From the conclusion on my personal chapter for my co-edited/authored book, Evangelical Calvinism: Dogmatics&Devotion: Volume 2. My chapter is entitled: “Assurance is of the Essence of Saving Faith” Calvin, Barth, Torrance, and the “Faith of Christ”. In it I offer a charitable corrective of John Calvin’s doctrine of assurance of salvation (or lack thereof), by resourcing the theologies of Karl Barth and Thomas Torrance, respectively.

Biblically, only God genuinely has liberum arbitrium. But He is a gifting God. Never in abstraction from Himself, but only concretely within Himself, and thus for us in Jesus Christ. As such humanity comes to have liberum arbitrium only because God has freely elected that we come to actually have it, to be for Him rather than against Him, in and through participation with the only humanity that is truly for God; Christ’s vicarious humanity for us. So, the path for human agency, human freedom for God, is only blazed first, by Christ’s humanity for us; indeed, as He is the firstborn from the dead. It is by the Holy Spirit that human beings are awakened to the fact that this is already the objective and subjective reality for them, as Christ has already accomplished that for them, whereby by a node of corresponding faith with Christ’s for us, that the human being can say Yes and Amen for God, just as Christ is God’s Yes and Amen for us, in both the No (to sin) and Yes (for God) that Christ freely chose to be for ALL of humanity, as His humanity is ALL of humanity as humanity’s free turn to God and away from the incurved hearts they have lived in bondage to since conception.

Do the Son and the Spirit merely subsist in the being of God (typically thought of as the Father, because he ostensibly is understood to be the “ingenerate” One)? Or instead, do the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit “subsist” in each other, in a subject-IN-being relation? Which then presupposes that the being (ousia) of God just is, always already and has been, and continues to be, the one in the three, the three in the one, as the eternal personal coinherence that just is constitutive of the Monarxia (Godhead). If so then, God just is Self-generative; which eternally presupposes upon the entirety of the triune relation as a generative movement without prioritization of one hypostasis (Father) next to another. Whilst also being able to refer to the Father as the first person, the Son as the second, the Holy Spirit as the third without also collapsing that type of linear thinking into a numerical hierarchy wherein mathematics as physics, rather than the triune filiation, becomes the determinative mode by which God is thought. The idea of causation or aitea is absent in such a scheme, insofar that the pleroma of God’s being is already and primordially understood, in se, as Self-generative within the subject-in-being relations. So, the Godhead itself is thought of as eternally generative rather than causative, per se, and or delimited to a singular source (as if a monad).

And then this down the line has serious impact upon how we conceive of a God-world relation (nostra theologia).

*Inspired by an internalization of Thomas F. Torrance’s thinking over the years.

When reality starts with God as the given, as the Self-given one for the world in Christ—indeed as the purpose for the world’s existence—rather than starting from the given, as if the creaturely just is, then everything is flipped on its head. Questions of human freedom, agency, morality, sin, evil, life, death—everything—is from that point on conditioned by God first rather than us first. We at His behest, and He not at ours (i.e., He doesn’t answer to us). Because He is a relational Father-Son-by the Holy Spirit Got, there is ineffable amount of space to dialogue with and know Him, as He has deigned it so.

The sooner folks accept that He is God and that we are not, the sooner an order is given in regard to the character of our questions and His answers. And this because He is the One who sets the questions to be answered, not us.

This is what true dogmatic theology does: it only attempts to speak, after it recognizes Deus dixit (that ‘God has spoken’ in Christ). Outwith this order there really is no order in theological development, or the great questions of life. All that someone can do outside of this God is God order is speculate in discursive forms, hoping to make contact with the source of all reality.

Karl Barth’s doctrine of human agency and salvation in general, as John Webster underscores, is largely in response to Rudolf Bultmann’s existentialist from below anthropology vis-à-vis soteriology. Barth became concerned with Bultmann’s et al. turn to the subject in Christian salvation, insofar that the humanity in need of salvation, in Bultmann’s frame, had its own independent resource to turn to Christ outwith Christ first and unilaterally turning to and for them. Barth spied in Bultmann a type of monistic humanity wherein humanity simpliciter could actualize ‘their salvation’ almost in a symmetrical way to God’s own agency for the world in Christ. And of course, this type of Herculean action, for Barth, not to mention the clear teaching of Holy Scripture, represented the heights of human idolatry. Webster writes on Barth in extenso:

As often in Church Dogmatics IV, Barth’s hidden dialogue partner is Bultmann. Already in the Foreword to IV/1, Barth remarked that ‘throughout I have found myself in an intensive, although for the most part quiet, debate with Rudolf Bultmann’, and Barth’s critical distance from Bultmann here, as earlier, revolves around the question of how and on what grounds the reality of God impinges upon our existence. The distance between the two dates back at least as far as Bultmann’s critical remarks on Barth’s Christliche Dogmatik for working with ‘uncritically adopted concepts of an older ontology’. By 1930, Barth had come to see the rift between the two as once concerning the entire grounds of Christian faith and theology: writing of Bultmann, Gogarten and Brunner, he says:

From my standpoint all of you, though your concern differs from mine in different ways, represent a large-scale return to the fleshpots of Egypt. I mean that if I am not deceived, all of you – in a new way different from that of the nineteenth century – are trying to understand faith as a human possibility, or, if you will, as grounded in a human possibility, and therefore you are once again surrendering theology to philosophy.

Where Bultmann read Barth as a return to a post-Reformation scholasticism, Barth came to read Bultmann as espousing a relatively independent sphere of human existence and its capabilities with which faith and theology must be coordinated, thus compromising the absolute originality and gratuity of the basis of faith. By the time Barth came to deliver his famous response in the early 1950s, Rudolf Bultmann – An Attempt to Understand Him, he presented his quarrel with Bultmann in terms of a widely divergent understanding of the place of the pro nobis aspect of the Christ event. For Bultmann (in the tradition of Schleiermacher, Melanchthon, and the young Luther), the pro nobis is accorded such central importance that soteriology swallows up Christology, and the exposition of the gospel becomes caught within ‘the anthropological triangle of law, sin and grace’. What Barth fails to find in Bultmann is a sense that the Christ-event ‘possessed an intrinsic significance of its own, and that only because it has that primary significance has it a derived significance here and now’. And, in response to Bultmann’s reply to Rudolph Bultmann, Barth writes thus:

I have become increasingly a Zinzendorfian to the extent that in the New Testament only the one central figure as such has begun to occupy me – or each and everything else only in the light and under the sign of this central figure. As I see it, one can and should read all theology in some sense backwards from it: down to anthropology, ethics, and then methodology . . . [I]n this light it has become for me a very positive business . . . One cannot discuss the fact that ‘Jesus lives’, as we are both convinced. But one can, as a theologian, either refrain or not refrain from thinking to and from this ‘objective’ reality. I myself cannot refrain from doing so.

The issue here, as throughout Dogmatics IV, is not simply one of the importance assigned to the subjective realm in talking of the work of Christ: on that, both are in some measure agreed (Barth more than is commonly realised). The issue is much more one of the grounds upon which the subjective realm is affirmed. By securing that realm by reference to the ‘prophetic’ character of Christ’s work (rather than by reference to the dynamics of human existence or faith), Barth is denying that there are two realities, the reality of Christ on the one hand and, on the other hand, the quasi-independent reality of human existence in terms of which Christ’s reality has to be made meaningful. Any such affirmation, Barth has come to propose, is in the end a form of unbelief, a covert disqualification of the absoluteness of Jesus Christ as the God-man who embraces both sides of the covenant relation. Over against Bultmann, Barth presses the point that what matters is not that – in apologetic fashion – Jesus’ history be made meaningful in our history (as if there were any real human history ex Christum), but the opposite: what matters is our being drawn into his sphere, which is in truth the sphere in which alone we may properly be said to exist:

Whatever it may or may not mean for us subjectively; whatever may be its reflection in our consciousness, the fact that reconciliation is also revelation and Jesus Christ lives and works as Prophet means that objectively we can no longer be remote from Him in a private sphere, but that we are drawn into His sphere, into what takes place in Him.

Barth’s protest, then, is that by according to such significance to the existential conditions for the gospel’s realisation, Bultmann fails to see the objective history of Jesus as ‘history in the supreme sense, history in which we have a share whether we realise it and like it or not, history in which our own history takes place’. In sum: on the basis of his doctrine of hypostatic union, Barth stresses that the existential realm is ‘a minor and conclusion’ deduced from ‘a given major’.^[1]

In nuce, as Webster develops, Barth wants to ensure that it is God’s initiation, God’s unilateral act of love as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit whereby a salvific history has the potency to obtain. And for Barth, and dare I say, the Bible, it is this history, God’s own elected and Self-given history for us where the occasion for human agency before God comes to be made actualized and event[ual] reality. It is by his entrance and assumptio carnis into our humanity, which first was always already his humanity, whereby the covenant relations between God and humanity have a concrete ground; indeed, a nexus wherein the human has re-creational freedom to move and breathe and have its being in and before, and most significantly, from God’s being for humanity in his graciously elected humanity in the man from Nazareth, Jesus Christ.

^[1] John Webster, Barth’s ethics of reconciliation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 91–93.

Do evangelicals have a theology, like a confessional-dogmatic theology? No. As an evangelical myself, growing up the deepest theologies I was ever exposed to was something like Walter Martin’s Kingdom of the Cults, or on the fringes, I would hear the name, Francis Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop (as an evangelical who was an intellectual) thrown around (and maybe, Charles Ryrie). None of this is to suggest that my experience is the delimiting factor in regards to whether or not evangelicals had or have a dogmatic theology present. But it is to recognize that even if attempts were indeed being made, they were not prominent ones. Later in life (like in my early 20s) I was exposed to Millard Erickson and Wayne Grudem; not to mention Bruce and Demarest and Stanley Grenz. But none of these theologies have ever risen to the levels of the Post Reformed orthodox theologians, or the Lutherans scholastics of the 16^th and 17^th centuries. And of course, in such a vacuum, because of the lacuna of dogmatic theologies for contemporary evangelicals and Reformed types, they are called back to said 16^th and 17^th century theologians, respectively (which we see now in the retrieval movement). And I think I am also part of this generation of evangelicals who happens to be a deep thinker, and was on the lookout for something deeper and substantive; something catholic, which has a liminal rootage with the church continuous.

What’s more, my turn hasn’t been to the 16^th and 17^th centuries, per se, but, clearly to the early 20^th century as that is primarily resident in the theologies of Karl Barth and Thomas Torrance. Even so, my “turn” happened by becoming attuned to the patristics, the medieval theologians, along with Martin Luther, John Calvin, and even the Post Reformed orthodox; primarily, the Puritans and Pietists. I quickly recognized that whilst there are great riches strewn throughout the history of the church’s doctrinal development, that much of it did not correlate directly with an evangelical ethos. That is, while there has been a lacuna of evangelical dogmatics in the 20^th and 21^st centuries, even still, evangelicals have functioned with an unspoken set of theological themes that have served regulative for their worship services, Sunday morning sermons, Bible studies, so on and so forth. Evangelicals, by and large, believe that Jesus died and rose again for everyone; that the Bible is the authoritative Word of God; that the Gospel is genuinely offered to everyone (not just sufficiently, but efficaciously too); that God is love; that Jesus is God in flesh, both fully God and fully human; that God is triune as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; that salvation is by faith alone; and more.

And yet, does Post Reformed orthodoxy map onto those themes in ethos? No, I would say not; even if there is some doctrinal overlap here and there. And so where can the evangelical turn? Many think they are more Arminian or Wesleyan than Calvinist, and then vice versa. As if these types of binaries are the only ones available, or most proximate to what they think they believe as evangelicals. And so often, the evangelical will attempt to cobble together some type of theological identity by taking themes from this perceived “side” or that, and then claim to be an Arminian, Wesleyan, Provisionist (as that has been more popularly developing), Free Grace, Calvinist, Anabaptist, evangelical Lutheran etc. But, in my view, this type of pastiche does not represent a coherent dogmatic theological offering that is genuinely evangelical in ethos, in spirit. I think Barth and TF Torrance, in their own ways, map onto a genuinely evangelical dogmatic theology in ways that evangelicals have been in search for, for a long time (if they have been searching, anyway).

I understand that this post is highly generalized. But it is in gist.

If you give MB's Substack post a read what you'll notice is that he isn't actually just describing a basic Anglicanism (which has certain Protestant and Reformed emphases). He is describing an Anglo-Catholicism, with its affirmation of Apostolic Succession to boot (a high ecclesiology; there are alternatively low church Anglican polities out there). To be an Anglo-Catholic is one small step away, theo-logically, to getting out on the other side of the Tiber. To stick with the analogy: to be an Anglo-Catholic is to be stuck in a swirling current on the west side of the Tiber river. And in Barrett's case the lifeguard on duty that day is none other than, St. Thomas Aquinas.

The above is what I wrote in response to Matthew Barrett’s Substack post where he is ostensibly providing encouragement to his former Baptist brethren who might be interested in swimming the “Pond” to the Anglican communion. But MB has only just “converted” (to use his language) himself. And as you read his article, as noted above, he surprisingly, to me, starts describing an Anglo-Catholic high church ecclesiology. This is surprising to me, also, because I have ‘known’ the bishop of the ACNA church he converted to in Kansas, for years. Michael Flowers, the said bishop, told me that there was no chance that MB was going to convert to Romana. And yet in this most recent post of MB’s he clearly is articulating his theory on the church, and her ‘Apostolic Succession’; not as an adiaphora for him, but as an essential piece for his understanding of what it means to be an Anglican. Further, this is also surprising to me, because as far as I know, Flowers isn’t Anglo-Catholic whatsoever.

Either way, MB’s article, in my view, is sowing discord among the brethren. That is, MB is making an attempt to call others over, along with him; i.e., a ‘calling to communion’ of sorts. And what he is calling his former Baptist brethren to is to an affirmation of an Ignatian theory (or at least that is always the attribution) of the Church, and her genealogical succession of Catholic bishops. As we might recall, what opened MB up to his whole ecclesial movement was his adoration of Thomas Aquinas. Indeed, now, as an Anglican, this has become even that much more concretized as he has been appointed as the McDonald Agape Visiting Scholar at the Dominican House of Washington D.C. When you read that into what he just wrote with reference to his theory of the church (and her Apostolic succession), how many more steps away is MB from taking the towel from St. Thomas Aquinas as he dries off on the western side of the Tiber?

For those looking to do an MA aka MRS degree in Reformed studies, here’s an opportunity. A hybrid: first semester coursework online. Second semester, in residence at Geneva. Third semester, back home and by distance working on your thesis (it is a three semester degree). Very affordable, other than the semester in Geneva (living costs etc). But the program itself is also funded, which makes it that much more doable for the right person.

Here is how the degree itself is introduced and described at the University of Geneva’s website:

Click Here for more information.

I am just starting to write my very first rough rough rough draft for my proposal. The below represents the opening section. Just know, this is off the top at this point. I will come back later and redraft, and then redraft, and then redraft, inclusive of footnotes peppered here and there throughout. Cleaner turns of phrases. More precise explication. Better structuring, so on and so forth. The total proposal runs between 15 to 20 pages. This, below, is the very first substantive section of it. And again, extremely rough. But I’m thinking of doing this at points in case anyone wants to give me feedback, or press me on things.

III. Why does human agency in a doctrine of sanctification in a ‘Christological Objectivism’ invite further engagement?

A doctrine of sanctification is typically understood as the ‘subjective’ aspect of the soteriological combine (juxtaposed with a doctrine of justification and glorification). That is, sanctification within a Protestant frame, is that aspect of salvation wherein the human agent is understood to be actively ‘working out’ their salvation. As the Apostle Paul writes, “Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed—not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence—continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose” (Philippians 2:12–13). This locus classicus points up what might appear to be competing themes; that is, between the human agent, ‘the one who works out salvation,’ and God ‘who works in you to will and to act,’ in this agential fulcrum of salvific workings. More pointedly, this apparent competition between God and humanity, in the soterio-logic of the Gospel reality, appears to potentially place divine agency into a contraposing position vis-à-vis the human agent wherein the divine being swallows up the human being, to the point that the divine being is the only one who has performative agency in the totality of the salvific event. Hence, a ‘Christological-objectivism’ ostensibly obtains wherein individual human beings/agents have no real personal agency within the circumscription of God’s life for them in Jesus Christ.

Conversely, Swiss theologian, Karl Barth, and his best Anglophone student, Scottish theologian, Thomas Forsyth Torrance, both have been charged with operating with a Christological obejectivism within their respective soteriological offerings. That is, because of the emphasis these theologians, respectively, place on ‘God’s being in becoming’ for the world in Jesus Christ, as God is understood to be the electing God who has freely and graciously become the elected man, the elected human for the world, they are criticized with constructing a ‘metaphysical human,’ a human (in Christ) operating behind the back of individual human beings (in totality). As such, the concern is that if this were to be the case, that both Barth and Torrance, respectively, sublimate an integral human agency by the singular human agency of Christ for them. Thus, human agency becomes a mere phenomenological phantom acting out a determinacy absolutely funded by God’s agency, as that is diffuse for humanity, in the singular humanity of Christ. Therefore, in this understanding, the criticism maintains that both Barth and Torrance are guilty of misoffering an account of human agency, particularly as that is played out in a doctrine of sanctification, wherein the human agent is freely and ostensibly ‘working out their salvation,’ compelled by their own, albeit contingent, gift of human freedom coram Deo.

The dilemma this thesis seeks to provide dénouement for is the ostensibly competitive relationship between God and humanity in a doctrine of sanctification. Wherein, the purported ‘Christological objectivism’ present in both Barth’s and Torrance’s theologies, constructs a situation that so makes God, as ‘the author and perfector of faith,’ the absolute terminus of the total event of working out one’s salvation, that the human agent ends up having no real integral agency of their own in the process of becoming ‘set apart’ (sanctified unto God).

After the details of Barth’s and Torrance’s doctrines of sanctification have been presented vis-à-vis human agency, within that doctrine, this thesis will constructively engage with the themes present within said theological themes, and make a turn to the ethical question of a doctrine of sanctification and human agency within the question of the Christian’s role in the violences of war, pacificism, activism, and like ethical dilemmas the Christian is oft faced with in the 21^st century global geo-political landscape. The application of a doctrine of human agency within this ethical and sanctificational ambit, particularly as these themes have already been treated by engagement with both Karl Barth and Thomas Torrance, respectively, will provide a concretization in the real and present world where Christians attempt to ‘work out their salvation’ when confronted with the ethical and political events this current age offers up. As a case study, in this section of the thesis, I will engage with Dietrich Bonhoeffer as he was faced with the reality of Adolf Hitler. Bonhoeffer will make an excellent study, insofar that he was a known Christian pacifist, but who also ended up engaging in a plot to commit tyrannicide against Hitler.

When the Gospel is reduced to a feeling, a mood, the space for growth in grace and knowledge has been negated. Theologians (docents) become irrelevant; not to mention the pastors who seek to preach deeply the Word of God. What fills the vacuum are the ear ticklers and the professional musicians. God help us.

Christian reductionism has probably produced more spiritual fatalities than anything else. The way I define Christian reductionism (CR) is in this way: Christian reductionism is when professing Christians come to think, typically subconsciously, that they have arrived. That they have come to experience the pinnacles of Christianity in their daily and mundane experiences, even as those might entail “mountain top experiences,” and extrapolate from there that there is nothing more. Often, subsequent to this type of reasoning, people attempt to live within the formalism of the way that Christianity has been snapshotted for them in their own experience, but ultimately come to lose interest in the Christian life (inwardly). This loss of interest, under the terms of CR that I am currently defining, pivots on the individual’s belief that they have already exhausted the depths and heights of Christianity, of the Gospel reality, at which point they see no more space for growth (even though they wouldn’t admit it). Following, a fatalistic attitude towards the Gospel comes to consume their lives, and they begin the process of compartmentalizing their Christian life into a banality of just one piece of their daily existences, knowing that they at least are probably on their way to Heaven, and simply settle-in for the long haul (or the shorter haul, as the case may be).

Sadly, they have believed a lie. For the CRs the broader society, the cultural upheavals and underheavals, daily life, the perceived wins and losses, simply become apiece with what they believe the Christian life to be; just one more aspect of what it means to be alive. Sadly, they have believed a lie. They have become participants in a Folk Religion, rather than in the faith of Christ. But I don’t think it is a stretch to say that this type of religion is the dominant undercurrent of what makes up most of Western Christianity today in the 21^st century.

The Gospel is radical. And it requires effort, spiritual battle, recognition, a fight, and an unwillingness to allow oneself to reduce the Gospel to one’s own parochial rendition of it. The Gospel life is charged through with the energy of the resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ Himself. It surely has a sobriety to it, but the sobriety of a stately Lion laying around in his domain on the Masai Mara. PS. Of course, when I say it requires effort etc., what I'm referring to is living the Christian life, not becoming a Christian or coming into the family of God in Christ. Living the Christian life requires effort though.

Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your toil is not in vain in the Lord. -I Corinthians 15.58

As an evangelical (at least that’s my pedigree from birth), here in the 21^st century, things have become rather dire, in my opinion, with reference to finding sound so-called “evangelical churches.” This is no abstract thing for me, but an ongoing reality. We have literally been churchless for quite a while now (we watch a home church of ours back in Southern California online every Sunday morning, which isn’t ultimately sufficient; as far as real life in-person fellowship etc.) We have tried multitudes of “evangelical churches,” and not to be reductionistic, they are all almost exactly the same. They still have 1990s seeker sensitive programs ongoing—with 21^st century technology—and/or personality cult driven pastorates that only stay viable until said pastor dies or retires (which such pastors rarely do). But the actuality of Christ is really nowhere to be found; in name only. Bibles are nowhere present, not in the hands of the people (some of that is tech related, but not really, I don’t think), and the sermons mostly mimic bad Ted Talks. The worship/music part of it appears to be something more like American Idol tryouts than it does actual leadership to worship of the triune God. Beyond that, and based on a relatively recent poll of evangelicals, most don’t even believe that or know if Jesus Christ is fully God. The sound doctrinal body of teaching is lacking to the point that it is non-existent; which then that vacuum only leaves room for bad doctrine. This is a lamentable thing.

And yet the aforementioned, unfortunately, isn’t unique to the 21^st century evangelicals. Here is Karl Barth discussing his own experience of the “church” in his early to middle 20^th century context in his native Switzerland:

It hardly needs to be said that we are dealing here with a point of view which has been most flagrantly neglected in modern Protestantism since the 18^th century. From the visible standpoint our Protestant national Churches are little more than great unions, or communities of interest, of individuals who are Christian or are called Christian, individualists, each of whom—like the people of Israel in the time of the Judges—does that which is right in his own eyes, so that although some may act together in particular ecclesiolae [churches] called movements, we cannot inquire too closely what it really is that unites them. Even less can we inquire what these Churches are as a whole, a question which would yield the most gratuitous and to a large extent unconvincing answers. If we will and can and must maintain the form revealed in them, then we can only sigh: Kyrie eleison. Destroying as they do the relationship between the community and its members, they are hopelessly a-catholic Churches, hardly distinguishable, if at all, from heretical sects, or sects which verge on heresy, in the matter which now concerns us.

The most obvious example is the 1911 Constitution of the Evangelical Reformed Church of the City of Basel. It begins with a kind of hymnal introit to which a conscientious exegete could hardly give any but an Arian sense . . ..^[1]

What is the common identifiable theme that holds Barth’s early to middle Evangelical Reformed church together with the North American evangelical church of today? Embedded in the passage from, where he notes, “It hardly needs to be said that we are dealing here with a point of view which has been most flagrantly neglected in modern Protestantism since the 18^th century. . ..” It is the Enlightenment tentacles, and its anthropology of turn-to-the-subject that has helped to tie the whole modern and postmodern churches together (there are other factors, as well). A spirituality where individualism reigns prime, romanticist feelings cajole the heart-strings, and personal interest sublimates the interests of the living God. Kyrie eleison indeed!

Are there exceptions? Always. In fact, we are looking for an exception currently; so please keep that in prayer if you would. Note: I am not implying or presuming that we are looking for a “perfect church.” Nein. We are simply looking for the church in its local expression. An environ wherein the church is being the Church by genuinely bearing witness to her reality in Jesus Christ and the triune God.

PS. I am remaining charitable in my language throughout this post. The so-called evangelical church has already gone right by the impasse, and she doesn’t even realize it. She indeed functions as a series of social clubs with the name of Jesus Christ splattered all over her programs and multimedia presentations. Good intentions, and smiles are not enough to gloss over the tragedy of it all. Only repentance, as if ancient Israel before God, will do. Kyrie eleison.

^[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 §62 [521–22] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 195.

Some brief interactions I’ve recently had on X with reference to a question on the relationship between Christ and creation, and another question on how I view the institutional church on earth. These questions were posed by two different interlocutors. The one on the institutional church has some further interaction behind it that I won’t share here. Interestingly these two loci are not unrelated; i.e., a doctrine of creation and an ecclesiology. A genuine Christian dogmatics sees the taxis, the order and interrelationships that all inhere and cohere in and through, we might say, their Archimedean and primordial point in Jesus Christ; who is the triune God for the world in his being in becoming, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in whose works are indivisible from his reality as God.

Interlocutor 1. Trying to understand what you’ve written here... Are you saying that no institutional church exists on earth?

My response. No, I’m saying that the institutional church on earth only becomes that by her active union with Christ; who in fact, in his Theanthropic person, in His vicarious humanity for the world, is in fact constituently, in himself, the institutional church—“for as He is so also are we in this world.” 1 Jn 4.17

Addendum: Christoph Schwöbel, writes, with reference to Barth’s conception of the visible and invisible church (and this is what my thinking reflects as well):

For Barth, the visible Church is also an article of faith. The church is believed both as invisible and visible Church. “Visible” and “invisible” are not two species of the same genus, he emphasizes, but one and the same subject in two respects. In order to explain the dialectic, Barth points to a parallel in his doctrine of the Word of God. Just as God’s revelation is the Word becoming flesh in Christ, this Word becoming Scripture and Scripture becoming a human word in proclamation, so the invisible Church is where the visible Church is. However, the visible church can never by itself be an object of faith; the visible Church belongs to faith as pointing to its ground in God. By itself, it is a creature in which one cannot believe, because one can only believe in the creator. Everything else is idolatry. Therefore Barth can say: “One believes in God when one believes in the visibility of the Church that falls from above into history—because that is He, that is His work of reconciliation—just as an individual human person believes in God by believing in the grace falling from above into his boundless unholiness.” Believing in the Church means to believe in God as God creates, preserves, and perfects the Church. For Barth it is therefore clear that the visible church witnesses to the invisible church and in doing so witnesses to God as the only object of faith: “The glory of the church is to give all glory to God.”^[1]

Interlocutor 2. Does Christocentrism deepen the reality of created, historical existence, or does it end up quietly dissolving it into something more like a single, seamless divine act?

My response. There are many versions of “christocentrism” out there. The one I follow sees Jesus as the whole reason for creation (see Col. 1.15 and the primacy of Christ therein). Also, following Barth, the external creation is really just the inner relation of God’s covenanted life of triune grace, given expression as the effulgence of who He has freely chosen to be for and with us in Jesus Christ. So, yes, contra a torpid pantheism, or panentheism, the created reality, in the account I follow, is charged with God’s triune being in becoming for us in Jesus Christ. Which would entail that He is closer to us and all of creation than we are to ourselves. David Fergusson rightly opines: “the world was made so that Christ might be born.”

As usual my own thoughts, idiosyncratic as they are, are indeed mine. They require greater clarification and “fleshing” out than my off the top responses have rendered. But that does not mean that type of work or thought hasn’t or cannot be done. Time and space restraints are always a factor when engaging in a communicative act. In other words, I recognize my responses require further explication, but since they are brief responses intended for social media consumption, they will remain as currently stands. That isn’t to say I am not willing to hash things out further; or that I’m not open to further interrogation. It just means that these responses represent a running commentary on where I am at myself in the developments of my own thinking on these matters.

Interior rerum creatarum natura in foedere gratiae trina est.

^[1] Christoph Schwöbel, “’The Kingdom of Christ Now Present in Mystery,’ and the Question of the ‘Distance between Christ as Lord, King, and Judge and His Church,’” edited by Matthew Levering, Bruce L. McCormack and Thomas Joseph White, OP, Dogma and Ecumenism: Vatican II and Karl Barth’s Ad Limina Apostolorum (Washington D.C., The Catholic University of America Press, 2020), 104-05.

The battle of the Arminains and Calvinists continues on ad infinitum; indeed, in different expressions and levels of discourse. Nonetheless, the gruel continues unabated. Ironically, and historically, the Arminians, particularly, Arminius himself, weren’t outwith, but within the Reformed halo. As is commonly understood, Arminius was intent on engaging with the theological-anthropological conundrum of human freedom vis-à-vis God’s ostensible sovereignty (as the Calvinists were wont to press in their own stylized way). It wasn’t, of course, that Arminius was attempting to undercut the Calvinist notion that God is sovereign—God forbit it!—but instead, he was challenging the character and way of God’s sovereignty related to human freedom. Jaroslav Pelikan offers nice coverage on this:

The most controversial attempt at such an elucidation within the Reformed communion was the one associated with the names of Jacob Arminius and Simon Episcopius, which eventually challenged openly the central affirmations of the Calvinistic doctrine itself. Arminian acquired its own confessional status in the Remonstrance of 1610 and then, after the Synod of Dort, in the Remonstrant Confession of 1621/22. Reiterating and developing many of the objections to predestinarianism that had already been current during Calvin’s lifetime, the Arminian and Remonstrant protest focused on the problem of will: of the human will as responsible for conduct and therefore in some genuine sense free of “fatalistic necessity”; and of the divine will as addressed to all and therefore in some genuine sense universal, but also as free of sin and evil and free coercion, since such freedom was “the perfection of the [divine] will.” Calvin’s “fictitious fate of predestination” was “hostile to religion” because it managed to undercut both the free will of God and the free will of man. Against “the iron and fatalistic necessity of the Stoics, Manicheans, and Predestinarians,” as well as against the “blind chance” of the Epicureans, stood the biblical doctrine of “the providence of God in the world, which rules everything in a wise, holy and just manner.” The providence of God, which followed immediately upon creation and which extended also to the work of redemption, was universal in scope, pertaining to “this entire universe and especially to man,” as an expression of “the wisdom, justice, and equity of God.” These divine attributes of wisdom, justice, and equity, as disclosed in providence, meant that God was free from “any internal necessity of his own nature or of any external power of some other force”; therefore it was Arminian and Remonstrant doctrine, no less than it was Calvinist doctrine, that God did foreknow future contingents and that he was free “to dispose for his creatures whatever he wills,” death or life, command or prohibition.

It was likewise Remonstrant doctrine, no less than Calvinist, that the grace of God, defined as “undeserved and unmerited favor,” was, as the Remonstrance put it, “the beginning, the progress, and the completion of all good.” But that did not mean that grace was “irresistible.” The analogy, drawn by Augustine and after him by Calvin, between God’s call to faith and the summons to resurrection addressed by Christ, irresistibly, to a dead body, was fallacious. For “those whom God calls to faith, he calls seriously”; if it were impossible to resist the grace of God, his offer of “a reward for Christian virtue” and his threat of punishment for immorality would both be vain. On the other hand, the distinction between what God willed and what God permitted, which Calvin had dismissed as a “falsehood” and an “evasion,” was essential to prevent “the overthrow of all religion”: divine permission did not imply that “it is not possible for anything but disobedience to follow,” but rather that “man can be disobedient, yet only if he so wills.” Therefore God permitted evil not because he will it, but to leave man free. And, contrary to Calvin’s theory, it was similarly “with the permission of God and in accordance with his just judgment,” but by their own action, that the hearts of sinners were “hardened.” Hardening, also in the case of the Jews, was a divine “declaration,” not the initiative of a divine “action.”^[1]

A rather succinct presentation of the primary theme[s] present between the Remonstrants and the Calvinists.

I would suggest there is a better way. It is unnecessary to place humanity and God and God and humanity into either the Armianian or Calvinist combine. All that is required to overcome such enmity is to think the relationship between God-humanity through the singular personalis (person) of Jesus Christ. Both God’s downward movement to humanity and humanity’s upward movement to God can be understood from within this miraculous nexus. When election, predestination, human freedom vis-à-vis Divine freedom/sovereignty, so on and so forth becomes the ambit by which such loci is imagined, the Gordian knot of inimical theofare, as that obtains between the “Arminians and Calvinists,” is once and for all, cut through.

Pax mundi theologica obtenta est.

^[1] Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine: Reformation of Church and Dogma (1300—1700), Volume 4 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1977), 233–34.

Augustine’s massa damnata (humanity is a damned mass) only fits well when understood within the context of Christ’s assumptio carnis (assumption of flesh) as archetypal humanity (what it means to be human at the blueprint level) for all of humanity. And even then the mirifica commutatio (wonderful exchange) isn’t transactional but filial.

Human agency, a Theanthropology will be a central piece of development in treating a doctrine of Sanctification in the theologies of Barth and TFT, respectively. Without genuine human agency, human freedom before God, even as that is somehow unilaterally grounded by God’s Self-freedom, it isn’t really meaningful to think of a Christian doctrine of sanctification. That is, because agency without real human freedom only reduces the human to metaphysical abstractions acting out an automated history already done for them absolutely by God. But in reality, if thought well, both accounts of agency, Divine and human, must and can be thought together—hypostatically so.

The privacy of the Christian religion, particularly as that obtains within the so-called evangelical churches of North America, might be one of the most deleterious things to have ever pierced its fabric. The individualism of a post-Enlightened secular world has penetrated the walls of evangelicalism in force. Evangelicals hold onto “me and my Jesus,” “me and my Bible,” and only when that serves their personal interests and feelings. This has been a century’s long problem, longer in fact, and it has destroyed the spirituality, or even the potential for a genuine Christian spirituality, en masse.

When a turn-to-the-subject posture gets applied to the Christian life what gets produced is North American evangelicalism, simpliciter. In my view, at least institutionally and collectivistically, the experiment of an evangelicalism ought to be abandoned (because it has already abandoned itself); and this, posthaste. Originally, in the early Protestant world, to be an evangelical meant to be a full blooded proponent of what came to be known as a sola Scriptura Christianity. To be an evangelical under this rubric was to literally put your life on the line. To be a sola fide Gospel proponent was to deny the authority of the known church (in the West), at the time. Now to be an evangelical means to be a moralistic therapeutic deist; to be a participant in a folk religion founded upon the ‘feels’ of the pastors and the laity, respectively.

I have been triggered, and this post is the result of that. There is a lot behind this trigger which will remain unstated. It should be said though: good intentions are no longer good enough (and never were). An empty piety, and its spirituality, does not reflect a genuinely Gospel formed Christianity. When churches are funded by said piety, all that we are left with, again, is a folk religion; not worth the time and energy of any committed Christian. Elks Lodge Christianity, country club Christianity, narthex Christianity, me and my Jesus Christianity have failed the people. There is no power there because the Holy Spirit is not there. There is no growth there because everything has been dumbed down to the feels of the people; indeed, this shaped by the secular culture that has penetrated the evangelical church to its core. But the pietism keeps the blinders on the peoples’ eyes all around. What an atrocious pitiful thing.

#rantover

I’m not an enjoyer of the Pelagian language, per se. It is thrown about much too haphazardly as smear and dismissal. But that notwithstanding: the language itself, historically, was intended to signify a basket of theological beliefs; and beliefs that have roundly been repudiated as at odds with the Gospel implications; particularly with reference to an anthropology. Even if the word itself has been played out, this doesn’t mean its original signification has been overcome, per se.

To me, then, this is an invitation to engaging with the ideas themselves. Is there a theological problem that corresponds with what the label of Pelagianism was originally intended to identify, or not? Just avoiding the theological nuancing that the language is intended to signify, does not negate its material realities itself. Those realities remain. Ultimately, I take it to entail a competitive understanding of a God-world relation. And this understanding is not limited to the Arminians (and its subsets), but touches the Calvinists as well. It is the issue of an Augustinian dualism; a methodological salvation-ism that thinks persons vis-à-vis God in terms of an individualism rather than a personalism, indeed. A personalism that is necessarily trinitarian in orientation and extent.

I’ve been doing some research on what my degree is formally identified as at L’Université de Genève (the University of Geneva). What will show on my diploma, once I complete the degree (Lord willing) is: Doctorat en théologie. Obviously, this is the French, which is the official language at the University of Geneva. If it were to be formally equivalently translated into English, it would be: Doctor in Theology (ThD or DTh). If it were to be dynamically equivalently translated into English, it would be: Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in theology. On the English site at the UG’s Faculty of Protestant Theology page it translates it using the dynamic equivalent: PhD in theology. But at the same time it also identifies it as: Doctorat en théologie. In German speaking theological faculties they are awarded the: Doctor Theologiae (they use the Latin). They abbreviate theirs to: Dr. theol. But it too, like my forthcoming degree from Geneva, can be and often is dynamically translated as: PhD in theology. Ultimately, it is a matter of preference and audience. Typically I see German language school graduates using the Dr. theol. nomenclature. What I’m coming to find out is that in the Francophone world they don’t abbreviate it and just call it: Doctorat en théologie. But I have also seen graduates from Francophone schools using PhD in Anglophone contexts. This way, folks in the English speaking contexts will understand that the holder of said degree has a PhD equivalent degree from their home-country, even if it is called something else. In France proper they just designate their PhD equivalent degrees: Doctorat (like from the University of Paris, Sorbonne etc.)

Since my diploma will say (when it is completed): Doctorat en théologie, I will go with that on official things like CVs and such. I will probably use the PhD designation in certain contexts as well. But I kind of like having the distinct nomenclature used by the Francophone Swiss school it is being pursued at. I’m nerding out here, I know. It’s what I do at times. ;)

Being oppositional to natural theology is a hallmark of Karl Barth’s theological posture. His primary rejection of a natural theology isn’t a result of his socio-politico atmosphere in the Reich of Germany per se; even though it has application towards the type of Nationalistic Socialism that characterized Adolf Hitler’s vision of the golden age of Germany. Barth rejected natural theology for theological reasons; i.e., theological-anthropological reasons. He maintained a radical commitment to the reformational notion of the total depravity of humanity; albeit, in an Athanasian key. This commitment is best illustrated by his collegial correspondences, and even debates with Catholic German theologian, Erich Przywara. Przywara, was a modern advocate, and constructive builder, indeed, a retriever of the classical Thomistic analogia entis (‘analogy of being’). Przywara ultimately argued from something like a capaciousness left in fallen humanity, as if a residual spark continued to burn within the intellect; which when perfected by grace, even preveniently or objectively so, would allow fallen human beings to build an intellectual cathedral wherein its spire might reach into the heavens and touch the feet of God. But of course, this was a speculative measure by which human beings reason by a series of negations from their finite beings to its primary and first cause in the infinite being, the unmoved mover, who is, in the Przywaran frame, the God of Jesus Christ. Barth retorted to such machination with a loud Nein, such that the canton church bells in Basel were made to ring out.

Barth offered his own reading on thinking God. This has been identified by such theologians as Eberhard Juengal et al. as the analogia fidei -/relationis (analogy of faith -/relation). Barth contended that there was such a qualitative disjunction between God and humanity that outwith God’s invasion, His descending into the fallen world, outwith His assumptio carnis (assumption of flesh) it would be nigh impossible for human beings to begin to even imagine the living and triune God; let alone ‘know’ this God. What was required in Barth’s estimation was that God enter into the garb of our humanity, by becoming human Himself in Jesus Christ, and to do so unto the point of death; even death on the cross. Barth maintains that it was only this type of the dissolution of fallen humanity, and then via its resurrection in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, that humanity by the Holy Spirit, in union with Christ’s humanity (spiritually), might come to have a correspondence of faith, with Christ’s faith, through Christ’s relationship to humanity mediated through His humanity, and in turn, through His human nature in inseparable relationship with the divine Logos, who is the ground of Christ’s singular person, that humanity could ever have a center in God to rightly know God by.

With the aforementioned noted, Anthony Feneuil offers a helpful reading on how Barth engaged with Anselm’s so-called ‘ontological proof’ for the existence of God. As Feneuil shows, Barth could affirm Anselm’s proof without collapsing it into something like the analogia entis presented by Przywara et al. So, how could Barth affirm a ‘proof’ for God’s existence, without falling prey to his own critique of an analogia entis (which is a subset of a natural theology simplicter)? Feneuil writes (in extenso):

According to Barth, Anselm’s proof is not natural theology. Anselm never places himself on the —supposedly common to the believer and the unbeliever—ground of natural reason. The definition of God Anselm gives at the beginning of the Proslogion is not, says Barth, a definition in the strict sense of the term but, rather, a confession of faith. It does not define the nature of God but acknowledges a divine command, actually the first of the Ten Commandments (“You shall have no other gods before me”): “We believe that You are something than which nothing greater can be thought.” It is not about the abstract essence of God, but about the relation of lordliness between the revealed God and God’s creatures. Anselm does not place himself on the fool’s ground, he does not think on the same level. And the proof does not primarily prove the existence of God but, rather, the fact that, on the ground of this lordliness relationship that God initiated, it is not even possible for us to imagine, even as a mere hypothesis, the inexistence of God. The mere hypothesis of the nonexistence does not fit God. In that respect as well, God is very different from any other object of the world (very different from a hundred–euro note, for instance). Therefore, Anselm’s proof is not an ontological proof, that is, a proof that would go from God’s essence in thought of God’s actual existence. It is not a proof in which human thought is above God, in which human thought decides about God’s existence. It is the other way around: the proof aims at showing, from the revealed name of God, that human thought cannot establish itself as a spectator above God. The proof shows that human thought, in relation to God, is unescapably limited.

Therefore, one could say that, in a sense, the proof aims precisely at negating the possibility of any natural theology, understood as a human attempt to escape the relation of obedience to God, and to establish oneself in the position of being able to make judgments about God’s existence, just as about the existence of any object. It is a proof that declares our wisdom as a folly before God. Hence, the insipiens, in Barth’s reading of Anselm—that is, the one who does not understand the proof—is not only the one who denies the existence of God, but also the one who tries to establish this existence on purely rational grounds. Who, then, is the insipiens? He is Descartes, not less than Kant, because when Descartes attempts to ground the certainty of God’s existence exclusively on human reason, he believes that he can consider God as a thought object similar to others, whose existence can always be put into bracket. Insofar, he is an insipiens: he believes that one can talk about God as about a thing or an absent person, using a third-person discourse, whereas one cannot talk about God without talking to God. Consequently, there is no fundamental difference between Anselm’s insipiens and Paul’s fool: both refer to those who do not acknowledge the foolishness of their own wisdom, but neither Anselm’s incipiens [sic.] nor Paul’s fool refer to the one who cannot reason well, for any contingent cause.[1]

If Feneuil is correct in his reading of Barth, and there is no reason to think otherwise, we can see, even in Barth’s reading on Anselm’s ‘proof’ how Barth’s rejection of a natural theology was operative. Ultimately, I would contend, Barth sees natural theology, and its subset in the analogia entis, as foolish because it attempts to decenter God’s ontology with fallen humanity’s; i.e., by asserting that there remains a residual foundation within the intellect of fallen humanity whereby knowledge of the true and living God has been retained; even if it might need a drop of God’s created grace to jumpstart it.

[1] Anthony Feneuil, “The Cross of Wisdom: Ambiguities in Turning Down Apologetics (Paul, Anselm, Barth),” in Christophe Chalamet and Hans–Christoph Askani, eds., The Wisdom and Foolishness of God: First Corinthians 1—2 In Theological Exploration (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 174–75.