I don’t like tumblr, I am just going to continue to blog at THE EVANGELICAL CALVINIST. Sorry for all of the confusion lately, my intention is to stay at the original Evangelical Calvinist blog (wordpress … well, one of them). Again, I am sorry about all of this confusion lately with my blogs. Rest assured that http://growrag.wordpress.com will be my last blog address I ever use in the blogosphere.

I really like how John Webster describes Barth’s understanding against the Liberal Protestantism of his day. Ironically, I think, that the way Barth understood the Liberal Protestants of his day, could (should) be the way (by and large) that we understand American Evangelicals of our day [please note: I am speaking in generalities, there are obviously many exceptions to this amongst American Evangelicals, just as there was exceptions to the Liberal Protestants in Barth’s day]. In fact, I think this dovetails nicely with the post I just posted on Occupy Wall Street. It gets to the question of how it is that “good” honest hard working (even Christian) people can be duped into thinking that the aformentioned attributes serve as the garb that justifies their place in society (i.e. as good honest hard working folk). There is always room for conviction and self-“criticality;” I know we don’t like this, and I know that much of this ultimately bothers our sensibilities; but we are Christians, people of love and truth (insofar as we participate in God’s life in Christ). As I’ve already alluded to, the following is Webster commenting on Barth and his critique of the Liberal Protestants (which I am lifting and applying to American Evangelicals). This is intended to decenter our trust in ourselves, and instead cause us to throw ourselves at the mercy of God in Christ. This is intended to turn our lights on so that we can more critically see how what counts as Christian and Ethical (in America and the West), probably is not as ethical and Christian as we think. This is intended to highlight how it is that “we” so easily become the standard for what is good and right in the world instead of our Savior, Jesus Christ.

[A] large part of Barth’s distaste is his sense that the ethics of liberal Protestantism could not be extricated from a certain kind of cultural confidence: ‘[H]ere was … a human culture building itself up in orderly fashion in politics, economics, and science, theoretical and applied, progressing steadily along its whole front, interpreted and ennobled by art, and through its morality and religion reaching well beyond itself toward yet better days.’ The ethical question, on such an account, is no longer disruptive; it has ‘an almost perfectly obvious answer’, so that, in effect, the moral life becomes too easy, a matter of the simple task of following Jesus.

Within this ethos, Barth also discerns a moral anthropology with which he is distinctly ill-at-ease. He unearths in the received Protestant moral culture a notion of moral subjectivity (ultimately Kantian in origin), according to which ‘[t]he moral personality is the author both of the conduct with which the ethical question is concerned and of the question itself. Barth’s point is not simply that such an anthropology lacks serious consideration of human corruption, but something more complex. He is beginning to unearth the way in which this picture of human subjectivity as it were projects the moral self into a neutral space, from which it can survey the ethical question ‘from the viewpoint of spectators’. This notion Barth reads as a kind of absolutizing of the self and its reflective consciousness, which come to assume ‘the dignity of ultimateness’. And it is precisely this —- the image of moral reason as a secure centre of value, omnicompetent in its judgements —- that the ethical question interrogates. [John Webster, Barth’s Moral Theology: Human Action in Barth’s Thought, 35-6]

The ‘Human culture building itself up’ was the German one (for Barth) that ultimately expressed itself in German bourgeois society, and ultimately Nazi Germany. For Barth, for the Liberal Protestant, because of the collapse of the Christian self into the self as the moral self; there no longer remained space for Christ to break in and speak a fresh word of holiness over and against the established norms of what the Liberal Protestant had come to already think of what counted as such. In other words, Barth was against a What Would Jesus Do? society. I am appropriating this critique from Barth (a la Webster) for the American Evangelical in particular. We have come to think that what counts as moral is captured by the symbol ‘Conservative’. It is this absolutized ‘Conservative Self’ that presumes that what it means to be moral, and Christian is to ask, simply, ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ This perfectly illustrates Barth’s critique of the German Liberal Protestant. For them, as for us, to be Christian, was to be nationalist, exceptional, and normal. It is this posture that negates any space for the Word of God to break in on all of these norms or the status quo; since the status quo is synonymous with being Christian. And it is this self-evidential situation which allows for atrocities to take place in the name of Christ; through the “absolute self.”

*I know I have posted this a couple times before at my other blogs, but I like this post, so I am putting it up again.

Let me finish something I started at my ‘EC’ blog, it was that post that was discussing The Gospel Coalition’s and Resurgence’s grounding in 5 point Calvinist or classical Calvinist theology. I claimed in that post that TGC and Resurgence were intentionally avoiding the language that Calvinists normally use when they communicate what they believe about salvation. It is true TGC and Resurgence (a ministry of Mark Driscoll’s ‘Mars Hill church’ in Seattle) may simply be trying to paraphrase or use today’s lingo to communicate some old truth, but either way, the way they are communicating is not explicitly identifying themselves with the interpretive tradition that they are a part of, and consciously so; classical or what I often reference as 5 point Calvinism (and I do this as short hand, there is no doubt that the theology behind what has become known as 5 point Calvinism in America today runs much deeper—beyond that, I also use 5 point Calvinism as a label because it is able to identify all parties associated with a particular strand of Calvinism—whether that be straight up Federal/Covenant theology, or Baptist Dispensational Calvinists [there are real and definite distinctions even amongst these 5 point Calvinists, but they would all agree on what is articulated by the 5 points, insofar as that goes]). So let me just try to highlight how one of the confessional points from TGC’s confessional statement is indeed communicating, materially, what historic classical Calvinists have always believed about predestination, election, and salvation in general. Here is the point in question:

The Plan of God We believe that from all eternity God determined in grace to save a great multitude of guilty sinners from every tribe and language and people and nation, and to this end foreknew them and chose them. We believe that God justifies and sanctifies those who by grace have faith in Jesus, and that he will one day glorify them—all to the praise of his glorious grace. In love God commands and implores all people to repent and believe, having set his saving love on those he has chosen and having ordained Christ to be their Redeemer. [taken from The Gospel Coalition’s‘Confessional Statement’, point 5]

And then let’s compare this, at some length, with the Canons of Dort (the theological statements that serve as the foundation for what came to be known as the TULIP or 5 points of Calvinism. The Canons of Dort were in response to the Remonstrants or Arminian assertions about free will and God’s election of people). Here are articles 6-9:

Article 6: God’s Eternal Decision

The fact that some receive from God the gift of faith within time, and that others do not, stems from his eternal decision. For all his works are known to God from eternity (Acts 15:18; Eph. 1:11). In accordance with this decision he graciously softens the hearts, however hard, of his chosen ones and inclines them to believe, but by his just judgment he leaves in their wickedness and hardness of heart those who have not been chosen. And in this especially is disclosed to us his act—unfathomable, and as merciful as it is just—of distinguishing between people equally lost. This is the well-known decision of election and reprobation revealed in God’s Word. This decision the wicked, impure, and unstable distort to their own ruin, but it provides holy and godly souls with comfort beyond words.

Article 7: Election

Election [or choosing] is God’s unchangeable purpose by which he did the following:

Before the foundation of the world, by sheer grace, according to the free good pleasure of his will, he chose in Christ to salvation a definite number of particular people out of the entire human race, which had fallen by its own fault from its original innocence into sin and ruin. Those chosen were neither better nor more deserving than the others, but lay with them in the common misery. He did this in Christ, whom he also appointed from eternity to be the mediator, the head of all those chosen, and the foundation of their salvation. And so he decided to give the chosen ones to Christ to be saved, and to call and draw them effectively into Christ’s fellowship through his Word and Spirit. In other words, he decided to grant them true faith in Christ, to justify them, to sanctify them, and finally, after powerfully preserving them in the fellowship of his Son, to glorify them.

God did all this in order to demonstrate his mercy, to the praise of the riches of his glorious grace.

As Scripture says, God chose us in Christ, before the foundation of the world, so that we should be holy and blameless before him with love; he predestined us whom he adopted as his children through Jesus Christ, in himself, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, by which he freely made us pleasing to himself in his beloved (Eph. 1:4-6). And elsewhere, Those whom he predestined, he also called; and those whom he called, he also justified; and those whom he justified, he also glorified (Rom. 8:30).

Article 8: A Single Decision of Election

This election is not of many kinds; it is one and the same election for all who were to be saved in the Old and the New Testament. For Scripture declares that there is a single good pleasure, purpose, and plan of God’s will, by which he chose us from eternity both to grace and to glory, both to salvation and to the way of salvation, which he prepared in advance for us to walk in.

Article 9: Election Not Based on Foreseen Faith

This same election took place, not on the basis of foreseen faith, of the obedience of faith, of holiness, or of any other good quality and disposition, as though it were based on a prerequisite cause or condition in the person to be chosen, but rather for the purpose of faith, of the obedience of faith, of holiness, and so on. Accordingly, election is the source of each of the benefits of salvation. Faith, holiness, and the other saving gifts, and at last eternal life itself, flow forth from election as its fruits and effects. As the apostle says, He chose us (not because we were, but) so that we should be holy and blameless before him in love (Eph. 1:4). [taken from here ). 

I won’t do much commentary on this, it is pretty self evident how TGC’s confessional statement, and their point number 5 is a compressed and summarizing statement of something like we read in these articles provided in The Canons of Dort. 

Maybe everyone who attends RE: Train, and all of those who frequent The Gospel Coalition’s website and partakes of all of their pastoral and churchly resources is already well aware of both of these groups doctrinal commitments. If that is the case, then this post really is lost on you. But if you aren’t as clear on the theological heritage that Resurgence (RE: Train) and TGC draw from, then this post is for you.

It is no secret that I am not a fan of this kind of Calvinism, and my reasons are highly personal and thus theological. I find it highly naive to presume that doctrine can be disassociated from the personal. I also find it disingenuous when people might claim that because I have had personal (negative) experiences with classic Calvinism that I can no longer “objectively” critique this movement theologically. If we are going to be consistent with this line of thinking then we might as well chuck most of the orthodox Christian dogma that developed in the patristic period of the church; which stemmed from highly personal and polemic situations. 

I have some more “positive” stuff I will be covering, maybe tomorrow, on Athanasius’s Trinitarian theology, and his views on the vicarious humanity of Christ … some good stuff!

Here we go again, I am scheduled for my next CT scan this next Tuesday, August 28th (at 10am and I get the results at 12:15pm the same day). I hate this time, the time just prior to this CT scan. For those of you who don’t know, most of you do, I was diagnosed with a rare and deadly cancer called Desmoplatic Small Round Cell Tumor sarcoma back in November 2009. I went through the worst kind of chemo you can get (and all of its attendant side effects … which makes it the worst kind :-(), a 7 hour resection surgery (that ended up taking my right kidney, reconstructing 3 inches of my inferior vena cava, and of YES!, removing what was left of my tumor with a bunch of unaffected lymph nodes that were in the tissue bed surrounding the tumor), and a bunch of stuff. I have been cancer free since that surgery in May of 2010, and have been consistently, since, getting these dreaded CT scans at least every 4 months, and now 6 months.

I am conflicted, to get psychological on this, because I am sure that I am fine (which is a total miracle!), but I don’t want to get over confident because of the possibility that the doctor could come into the room and say that I am not. I am sure that I must have some sort of post traumatic stress disorder when it comes to this time—the time of getting this CT scan and the results. I flashback to the day that I went into the diagnosing doctor’s office, having convinced myself that what they found on my initial CT scan was just a hernia, and fear that I will once again hear those ominous words … “You have a large mass by your right kidney.”  It has been long enough now that I have slipped, a bit, back into a life that is removed from that whole season (other than the reminder of the neuropathy in my feet from the chemo, the large scar from the surgery running up and down my abdomen, and the drastic change in our diet). I know, if Jesus does not return first, that I will indeed die someday (I/we am dying a bit everyday … but take heart ‘even though our outward man is decay, our inward man is being renewed everyday’); but, I don’t want to die from DSRCT cancer!

One thing that going through all of this has made me realize, existentially (and not just intellectually), is that there is a whole other universe of people out there (touching most of us given the statistics) sitting in a sequestered chemo clinic somewhere with a poison drip of a chemo cocktail dripping into their veins who are hoping against hope that the dreaded drink will kill not just all of the good stuff in their bodies (which it does!), but the bad stuff too (the freakin cancer!). They are people just like you, and me (I know, because I was one of those people); they are part of a caste of people who the world would really like to not acknowledge, because their plight reminds everyone else that they are actually mortal. I will be back in this world on Tuesday the 28th; I am sure that I will be overwhelmed by the pictures of sickness that I will see as I enter that old clinic of mine. As I think about this, and write this right now, I can hardly handle contemplating that there are people sitting in one of the very chairs that I once sat in. They are hoping that they will be able to be “normal” again someday, that they won’t die from the disease that is trying to kill them from the inside out. I really cannot handle this, never could.

Please as you remember me and my wife coming this Tuesday the 28th, will you pray for me and her? That the peace that surpasses all understanding will stand guard over our hearts and minds that day. Please pray that I am all good still! My cancer is a monster, a dragon that would like to snuff me; but I know the dragon slayer, he is my Father and brother. Please pray that he still sees fit to knock this dragon on its arse (excuse my Australian ;-).

In contrast to TULIP Calvinism, ‘Evangelical Calvinism’ (of the kind that Myk Habets and I propose) teaches that the extent of Jesus’ atoning life is universal, and thus not limited to an elect group of particular/individual people chosen before the foundation of the world. Here is what we write for one of our theses in the last chapter of our edited book:

Thesis 11. Christ lived, died, and rose again for all humanity, thus Evangelical Calvinism affirms a doctrine of universal atonement.

Evangelical Calvinism can genuinely preach the Good News to all that Christ has died for them and their salvation and has forgiven their sins. We affirm a universal atonement and forgiveness of sin through the finished work of Christ. This flows theo-logically from the implications of the Incarnation of Christ: the humanity he assumed was real ontological humanity, which included all of humanity. According to Thomas Torrance:

[W]e must affirm resolutely that Christ died for all humanity—that is a fact that cannot be undone. All men and women were represented by Christ in life and death, in his advocacy and substitution in their place. That is a finished work and not a mere possibility. It is an accomplished reality, for in Christ, in the incarnation and in his death on the cross, God has once and for all poured himself out in love for all mankind, has taken the cause of all mankind therefore upon himself. And that love has once and for all been enacted in the substitutionary work on the cross, and has become fact—nothing can undo it. That means that God has taken the great positive decision for man, the decision of love translated into fact. But because the work and the person of Christ are one, that finished work is identical with the self-giving of God to all humanity which he extends to everyone in the living Christ. God does not withhold himself from any one, but he gives himself to all whether they will or not—even if they will not have him, he gives himself to them, for he has once and for all given himself, and therefore the giving of himself in the cross when opposed by the will of man inevitably opposes that will of man and is its judgement. As we saw, it is the positive will of God in loving humanity that becomes humanity’s judgement when they refuse it.47

If we fail to accept this theo-logic, then we are left with the possibility that Christ could have assumed a particular (elect) humanity that was not truly representative of real sinful humanity which potentially injects Nestorianism into Reformed theology. Torrance further surmises that there is no

[s]uggestion that this atoning sacrifice was offered only for some people and not for all, for that would imply that he who became incarnate was not God the Creator in whom all men and women live and move and have their being, and that Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour was not God and man in the one Person, but only an instrument in the hands of the Father for the salvation of a chosen few. In other words, a notion of limited atonement implies a Nestorian heresy in which Jesus Christ is not really God and man united in one Person. It must be added that the perfect response offered by Jesus Christ in life and death to God in our place and on our behalf, contains and is the pledge of our response. Just as the union of God and man in Christ holds good in spite of all the contradiction of our sin under divine judgment, so his vicarious response holds good for us in spite of our unworthiness:
“not I but Christ”… .48

This ties back into thesis 8, and the idea that Christ is primary over all creation; Colossians 1:15 is apropos, “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.” The extent of the atonement is an interlocking reflection of the extent of his all encompassing life as the Triune God; no-one can escape the reach of God’s life of love and grace. [Myk Habets and Bobby Grow,Evangelical Calvinism: Essays Resourcing the Continuing Reformation of the Church: Chapter 15,445-46]

This is very significant! If you are truly considering, or are already in the 5 point Calvinist trajectory; then at least ask yourself if in fact scripture and God’s life revealed in Jesus actually articulate doctrine that says what the “L” of the TULIP says—-e.g. that Jesus only died for an elect group of people.

If you truly can affirm that Jesus only died for an elect group of people, then how do you think this will effect your own Christian spirituality, ministry, and evangelism? And where does this “limiting” view of God’s grace toward the elect flow from in regard to how you conceive of God? This is really the issue at stake—as it is always—that is, the real issue at stake here is your theology proper or doctrine of God. If you believe that Jesus only died for an ‘elect’ group of people (and you do if you can affirm the 5 points of Calvinism), then you believe that God relates to people, primarily, on the basis of “Law” (or “Law” breaking, as the case may be). And so you assume that in order for “some” people to have relationship with God again, that a “penalty” needs to be paid (for the “Law” breaking). You further believe that once this penalty is paid for, then God is free to now relate to “some” of you (the elect) in love; but always hearkening back to the fact that God’s love is based, first, upon his relation to you by way of “Law.” This is one of the inevitable consequences of your adoption of 5 point Calvinist theology. Are you sure you really want to do this?

As you can see from the body of this post, you don’t have to. There is an alternative that emphasizes that God is relational, loving, triune, gracious, and christologically oriented to us and for us in his dearly beloved Son. All I really want to do is invite folk into a ‘way’ to think about God that is intentionally grounded in the idea that God is indeed Love!

What do you think about biological evolution as the means by which God created? Growing up, of course, I was a straight edged creationist; then I became a devoted intelligent design guy; and now I am in a state of suspension. A friend (we don’t really know each other except through on line interaction, and the fact that he attends my alma mater, i.e. Multnomah) has recently put up a post at his blog that is dealing with this very question. In Derrick’s post he essentially is repudiating ‘intelligent design’ in favor of a kind of theistic evolution. He writes toward the end of his post, this:

As a Christian, of course I believe that God is the Creator, and of course I believe that God made biological systems.  In fact I believe that God is intimately involved in every aspect of the universe.  The question boils down to what these all mean.  What I do deny is the supposed mechanism of Irreducible Complexity, or that the inability of evolution to explain the development of some biological phenomena (yet) does not constitute positive evidence for design.  Or perhaps to just state it in a broader manner: I do not believe ID is science.  It is perhaps theology, and it is perhaps philosophy.  But it is not and can not be a science.  Which is why I agree with Kenneth Miller’s ultimate assessment. (read Derrick’s full post here)

So obviously Petersen disagrees with ‘ID’, and he enumerates some of the reasons why, if you read his whole post. 

Like I wrote above, I am (unbelievably) somewhat suspended on this issue. One of the greater hurdles for me is of a theological kind. If biological macro-evolution is the means by which God created man and woman, then this presupposes that they were not the first on the scene (as far as life forms), and that there was ‘death’ prior to the Biblical ‘Fall’ (cf. Genesis 3). This is a massive hurdle, and one that the so called ‘Framework hypothesis’ of the book of Genesis (e.g. which is the notion that Genesis is intended to introduce theological truth about the God of Israel, not historico literal truth about how and when God created the earth) seeks to jump; indeed it must if its adherents are going to coexist with evolutionary natural science. And it must in order to explain away the idea of a literal ‘fall’ of humanity which introduced the entrance of death and decay into the created order. If I am a Christian who endorses biological (at least) macro evolution as the means by which God created; then I must, hermeneutically, reject the literal reading of Adam and Eve as historic personages, and I must reject that death and sin entered the created order as a result of Adam and Eve’s disobedience in the ‘literal’ Garden of Eden. If I don’t do this, then I must reject the commentary of natural origins provided by the so called evidence of the natural sciences of today; the sciences that induce the idea that humanity’s relation to the monkey is real and organic.

What do you think, my persistent reader?

What is Coram Deo?It means literally to be in the face of God. It is the understanding that whatever we do we do before him to whom we stand naked and must give account (Hebrews 4.13). I have always liked this phrase, ever since I came across it, because it signifies the posture I desire to live in on an ongoing basis. And so it is the title of this blog mine. I plan on writing what I write at this blog, ‘coram Deo’, and I hope, if you choose to interact, that you will do so coram Deo ;-) .

Khaled Anatolios, in his most masterful book Retrieving Nicaea, offers something on the Trinitarian theology of Athanasius that is simply splendid! He is getting at something, relative to the neglect of a central aspect of Athanasius’s theology that indeed is key to something that I have written in my chapter for our Evangelical Calvinist book; here is what I have written:

The conditio sine qua non of an Evangelical Calvinist understanding of God begins where God begins, with his Son. As Thomas Torrance makes clear, starting with God as revealed by the Son allows God’s triune nature to determine the way that we, as Christians, come to know him. That is, this is the proper way to think about the Christian God, trinitarianly; and we believe that this must lead to and from the conviction that God, as Athanasius held, has always already been Father and Son by the Holy Spirit before he ever becomes Creator.1 This becomes important, as Colin Gunton has explained in regards to the Nicene Council’s thinking; because “… By insisting … that God is eternally Son as well as Father, the Nicene theologians introduced a note of relationality into the being of God: God’s being is defined as being in relation. Such is the impact of the doctrine of the incarnation on conceptions of what it is to be.”2 The problem that arises if we fail to engage God on his (these) terms, if we start with God as creator before Father; is that the Son can come to be thought of as part of God’s creation, instead of the creator himself3 resulting in a project that simply looks at Jesus as another one of “God’s” works whereby we come to know God (as demiurge). Torrance makes this point vividly clear:

[I]n such an approach we can do no more than attempt to speak of God from his works which have come into being at his will through his Word, that is, from what is externally related to God, and which as such do not really tell us anything about who God is or what he is like in his own nature. That line of approach, as both Athanasius and Hilary insisted, is entirely lacking in accuracy or precision… . They differentiated themselves here sharply from the thesis of Basileides, the Gnostic of Alexandria, who taught, with reference to Plato’s statement that God is beyond all being, that we cannot say anything about what God is, but can only say something about what he is not. It was pointed out by Gregory Nazianzen, however, that if we cannot say anything positive about what God is, we really cannot say anything accurate about what he is not.4 [Myk Habets and Bobby Grow, Evangelical Calvinism, citing Chapter 4 by Bobby Grow, 95]

And here is what Anatolios has written in the same vein (and with more explanation on the theology of Athanasius, and a helpful elaboration of what I was thinking when I wrote what I did for my personal chapter in our book [quoted above]):

[T]he insistence that the creation of  the world is grounded in the generation of the Son is an aspect of Athanasius’s Trinitarian theology that has received remarkably little attention. But it is not an incidental detail for Athanasius. What is at stake is not only a certain vision of fecundity of the divine nature, as a merely abstract divine attribute. But it is also structural to Athanasius’s vision that both in the original creation and in the renewed and redeemed creation, God’s relation to the world is enfolded by the Father’s relation to the Son. Using the felicitous biblical image of God’s delight in Wisdom, Athanasius speaks of God’s delight in the world as derivative of and embraced within the intra-divine delight of the relation of Father and Son [Khaled Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea, 118]:

Therefore all the earth is filled with his knowledge. For one is the knowledge of the Father, through the Son, and of the Son, from the Father, and the Father rejoices in the Son and in this same joy, the Son delights in the Father, saying, “I was beside him, his delight. Day by day, I rejoiced in his presence” (Prov 8:30), except by seeing himself in his own image, which is his Word? Even though, as it is written in these same Proverbs, he also “delighted in the sons of people, having consummated the world” (Prov 8:31), yet this also has the same meaning. For he did not delight in this way by acquiring delight as an addition to himself, but it was upon seeing the works that were made according to his own image, so that the basis of this delight also is God’s own Image. And how does Son too rejoice, except by seeing himself in the Father? For to say this is the same as to say: “The one who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9), and “I am in the Father and the Father is in me” (John 14:10) [Athanasius, Contra Arianos, 2.82, cited by Anatolios, 118]

Athanasius’s Trinitarian theology developed, as does so much of theology, in a polemical context. He is countering the thought of both Arius, and one of Arius’ tribe members Asterius; both of these “arch-heretics” held, in their respective and nuanced ways, that Jesus was ultimately a creation of the unbegotten, ingenerate Father (who functioned as a demiurge between the Father and his creation). Both of these heretics were what can be called (as Anatolios labels it) ‘unity-of-will’ theologians V. ‘unity-of-being’; meaning that they made a distinction between God’s inner life (‘ad intra’) and his outer life (‘ad extra’), such that the latter was simply an expression of the Unbegotten God’s desire (to create for example). And neither one of these heretics saw any necessary relation between God’s ‘will’ (his outer workings) and his inner life, or his divine ‘being’. The consequence of this was that these heretics placed Jesus into the ‘will’ category of God, such that there was no necessary relation of being between the Father and the Son; and so then, the Son becomes a part of God’s generation and creation–even if, for Arius and Asterius, they believed that the Son was a creation of God who was pre-existent to the creation of the world.

It is this setting into which Athanasius is speaking. Instead of making a disjunction between the ‘essence’ or ‘being’ of God with his ‘will’, Athanasius sees these two realities of God’s life as coordinate and necessary corollaries. As such, the will of the Father to create flows from an intrinsic reality of his being; which is to say, that the Father’s being cannot be such without his relation to the Son (which is what makes him ‘Father’). It is in this prior relation that God’s will to create takes form and is coordinate, and it is this reality that Athanasius believes (with the Gospel of John, no less) must be affirmed in order to faithfully understand a God-world relation that keeps the ‘being’ and person of God in-tact, relative to the triune relation that inheres between the Father, Son, and later the Holy Spirit (and I mean later relative to the way that the Patristics dealt with the articulating the divine life and the homoousion).

The bottom line is that the Father has always been the Father of the Son before he became a creator, as Thomas Torrance so often liked to iterate. Hopefully now you can see a little more clearly, at least, where Torrance got his line of thinking from. My concern is that classic Calvinists, by their adoption of classical theism, and the integration of Aristotelian categories into their theological methodology (prolegomena), is that they have provided a doctrine of God that is more akin to the errors of Arius and Asterius by collapsing God in Christ into the creation rather than providing a proper order of things relative to a properly construed Trinitarian theology.

The classic Calvinist ordering of creation, covenant, redemption is an example of how the problem I am referring to inheres in their theological method. By placing creation prior to covenant (or God’s life), they have set up a situation wherein the creation can predicate the life of God as God enters into creation in Christ. Creation takes priority over Christ in this instance, such that the only way to safeguard God as untouched by creation (the Unbegotten God) is to posit a distinction between God’s ‘will’ and God’s ‘being’. In the incarnation Jesus would be functioning at the level of God’s will, which must be separate from God’s being in order to maintain that the creation does not ‘touch’ God’s inner being. The problem with this, obviously, is that now there is ‘a God behind the back of Jesus’ and Jesus simply becomes an instrument in the Unbegotten God’s hand in order to accomplish his desired will in the world.

I will have to get into this more later. Suffice it to say, that the depth of what I was only really sketching in my personal chapter in our book gets into the issues that I am discussing in this post.

Just a couple days ago I claimed that I was done with blogging, but let me explain why I made such a rash move. I have been working crazy crazy ridiculous hours at work, moving back and forth between shifts (days and swing), working massive amounts of overtime, being forced into work on my days off, etc. Needless to say this whole thing has drained me, I would say almost to the point of exhaustion (at least this is how I feel!). It was in this context, filling overwhelmed and just plain tired (which I still am, even if I get 7 to 8 hours of sleep) that I claimed that ‘I was done with blogging’. But how can I really ever be done with blogging? I have been blogging now since the Spring of 2005, I have had numerous urls, blog titles, and have claimed that I was going to quit blogging at least a few times in the past (and often for some of the same reasons I said I was going to quit this time … they are legitimate reasons, I think). But the reality is, is that I have a million things on my mind and heart, and, really, nowhere to place these ideas; I have no outlet, I have no audience to speak my theological ideas to—I am a teacher without a classroom! And so for me to just “quit” blogging simply cannot work, no matter how tired I might be, no matter how discouraged I might be (by life’s current circumstances, i.e. like my employment). And so what I am saying with this post, if you haven’t figured it out yet, is that I am not done blogging, and never will be until Jesus comes, or takes me home first. So here I am once again, I am blogging once again (after a long 2 day respite). I will just blog here, at the tumblr site here; I have added comments to it, to make it a true blue blog. I will blog about Evangelical Calvinism etc. right from here; and I will simply blog to get things off of my heart as I always have. If the things on my heart serve to edify or challenge you, then good; if not, then I am still getting to do what I love anyway. That is, I am getting to write, to think theologically, and to do so in a way that is challenging to me; since to write out my thoughts allows them to be articulated in a way that left in my psyche they are not. 

Khaled Anatolios,Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine,(Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2011), 111-12.

Annotation: This passage discusses Athanasius’s allegorical hermeneutic that he employed to prove the divinity of Christ from the usage of various divine names in the Old Testament, in particular.

§… the Egyptian bishop employs a fundamental principle of allegorical reasoning that stops short of producing standard allegorical exegesis. This principle is that the Scriptures are revelatory not only by their reference to external events in history but also by the mutual interrelatedness of biblical texts on a surface linguistic level. In standard allegorical technique, this principle of intertextuality enables one to construct a biblical meaning by connecting together related language from different parts of Scripture, seemingly overstepping the contextual distance between the different usages. The principle of the unity of Scripture is assumed to legitimate the meaningfulness of its intertextual relations. Athanasius’s distinctly dogmatic application of this principle is found in his assumption that the intertextual patterns of the scriptural naming of God must mirror, in a way accommodated to human understanding, the being of God. The patterns of scriptural divine naming must correspond to the pattern of divine being. Athanasius’s reiterated presentations of the paradeigmata presume this principle and then present these patterns as a demonstration of an implicit logic, as follows: (1) Scripture names the divine presence by reference to a delimited lexical field: God is a speaker of a Word, possessor of Wisdom and Power, manifest as Light, and so on; (2) Scripture names Christ by reference to the same lexical field: Christ is the Word of God, Wisdom and Power of God, Radiance of the Light, and so on; therefore (3) the biblically named God is the God whose being must be construed according to the mutual correlation of these lexical fields. Conversely, a god who is described or named in such a way as to disrupt this correlation is not the biblical God.