Der Evangelische Theologe

Torrance on Judgment and Atonement in Christ

2009-12-24T08:08:00.001-05:00

Merry Christmas to all DET readers (and anyone else, for that matter)! Here are some christological reflections for your Christmas Eve.

I’m approaching the end of chapter 4 in my reading of Torrance’s Incarnation, and this chapter has been especially rich with Torrance’s reading of the biblical text. This is a side of Torrance that I think comes to light in a unique way in these posthumous dogmatics lectures, and I find it quite fascinating to see the connections he makes between the various aspects of scriptural narrative. The following is a particularly good summary section of what he has been talking about for much of the chapter:

Thomas F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ (Robert T. walker, ed.; Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic and Paternoster, 2008): 152-3.

“The atoning work of Christ seen at work…is no mechanical or merely forensic transaction; it is the activity of the divine person penetrating directly into the hearts of men and women and in an acutely personal way, by way of God’s decision of love, opening up people in their decisions and gathering them into communion and union with God. That was the three years’ ministry of Jesus. That is why he operated as he did with unheard of meekness and kindness, shrouding his divine majesty and even veiling the naked truth by parable, les he should bluntly crush the bruised reed or quench the smoking flax. He lived with publicans and sinners, and scribes and Pharisees, and people of all sorts, gradually revealing himself, and as they were able to hear he spoke to them the truth, challenging them at every turn in their decisions before the majesty of the kingdom. Acting on their decisions and by means of them he penetrated into the innermost being of men and women as only he who is God and man could.

“And so all through those years of historical encounter and human living in the midst of people and their hurts and needs, he involved himself more and more, intertwined himself more and more completely with sinners, until in the fullest and most personal sense he was the representative of the divine judge to us, condemning by his truth our sin in the flesh, and was also our representative, representing us the judged as he wore our humanity. Because he was God’s Son become man he could both incarnate God for us, and represent us before God, this one man on behalf of all men and women. In this authoritative representation, representation in truth and reality, of God to us and of all to God, Jesus Christ stood in the gap to work out to the bitter end in justice and mercy the conflict between God’s holy love consistently true to itself, and man’s persistent contradiction of God’s love even when it was poured out in utter compassion and grace. In that, as the very heart of God beating within our humanity, he really suffered our distress, and bore also the whole of God’s judgement [sic] upon humanity with which, in all its guilt and rejection, he stood in complete solidarity. All the years of his earthly life, but especially during those three years of his public ministry, as he revealed the Father, and poured out the Father’s compassion, he engaged himself more and more closely with the ultimate things, the very last things, until on the cross the eschaton took place, the final judgement and final salvation.”

My Most Recent Publications

2009-12-21T07:20:00.000-05:00

Review of Daniel J. Treier, Introducing Theological Interpretation of Scripture: Recovering a Christian Practice (Baker Academic, 2008), Reviews in Religion and Theology 17.1 (2009): 24-6.

Review of Neil B. MacDonald and Carl Trueman (eds), Calvin, Barth, and Reformed Theology (Paternoster, 2008), Reviews in Religion and Theology 17.1 (2009): 96-8.

Worth Remembering

2009-12-17T06:28:00.000-05:00

"It is reasonable to expect that any theologian worth his or her salt will be able to show the difference between a mystery and a muddle."

B. A. Gerrish, Grace and Gratitude: The Eucharistic Theology of John Calvin (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2002): 160.

New Center for Barth Studies Book Review

2009-12-14T10:00:00.001-05:00

Cambria Janae Kaltwasser has reviewed Adam Neder's Participation in Christ: An Entry in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics, Columbia Series in Reformed Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009). Be sure to check it out!

The Saga Continues

2009-12-13T06:29:00.000-05:00

Many of you know that I recently completed the exams in my doctoral program. Well, the latest news is that my dissertation proposal has been accepted by the powers that be. So, now I can start actually working on the thing – and idea at once both intimidating and freeing. In any case, here are some vital stats. Don’t try to get more out of me, because you won’t succeed – you’ll have to wait for the book! ;-)

* Working Title: “The Sign of the Gospel” – Toward a Reformed and Evangelical Doctrine of Infant Baptism After Barth

* Dissertation committee: George Hunsinger (chair), Bruce McCormack, and Bryan Spinks (Yale Div School).

Wish me luck!

Lynn Cohick, “Women in the World of the Earliest Christians”

2009-12-09T06:12:00.000-05:00

In addition to reading Torrance (see last post), I am also reading Cohick. Lynn Cohick was my NT professor during my time at Wheaton – they had and still have other NT professors, and I took a course with one of them, but most of my work in the area was with Cohick – and I had the added privilege of serving as her TA. She has remained interested in my scholarly development since I left Wheaton, and has served as a mentor and collaborator (for instance, she wrote a very engaging response as part of the 2009 Karl Barth Blog Conference here at DET) as occasion presented itself. Needless to say, I am very grateful for all of this. But, I am also grateful to Lynn because she recently sent me a copy of her very recently (Amazon lists the publication date as Nov 1, 2009) published Women in the World of the Earliest Christians. Having studied with and worked for Lynn, I have a deeply ingrained curiosity about New Testament backgrounds even though I do little formal NT scholarship anymore, and so I am working through her promising volume. So, expect me to post interesting snippets from time to time.

I have never seen a book quite like this one, and I am convinced that it will quickly become standard reading for those who are interested in parsing what the NT has to say about women in conversation with the NT’s historical context. By way of further introduction, here is a bit from Lynn’s introduction on why she wrote the book:

Lynn H. Cohick, Women in the World of the Earliest Christians: Illuminating Ancient Ways of Life (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009): 20-1.

“I was on a journey of discovery, looking for information about real women who lived during the time of Second Temple Judaism, during the Roman Republic and Empire, during the birth of Christianity. I read arguments describing their daily life inside and outside the home. But the more I read, the less clear this “everywoman” became. The immediate impetus for writing this book was my frustration over the various analyses concerning New Testament women. Some approaches, sympathetic to canonical authority, ignored the rhetorical and stylized character portraits, envisioning the texts as requiring no interpretation or reading them with little historical sophistication. Other scholars tended to repudiate authoritative texts, but extreme skepticism toward discovering historical information within canonical works seemed an unnecessary reaction, one that assumed an apologetic or theological text cannot at the same time carry historical data. Instead of concluding that no reliable historical evidence is retrievable, I would suggest that the authors of the canonical works are not intentionally misrepresenting women, but rather are interested in communicating something else, and chose as a device the “woman” tropos. In so doing, these writings likely contain something useful about real women’s experiences or the world in which they lived.”

And then, on page 23, we get an early hint of a mode of analysis that is one of Cohick’s unique emphases:

“To best understand the complexity of ancient women’s lives, we must consider the crucial role the institution of patronage played 8in the broader culture, as well as be attentive to the construction of gender identity as it impacts the discussion of real women… [P]atronage extended the household into the public arena, allowing women to influence the politics and religions of their cities. Patronage provided women with an avenue for attaining public honor and for impacting society. Patronage bridged the gap between public and private, and clarified how public women were esteemed with “private” virtues of modesty and chasteness.”

Torrance on Luke 2.40

2009-12-02T06:35:00.003-05:00

I had pre-ordered my copy of Torrance’s Atonement, the second half of TF Torrance’s posthumously published dogmatics lectures from his time at New College in the University of Edinburgh, and finally received it shortly before Thanksgiving. A year or so ago the publishers generously sent me an advanced copy of the un-proofed text of the first half, Incarnation, so that I might be one of the first to review it (my review is accessible online). While I picked-up a copy of the published volume shortly after it came out, I had been putting off returning to it until the publication of the second volume. So, once Atonement arrived on my desk I began reading Incarnation with the intention of reading the two volumes back-to-back. So, you can expect to see snippets from these two volumes posted from time to time in the near future. Here is the first:

Thomas F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ (Robert T. walker, ed.; Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic and Paternoster, 2008): 105-6:

"What happens in the incarnation is the union of God and man. At last in the midst of our fallen humanity, within and in spite of our estrangement from him, God comes in his love and binds us to himself forever. God and man meet in Jesus Christ and a new covenant is eternally established and fulfilled.

"That takes place in the union of man and Go din the infant and maturing Jesus, in a growing in wisdom and stature both toward God and toward man. It is a growing which reaches its first stage when Jesus is twelve years of age, when according to Jewish law a son passes from infancy to the state of adult responsibility, and when the child himself confesses with his own lips the word of God sealed in his flesh in circumcision. Then Jesus is found in his Father’s house, not only answering the required interrogations but proposing them himself to the doctors of the law. Brought up from his mother’s knee in the Old Testament scriptures he has already entered into a wonderful fullness of divine wisdom. The second stage is reached when, after years of toil at the carpenter’s bench as the ben-bayith, the son of the house, taking his place along with Joseph as bread winner in the family at Nazareth, Jesus at last reaches the age of thirty, the age when under the Old Testament regulations a man might enter upon the active life of the priesthood. At that point in the fullness of time, Jesus steps forth among mankind, deliberately entering into active and living solidarity with his fellow men and women, in order to bring the union between himself and sinners to its completion in the mission of mediation upon which he has been sent by the Father."

Coincidently, this is my 400th post here at DET.

Happy Thanksgiving!

2009-11-26T09:10:00.004-05:00

When you have a 14-month old son, you don't have a lot of free time on holidays for deep theological reflection. So, instead, I leave you with this...

New Look at DET

2009-11-21T20:56:00.002-05:00

Those of you who interact with me here at DET solely through a RSS reader will not have noticed, but DET has undergone a much overdue face-lift. I hope you all like it and find it more functional than the previous look.

H/T to Chris for pointing me in the right direction on this stuff.

Kathryn Tanner on Condign and Congruent Merit

2009-11-18T06:13:00.000-05:00

In this section, Tanner is explicating the theology of Gabriel Biel, and pointing out ways in which he diverged from previous scholastic positions in subtle ways. This whole section is interesting, and I highly recommend you take a look at it for yourself. But, here is a not insignificant portion to whet your appetite a bit more concerning this rather esoteric theological discussion. I find the development that Tanner lays out here to be very important to Reformation history as, if my memory serves me, Luther was trained in Biel's tradition. If Biel is an aberration of a more basic scholastic position, Luther is (perhaps) a corrective rather than an aberration in his own right. Just a thought. :-)

Kathryn Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment? (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2005): 140-1.

“In traditional use (e.g., Thomas), the distinction between congruous and condign merit was a way of considering the same human action performed on the basis of created grace and under two different aspects – from the side of human agency on the one hand and divine agency on the other. Human works performed on the basis of created grace may be said to merit salvation de condigno to the extent that such works are considered to proceed from the grace of the Holy Spirit and to the extent, therefore, that eternal life appears as the fitting completion of the gift of created grace from the side of the divine agency which works both. When the same human action performed on the basis of created grace is considered on its human side, it is said to merit salvation merely de congruo. One can assert this, moreover, only because God is operating as well tom complete ‘his’ own work de condigno. Human acts have no claim in themselves to an eternal ‘supernatural’ life; nevertheless, they may be said to merit salvation de congruo to the extent that God out of free mercy rewards ‘his’ own gifts.

“On Biel’s use, on the contrary, congruous merit is reified as a form of merit really distinct from condign merit, having its ground in human achievement alone apart from any direct operation of divine agency effective of grace. Congruous merit becomes a naturalistically interpreted preparation for the reception of the habit of grace, proceeding apart from any direct establishment of the relevant human operations by divine saving agency. In technical scholastic language, preparation for the reception of created grace is, according to Biel, essentially performed by human power without being itself established either by the very ‘form’ of created grace as its appropriate material condition (Thomas) or by gratia gratis data or auxilium Dei speciale. The traditional scholastic formula facere quod in se est, according to which God does not deny grace to those who do what is in them under the influence of grace, takes on the character of a self-originating human activity conditioning the divine ordination of grace.

“…Condign merit was traditionally based on the free mercy of God who ordains that unmerited created grace should be completed by eternal life; now it comes instead to be attributed at least partially – perhaps even in the main – to the independent efforts of human persons to perform good works. Condign merit no longer expresses the loving largesse of a God who rewards what itself arises only as a free divine gift; it is instead taken to represent the result of the joint co-agency of God and independently operative human beings.”

New Center for Barth Studies Book Review

2009-11-13T09:45:00.003-05:00

Jesse Couenhoven has reviewed Neil B. MacDonald and Carl Trueman (eds.), Calvin, Barth, and Reformed Theology (Paternoster, 2008). He does a nice job of parsing out the contents and indentifying their strengths and weaknesses. Of course, readers of DET need no explanation as to why a volume of this might be interesting. Be sure to check it out.

Trinity and Christology According to Gunton

2009-11-11T06:20:00.000-05:00

****For those of you following the saga, I have passed my oral exam. All that now remains is the dissertation proposal, and that small matter of actually writing the dissertation. While I'm worrying about that, please enjoy the following.****

“What, then, is the relation of the doctrine of the Trinity to…christology…? Pannenberg has famously said…that the trouble with traditional christologies is that they make the mistake of presupposing the doctrine of the Trinity. Rather, he holds, any doctrine of the Trinity must be the outcome of christological thought. In a sense, the latter is true. A [proper] doctrine of the Trinity…can only be the result of thought about the economy of salvation through Christ and the Spirit. That is the necessary order of knowing: from God’s relatedness to the world, make known in Christ, to a doctrine of his eternal being in relation. But the order of being must take a different orientation. If there is to be talk of the incarnation, it must presuppose the existence of a triune God, for it holds that the one through whom the world was made has become part of that world in order to redeem it from its bondage to decay. In that respect, the two doctrines, of God and of Christ, offer each other mutual support, or, rather, are dependent upon one another. Without a presupposed Trinity, the doctrine of the incarnation becomes an absurdity. With it, the point of the doctrine of the Trinity comes to be further realised, for it can be understood that it is not absurd that the agent of creation, the one through relation to whom it comes to be, by whom it is held in being, and to whom it is directed, should so involve himself in what he has made.”

Colin E. Gunton, Christ and Creation: The Didsbury Lectures, 1990 (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2005): 75-6.

I’m very sympathetic with a lot of what Gunton writes here. However, I do wonder about his way of parsing the noetic and ontic orders. For Gunton, these orders run parallel but in contrary directions. I’m far more inclined to side with Barth and see them as parallel and running in the same direction. Gunton’s position here is conceptually rather tight, and that is to be admired. But I wonder if he unnecessarily elevates the doctrine of the incarnation to a matter of faith. Now, I don’t mean to imply that I think the doctrine of the incarnation is somehow less than true – I affirm it wholeheartedly. But, it seems to me that such a conception is a conclusion rather than a starting point. The starting point is the faith affirmation and conviction that Jesus is Lord within the 1st century CE Jewish milieu. From there it isn’t too hard to get to a robust two-nature’s Christology as well as a doctrine of the Trinity – as the early church did.

So, while the doctrine of the Trinity is conceptually bound up with the doctrine of the incarnation in the way that Gunton proposes, the noetic order reaches back a little further. Of course, Barth takes this faith affirmation and conviction, seeing the noetic and ontic orders as concurrent rather than counterveiling. This means that there is no sense in which the Trinity relates to creation apart from considerations of Jesus. In other words: Barth is supralapsarian, and Gunton is not.

T.F. Torrance on Karl Barth's Significance

2009-11-04T06:19:00.000-05:00

This is from the first page of Torrance’s introduction to Barth’s Theology and Church: Shorter Writings, 1920-1928 (Louise Pettibone Smith, trans.; New York: Harper & Row, 1962).

Karl Barth is the greatest theological genius that has appeared on the scene for centuries. He cannot be appreciated except in the context of the greatest theologians such as Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, nor can his thinking be adequately measured except in the context of the whole history of theology and philosophy. Not only does he recapitulate in himself in the most extraordinary way the development of all modern theology since the Reformation, but he towers above it in such a way that he has created a situation in the Church, comparable only to the Reformation, in which massive clarification through debate with the theology of the Roman Church can go on. Karl Barth has, in fact, so changed the whole landscape of theology, Evangelical and Roman alike, that the other great theologians of modern times appear in comparison rather like jobbing gardeners.

Hyperbole at points? Maybe. Crying for further clarification? Certainly. Still, leave it to TFT to write such a sweeping account of Barth’s significance.

T.F. Torrance on Evangelistic Preaching

2009-10-28T05:56:00.000-05:00

***For those of you who care, I'm sitting my last qualifying exam today - systematic theology. While I'm slaving away, enjoy some good ol' TFT.***

Thomas F. Torrance, When Christ Comes and Comes Again (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1957): 8-9.

There are aspects of modern preaching which give rise to great anxiety, the temptation of the popular preacher to build the faith of the congregation on his own personality, to parade his knowledge of modern literature, to feed his people with constant diagnosis of the various maladies of our time instead of with the substance of the Gospel, to allow an existentialist decision to oust from their central place in the Gospel the mighty acts of God in Christ, and so to give the people anthropology instead of Christology, or to preach the Church instead of Christ in His Church and so to give the congregation the traditions of men instead of Incarnation, Atonement, Resurrection, Ascension, and Advent. A sheep lost in a snowstorm may eke out its life a little longer by feeding upon its own wool, but the Church cannot live very long by feeding upon its own experience or conventions instead of the Body and Blood of Christ…Too often the Word of God is bound in the fetters and techniques of an “evangelical tradition” which is man-made and does not derive from the Gospel itself, and can only succeed in making important elements of the Word of none effect.

Those of you who read this blog regularly, or had the good fortune to encounter the friendly disagreement between Ben Myers and myself over whether and to what extent T.F. Torrance can be considered a Barthian, know that I enjoy reading Torrance and think that his theology is a far sight better than some. Passages like this are part of the reason why. Here TF reveals himself to be a staunch advocate of preaching the gospel and a supporter of the church’s evangelistic mission, but also to be a critic of much that passes for this. His criticisms – as well as his positive counter-proposal – still apply.

New Center for Barth Studies Book Review

2009-10-23T10:51:00.001-05:00

Matthias Gockel reviews Bruce McCormack's Orthodox and Modern. Be sure to check it out!

Kathryn Tanner on “whether” and “how” God can be said to respond to our prayers

2009-10-21T06:10:00.000-05:00

*****For those few of you who care or might minutely be interested, I'm sitting my qualifying exam in philosophy this morning. I know it sounds like lots of fun, but its not really. Take my word on it. Anyway, enjoy this from Tanner while I slave away.*****

Kathryn Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment? (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2005): 97-8.

“Christians do say…that God responds to the prayers of the faithful. Are there not, then, exceptional cases where God’s agency for created effects is determined by what the creature does? We have to say that a statement like ‘God grants petitions’ holds, not because God’s agency is itself altered by prayer, but because prayer is according to God’s will a necessary created condition in particular cases for a created effect or for the alteration of the usual order of created cause and effect. To say that God makes up for the deficiency of created causes to produce the effect for which a person prays is to say, according to our account, that God’s created intention includes the effect and the prayer as its condition but not adequate secondary causes.

“Could one say instead that God creatively intends his own agency to be conditioned by prayer? If one could, one would avoid talk of the creature’s influencing or altering divine agency in any strong sense. Such statements can only collapse, however, into the ones we have just recommended…[I]t is appropriate to say things like ‘God hears our prayers’; God’s creative intention may be said to include ‘himself’ as genuinely affected by creatures. One cannot talk in the same way to suggest the conditioning of God’s very agency by creatures; the divine agency forming a creative intention cannot be included in any real sense within it.”

Good stuff, but definitely dense. I found this volume to be quite tedious, but full of little surprises.

New Music from 'The McMakens'

2009-10-20T06:25:00.000-05:00

It seems that it is family promotion month here at DET. You may remember that I recently posted about an article that my brother and his wife wrote for Relevant magazine. Well, as it turns out, they have just released their first album, entitled Sleep Easy They have been working on it a long time, and it is sure to be well put together (I haven't heard it all yet - maybe I'll get a free copy for writing this notice! :-P ) In any case, if you'd like to listen to "nine original songs and two folk arrangements [that] capture this duo's timeless songwriting, lush instrumentation, and evocative vocals: (copy from their website), you can order now. And, if you live in the Chicago-land area, think about dropping by one of their shows.

How do worship and mission relate?

2009-10-15T09:34:00.003-05:00

No, I'm not tipping my hand just yet. But, my brother and his wife have recently published a short piece on the topic that is worth a read over at Relevant Magazine - "Your Worship Isn't Enough". Those of tired of the rather dry and rationalist approach taken here at DET may find their more evocative and conversational tone refreshing.

Frei on Barth, Theological Method, and CD 2.2 (?)

2009-10-14T06:54:00.000-05:00

The following few paragraphs are taken from Frei’s Types of Christian Theology (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). They deal with Barth and the way in which Barth deployed philosophical, or non-Christian modes of inquiry in general, to the task of theology or, more specifically, to the task of reading Scripture. I present it here not only because I think Frei gets a number of things right about Barth in this passage, but because the third paragraph is – I think; it isn’t explicitly stated – a methodological gloss on Church Dogmatics 2.2, which is very illuminating on its own. Of course, you will have to make your own judgments, and I would be very interested in hearing your impressions.

Pages 87-8:

“Barth…suggests that some biblical texts have been more crucial than others in the history of Christian reading [of Scripture], largely because they are more perspicuous and therefore more conductive to agreed-upon interpretation—or “plain” reading. And chief among these, so that it can serve as a kind of loose organizing center for the whole, is the story of Jesus.

“When Barth turns to that story he simply follows the consensus with which we began; in fact, he confines himself to it with great care. The job of the commentator is to draw attention to the literal, ascriptive sense which serves simply to answer the question Who is Jesus in this text? In other words the commentator’s task is to render a conceptual redescription of those identifying descriptions which cohere because they are descriptions of this particular person, Jesus of Nazareth. Barth almost always proceeds from the priority of the singular and from the particular to the general…Just as he subordinated the general scheme to the specific text, in his hermeneutical priority ordering, so he reversed the logic that mediating theology had introduced in the eighteenth century and followed ever since, the logic which identified the order of belief with that of coming to believe: from the general meaningfulness of sin to that of the general notion of redemption, to the affirmation that the textual and historical individual person Jesus met the specifications of “redeemer.” He reversed the flow of interpretation, claiming that the texts about Jesus were our means of access to incorporating ourselves, or being incorporated, in the world of discourse he shared with us, rather than his specific identity as Redeemer having to be fitted to the criteria of the world of our general experience.

“Barth did not return to the pre-Enlightenment orthodox view that the logic of the gospel story is provided by the eternal, pretemporal scheme in which God predestines some to salvation and others to damnation, foreordaining the redeeming act of Christ in the light of the sin of Adam. Barth did write a long work on divine grace and predestination, but its status, despite its enormous length, is that of a grammatical remark about the language of the Gospel: Given that in the history of Jesus Christ as rendered in the Gospels we are incorporated into the reality he shares with God—and given that this incorporation is not only a possibility but is actualized in what he did for us, that his very being or essence was a being-for-us—what then is the internal logic or grammar of this depiction, not the condition of its possibility, intelligible in abstractions from it? And the answer for Barth is that the internal logic—if you will, the grammatical rule of this story—is the saving will of God, his election of Jesus and of us in him, from eternity. But this is a very different thing from the reverse: founding the story of Jesus on a prior and independent metaphysics of divine predestination, of which the story is only the indispensible source of information. Even here, the general (the scheme) is contained in, subordinate to, the particular (the story). It is the particularity of Jesus, enacted in and inseparable from history that makes him significant for salvation and provides the criteria for what the criteria for such significance are."

Kaufman on how Luther gave us the likes of Feuerbach and Nietzsche

2009-10-07T06:02:00.000-05:00

To set the stage, Kaufman is talking about the conceptual difficulties involved in conceiving of God as objective to us in a way broadly similar to how any other object with which we interact is objective to us. He is definitely pursuing an agenda with this analysis – as far as I can tell, he doesn’t want anything like a personal God in the traditional sense – but that doesn’t mean he isn’t illuminating. For instance, he has this nice bit about how Luther gave us the likes of Feuerbach and Nietzsche. To set the stage, he understands Luther’s notion of simul iustus et peccator as driving such a wedge between us and God – God is righteous, we are not, and we never actually possess righteousness as saved and so remain utterly distinct from God – as to undermine knowledge of God. Below are some extracts that draw some of these strands together.

“Luther’s position…is a reductio ad absurdum, I suggest, becomes it makes the distinction so sharp that even my consciousness of God—my ideas about him or the quality of my faith in him has nothing whatever to do with the question of my salvation. God has indeed become “wholly other” here…[T]he sharp distinction which Luther makes implies that nothing in us—even our thoughts about God—can claim actually to relate us to him, i.e., can lay claim to being valid or true or dependable in any respects. In short, God becomes—if one works through consistently what is entailed here—an absolutely unknowable, incomprehensible, unattainable, mysterious “X.” While this frees us to live out our lives in this world with confidence and spontaneity, it also means that nothing we are or can be, nothing we do or can do, nothing we think or can think, can in any way affect our relation to God either positively or negatively. God has become so abstracted from our consciousness and experience that these can go on, indeed, must go on, without reference to him or thought about him: he has become a zero, a nothing, a complete irrelevancy to our life here and now…

"…If God is really completely objective to and distinct from all our ideas, he is irrelevant to us in every respect; and we may as well lead our lives with no reference to or concern about him. This is the secularist conclusion which can be drawn from Luther’s position.

"However, Luther’s reductio ad absurdum of the objectivist language also opened up…the understanding that “God” is not a reality over against us, totally other from us at all, but is in fact a construction of the human imagination which performs certain important functions in our thinking and experience. The only God we can know or respond to or take account of is the God we can know and take account of and respond to. It is the God that we, with the help of a long tradition developing before us, construct in our imagination as the ultimate point of reference for all life and thought and reality…With Kant the issue at last became clarified: “God” must be understood as a human construct, doubtless a very important, perhaps indispensible, construct, but a human construct nonetheless.

"Successors to Kant—Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Freud, Dewey—have seized upon his discover…"

Gordon Kaufman, An Essay on Theological Method, 3rd edition (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1995): 31-3.

It bears mention that something like this is precisely the problem that Barth is trying to address in his theology. This is perhaps most clearly seen in Church Dogmatics 1.1 on the one hand, and in CD 2.1 and 2.2 on the other hand and – perhaps – in somewhat different ways.

Types of Philosophy: A Serioues Jest?

2009-09-30T06:18:00.000-05:00

I’m no philosopher, and I am happy to proclaim my philosophical ignorance to any who will listen (although, truth be told, I’m slowly trying to remedy this and, as it turns out, I can claim the pedigree of Socrates for such proclamations). But, one of the joys of being involved in teaching introductory courses on theology is that one often gets asked questions that one does not expect and has not prepared for, and that force one to do one’s best to give answers, which in turn forces one to organize whole heaps of information on the fly, the result of which is to produce gross overgeneralizations like the following. So, I present to you my gentle readers, four types of philosophy. Once-upon-a-time I presented some types of systematic theology, in case you are interested.

Type 1

The British are, by history and – perhaps – by natural inclination (whatever that means), mercantile in orientation. Thus, their philosophy bears a striking resemblance to accounting: ledgers must be balanced, sums figured, and columns put neatly in order. There is a place for everything, and everything ought to be in its place. They have given us analytic philosophy.

Type 2

Americans are the great achievers. They build large bridges and buildings, and sometimes it seems that they (alright, “we”) do it just for the fun of it. Scratch that, I know we sometimes do it just for the fun of it: exhibit A, Las Vegas! In any case, what matters here is weight supported, office space provided, and financial return garnered. Our philosophical gift to the world is pragmatism.

Type 3

Crossing the pond once again, we return to Europe and cast our eye across Germany. The Germans are, paradoxically, great poets and scientists. As poets they are fascinated by stories, mythologies, and big, sweeping ideas; as scientists, they tend to work out these mythologies and ideas in a very comprehensive and precise way. In essence, their poetic side dreams up ways to explain the world, and their scientific side goes to work making those ideas make sense. Quintessential German philosophy is speculative idealism.

Type 4

Finally, the French. Ah, the French! France is the land of sommeliers and chefs. They enjoy producing and consuming the finer things in life in a relaxed, convivial environment. Given that environment, they tend to be in great moods when they philosophize, and seldom alone. French philosophy is characterized by two thinkers sitting in a Paris café with lattes and cigarettes, bandying about big ideas in an effort to pull one over on their companion. Conversely, it is an exercise in dismantling these big ideas. Thus, the French have given us structuralism and deconstruction.

So, there you have it – the secret to understanding philosophy is out of the bag! I expect comments from British folks aimed at trying to tighten up my arguments by putting them into syllogistic form, from Americans trying to get me to explain why this typology matters in concrete terms, from Germans presenting alternate typologies, and from the French explaining to me why language is too full of slippage for this sort of typology to be helpful. ;-)

Bonhoeffer on Genesis 1.1 – “And God said…”

2009-09-24T06:24:00.000-05:00

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall: A Theological Exposition of Genesis 1-3 (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2004): 40-1:

“[T]he God of the Bible remains wholly God, wholly the Creator, wholly the Lord, and what God has created remains wholly subject and obedient, praising and worshiping God as Lord. God is never the creation but always the Creator. God is not the substance of nature. There is no continuum that ties God to, or unites God with, God’s work – except God’s word…That is, ‘inherently’ [‘an sich’] there is no continuum; were the word not there, the world would drop into a bottomless abyss. This word of God is neither the nature nor the essence of God; it is the commandment of God. It is the very God who thinks and creates this word, but as One who chooses to encounter the creature as its Creator. God’s creatorship is not the essence, the substance, but the will or commandment of God; in it God gives us God’s very self as God wills. That God creates by the word means that creation is God’s order or command, and that this command is free.

“God says, God speaks. This means that God creates in complete freedom. Even in creating, God remains wholly free over against what is created. God is not bound to what is created; instead God binds it to God. God does not enter into what is created as its substance; instead what relates God to what is created is God’s command. That is, God is never in the world in any other way than as one who is utterly beyond it. God is, as the word, in the world, because God is the one who is utterly beyond, and God is utterly beyond the world, because God is in the world in the word. Only in the word of creation do we know the Creator; only in the word addressed to us in the middle do we have the beginning. It is not ‘from’ God’s works, then, that we recognize the Creator – as though the substance, the nature, or the essence of the work were after all ultimately somehow identical with God’s essence or as if there were some kind of continuum between them, such as that of cause and effect. On the contrary we believe that God is the Creator only because by his word God acknowledges these works as his own, and we believe this word about these works. There is no via eminentiae, negationis, causalitatis!”

TF Torrance on Calvin

2009-09-17T06:12:00.000-05:00

Being officially out of coursework, I'm such a glutton for punishment that I am nevertheless auditing a seminar on John Calvin this semester offered by George Hunsinger. So, I thought I would throw this up as kind of a kick-off to the semester.

I wish that I had more to say about this extensive quote I’m about to show you, whether comments of criticism, clarification, construction, or addition. But, the fact is that I don’t quite yet know what to do with the notions that TFT relates here. Some of them resonate, and some of them chafe. There are certainly things that I would want to criticize, clarify, use to construct further positions, or add. For instance, some of the dichotomies that TFT sets up for how Calvin ought to be understood seem a little forced, that is, there are certainly other options for viewing Calvin than those offered here. But, TFT’s vision of Calvin here is so much a whole that I want to be very careful before beginning to pick it apart. It is one of those things that one needs to sit with a while. In any case, I invite you to join me in contemplating what TFT has to tell us about Calvin.

Thomas F. Torrance, Conflict and Agreement in the Church (Wipf & Stock, 1996): 1.91-3:

“All Calvin’s teaching and preaching have to do with salvation through union with Christ in His death and resurrection. That is very clear in the Institutes in which the central message is worked out more and more clearly and fully from book to book, and is given most magnificent form in book four. In the history of theology Calvin represents the movement to bring the doctrine of the Person of Christ into the centre. In that he stood consciously in the tradition of Augustine and Bernard (the two fathers he cites more frequently than any others) in their emphasis upon personal Christological truth, but in Calvin it is more biblical, more dynamic and eschatological, than mystical – and certainly much less individualistic that it was in Bernard. Calvin, for example, would have nothing to do with Bernard’s notion that the individual soul is the Bride of Christ. It is of the whole Church that we must speak in this way, and union with Christ is essentially the corporate union between Christ and the Church as His Body.

“It is around this doctrine of union with Christ, then, that Calvin builds his doctrine of faith, of the Church as the living Body of Christ, and his doctrines of the Christian life, Baptism, and the Lord’s Supper. Apart from union with Christ, Calvin says, all that Christ did for us in His Incarnation, death, and resurrection, would be unavailing. An examination of the structure of the Institutes makes it clear that this forms the main substance of his theology, and that the idea of predestination is not given a central place. Predestination or election is important, but Calvin speaks about it as a rule in connection with certain controversies (notably with Castellio and Pighius) but never as a basic doctrine in itself – except in so far as Christ is Himself the Beloved Son and the mirror of our election. And so right in the heart of his Christology Calvin devotes a small chapter to that fact, the really central point of election…Rather, then, does Calvin give predestination a place on the circumference of his theology, where it acted like a protecting wall for the central emphases of grace and adoption or sonship in Christ…

“Nothing has done more harm to Calvinism than the invention and perpetuation of the myth that Calvin’s theology was a severely logical structure. That notion grew up on French soil and was perpetuated by the great succession of Calvinist Schoolmen on the Continent, eminently in Holland. Modern research, however, makes it indubitably clear that Calvin’s whole theology was formulated in a very definite reaction against the arid logical schematisms into which the doctrines of the Church had been thrust by “the frigid doctors of the Sorbonne”, as he called them, and that again and again he was content to leave the ends of his theological thinking loose for the precise reason that theology runs out always to the point of wonder where we can only clap our hands on our mouth and remember that we are humble creatures. The whole inner substance of Calvin’s teaching…enshrines mystery and resists rationalistic schematization – so that it is a great disservice to interpret him as above all a logician.

“That is not to say that his theology is not amazingly consistent; as it is. It is consistency, however, that derives not from formal logic but from the thoroughness with which he stated his theology in terms of the analogy of Christ. In his prefatory letter to the King of France, in the 1559 edition of the Institutes, Calvin pointed out that, following the Apostle Paul, Christian theology must operate with the analogy of faith, and that when doctrine is tested by this its victory is secure. By the analogy of faith Calvin meant both that all doctrine must be based upon the exegetical study of Holy Scripture in which Scriptural passages are interpreted in terms of each other, and more basically, that all doctrines are to be thought out thoroughly in terms of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Thus, for example, in regard to repentance, which was such an important issue at the Reformation, while the Roman Schoolmen divided repentance into three parts, contrition, confession, and satisfaction, Calvin, following the analogy of faith in Jesus Christ, showed that repentance has two essential parts, mortification and vivification, corresponding to the death and resurrection of Christ. It was in carrying that Christological analogy through all the doctrines of the faith that Calvin achieved such an astonishing consistency, but it is consistency determined not by logical relation or by some kind of Calvinist philosophy (so-called), but by the principle of Christological analogy – i.e. Christology applied to the whole of our life and work and thought.”

Hans Frei, “Types 1 & 2,” and a Rhetorical Flourish

2009-09-15T06:00:00.000-05:00

I’ve been reading Hans Frei’s Types of Christian Theology (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992) and, coming across the following spunky paragraph, I just had to share it. As for context, this paragraph comes at the end of a section of the book where Frei is considering whether one’s theological ‘type’ makes a hermeneutical difference concerning how one handles the literal sense of Scripture. He has considered types 1 (Gordon Kaufman / Immanuel Kant) and 2 (David Tracy and, implicitly, Paul Tillich - although Frei suggests that Tillich belongs in type 3) independently, but is here drawing these two threads together. Frei’s basic contention is that these two types have no real use for a literal sense, and it is this conclusion that lies behind the following invective. The following paragraph is written sarcastically in the voice of a member of the second type, meanwhile lampooning academic theological bureaucracy and, to add injury to insult, hypocrisy when it comes to social issues (thankfully, some of the latter has been positively addressed, although I’m not sure the former has):

Pages 64-5:

“Now one needs to say that to the extent that the name and title Jesus Christ function within the sociolinguistic context of the specific community called Christian, and theological talk about “Jesus Christ” is part of the self-description of Christianity, the language rules are such that culture as the history of collection consciousness and its linguistic self-expressions are simply not apt representations…Still, it is a relief to have symbols that live and die organically rather than having images paraphrasing rational constructions that are brought about by deliberate analytical (as for Kaufman) reflections, so that, say, the image of God as monarch may be abolished by scholarly theological committee vote under the auspices of the A.A.R., and a prize issued for the invention of a more fitting image for these times, which are, on the one hand, threatened by complete self-destruction in nuclear war and, on the other hand, obviously no longer mythical or absolutist in political sentiment. The “Suffering Servant” image for God and for Christ is always all right as long as it is not taken to provide religious legitimacy for the status of non-unionized domestic help. But enough.”

My Most Recent Publication

2009-09-10T06:16:00.000-05:00

Ecclesiology has just published (online; I think the hard-copy will take a little more time to get out) an essay of mine. Those of you with the proper permissions can likely access it. The essay deals with Barth on infant baptism, and it does two things: first, it traces the development of Barth’s doctrine through the Church Dogmatics period; and, second, it concludes by hinting at the line of thinking I intend to pursue in my dissertation. Here is the bibliographic information, and below is the abstract:

W. Travis McMaken, “Authority, Mission, and Institution: A Systematic Consideration of Matthew 28.18-20 in Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Baptism,” in Ecclesiology 53 (2009): 345-61.

ABSTRACT: Many of Barth’s most faithful and devoted interpreters have taken issue with his unapologetically non-sacramental account of baptism in CD IV/4 and his attendant rejection of infant baptism. While many questions have been raised concerning the veracity of the exegesis that Barth produces in support of his position, little attention has been paid to the way in which Matthew 28.18-20, when systematically considered, relates to his account of baptism. Taking the themes of authority, mission and institution as analytic tools, this paper examines the role played by the Matthean passage throughout the Church Dogmatics period, and considers how these themes relate to Barth’s rejection of infant baptism. It is suggested in conclusion that understanding baptism as the ‘sign of the gospel’ allows us to move beyond Barth’s rejection of infant baptism without abrogating his concern for mission.