding to its judgment… Understood in this epistemological way, justification by Grace, or verification through the Truth that Christ himself is, provides theology with the most powerful principle of objectivity, for it cuts away the ground from all our subjective claims and assertions.”[2]

Now, how is Torrance’s idea of the Word of God then apprehended, at all, by human interpreters? Torrance’s answer runs along the lines of the traditionally-conceived debate between faith and reason. Torrance, ever the Barthian, insists that it is only as the human theologian/biblical interpreter – the same thing in Torrance’s (and my) opinion – “submit[s] [his]… understanding to [the Bible’s]… judgment” that the human theologian may wish to utter any correct theological speech at all. It is only through a total dependence on the Reality of God – a hope that that Reality apprehends and encompasses the interpreter – that any human language may hope to participate in the ontological Reality of God by God’s own intervention and eventing of his revealing-of-Self. In Anselm’s classic phrase, “I believe [or, allow myself to be encompassed by God’s reality], therefore I understand.”

All the ways that certain Modern categories about textual authority and truthful correspondence have infiltrated evangelical understandings of the Word of God, I am convinced Torrance presents a solid case here for a unique understanding of these concepts of the Word of God and the Word of Man. Of course, one of Torrance’s other argumentative veins is that his arguments are not new, as he claims Athanasius, Calvin, and others have thought identically. I myself have long been wrestling with issues of biblical-textual coherence, and for all the ways I have reconceptualized my own understanding of biblical authority I have come back to the thought that the Bible is indeed revelatory, wonderfully amazing, and inspired; where that inspiration, authority, and revelation is to be located, however, is purely and completely with the power and control of the God who reveals, authorizes, and inspires the text. When the text itself is imbued with an independent power, as many evangelicals implicitly think of it, it takes on a truly dangerous discursive function and serves the power-moves of those theological speakers who would proof-text their way to the top. Although the “implications” of such a view would seem to some in the conservative evangelical vein to lead to “liberal theology,” I think it does just the opposite: emphatically pushing the claim that the reality of the Bible’s inspiration lies in the sole hands of the God who willed its existence destroys the foundations of contemporary theological leftism. How, I think deserves a whole other blog post. I would, of course, add as a footnote add that such an understanding of the Word of God must always and evermore be supplemented by a constant listening-ear to the word of the Ancient Church Catholic (i.e., the saint’s throughout the ages who have themselves wrestled, better than us, over these issues). Take these thoughts with a grain of salt; I myself am still thinking through them.

Soli Deo Gloria

[1] Thomas F. Torrance, Reality & Evangelical Theology (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1982), 125-6. 

[2] Thomas F. Torrance, Reality & Evangelical Theology (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1982), 123.

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Thomas F. Torrance as the Best of the Barthians

Alex Renner

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Thomas F. Torrance was a Church of Scotland minister, mentee to the preeminent Karl Barth, and a world-renowned theologian in his own right whose universal appreciation – from all sides of the aisle – points to the man’s formidable theological mind, his heart for people, and a passion for the unity of the twentieth century Church. Personally, I have benefitted enormously from the little amount of meditative reading I have recently done on him, and do not plan to stop reading Torrance until I go to be with the Lord. Along with Barth, he has all but revolutionized my understanding of what Christ has done for the world and how I should subsequently see my place within Christ’s universe; of those I have heard from who have read Torrance with charity, a similar change has taken place in them. Of the Barthians – the term I am using to refer to those theologians which Barth intimately influenced – I think Torrance stands as the most insightful and thought-out theologian, and his evangelistic fervor and obvious concern he had for the pastorate pull on my deepest heartstrings. Eberhard Jüngel, the Lutheran mentee of Barth’s whose place in the hierarchy of those Barth taught falls directly behind Torrance, in my opinion, had a similar but quieter influence on the theological landscape of his day but in mostly Lutheran circles (whereas Torrance was a Reformed man, through and through).

The First Things article titled “T.F. Torrance and the Latin Heresy,” written by a Roman Catholic acquaintance of Torrance’s, presents a clear-cut image and a strong critique of Torrance’s entire theological project. In so many respects like his mentor, Torrance used strongly-worded language when referring to those ideas he perceived to have corrupted the Church’s theological language through the centuries, perhaps the most exciting of which was what Torrance termed the “Latin Heresy.” The Latin Heresy alluded to the Western Church’s continual tendency to adopt theological language which conceptualized God’s relation to humanity in Christ in dualist terms, using ways of speaking which separated being and act, form and content, and, in Torrance’s view, Jesus Christ and God the Father. The Latin Heresy – and the essay Torrance devoted to the development of the idea, titled “Karl Barth and the Latin Heresy” – is what the author of the article, Douglas Farrow, tackles from a Roman Catholic perspective. In what follows I will pull out a few ideas of Farrow’s and Torrance’s and put them in critical conversation, and attempt to work out my own thoughts concerning it all.

As a side note of sorts, I would like to start with a small comment Farrow makes near the middle point of his article. He writes, about Torrance’s value to Christians of other traditions:

“For he [Torrance] is capable, with Barth, of helping Protestants learn how to be critical of Protestantism as well as of Catholicism, and how to enrich themselves with patristic insights and resources. Moreover, Protestants can learn from Torrance something that Barth cannot teach them: a degree of respect for liturgy and sacraments and even for episcopal ministry… Catholics can hardly dismiss Torrance’s critiques as so much Protestant caricature. In Torrance, as in Barth, they are confronted by a Protestant who forces them to think hard about the mediation of Christ in ways they are not accustomed to. On the other hand, in Torrance they can discover points of contact with the hieratic and liturgical dimensions missed by Barth.”[1]

Here Farrow notes something I too have realized about the difference between Barth and Torrance. In many respects, Torrance has a much more patristic flavor than Barth, even considering how heavily Barth leaned on and listened to the Fathers. One can only expect Torrance, then, to have a much higher appreciation for catholic – and here I am very much ready to throw Barth under the rug – sacramental understandings and for the place of structure and order in the Sunday liturgy. The very fact that Torrance’s entire project was constantly emphasized to be founded on the complimentary theologies of Sts. John Calvin and Athanasius of Alexandria points to how highly and explicitly Torrance considered Nicene theology in his approach. Torrance was a thoroughly Nicene theologian, and no one can combat it.

Of course, Farrow then combats it. Before we get to Farrow’s critiques, let us see what Torrance puts forth in thesis form (this is a blog after all) in his essay “Karl Barth and the Latin Heresy.”

To begin with, Torrance outlines Barth’s primary theological input as reminding the Church that “‘God himself is the content of his Revelation,'” as opposed to an instrumentalist or dualist conception of Revelation where God is imparting some thing outside of Himself. He then goes on to lay out theological history as he sees it developing in the West (for the worst):

“What Karl Barth found to be at stake in the twentieth century was nothing less than the downright Godness of God in his revelation, for the Augustinian, Cartesian and Newtonian dualism built into the general framework of Western thought and culture had the effect of cutting back into the preaching and teaching of the Church in such a way as to damage, and sometimes even to sever, the ontological bond between Jesus Christ and God the Father, and thus to introduce an oblique or symbolical relation between the Word of God and God himself. Barth’s struggle for the integrity of divine Revelation opened his eyes to the underlying epistemological problems, not only in Neo-Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, but in Protestant orthodoxy as well. These were bound up with the Western habit of thinking in abstract formal relations, which was greatly reinforced by Descartes in his critico-analytical method, and of thinking in external relations which was accentuated by Kant in his denial of the possibility of knowing things in their internal relations. This is what I have called ‘the Latin heresy,’ for in theology at any rate its roots go back to a form of linguistic and conceptual dualism that prevailed in late patristic and medieval Latin theology.”[2]

Torrance’s primary problem, then, is Western theology’s characteristic tendency to externalize the ontological relations of God in both its doctrine of the Trinity and its doctrine of the Hypostatic Union. Thus, he goes on to say, you see Westminster orthodoxy’s tendency to Nestorian-ize the Hypostatic Union in pursuit of fulfilling their closed doctrinal loop of satieting God’s anger-principle, and, in Roman Catholicism, of constructing an ecclesiology which objectifies God’s grace in an outer-hierarchical-imparted-grace-Church mode. Farrow rightly summarizes,

“Liberal Protestantism… had more or less reduced theology to ethics, and the mediation of Christ to moral influence… In so-called high Calvinism, represented by the Synod of Dort, there had long been a severe instrumentalization of Christ, which both Barth and Torrance spent much energy resisting… British and American Evangelicalism… developed a penal substitution theory of the atonement that has its closest Catholic counterpart in Mel Gibson’s misbegotten The Passion of the Christ.”[3]

Following this critical-historical diagnosis of Western theological thought, Torrance goes on to reveal what he believes is the antidote to the problem. Bringing in St. Athanasius, he further argues:

“My concern here, however, is with the place which Barth, like Athanasius, gave to internal relations in the coherent structure of Christian theology, and of the way in which he exposed and rejected the habit of thinking in terms of external relations which had come to characterize so much of Western theology.”[4]

At the heart of Torrance’s and Barth’s critiques of the West have to do with the primary issue mentioned earlier: for God to truly have said to reveal Himself to mankind, for the Christian faith to be truly unique from the rest of mankind’s self-made religious-expressive landscape, for God to have truly said to have united Himself to humanity in his breaking-forth into our limited, corrupted existence in Jesus Christ, there must really and truly be taking place an authentic, Triune, Self-revealing in the event of the incarnation. The externalism of the West obscures and objectifies what God imparts to us, diminishing this central truth of the Gospel that what we have in salvation is relational, since our “salvation” is truly “reconciliation,” i.e., reconciliation with God Himself and not some external legal thing or some external imparted or mediated “grace.”

*Here, I might footnote that a sacramentology which uses language of “imparted grace” does not necessarily then fall into the externalism under discussion, but, understood rightly, further reinforces this truth of the Gospel-centric presencing of God in, through, and with the sacraments.*

Let’s bring in Farrow’s critique. He remarks, after a lengthy appreciation section on Torrance:

“Barth and Torrance have, in part, misdiagnosed the problem and misconstrued the solution… Barth’s imposition on the doctrine of the Incarnation of an actualist ontology – an ontology that already contains and is soteriology – is seen by Torrance as a breakthrough that enables us to shake off the Latin heresy. But it can also be seen as a kind of theological oversteer that puts Christology into the ditch on the Eutychian side of the road… The first consequence of turning Jesus into a reconciling event, into a divine-human Happening that… is everywhere and always taking place, is that the Church becomes nothing more than a community of witnesses, a community of people who with the eyes of faith see and confess what is everywhere and always the case. The sacraments themselves become mere acts of confession… For if reconciliation is an event strictly internal to the being of Christ, and if Christ is without remainder the reconciliation he achieves, then the Church must be denied any reconciling or mediating function of its own, lest it somehow be confused with Christ. Thus the Eucharist, as traditionally understood both in the Latin and the Greek Churches, is incomprehensible – even idolatrous. And the Church remains something hidden. Even in the Eucharist it cannot be said, ‘Here is the Church.’”[5]

I think Farrow is actually on to something here. Although I would push back with his observation that Torrance’s formulation of the Incarnation is Eutychian (it is one of the healthiest, most balanced treatments I have come across of the Hypostatic Union), his ecclesial and sacramental concerns resonate with me. Undoubtedly, what Farrow has in mind in terms of the “mediating function” he wants imparted to the Church looks like the specifically Roman hierarchical structure of which he is a part, but the sentiment behind it is not necessarily wrong. As I noted in my aside earlier, the language of “imparted grace” does not constrict the Christian theologian to a Roman sacramental or ecclesial understanding. The “authority” of the Church can still wholeheartedly be affirmed, apart from the poles of the Roman magisterium or the pietistic, democratic religion prevalent in lower Evangelicalism.

For sake of space, I will cease the discussion here (for now). Farrow will go on to mention his frustrations over Barth’s and Torrance’s Mariologies and perceived historical ignorances. Perhaps I will do a blog post on how rightly I think Torrance and Barth tackle history.

Farrow gives a critically appreciative final thought, the spirit of which I share:

“For my part, I wish to say in grateful tribute: It was he who began to open me to theology as a discipline, to Barth as its preeminent twentieth-century practitioner, and to critical realism as its appropriate epistemological mode. Like many others, I learned from Torrance how to find in Barth what his many detractors had missed or deliberately overlooked. From Torrance (as from Gunton), I learned to see some things that even Barth had overlooked, and so to think independently of Barth. The twentieth century was a century of great theologians, the likes of which we may not see again for a long while, and Torrance must be numbered among them.”[6]

Thomas F. Torrance is worth your time to read. As a Nicene, Trinitarian, Christological, and Ecumenical theologian, he should rightly go down as a contemporary Church Father.

Soli Deo Gloria

[1] Douglas Farrow, “T.F. Torrance and the Latin Heresy,” First Things, December 2013, pg. 28. 

[2] Thomas F. Torrance, “Karl Barth and the Latin Heresy,” Divine Interpretation: Studies in Medieval and Modern Hermeneutics (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2017).

[3] Douglas Farrow, “T.F. Torrance and the Latin Heresy,” First Things, December 2013, pg. 28-9.

[4] Thomas F. Torrance, “Karl Barth and the Latin Heresy,” Divine Interpretation: Studies in Medieval and Modern Hermeneutics (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2017).

[5] Douglas Farrow, “T.F. Torrance and the Latin Heresy,” First Things, December 2013, pg. 29-30.

[6] Douglas Farrow, “T.F. Torrance and the Latin Heresy,” First Things, December 2013, pg. 31.

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The Atonement as Encompassing All of Christ’s Life for Us

Alex Renner

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What has taken place in the event of Jesus Christ – the in-carnat-ion, the en-flesh-ment, the Son of God taking upon Himself the flesh of humanity – is the redeeming of humanity by God Himself. In God’s program of salvation, God is both the initiator and receiver of that Man-to-Godward movement and God-to-Manward movement. In Himself, Christ is both God and Man, and satisfies the necessary requirements for union and communion from both sides, on God’s side as the perfect imago of the Father (and therefore the Triune God) and on Man’s side as the perfectly obedient priest unto God and revealer to humanity of the true nature of God’s inner heart and life, in whose flesh we now share. The incarnation, then, is itself salvific. Now, when I claim that the incarnation is salvific, what do I mean?

In my last post I made a point to distinguish two branches of the Reformed Christian tradition which both derive their theological heritage from the writings of John Calvin and the western, non-German Continental Reformation tradition generally. On the one side, I marked out the “Westminster” tradition as that Reformed tradition deriving its theological language from confessional documents Westminster and Dort. On the other hand, following the lead of theologians like Barth, Torrance, and others, I recognized the other Reformed tradition which sought to find fundamental continuities between the early Reformed tradition and the Ancient Catholic tradition, the wellspring from which all Christians following the Great Schism derive their spiritual heritage. How I differentiated the two streams’s theological language was by contrasting the Westminster tradition’s underlying Nestorian tendencies which lead to “theologies of glory,” so called, with the “Athanasian Reformed” tradition’s methodology of grounding all Theo-logic in the life-sphere of Scripture, which is itself Jesus Christ.

Perhaps the greatest thing I had to critique in the Westminster Reformed branch was its almost-conscious affirmation of something like the classical Arian formula of salvation: that God, who harbors a damning wrath towards humanity, must propitiate his justice and anger upon a third-party mediator in order to secure the forgiveness of the human race, with Jesus acting out such a mediatorial role. In such a formula, the taking-on-of-humanity by Christ becomes a means to the end of the fulfillment of some anger-principle within God which must be satiated, instead of being itself a healing and atoning work which springs forth from the deepest bowels of God’s inner Triune heart and life. The way many in the Westminster Reformed camp use their theological language would seem to lay out such a Nestorian-leaning plan of God’s, where although the ancient creeds are affirmed and the divinity of Christ is firmly proclaimed from the pulpit, the other theological language which many Westminsters feel compelled to utter sways them towards using language where the hypostatic union of Christ is something really only done to scurry Christ to the cross. In other words, all that matters is the cross and the mediatorial role in which it functions in this larger theological-linguistic paradigm of sin-wrath-satiety.

TF Torrance, and the Ancient Church, provide a wonderful antidote to such a harmful theological-linguistic system. For Torrance and the Ancient Church, the Incarnation was rightly so called salvific not just for the fact that the cross happened by and against the enfleshed Son of God but also because Atonement rightly characterizes the entirety of Christ’s life as a human. In other words, the Atonement is not something so exclusively tied to the event of the cross as to render the rest of Christ’s pre-cross human life as somehow un-atoning. No, our idea of Atonement should extend to the entirety of Christ’s human life which he lived (and lives) for our sakes. The entire life of Christ is an atonement, not just his life while up on the cross.

Torrance writes,

“All through his life and ministry, from the baptism to the cross, he was at work in holy atonement, bearing the sins of the world on his spirit, and through the Spirit offering himself in sacrifice to God: that is forgiving and healing only as he bowed himself to receive the just judgment upon our human sin and fuilt, the just for the unjust. In this way we see that the whole of his life was an atoning sacrifice, although it is on the cross that at last all the sin of humanity is finally laid upon him, and there that through the eternal Spirit he offered himself once and for all in complete and final expiation for the sin of mankind.”[1]

The whole life of Christ is atonement. If you take a simple analysis of the term itself, “at-one-ment,” you will see that the whole Christian faith proclaims that Christ’s life was, in its acting-out, death, and final-consummation, an “at-one-ing” between Man and God, where God, as Man, destroyed the barriers that separated Man and God (i.e., Man’s sinful guilt and isolation and desecration) and restored the union and communion of God to Man and Man back to God.

In case you think I am putting down the special and unique nature of the cross, I rebut that I agree with Torrance when he says,

“We sum up this consideration of Christ’s compassionate ministry as the shepherd priest by saying that he came to enter into complete solidarity with sinners in order to redeem them by taking their burdens upon himself. That is what the epistle to the Hebrews describes by the words which speak of Christ as made perfect through suffering and so qualified to be our high priest and the author of our salvation. The ‘making perfect’ refers to his ordeal of consecration when before the cross he entered more and more into compassionate and sympathetic solidarity with lost and guilty sinners, bringing his relation of solidarity with them to its purposed end or completion on the cross. ‘Making perfect’ does not mean some process of moral perfecting in Jesus, but the completing or perfecting of a process into which he solemnly entered at his baptismal consecration and which continued in his relations with those he came to save. That he learned obedience does not mean his act of perfecting obedience to the Father so far as he himself was concerned, but his entering more and more fully into the actual practice and experience of what his obedience was as Son of God among sinners until his obedience was crowned in his suffering and death on the cross. Then he became at once the author and perfector of faith – that is, he carried through to its very end the whole course of faith, his life of faithfulness toward God and his life of faithfulness toward man. Thus the whole movement of entering into solidarity with sinners, and his obedience within that to the Father, reached its end or completion on the cross (emphasis added).”[2]

All of Christ’s life for us is rightly called atonement, for by being our obedient high priest unto God Christ so fulfills the requirements for right relationship with God which we consistently reject and put aside out of our own self-made pursuits, and he finally fulfills such a life of perfect Man-to-Godward and God-to-Manward relations so as to affect our union with God forevermore. In Christ, we are at-one with God; for Christ is Man and God united in perfect harmony.

Soli Deo Gloria

[1] Thomas F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2007), 136.

[2] Thomas F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2007), 137-138.

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The Reformed Branch of the Reformation: An Exercise in Tradition Interpretation

Alex Renner

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There were many powerful insights to arise out of the theological crises and reflections of the Reformation period. Liturgically, theologically, and morally, the Reformation is rightly so called a reform-ation of the Western Christian churches of the Late Medieval period. During the period, the Roman Catholic Church was split asunder as groups within it began perceiving the Roman Church’s priestly abuses and theological missteps. A return to the biblical text, to the Fathers, and to a robust liturgy took place which would forever change the face of the Christian West. The two largest branches to arise out of the Reformation period – the Lutherans and the Reformed – nonetheless stood at odds with each other and fought amongst themselves.

The Reformed branch ended up taking the most ground, since the influence it garnered throughout England, Switzerland, the Dutch lands, and eventually North America (where the early evangelicals fled to from England) bequeathed to it major theological sway over the Western world. Many contemporary evangelical denominations of the Presbyterian and Baptist veins owe their heritage to the thoroughly-Reformed Puritans who split from the hierarchical Church of England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Church of England itself was influenced heavily by the theological emphases espoused by the Continental Reformed churches. Their figureheads, however, John Calvin and Ulrich Zwingli, did not themselves agree on much and even functioned within largely different liturgical situations. Calvin, in Geneva, largely stayed put, expending his efforts on pastoral, theological, and biblical matters, while Zwingli utilized the authority he gained to wage a bloody war on the surrounding Roman groups which bordered his territory.

As time went on and the Reformed Protestants after Calvin and Zwingli died were tasked with maintaining their Reformed churches, certain further interpretations of their young tradition took place. Roughly one hundred years after the death of Calvin, Reformed theologians of the English churches and the Dutch churches met separately to systematize the work and theology of their respective branches, leaning heavily on the theological writings of their mutual forefather John Calvin. The first document, the Canons of Dort, was written by the Dutch Reformed theologians in the years 1618-19. The second – and much more popular document in the Western world – was the Westminster Catechism, written by the English Reformed theologians in 1646-47. Each document centers its theology on matters like Divine Providence and Election, and makes the enmity between God and Man (and particularly the enmity they believe exists in God towards Man) a focal point of their “theological system.” For the purposes of this post, I will refer to this branch of the Reformed churches – i.e., the branch I am conjoining because of their mutually-agreed-upon foci – as the “Westminster” branch.

*To be transparent, I take my historical-interpretive lead here from theologians like Barth and Torrance, and contemporary theologians like Athanasian Reformed (growrag.wordpress.com).*

I have found that there is another way to be Reformed, however. See, other, better tradition-interpretations took place within just this last century by theologians who were much more in tune with the patristic consensus of the Ancient Catholic Church (to which all orthodox Christians today are heirs). Something which must be emphatically pushed: it is not, not, not a commendable thing to consciously understand one’s Christian faith as consisting of something fundamentally different from that of those Christians living before the time of the Reformation period. So many contemporary Christians today are almost proud of how much more “biblical” their current expression of the faith is compared to those living before Martin Luther, as if the Reformation was only and exclusively some pure renewal movement, as if the Reformation was some divine thing. *For more on this thought, read Jackson Shepard’s new Mere Orthodoxy article.*

The theologian who most influences me in this regard, towards seeing a continuity between the Ancient Catholic Church and contemporary Christian churches of all veins (within the bounds of Nicaea, of course), but particularly of the Reformed tradition, is Thomas F. Torrance. In his lecture, “The Distinctive Character of the Reformed Tradition,” Torrance lays out a better way to interpret and utilize the history of the Reformed tradition and Calvin’s writings, a way which decidedly departs from the branch that developed into the Westminster theology.

Torrance writes:

“Built into the foundations of the Reformed tradition, of course, was the primacy given to the Word of God, which was regarded not as some communication about God detached from God but as God himself speaking to us personally. God is known only through God, on the actual ground of God’s self-revelation and gracious activity toward us, for it is only through Christ and the Spirit that we have access to God… For Calvin the primary question became, Who is God? Who is the One who acts in this merciful and loving way toward us in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit? This is not a question in which the essence and the existence of God are held apart from one another, but one in which God is allowed to disclose who he is in actual relation toward us, and one in which we are cast wholly upon God’s own reality in presenting himself to be known by us.”[1]

The “distinctly Reformed” character of the tradition is the infinite qualitative distinction between God and Man, where God is recognized as the always-initiator of the union between God and Man. The central feature of the Reformed tradition, parallel to Torrance’s description of God’s initiative, is rightly summarized by Francois Wendel:

“No theology is Christian and in conformity with the Scriptures but in the degree to which it respects the infinite distance separating God from his creature and gives up all confusion, all ‘mixing’ that might tend to efface the radical distinction between the Divine and the human.”[2]

I.e., Barth’s term of God as “wholly other.”

Torrance then distinguishes what he categorizes as a patristically-informed version of the Reformed tradition (“Athanasian Reformed,” see the website above) from the Westminster Reformed:

“Thus predestination is not to be understood in terms of some timeless decree in God, but as the electing activity of God providentially and savingly at work in what Calvin called ‘the history of redemption’… This identity of eternal election and divine providence in Jesus Christ generated in the Reformed tradition its well-known conjunction of repose in God and active obedience to God in the service of Christ’s kingdom. However, if that repose in God is referred, as has happened only too often in the history of Reformed churches, to an inertial ground in the eternal being of God, then there opens up a split in people’s understanding between predestination and the saving activity of Christ in space and time, e.g., in the notion of election as ‘antecedent to grace.’ That would seem to be the source of a tendency toward a Nestorian view of Christ that keeps cropping up in Calvinist theology. This is very evident in misguided attempts to construe a ‘pre’ in ‘predestination’ in a logical, causal, or temporal way, and then to project it back into an absolute decree behind the back of Jesus and thus to introduce a division into the very person of Christ. It is one of Karl Barth’s prime contributions to Reformed theology that he has decisively exposed and rejected such a damaging way of thought.”[3]

The problem with the Westminster theologians, Torrance notes, is that in their attempts to uphold their prized elucidations of the doctrines of Predestination and Election, they so conceptualize that “‘pre’ in ‘predestination'” as something which is fundamentally detached and hidden “behind the back of Jesus,” i.e., as something not ontologically related to Jesus Christ who is the Son of God (the Son within Triune formula of Father-Son-Spirit), and as something they posit exists in the pre-creation planning of God as some choice of some over others without any reference to Christ’s all-encompassing work. Torrance’s chief critique, then, is that the Westminster theologians introduce a hidden element within the life and revelation of God, which in turn means God does not actually or authentically reveal Himself in Christ, but maintains a separation from humanity such that His lofty holiness is untouched by humanity’s filthy lowness. Such a hidden element then adequately qualifies the God “revealed” by Christ as sharing a fundamental similarity of detachment from humanity with the absolute-power deity espoused as the Muslim god, Allah, the god who is decidedly separate from and unknowable by humanity. To Torrance, any god so conceptualized has no claim to true revealing-of-Self as claimed taking place in Christ by the historic Church catholic. If there is no revealing-of-Self, humanity has no authentic claim to be united to God’s inner, Triune life. The Westminster formulation of Predestination then undermines the entire divine program as acted out, embodied, and completed in Jesus Christ.

Any cursory familiarity with the theological language of Westminster theologians (epitomized in theologians like the late R.C. Sproul and in contemporary pop-theology like the Five Points) makes their prized conception of God’s hiddenness from humanity plain. The sort of put-you-in-your-place theological aggression exemplified by Westminsters is remarkably similar to what you see in the innumerable videos of doctrinally-orthodox Muslim apologists whose primary strategy is intimidation and recourse to the sinfulness of the human race.

Tied to all this is the problem that Westminster theology tends to locate that transcendence of God mentioned earlier (Barth’s “wholly other”) in the moral uprightness and justice of God rather than in His factual ontological status as qualitatively other or categorically different than creation. There is this underlying current in Westminster theology, too, that the reason for the Son’s enflesh-ment has to do primarily with satisfying the anger and wrath God harbors against humanity, and nothing else, as if the life and active obedience of Christ is some means to a further end rather than the means and end of the whole Divine program (i.e., an ontological rather than a moral end). Torrance is on to this when he remarks, finally, that:

“For us to be in Christ or for Christ to be in us has to be understood in an ontological way, and not just in a figurative or spiritual way. It is through a real union with Christ in his vicarious humanity that all that Christ has done for us in himself becomes ours and we are made to share together what Christ is. That was Calvin’s doctrine of the ‘blessed exchange,’ which he took over from the Greek Fathers. It was in that incarnational and atoning way that justification has to be understood, not just in terms of imputed righteousness but in terms of a participation in the righteousness of Christ which is transferred to us through union with him.”[4]

Soli Deo Gloria

[1] Thomas F. Torrance, “The Distinctive Character of the Reformed Tradition,” The Donnell Lecture delivered at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary, October 6, 1988, pgs. 5-6. 

[2] François Wendel, Calvin: Origins and Development of His Religious Thought, trans. Philip Mairet (London, UK: Collins, 1965), 151. 

[3] Thomas F. Torrance, “The Distinctive Character of the Reformed Tradition,” The Donnell Lecture delivered at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary, October 6, 1988, pgs 6-7.

[4] Thomas F. Torrance, “The Distinctive Character of the Reformed Tradition,” The Donnell Lecture delivered at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary, October 6, 1988, pg 10.

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Theological Knowledge as Originating in God’s Initiative in Karl Barth’s Dogmatics in Outline

Alex Renner

–

Karl Barth’s Dogmatics in Outline is an imperfect summarizing of his more layered, theologically-structured work, the Church Dogmatics. The Outline, made up of 24 chapters each covering a portion of the Apostle’s Creed, is a formidable introduction for the Barth-curious. More than a simple introduction, however, Dogmatics in Outline is a rich theological-devotional meditation which Barth gave in the form of a series of lectures immediately following the end of the Second World War. Along with his Evangelical Theology (also a series of lectures he gave, but in America), the Outline is a shiny jewel in the myriad-ly colorful theological crown of Karl Barth. There are too many sizable nuggets of theological goodness to cover here, but chapters 5-10 are especially enriching.

At the beginning of chapter five, Barth begins an offensive against the unnamed specter of his theologically liberal forefather Friedrich Schleiermacher. He contrasts the faith found in the Apostles Creed with that espoused by the preeminent theological Romantic, who represents (still, sadly) much of modern hermeneutics and biblical theology of both “liberal” and “conservative” veins. He starts:

“In the sense of Christian faith, God is not to be found in the series of gods. He is not to be found in the pantheon of human piety and religious inventive skill. So it is not that there is in humanity something like a universal natural disposition, a general concept of the divine, which at some particular point involves the thing which we Christians call God and as such believe in and confess; so that Christian faith would be one among many, an instance within a general rule… The God of the Christian Confession is, in distinction from all gods, not a found or invented God or one at last and at the end discovered by man; He is not a fulfillment, perhaps the last, supreme and best fulfillment, of what man was in course of seeking and finding.”[1]

In other words, the classical method of “proving God’s existence,” of analyzing God just as one would analyze the theological pronouncements of any other deity originating in the sinful creativity of mankind, is a fools errand; it does not and cannot get you to the God revealed and disclosed in the Christian Scriptures. Further, God is not something which can be, has been, or will ever be “found out” by man, period. Man, in his lowly and corrupted estate, is incapable of finding his way to the God who is, and all attempts have ended up creating language structures and conceptions of a god which are in fundamental disagreement with who God tells us He is in such Scriptures (and the Tradition which interprets those Scriptures). The only way in which such a God-to-Man relationship can be established is if God breaks forth into our limited reality and establishes such a relationship. Theologically and existentially, we are in need of God’s help.

“What is involved [i.e., revealed in the Apostles Creed] is man’s meeting with the Reality which he has never of himself sought out or first of all discovered. ‘What no eye hath seen nor ear heard, what hath not entered into the heart of any man, God hath given to those who love Him’… God in the sense of the Christian Confession is and exists in a completely different way from that which is elsewhere called divine.”[2]

So. Barth has helped us establish that the “infinite qualitative distinction” which Christian history has affirmed of the ontological divide between God and creation is indeed true, and is the sword which splits in two every idea of divinity originating in Man’s mind. How, then, is theology established? How is it that humanity can speak of God (which is an ability Barth must believe we now have, however that works out, since he has written what he has written), if humanity cannot then “ascend” to true knowledge of God?

As he gives his answer about how theology is allowed, he also sets out to distinguish his theological project from most “systematic” theologians of the past five centuries or so. He writes:

“It is this God in the highest who has turned as such to man, given Himself to man, made Himself knowable to him… God in the highest, in the sense of the Christian Confession, means He who from on high has condescended to us, has come to us, has become ours… By this definition something fundamentally different is taking place from what would happen, if I should try and set before you conceptually arranged ideas of an infinite, supreme Being. In such a case I would be speculating. But I am not inviting you to speculate. I maintain that this is a radically wrong road which can never lead to God, but to a reality called so only in a false sense… When our talk is of Him and we speak of Him as about a familiar entity, who is more familiar and real than any other reality and who is nearer us than we are to ourselves, it is not because there may have been particularly pious people who were successful in investigating this Being, but because He who was hidden from us has disclosed Himself.”[3]

Theology can only be established on the foundation of God’s initiative to reveal Himself to Man. Without such a divine initiative, Man is doomed (but also revels in being doomed) to forever theorize and imagine a god who fits Man’s fancies and passions. Ten times out of ten, Man creates idols of the world he exists in, and without divine illumination is stuck in such a degrading, self-chosen pattern of destruction. Though his doctrine of the Word of God is be similar yet distinct from mine, Barth’s focus on Jesus Christ as the center of that divine initiative on the part of God to break through Man’s faulty thought-world is summed up well when Barth writes,

“The whole work of God lives and moves in this one Person. He who says God in the sense of Holy Scripture will necessarily have to say Jesus Christ over and over again… From this work we must make no abstractions, if we would know God’s nature and existence. Here, in this work, God is the Person who expounds Himself, and is thus the subject of this work.”[4]

Jesus Christ is the place where God breaks through to us and screams, smiling, “Here I am!”

Soli Deo Gloria

[1] Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline (New York, NY: Harper & Row Publishers, 1959), 36.

[2] Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline (New York, NY: Harper & Row Publishers, 1959), 36.

[3] Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline (New York, NY: Harper & Row Publishers, 1959), 37-38.

[4] Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline (New York, NY: Harper & Row Publishers, 1959), 39.

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The Incarnation of Christ as True Union with Fallen Humanity (and Some Mariological Sidebars) in T.F. Torrance

Alex Renner

–

One of the few essential patristic principles which we receive from our older brothers and sisters in the historic Church catholic is the principle that “What has not been assumed [by Christ, in the incarnation] has not been healed.” Such was the implicit assumption of Sts. Athanasius and Cyril of Alexandria, and such was the explicit argument of St. Gregory of Nazianzen, against whom all of the myriad voices who would contradict and drown out the Chalcedonian, Nicene faith that had been handed down by the Apostles to the subsequent spiritual offspring of the One-Springing-Triad God were casting their stones. In a very real sense, an attack on the Christological principle of His assumption of all that is human is an attack on the core of the Christian faith, a fact the fathers rightly and consistently perceived (but one which unfortunately leaves many Christians today, particularly evangelicals, scratching their heads). What does such a principle say, and why is it central (“essential”) to the whole of the Divine Program?

The Apollarian heresy, named after its chief proponent – a common feature of historic heresies – Apollinaris, claimed that Jesus Christ’s incarnation consisted of God the Son taking on all of what was human, a body and a soul, except the mind of a human. In simpler words, Christ became physically a man, but retained his divine mind in such a way as to “leave out” the assumption of a human mind. To Apollinaris, Jesus wore the body of a man but left out the mind; i.e., Jesus was less than truly and fully human. After an examination of such a position, contemporaries of Apollinaris began to contend that such an incarnational formula was out of step with the Nicene faith. To many of the Nicene/orthodox bishops, Apollinaris was spreading lies about what Christ accomplished for humanity in His incarnation.

Queue the Christological principle mentioned before: What has not been assumed has not been healed. The reason why these orthodox bishops rejected Apollinaris’s argument was because if Christ had not truly and completely become all that we are in our humanity, Christ was not redeeming us by uniting himself to humanity, but only “part” of us (in this case the fleshly part), i.e., only a part of what we are is redeemed. You can start to see the problem here. Such a conception of the incarnation puts down a major roadblock against much of the theological language we inherit from the historic Church catholic; we can no longer say with St. John that “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” if he did not truly “become flesh.”

Let’s turn to T.F. Torrance’s Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ. Torrance writes:

“In becoming flesh the Word penetrated into hostile territory, into our human alienation and estrangement from God. When the Word became flesh, he became all that we are in our opposition to God in our bondage under law – that is the amazing act of gracious condescension in the incarnation, that God the Son should assume our flesh, should enter a human existence under divine judgment, enter into the situation where the psalmist cried Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani, so that the Word or Son of God himself gave out the same cry when overwhelmed with the divine judgment upon our flesh… He was made in the likeness of sinful flesh, and was even made a curse for us.”[1]

Here, Torrance expounds on just the same topic. However, his further claim that “he became all that we are in our opposition to God in our bondage under the law” deserves to be specially treated, since there are many whose main beef with Torrance on this point is that they don’t deem it appropriate to claim that Christ assumed “sinful flesh”; to them, for Christ to assume sinful flesh implicates a corrupting sinfulness on behalf of the Son of God who assumes that flesh. Although I won’t say these critics are outright heretics, it is interesting that in their attempt to safeguard some aspect of the Son’s holiness and uprightness (arguably the exact motivation of Apollinaris and many other heretics of the same vein) they put a limit on what Christ assumed in his assumption of our human nature.

Torrance goes on, meeting these critics’ claims:

“One thing should be abundantly clear, that if Jesus Christ did not assume our fallen flesh, our fallen humanity, then our fallen humanity is untouched by his work – for ‘the unassumed is the unredeemed’, as Gregory Nazianzen put it. Patristic theology, especially as we see it expounded by the great Athanasius, makes a great deal of the fact that he who knew no sin became sin for us, exchanging his riches for our poverty, his perfection for our imperfection, his incorruption for our corruption, his eternal life for our mortality.”[2]

And then:

“If the Word of God did not really come into our fallen existence, if the Son of God did not actually come where we are, and join himself to us and range himself with us where we are in sin and under judgment, how could it be said that Christ really took our place, took our cause upon himself in order to redeem us? What could we then have to do with him? We stand before God as flesh of sin under God’s judgment, and it is into this concrete form of our sin-laden, corruptible and mortal humanity in which we are damned and lost that Christ came, without ceasing to be the holy Son of God. He entered into complete solidarity with us in our sinful existence in order to save us, without becoming himself a sinner [emphasis added].”[3]

–

Torrance makes his point well. See, much of theological history in the past millennium has tended to argue that – although it is completely true that Christ assumed all that we are – Christ took on a humanity that in a very real sense was already healed, especially if such humanity was bestowed on him by being birthed from the Mother of God, the Theotokos, whom many theologians consider to have been conceived in an “immaculate” way as well. Well, if the Mother of God holds a humanity which is already cleansed, then what Christ assumes by being born of the Theotokos is a humanity which is foreign to the rest of us, right? This seems, to me, to be an impasse at which a Mariology or Christology which disallows any talk of Christ or Mary holding sinful flesh (not that they themselves are sinful or engage in any sort of sin) contradicts the patristic principle we receive from the historic Church catholic. What do we do about this?

Well, as someone who holds a high reverence for the Theotokos and who even affirms (with the fathers) that she very well can be said to be sinless, I think the way forward for all catholic Christians is to hold to a sort of dual affirmation: that, just as Torrance emphasizes, Christ (and Mary) are completely sinless and spotless but in order to be in step with the Christological principle that “all that is unashamed is unredeemed” we must also say that Christ (and Mary) had corrupted flesh, at least in their earthly, pre-ascension, salvific lives.

Such it seems to me. Torrance ends, saying:

“Christ the Word did not sin. He did not become flesh of our flesh in a sinful way, by sinning in the flesh. If God the Word became flesh, God the Word is the subject of the incarnation, and how could God sin? How could God deny God, be against himself, divest himself of his holiness and purity?… By remaining holy and sinless in our flesh, he condemned sin in the flesh he assumed and judged it by his very sinlessness.”[4]

Our Lord Jesus Christ assumed all that we are in order that we may be all that he is in his restored, redeemed, ascended humanity. We truly do not have a great high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses.

Soli Deo Gloria

[1] Thomas F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 61.

[2] Thomas F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 62.

[3] Thomas F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 62.

[4] Thomas F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 63.

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Maximus the Confessor on Deification in His Two Hundred Chapters on Theology

Alex Renner

–

Maximus the Confessor is quickly becoming one of my favorite historical theologians. His characteristic Christocentrism, his healthy balance of apophatic and kataphatic theology, and his descriptions of the Christian life all lift up the soul to heights of love and peace which few contemporary Christian paperbacks have the ability to do. I am reminded of C.S. Lewis’s insistence, in his famous preface to Athanasius’s On the Incarnation, that, nine times out of ten it is the time-tested, ancient theological treatises which offer more spiritual encouragement than anything coming out in print today (with a few exceptions). I find the same to be true when reading Maximus; you can tell the man loved God, loved people, and found much growth in the contemplation of divine things. I myself benefit by allowing my soul to be lifted up by his theological movements.

When my wife and I were perusing the humungous Oxford book store, Blackwells, I came across a Patristics section which took up most of my time that day. While there, I purchased SVS Press’s copy of Maximus’s Two Hundred Chapters on Theology. It is turning out, in only the first few pages, to be enormously rich and spiritually and theologically precious to me. There is much gold to be dug up, here.

Maximus begins his work by setting up a few guard rails about God’s absolute otherness, using terms I have only ever read Dionysius use (i.e., “super-substantial” and “absolutely above/beyond essence or substance”). He then goes on to describe the inner life of the one whose spiritual/thought life is continually disciplined to draw itself up to God:

“1.13 He who has dazzled the intellect with divine thoughts, and has accustomed his rationality unceasingly to celebrate the creator with divine hymns, and has hallowed his sensory perception with unadulterated mental representations – such a one has added to the natural beauty in accordance with the image, the deliberate good in accordance with the likeness.”[1]

You can see here the patristic conception of image/likeness in Maximus, as well as a definition of deification as a mystical union or sharing, an unutterable love-relationship which God and Man continually keep up with one another (based on both God’s and Man’s dual initiative). Reading 1.13 reminded me of a similar statement of Maximus’s in his Ambiguum, where his explanation of mystical union revolves around something like the idea of being fully encompassed by the Other. To Maximus, our union with Christ is a full-encompassing, where, though we keep our essential humanity intact, we are known and are seeking to be more known only in line with those characteristics and particularities as filtered through God’s gifting of them. In other words, we refuse to be known or encompassed apart from our own total-identification and encompassing by Christ. Glorious.

Three “chapters” later, Maximus illustrates a provocative picture of salvation which further attempts an elucidation of deification. He writes,

“And he who has been purified, is illuminated; and he who has been illuminated is made worthy to lie with the bridegroom Word in the chamber of the mysteries.”[2]

Maximus chooses to relate our union with God to the sexual union which a husband and wife share on their wedding night. He caveats that image, though, with the “mysteries” as the place wherein that sexual union takes place. Now, by “mysteries” he means the sacraments of the Church: the Eucharist and Baptism. So, the sacramental mysteries are the means through which God unites himself, continually, to his people. Without a consistent participation on the part of the Bride (the Church) in the mysteries (the Eucharist), the Bride and Groom (the Word, Christ) are not in full union and their relationship is not initiated or brought to completion. Again, glorious.

In case you thought Maximus the Pelagian, however, he insists, later on in the first forty or so chapters, that:

“1.31 Never can a soul reach out towards the knowledge of God if God himself does not, having condescended, lay hold of it and lead it up to himself. For a human mind is not strong enough to ascend such a distance – as if to seize for its part some divine illumination, if God himself did not draw it upward, as far as is possible for a human mind to be drawn upward, and enlighten it with divine radiances.”[3]

Such union, mediated to the Bride in the mysteries, is more rightly said to be initiated and brought to its end by the Groom, i.e., Christ. It is Christ who reaches toward the Christian and pulls him up to union with Himself. Christ gets the credit and the glory for the Triune work he completes in us, using the mysteries, to do such work.

Amen, amen, and amen!

For those who want a deep spiritual nourishment beyond the steady flow of contemporary, popular Christian literature (much of which misses the point), turn to the ancient fathers for the golden honey of biblical wisdom. Turn to the Tradition, and be satiated.

[1] St. Maximus the Confessor, Two Hundred Chapters on Theology (Yonkers, NY: SVS Press, 2015), 51.

[2] St. Maximus the Confessor, Two Hundred Chapters on Theology (Yonkers, NY: SVS Press, 2015), 53.

[3] St. Maximus the Confessor, Two Hundred Chapters on Theology (Yonkers, NY: SVS Press, 2015), 61.

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Dionysius the Areopagite on the Most Holy Trinity

Alex Renner

–

St. Dionysius the Areopagite, also known as “Pseudo-Dionysius” in more scholarly circles due to the fact that he was almost definitely not the Dionysius mentioned in Scripture as the disciple of the Apostle Paul, is a Christian theologian who garnered massive subsequent theological influence in both Western and Eastern theology. His treatise On the Divine Names is a meditative Trinitarian exposition on the central doctrine of the Christian faith, the Trinity. While the language Dionysius uses to describe human participation in the Triune God can be, at times, oddly-phrased, his theologizing stands as a cornerstone of later theological thinking and by itself serves to bring the reading Christian into further contemplative union with his God, who is Father, Son, and Spirit.

The second chapter, subtitled “Letter to Titus: Concerning common and distinctive theology, and what is the Divine Union and distinction” is uniquely worshipful, and offers us some theological meat to chew on. A feature of Dionysius’s theological vocabulary here which most excites reverence for his project in me is the frequent use he makes of what I call “super” terms. Since, for Dionysius (and the rest of the Christian Tradition), God is “beyond being” – i.e., beyond existence and non-existence, being and non-being – God can therefore rightly be called “superessential” or “supersubstantial.” God is “super essential,” then, because he is “above essence” or “substance-above-substance.” Substances or essences for Dionysius constitutes all that exists in the creaturely realm, i.e., everything that is not God; since God is not a creature and therefore not a part of the “substantial” or “essential realm,” he is therefore “super substantial.” I have yet to hear a contemporary theologian use such a term, but I believe terms like these – which make quick work of the Creator-creature distinction once its meaning is explicated – can help explain in concise ways God’s wholly otherness.

Before beginning his explication of the Trinitarian-ontological relations, he prefaces in section II,

“By taking thence the Divine revelations, as a most excellent canon of truth, we strive the guard the things lying there, in their native simplicity and integrity and identity – being ourselves guarded in our guard of the Oracles [Scriptures], and from these receiving strength to guard those who guard them.”[1]

By thus beginning, Dionysius tells his readers that the Trinitarian dogma he will then go on to describe has their foundation and source in the “Oracles” themselves. The Trinity and the Bible are inseparable.

In case anyone thought he only relied on an individualistic reading of the Oracles, he begins his explication in section IV by writing that his chronicles function within the Tradition which he inherited, stating,

“The sacred instructors of our theological tradition call the ‘Divine Unions’ the hidden and unrevealed sublimities of the super-unutterable and super-unknown Isolation; but the ‘distinctions,’ the goodly progressions and manifestations of the Godhead; and, following the sacred Oracles, they mention also properties of the aforesaid ‘Union’; and again of the distinction, that there are certain specific unions and distinctions… there is kindred and common to the One-springing Triad… the Oneness above source of one.”[2]

There is such richness packed into this portion I couldn’t possibly cover it all, but his theological vocabulary continues to arrest me. The Triune being, he argues from the Tradition, is “constituted” by a “super-unknown Isolation” and also by “goodly progressions and manifestations of the Godhead.” Translated into later Trinitarian parlance, God is Father who generates forth the Son and spirates the Spirit. The monarchy of God, i.e., the Father, is the “One” who is “springing” within that life of the “Triad”; but that springing forth is a “Oneness above source of one,” i.e., in unutterable and unspeakable (apophatic) generation within God’s ontology.

He clarifies in section V:

“But there is a distinction in the superessential nomenclature of God, not only that which I have mentioned, namely, that each of the One-springing Persons is fixed in the union itself, unmingled and unconfused; but also that the properties of the superessential Divine Production are not convertible in regard to one another. The Father is sole Fountain of the superessential Deity, since the Father is not Son, nor the Son, Father; since the hymns reverently guard their own characteristics for each of the supremely Divine Persons.”[3]

Let us not forget the distinctions within the Godhead, Dionysius reminds us. The Father does not stand alone as a unitary monad without inner distinction, but is eternally the Father-issuing-forth-both-Son-and-Spirit; neither the divine ontology nor any of the Christian theological pronouncements makes any sense without such inner-life distinctions between Father, Son, and Spirit. The Christian faith rests on such distinctions. “How these things are,” though, Dionysius says, “is neither possible to say, nor to conceive.”[4] Don’t think about it; shut up and worship the God who is Father, Son, and Spirit!

Dionysius finishes his second chapter by clarifying one final point: that though the Names of God exclusively apply to each “distinct” – a word I hesitate to use – Divine Person, the attributes of divinity can be rightly said to apply to each: Father, Son, and Spirit. He writes,

“These, the mutual and common distinctions, or rather the goodly progressions of the whole Deity, we will endeavor to the best of our ability to celebrate from the Names of God, which make them known in the Oracles;-first, having laid down, as we have said, that every beneficent Name of God, to whichever of the supremely Divine Persons it may be applied, is to be understood with reference to the whole Supremely Divine wholeness unreservedly.”[5]

Glory be to our Triune, unity-in-diversity God for all His manifold graces.

[1] Dionysius the Areopagite, The Collective Works: St. Dionysius the Areopagite, Trans. Rev. John Parker (Neptic Fathers Publications, 2023), 12.

[2] Dionysius the Areopagite, The Collective Works: St. Dionysius the Areopagite, Trans. Rev. John Parker (Neptic Fathers Publications, 2023), 13. 

[3] Dionysius the Areopagite, The Collective Works: St. Dionysius the Areopagite, Trans. Rev. John Parker (Neptic Fathers Publications, 2023), 14. 

[4] Dionysius the Areopagite, The Collective Works: St. Dionysius the Areopagite, Trans. Rev. John Parker (Neptic Fathers Publications, 2023), 16.

[5] Dionysius the Areopagite, The Collective Works: St. Dionysius the Areopagite, Trans. Rev. John Parker (Neptic Fathers Publications, 2023), 19.

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Maximus the Confessor on The Lord’s Prayer

Alex Renner

–

Maximus the Confessor’s commentary on the Lord’s Prayer is a short, edifying, worshipful read. The preeminent eastern theologian’s interaction with what is going on theo-logically in the words of The Lord’s Prayer is illuminating of the pre-Modern outlook concerning the Son’s salvific incarnation and our subsequent participation in the Trinity’s life. He writes,

“Indeed this prayer contains in outline, mysteriously hidden, or to speak more properly, openly proclaimed for those whose understanding is strong enough, the whole scope of what the words deal with. For the words of the prayer make request for whatever the Word of God himself wrought through the flesh in his self-abasement. It teaches us to strive for those goods of which only God the Father through the natural mediation of the Son in the Holy Spirit is in all truth the bestower, since according to the divine Apostle the Lord Jesus is ‘mediator between God and men’: Through his flesh he made manifest to men the Father whom they did not know, and through the Spirit he leads the men whom he reconciled in himself to the Father. For them and on their account, he became man without any change and he himself worked and taught many new mysteries whose number and dimension the mind can in no way grasp or measure.”[1]

Maximus’s insistence that “the words of the prayer make request for whatever the Word of God himself wrought through the flesh in his self-abasement” is the most profound statement in this small passage here, since it remarkably proclaims that the Lord’s Prayer’s telos goes beyond merely providing a structure for prayer but is itself a proclamation of the fulfillment of the Son’s economic workings. In other words, the Lord’s Prayer is itself a sort of gospel proclamation which tells of Jesus Christ’s working out within himself of the perfection of humanity through his own human life, death, and resurrection. Glory to God for such a wonderful insight.

Maximus continues, outlining the meet response to such reflection on God’s gracious salvation:

“He gives adoption by giving through the Spirit a supernatural birth from on high in grace, of which divine birth the guardian and preserver is the free will of those who are thus born. By a sincere disposition it cherishes the grace bestowed and by a careful observance of the commandments it adorns the beauty given by grace. By the humbling of the passions it takes on divinity in the same measure that the Word of God willed to empty himself in the incarnation of his own unmixed glory in becoming genuinely human.”[2]

Our response, fueled and given by the grace of God through the working of Jesus Christ and the Spirit, is one of worship and obedience. In worshipping and obeying, the human Christian ascends to greater levels of participated divinity in a reverse manner to how Christ condescends from the heights of his divinity down to his finite humanity. Thus is the whole Christian life: one of deifying ascent from one glory to the next, fulfilling our purpose as little Christs.

May we each individually become an εικον of our Lord: the divine and human God-Man.

[1] George C. Berthold, Trans., Maximus Confessor: Selected Writings (New York, NY: Paulist Press, 1985), 102.

[2] George C. Berthold, Trans., Maximus Confessor: Selected Writings (New York, NY: Paulist Press, 1985), 103.

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Eberhard Jüngel on Theology, Language, and God

Alex Renner

I recently purchased John Webster’s Eberhard Jüngel: An Introduction to his Theology, and have been wildly pleased with what I have found and read there. Amidst my daily perusing of the best anthology of Barth’s work in English today – The Essential Karl Barth by Keith Johnson – I find that reading Webster’s intro on Jüngel is a helpful supplement for illuminating certain points of Barth and for understanding how those after him built upon and developed his theology. Jüngel, in my opinion, functions as a sort of theological son to Barth: he builds upon his good points, elucidates emphases of Barth’s which aren’t totally clear in Barth’s writings, and critiques Barth when he thinks he is in error. I find many aspects of Jüngel’s life and work exciting, too. Both of Jüngel’s mentors, for example, Karl Barth and Martin Heidegger, have inspired much of my own life, language, and thought. Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, though I have only read portions of it, has solidified certain convictions I was playing around with when meditating on the relationship between human subjectivity, hermeneutics, and theological method. Needless to say, too, Barth’s writings have had a similar yet greater effect on me.

I found much to appreciate in the opening chapters of the book. Webster writes, commenting on a few core ideas of Jüngels’,

“The essence of God is nothing other than the essence of the one who works and reveals… The history of the man Jesus constitutes nothing less than the inner life of God, the very place where God’s trinitarian relatedness is played out before the world… God’s way of being himself is by being God for us. It is this which lies behind the concept of ‘correspondence’ (Entsprechung) which Jüngel uses to describe the inseparability of God’s immanent life from his economic operations. For if God ‘corresponds with himself’ in the event of revelation, then his revealed being pro nobis is nothing other than his immanent being pro se.”[1]

Jüngel emphasizes, then, the same point put forward by Barth, Rahner, and the Nicene theologians, that who we receive by faith in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ is none other than the Eternal Son of the Trinity. If we want to say that the Lord Jesus is truly “in the form of God” (Phil. 2:6) as we meet him by faith, then who God is in His economy (i.e., in Jesus) is who He must be in His ontology (i.e., in His Triune life). If “Rahner’s Rule,” that who God is in His life (i.e., who He really and truly is within Himself) is who He is in His activity or workings towards us, is to be upholded and maintained then we must affirm Jüngel’s point here: “The history of the man Jesus constitutes… the very place where God’s trinitarian relatedness is played out before the world.” The theological implications of this simple formula are tremendous. Furthermore, the statement that “God’s way of being himself is by being God for us” finds deep soil in Barth’s same case: who God has chosen to be in His act of love by uniting Himself with humanity in Jesus Christ is “God-with-humanity.” In other words, God’s incarnation in Jesus is the point at which God chose to forever be united with humanity in intimate union. God will never again be Himself without being God-with-humanity.

Going on to illuminate more of Jüngel’s core ideas, Webster discusses Jüngel’s elucidation of revelation from a different yet similar angle. Jüngel seeks to answer the question, in a truly post-metaphysical vein (with heavy overtones of Heideggerian ontology language): How is it that humans can speak of God “as object”? Jüngel’s contention with “traditional,” metaphysical accounts of God are that they subject God to metaphysical categories foreign to the subject itself (i.e., God) and inevitably treat God as an object to be analyzed. As a theologian of the inductive vein, convinced that theology can only proceed and take its cues from the nature of the divine subject in question rather than from general principles applied to the subject, Jüngel proposes that the only way humans can speak of God’s being-as-object is through the utter and total subjection of theology’s speech about God to the ways in which God has already allowed Himself to be spoken of. Webster includes a quotation I think should be given here in full (from Jüngel’s seminal work God’s Being is in Becoming):

“God’s being-as-object is his being-revealed. God is thus the object of knowledge insofar as he has interpreted himself. And insofar as God has interpreted himself in his revelation and so made himself the object of knowledge of God, he has also made man into the subject of the knowledge of God… That means… that God’s being-as-object is not the result of human objectification of God… He is only objective as the one who has made himself objective.”[2]

Moving on to Jüngel’s position on theological language, which I thought was particularly illuminating, Webster lays out the centrality of the idea of metaphor in the theology of Jüngel. Following Heidegger, Jüngel argues that the literalistic boundaries which Western thought has placed on the conception of truth has stifled theological language and theologians’ understanding of just what can be rightly said concerning God. However, theological language is not therefore transcendent of human speech. Theological language is and can only be decidedly human. Webster comments,

“Jüngel insists that language about God must be authentically human language. Of course, he is firm in the conviction that language about God is only possible on the basis of God’s revelatory utterance, and that such language does not take its rise from within human language since it is demanded of man from beyond the horizons of worldly discourse. But he affirms with equal conviction that language about God is not the suspension of human language or its devaluation. Language about God is certainly not immanent within the structures of ordinary human speech. Yet it does not so transcend those structures as to lose its human character. Language about God is a demand which goes against the grain of man’s natural linguistic resources; yet it is not thereby less but more human than ‘ordinary’ discourse.”[3]

Theological language is human language in the highest and most true sense.

I highly recommend the works of Jüngel, and this small introduction, to you. Along with the rest of the dialectical theologians, Jüngel stands as a voice which points a way forward (albeit imperfectly) for future theological speaking in this post-metaphysical moment.

[1] John Webster, Eberhard Jüngel: An Introduction to his Theology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), 17-18.

[2] Eberhard Jüngel, The Doctrine of the Trinity: God’s Being is in Becoming (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2014), 57.

[3] John Webster, Eberhard Jüngel: An Introduction to his Theology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), 40.