Blog Move
You are about to be forwarded to my new blog, Via Crucis.
HistoricalTheology.com is not currently being updated. It will return down the road, in some form. Thank you for visiting!
09.10.07
05.31.07
The Church and the Heretic: A Way Forward?
One of the most pressing theological issues in my own personal sphere right now deals with the persistent relevance of creedal orthodoxy in a “post-orthodox” world. While conservative churches continue to teach traditional doctrines about the nature of Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, the Trinity, and so forth, academia regards the notion of church authority to be antiquated and meaningless — while the average Christian in the pew tends to follow suit, taking from the church only those classic doctrines which she can make reasonable to her mind and relevant to her life.
Where does the church stand in a world where it has little dogmatic authority over the theological beliefs of its members? Where do Christian academics stand when the fields of scholastic discipline tell them that the authority of the church to make dogmatic statements is precisely the first thing that must be jettisoned, in order for them to be taken seriously as academics? Does the church have the right to determine, through its polity and practices, what is right and wrong in the realm of theology? Did it ever?
Are the creeds, then, shackles that the Enlightenment has loosed from the wrists of the faithful?
I would like to offer a first effort at a solution, knowing full well that it is a work in progress. First, it must be recognized that there is no answer that is wholly satisfactory to either liberal academics or to conservative church-goers. Any attempt to seriously deal with the academic charge that “orthodoxy is dead” will be met with fierce opposition from a church that is still attempting to defend both its theological dogmas and its right to define right belief. (This, it seems to me, is why Karl Barth frustrated and continues to frustrate so many both within and without the church: conservatives saw him as too liberal, while liberal academicians shook their heads at his undefended christological starting point.) And any attempt to embrace the church as a presence of God’s coming kingdom on the earth, an institution of men and women formed by Jesus Christ, risks being written off by serious students as trapped in the Middle Ages.
Until now, my view has been that the church (if not academic theology, which I had treated as a separate subject) is in need of a resurgence of theological orthodoxy — a universal recognition of basic doctrinal standards of who we are and what we believe about this “Jesus” whom we worship. The ancient councils, especially Nicea, Constantinople and Chalcedon in the fourth and fifth centuries, are (at least for a Protestant) the obvious choices for a dogmatic standard. If we can at least teach these doctrines of the nature of Jesus Christ and the Trinity, I believed, we can recover some measure of the “orthodoxy” that was slain by the Enlightenment.
Two things have recently begun to convince me that this sort of return to a pristine orthodoxy — where Christians believe these truths about Jesus Christ because of the authority of the church and its historical interpretation of Scripture — is naive and of no profit for Christ’s church in the twenty-first century. First, studying some twentieth-century thinkers such as Karl Barth has continued to impress upon me both the fluidity — or “organic” nature is probably better — of theological thinking. Each generation must revisit, reinterpret, and re-apply classic Christian thought for its own time and people. This is by no means to radically subjectivize the notion of Christian truth, nor does it give us permission to trade history and tradition for our culturally-rooted flights of fancy. Jesus Christ remains the only begotten son of God, who is fully human and fully divine, no matter what the next generation might come to think about that.
Second, in looking more closely at some so-called “marginalized” Christian traditions I have come to a better appreciation for the hair’s-breadth theology that separates them from what we would call orthodox. I can no longer declare with divinely-given certitude that someone who worships Jesus Christ as fully God and fully man but, for example, rejects the linguistic choices of Chalcedon in describing the union of Christ’s nature, is a heretic who is cast out of the eternal Kingdom of God. As an orthodox, historical theologian I wish to defend the Chalcedonian Definition to the ends of the earth — but I am no longer prepared to pass judgment on a brother or sister who worships the same Christ who I worship.
In such a case — and especially where there is no unified visible church to enforce dogma — to pass such judgment over theological minutiae is, in fact, to make the subtle claim that salvation is not by grace alone through faith alone, but also requires theological precision. I can and will hold theologians to a higher standard for belief and teaching, but precision is not a requirement for salvation.
There is, to be sure, a line that can be crossed in terms of theological freedom; the generosity of our orthodoxy can only go so far before we are universalists or pantheists. This is a slippery slope, and open fellowship with so-called miaphysites does not mean throwing wide our arms to Arians, Gnostics, New Agers, Muslims, and so on as “all one big part of the family of God.” Christianity continues to make firm truth claims, and so continues to be incompatible with every view of God — and yes, of Jesus Christ — in the world.
Our tradition is not the cage in which we may do theology, but the wide-open field of play. Some may occasionally straggle out of bounds in chasing the ball this way or that, but of course we do not play outside of bounds. My way forward is to now seek to meld “Protestant theological freedom” with historical orthodoxy that was born from ecclesial authority. Neither can be jettisoned, and I believe neither can be made entirely subject to the other.
05.27.07
Simil iustus et peccator
As part of Historical Theology’s new series, here’s another foreign theological phrase you should know:
Simil iustus et peccator — “simultaneously justified and sinful” (Latin).
Made famous by Martin Luther during the Protestant Reformation, this phrase expresses the very Protestant idea that when we are saved in fellowship with Jesus Christ believers are, at the same time, justified and sinful before God. This is a paradox and a mystery, for normally these two states would be mutually exclusive: either we are sinful and necessarily condemned by God’s justice, or we are sinless and justified in God’s sight. We are each defendants in a court room who are either found guilty and sentenced to a rightful punishment, or found innocent and set free.
But Luther suggested that in Christ we are simil iustus et peccator. We have been justified in God’s sight and therefore found innocent because of Christ’s work; his righteousness and merit is counted to be ours. The truth is that we are sinners and we remain sinners until our final redemption in the last days — but because of Christ, God has chosen to see us as God sees Christ.
An historical footnote: The Lutheran doctrine is quite different from Roman Catholic teaching on this point, which contributed to the theological schism of the sixteenth century. The classic Catholic teaching, going back at least to Augustine in the fifth century, is that when we receive Christ we are actually made to be righteous and not sinful: there is an ontological change in us. Luther taught that we are reckoned as righteous even though we remain sinners — leading to the Catholic charge that he was teaching righteousness as a “legal fiction,” implying that God was being dishonest with God’s self by making a determination he knew to be untrue.
05.23.07
Our Proclamation Is Not the Word of God
Our preaching and the ministries and functions of the church are human attempts to disclose the Word of God — but we can never be so bold as to believe ourselves to be speaking the Word of God, says Karl Barth:
Proclamation is human speech in and by which God Himself speaks like a king through the mouth of his herald, and which is meant to be heard and accepted as speech in and by which God Himself speaks, and therefore heard and accepted in faith as divine decision concerning life and death, as divine judgment and pardon, eternal Law and eternal Gospel both together.
Where human talk about God is proclamation, it raises this claim and lives in the atmosphere of this expectation. By what right? Certainly not by that of the logical form or material content, of the religioius profundity or personal power, which might pertain to this human talk about God in itself. In and with all that it is in itself, it can only serve God’s own Word. Nor does God’s own Word cease to be itself when it allows itself to be served by human utterance. But as it allows itself to be served by it, it is itself this human utterance, and as this human utterance serves it, it is itself God’s own Word.
… If, then, human talk about God aims to be proclamation, this can only mean that it wills to serve the Word of God and thus to point to its prior utterance by God Himself. It cannot assume that it is the Word of God, that God sanctifies the human pointer to be His own witness. The human will in question can only be the will to accept a task. It is a decisive part of the insight of all true prophecy that man as such has no possibility of uttering the Word of God. What human utterance concerning God aims to be when it is intended as proclamation is not grace, but service of grace or means of grace. If the will in question were man’s will to reach out beyond himself, to put himself with his word about God in the place of God, it would be blasphemous rebellion.
Church Dogmatics I/1, p. 52
05.21.07
Soli Deo Gloria
This is the first in what I hope will be an on-going series of Foreign Phrases You Should Know. Much better than practical travel phrases including “Wo ist die Toilette?”, this series of posts will give lay persons with a theological inclination a quick intro to important theological concepts that professional theologians like to trot out and quote in Greek, Latin, German, or French to look smart.
I can think of no better first entry than Soli Deo Gloria – “Glory to God alone” (Latin).
This phrase is one of the five classic “solas” of the Protestant Reformation, usually cited last to give proper context to the other four: Sola gratia (grace alone), Sola fide (faith alone), Sola Scriptura (Scripture alone), and Solus Christus (Christ alone). Why do we argue that salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone, based on Christ alone, with the Bible as the final and highest authority? Soli Deo Gloria — all this is to the glory of God alone. God has met us in our deepest need, reconciling us to himself even when we were God’s enemies (Romans 5:6-10). We give glory to God alone for our salvation, for the work of his son Jesus Christ, and even for our faith in him.
Read more about the “Five Solas of the Reformation” at Wikipedia.
05.20.07
Theology That Matters
In my current theological / professional training, I am learning to write in a manner that is no longer wholly descriptive, but also proscriptive — or “critical constructive,” in the language of theological writing. My habit and temptation is toward the former, for this is what I have always been taught to do: describe, evaluate, but leave out your own opinions and biases. I no longer believe that is the right way of going about theology (not to mention that it makes for rather uninteresting papers).
The implication is that theology must not merely describe this doctrine or the thought of that historical figure, but must — if it is to exist for the service of the church, which is the job description of all theology — draw from it meaning for the church today. Describing Karl Barth’s theological dialecticism as a scholarly exercise is less important than mining that theology for insights that persist into the twenty-first century; understanding and elucidating the logic of Chalcedon against Arianism and Nestorianism is important to our history and our preservation of traditional doctrines, but it is more important that we as theologians are able to make those ideas relevant to men and women who eagerly desire to worship Jesus Christ today.
This is the tug of war between theology and history, for the one is proscriptive while the other is descriptive. The knot in the middle, pulled this way and that over the giant puddle of mud, is the practice of specifically historical theology. Here, says H.R. Mackintosh (a beloved professor of T.F. Torrance), the theologian must be formed by the object of his study:
In theology we cannot well make experiments, and in that case we should be all the more careful to use observation. It is perhaps from thinkers of the modern period that a man derives most help or warning in the formation of his own theology. Only as it evokes or clarifies our personal convictions does the historical study of theology yield a positive gain, for in this field the historians besetting temptation is so to subtilize and refine that he becomes nearly incapable of recognizing truth or affirming it with the ring of persuasion.
Happily our minds — at all events if they have been touched by the Christian faith — are so made that it is all but impossible to take or keep that unmoving posture of perfectly balanced and sustained impartiality in which certain ideas of history would confine us. To know what others have believed, or where their thought-forms came from, is not enough. ‘Were the knowledge of religion historical only,’ writes Hegel, ‘we should have to regard theologians as resembling the bank-clerk who enters in his ledger large sums of money belonging to other people, yet acquires little of his own.’ To use history as a cushion to ward off the necessity for personal decision is to misuse it.
(Types of Modern Theology, pp. 9-10)
It is not enough to describe history or theology. One must participate in it, must take it into his own history and theology and be changed by it. He must not leave well enough alone and only bear witness to it, never letting it get to him, never taking the good and leaving the bad — or, in some cases, taking the bad along as well, so long as he does not merely analyse it from a distance and then go on his way.
Theology can be, indeed must be, an activity for the university — an undertaking with all the rigors and standards of scholastic inquiry, with attention to textual and literary criticism and to evidence and method. But it must also always be more. It must not describe only, analyse only, but it must be affected by it subject matter, it must take up the task of theology for what it really is — the bold and brash engagement with the history and continuity of Christian thought. Our purpose is to forge a way ahead for the church in the world, anticipating the return of Christ and our final redemption, knowing that just as we are conversation partners with our colleagues and pastors and parishoners and teachers and students, so also are we still in conversation with Paul, with Irenaeus and with Cyril, with Augustine and Thomas and Luther and Calvin, even with Hegel and Kant and Schleiermacher. Theology — and historical theology moreso — is the great, unending conversation of all those who incline their eyes toward heaven.
In other words, theology, if done correctly, is to be done in humble submission to the revelation and judgment of God. When we make it to be an object to be described, analyzed, and cataloged, we show off our anthropological starting point; we demonstrate that we are attempting to capture theology and make it ours, a subject to be caged and studied at our leisure. But when theology is always challenging us, always causing us to rethink the past — especially our own past — when our evaluations and decisions are made to be subject to the revelation and judgment of God, we see clearly that all our thinking is subject to God, that theology “studies us” more than we study it. We are made to be its subject, the object of its inquiry, rattling around in a cage of our own until we are liberated by the Holy Spirit.
05.17.07
PTS … One Year On
It is remarkable to look back on the past year and see how quickly it has passed. In the last 12 months we have sold our house and packed up and moved to Princeton, New Jersey, where I spent the summer studying Greek, and two great semesters in theology, Bible, church history, and learning about the teaching ministry. A third of the way through the M.Div program I am in a very different place, I have encountered some wonderful and challenging new things, and faced some true challenges and frustrations. And I have met some great people who are getting ready to serve the Kingdom of God all over the world.
I lucked out in having a very atypical Junior year, since my past studies allowed me to waive out of all the required intro courses except for one (Systematic Theology I, which I rather enjoyed). So I got to basically function like a Middler and take more electives, diving into the material I’m interested in right away. Bruce McCormack’s course on the atonement was a great introduction to him and to studying theology at Princeton: Coming off of a 9-month independent study of the atonement and a 50-page paper, I expected to already be familiar with most of the material. Boy, was I wrong. Anselm and penal substitution and Christus Victor were just the tip of the iceburg, as McCormack’s lectures ran the gambit of church history and made me realize how much I need to learn Hegel and Kant and Schleiermacher and the rest of philosophy and post-Reformation traditions.
A class on the teaching ministry was a helpful intro to theory and method, which has hopefully given me some good tools to take into the adult education environment at church this fall. In Bibleland it was Job, Galatians, and Intro to NT Exegesis, which were (in that order) good lectures, great curriculum, and an irritating lack of learning how to do NT exegesis. Professor Hunsinger’s course on the Lord’s Supper introduced me to some new material and a wonderfully ecumenical attitude, though I have to confess that at the end of the day I got as little out of the class as I put into it. And Speech … Speech was actually rather helpful. I’m a quiet guy.
I confess that my church history electives have left me a bit frustrated and disinterested, in part because of the course formats and in part because the professor opted to steer clear of matters of doctrinal history — which is my field of study. I did take the opportunity to write a pair of fun papers (one on Antiochene christology through Theodore of Mopsuestia, one on Alexandrine christology through Cyril of Alexandria), which I hope to combine and expand on in an independent study next year.
Finally, I am in Barth heaven. After an introductory course at Wheaton that, frankly, radically altered the way I view God and the theological discipline, Princeton’s notoriety for Barth studies is one of the top three reasons I elected to come here. We read from Church Dogmatics IV/1 for Atonement, and II/1 for Systematics. “Paul and Karl” was my favorite class from the year, the one that resulted in the best paper, and easily the most important class I took, due to its deliberately cross-disciplinary nature (co-taught by NT professor Beverly Gaventa and TH professor Bruce McCormack) and embracing of explicitly theological exegesis. There we read Romans II and a bit of secondary literature, most notably McCormack’s own important work Karl Barth’s Critically Real Dialectical Theology.
Last summer I layed on the lawn and read Evangelical Theology, and right now I’m doing the same with T.F. Torrance’s Karl Barth: An Introduction to His Early Theology — and taking recommendations for what’s next! I’m thinking that Church Dogmatics or Dogmatics in Outline would be a good way to go to get some big picture and survey stuff under my belt. The summer has also already kicked off with a student reading group on the first part of CD I/1 (co-led by the blogosphere’s own WTM).
I look forward to a summer of German language study and some much needed relaxation in August, but I cannot escape the first year of seminary without some critical self-evaluation of who I am, where I am, and where I am going. I seem to be continually moving back and forth between a confidence in my ability to “do theology,” and feelings of anxiety over Ph.D applications 18 months from now. Am I qualified? Am I ready? If I’m not ready now, what will I have to do to be ready?
Year Two will be a year of new challenges and some fun classes. I will be studying Latin at the university, and taking George Hunsinger’s class on post-liberal theology (reading Barth, von Balthasar, Frei, and Lindbeck, from the sound of things). I’ll study American church history up to the Civil War, and I think at this point I will end up in the course on the doctrine of election (not just a little bit challenging to the corners of my mind that cling to my Wesleyan heritage). I will be looking at Ph.D programs more aggressively, and — most importantly — serving in church ministry as an intern with a local Presbyterian congregation. And, of course, Middlers take a year of preaching, which I will finish in one semester thanks to PTS’s new rapid-fire pilot program. Stretching and growing all around.
It is often difficult for us to see the ways in which God uses our experiences to shape our lives and our faiths until long afterward, and I’m sure that is true of the PTS experience as well. But I do see God at work, forcing me a little further out of my comfort zone, throwing down the gautlet and challenging me to step up to the plate and start acting like the man I want to be, the man I believe God would have me become. That is finally what I fall upon when looking back at the past year and forward to the next — how can I become the man to say, “Here I am, Lord — send me.”
I intend to spend more time here at the blog during the course of the summer. It’s very difficult to find the time during the school year, in the midst of assignments, the reading load I never finish anyway, plus work and family life. But as a writer I still find it to be a valuable way to stretch the thinking and writing muscles. So if you are reading, I’d appreciate to hear about what you would like to read at HistoricalTheology.com in the coming months, and what you like and don’t like so much about what you see so far. (And I’d like to just know that you are still here!) Mi blog es su blog.
05.14.07
Christ the Eucharist
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Thomas F. Torrance outlines a wonderfully compelling look at the sacrament of the Eucharist in “The Paschal Mystery of Christ and the Eucharist” (Torrance, Thomas F. Theology in Reconciliation [Eugene: Wipf & Stock (Reprint), 1996], 106-38). It is in many respects Barthian (though Torrance apparently does not agree with Barth’s own, lower view of the sacraments [cf. 129]), in that Jesus Christ is described as at once the Gift and the Giver, and the Offering and the Offerer. The Eucharist is, according to Torrance, an act that draws the worshipping church that is the body of Christ into union with Christ, who has offered himself to God as the hilasterion for humankind. The key christological model is that of Christ our high priest, who offers himself to God “and so alters the way in which we conceive of the eucharistic sacrifice” (133) The doctrine of the Eucharist, which declares bread and wine to be the body and blood of the Lord, thus benefits from its association with christology: as priest Christ is our representative, the vicarious human who intercedes on our behalf with his self-offering. And so, too, the Eucharist is depicted as the self-offering of “the Incarnate Son [of] the Father” (133).
Here Torrance uses a traditional Anselmian argument for the necessity of Christ’s divine-human nature. Real mediation between God and man has taken place, and the sacrifice is “eternally valid in God and eternally prevalent for mankind” because Jesus Christ offers his own human life to God from our side, and because the Offerer is one and the same as the Offering. The Son of God acted not only in man but as man (117), and by sharing in what it means to be a human person he represented us before God. Though both the God-manward and man-Godward directions are important, by favoring the priestly image Torrance makes more of the latter in teasing out the meaning of the Eucharist, and in this respect he has more in common with Anselm than with Barth.
The Incarnation thus stands as the reciprocating center of a divine-human cosmology, mediating both the divine nature to humankind and human nature to God. In the downward direction the Son of God condescends to come among us in kenotic abasement (Phil. 2:6-8), while in the upward movement Jesus sanctifies human experience and draws us into participation in the divine life through the Spirit (109). The manward direction is realized in the Incarnation. And while the Incarnation is also, of course, important to the Godward aspect, for Torrance it is here that the Eucharist is at issue. “This union of Jesus Christ with us in body and blood … demands as its complement our union with him in his body and blood” (111), and so by partaking of the body and blood of Christ we are united to him. It may perhaps be said – though with careful qualification – that the body and the blood of Christ, both in the Incarnation and at the table, are the 2-way medium of divine-human communication. By taking on body and blood the Logos becomes like us, while by taking in that same body and blood in the Eucharist we become like God.
This union of human beings with Jesus Christ “demands as its compliment our union with him in his body and blood, in drawing near to God and offering him our worship with, in and through Christ” (111). Christ is our Mediator, our High Priest, and it is by eating his flesh and drinking his blood that we are brought into “participation in his vicarious self-offering to the Father” (111). Just as the Incarnation is a two-way nexus for the relation of God and humankind, so the Eucharist is a reciprocating center between Christ’s union with us (mediation) and our union with Christ (theosis).
Jesus Christ, says Torrance, is the true content of the Eucharist, and therefore the content of our worship directed toward God. Christ is also the true doer of that worship; we are drawn (by the Incarnation, and by eating his flesh and drinking his blood) into participation. By this he means that Christ is really present in the bread and the wine, but not quite in the traditional sense of spiritual presence or a metaphysical “in, with, and under.” Christ is not only present in the Eucharistic elements; Christ himself is the Eucharist, the offering made to God in the eucharistic sacrifice and also the one who offers. In it God communicates to us not a grace that is some metaphysical substance external to God, but a grace that is nothing short of God’s own inner life (132). “The Reformation,” Torrance says, “identified grace with the self-giving of God in Christ, that is, with Christ himself” (126), and clearly this is where Torrance is at home.
The sacraments are not actions that we do, but which God does to us and for us. The real presence of Christ in the elements is grounded in God’s own self-giving to us in Jesus Christ, and our consuming of the meal is reciprocally grounded in the self-offering of Jesus Christ to God the Father (131). This by no means detracts from what the real presence is, but quite the opposite: because the presence of Christ in the Eucharist is the gift of God’s own being, it is “a real presence of the most exalted kind, one grounded in the real presence of God to himself” (132; cf. 121).
Two things are most helpful in Torrance’s presentation. First is the broadened view of the doctrine of real presence and Torrance’s evaluation of (and escape from?) the metaphysical presuppositions of the Catholic and Protestant traditions. Second, the doctrine of the Eucharist is in many ways liberated by pinning it to the Incarnation so that the two together illustrate a reciprocal, “reconciling exchange in which Jesus Christ has put himself in our place that we may be put in his place” (136). The debate over the manner in which Christ is present in the bread is trumped by the greater testimony that he is the Gift and the Giver who, in the meal, draws us into participation with him, sharing his divinity as much as our humanity.
By defining the content of the eucharistic event as Jesus Christ, and the doer of the eucharistic event as God himself, Torrance has therefore elevated the conversation to a level that – in an ideal ecumenical world, at any rate – ought to provide a better contextual framework for discussion on eucharistic theology.
