Israel’s Failure and the Identity of God

A popular and well-known theme often heard from N.T. Wright and his supporters is that Israel failed in her vocation, which was to be a light to the nations, to be instructors of the ignorant and teachers to the immature. This failure is why Jesus, Israel’s God embodied, came. Wright has taken criticism in the scholarly world for overplaying this theme and for making Israel herself the messianic agent (Larry Hurtado argues that there’s no biblical data supporting the idea).

That Israel in some sense failed seems to be a fairly obvious theme in Paul – Romans 2:17-29 is basically an indictment for the failure of ‘the Jew’, who by his boasting both fails in his vocation as teacher and light and blasphemes the name of God among the Gentiles. Israel’s light is broken and dim, and instead of causing other nations to see the greatness of Israel’s god, causes the opposite to happen – the Gentiles want nothing to with God.

It may be here that Wright overplays his hand – though Israel was indeed to be a light, Israel wasn’t the actual agent of salvation but that through which salvation comes. Israel’s failure isn’t so much a failure of its own messianic vocation as a failure of its vocation to pave the way for the messiah.

The problem with which God is faced is that Israel is unfaithful – this is the primary failing on her part, not that she failed to be messianic. Romans 3:2-4 shows that though entrusted with the oracles of God but failing to bring the contents of said oracles to the world, Israel’s unbelief or unfaithfulness appeared to threaten God’s own faithfulness (as a side note, Wright appears to make the Incarnation a bit more contingent than other theologians).

God’s answer to this problem (though some may be uncomfortable with the language of ‘divine problem’, or ‘divine dilemma’, it should be remembered that Athanasius used the same language in ‘On the Incarnation) is reveal His righteousness through the messiah, who is faithful where Israel is not. Through the faithfulness of the messiah, the promises of Abraham are brought to the world. The true light (John 1:9) comes into the world, but this time not just to shine the light into darkness but to be the light of salvation.

Here, then, is where I see a bit stronger ground for the identification of Jesus and Israel by means of vocation. Israel is to a light to those in darkness – Jesus is the light of salvation. Israel is unfaithful, Jesus is faithful, and through his faithfulness God’s righteousness is revealed, where Israel’s unfaithfulness appeared to threaten God’s faithfulness. The identity of Israel with Jesus, then, is one of unfaithfulness/faithfulness in their vocation, as opposed to directly identifying the vocation of Israel/Jesus.

After reading this post, I like the basic point but don’t really feel I did a tight job expounding/arguing for it. Criticisms especially welcome here. Two brief critiques, one from Hurtado and one from Ben Witherington, can be found here.

The One God, or the Triune God?

If God is Triune, and God is the One God, then if we talk about the One God, aren’t we also talking about the Triune God?

Another Thought on Responsible Theology

‘Messy’ is a term that gets thrown around a lot in theological discussions – spirituality and theology is said to be ‘messy’, instead of clear, precise, well-defined, etc. This is typically a point made against more systematic forms of theology – but what seems to be the primary motive for terming theology and spirituality as ‘messy’ is an effort to avoid critical engagement and close scrutiny.

To claim that theology and spirituality is ‘messy’ is to absolve the claimant from any responsibility of precision in their theology and spirituality, which removes the claimant from any arguments or criticism. ‘Messy’ spirituality and theology are fundamentally subjective, when you really get right down to it – the messiness effectively locates theology and spirituality away from the objective controlling realities to which our theology and spirituality should conform to. To assert ‘messy’ spirituality and theology is to barricade oneself off from critical inquiry – because how can something inherently ‘messy’ be subjected to logical scrutiny?

What this does, then, is to move theology from the realm of the objective to the realm of the subjective, and once that move is made, the validity of one’s theology and spirituality becomes the same thing as the validity of one’s feelings – and how can the validity of one’s feelings, especially in spirituality be questioned?

An answer to an objection: no, this does not mean that theology and spirituality is a purely objective science concerned with arriving at all of the propositional truths about God – very few people would ever really claim to know every truth about God. However, theology isn’t mere articulation of one’s spiritual experiences, which we can term ‘messy’, and avoid having called into question. Theology, if it is true theology, is done in the service of the church, and so to that extent is authoritative. Yes, there are mysteries, no, we will never know everything about God, the Trinity, or Jesus – this does not mean that we cannot come to conclusions or authoritatively settle certain matters in theology.

 

 

Calvin, Bonhoeffer and Knowledge of God

Calvin takes as a basic axiom that the knowledge of ourselves and our knowledge of God is the most important aspect of knowing in general – of religious epistemology. They are tied together in an intimate way, Calvin says – from our knowledge of ourselves, we’ll come to a knowledge of God. However, no one can come to a true knowledge of themselves without a true knowledge of God. The two are tied together intimately.

Calvin treats knowledge of God first, and descends to the self later on – from the knowledge of ourselves, we can deduce only that we’re in a world of misery, and that we desire to rest in something greater. Our natural knowledge of God is suppressed or ignored, despite there being a kind of imprint of the divine on the heart and mind (this is an axiom for Reformed epistemology). The basic point, however, is that the knowledge of the self is tied together with knowledge of God – in Calvin’s case, our self-knowledge is knowledge of our need for God. For a brief exposition, see:  http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/kevindeyoung/2010/01/15/a-calvin-clarification/

What happens, according to Bonhoeffer, is that when we begin to think and reflect upon ourselves, all our knowledge becomes self-knowledge, and takes part in the disunion of the knowledge of good and evil:

‘Man knows good and evil, but because he is not the origin, because he acquires this knowledge only at the price of estrangement from the origin, the good and evil he knows are not the good and evil of God but good and evil against God.’ (‘Ethics’, p. 23)

Knowledge of good and evil is the cause of all the disunion in man’s life – and the cause of death in man’s life. The problem isn’t that we know good and evil, and try to do the good, but fail, and see that we need God – the problem is that we know good and evil, apart from God, against God. In Bonhoeffer’s terminology, we become a god against God:

‘…man, knowing of good and evil, has finally torn himself loose from life, that is to say from the eternal life which proceeds from the choice of God…Man knows good and evil, against God, against his origin, godlessly and of his own choice, understanding himself according to his own contrary possibilites; and he is cut off from the unifying, reconciling life in God, and is delivered over to death. The secret which man has stolen from God is bringing about man’s downfall.’ (‘Ethics’, p. 23-24)

Bonhoeffer, contra Calvin, says that the knowledge of the self isn’t tied to knowledge of God – knowledge of the self is born out of disunion with God. This is an inversion of what’s a fairly key point in a lot of philosophy and theology – the knowledge of the self.

 

Karl Barth’s Failure

Read about it here: http://www.firstthings.com/article/2014/06/karl-barths-failure

‘Modern philosophy assumes the falsity of classical theism. It begins by discarding, not disproving, the family of arguments that provide the metaphysical grammar of Christian orthodoxy. Barth followed suit—and the results were fatal.

Barth yielded to modernity’s most pernicious idea, which took aim not at belief in the supernatural but at our rational capacity for knowledge of it. In denying what Jesuit philosopher Bernard Lonergan called the “native infinity” of human understanding, Barth capitulated where he most needed to take a stand. He seemingly did not understand that restricting reason was modern philosophy’s great act of presumption, not humility. Nor did he understand that rejecting the secularity of reason was Christian philosophy’s great act of piety, not hubris. And his bargain with Kant—turning the limits of reason into an opening for revelation—could only corrode the foundations of Christian faith.

By rejecting the speculative power of the intellect, Barth was drawn into making two mistakes. First, he turned his back on the metaphysics of classical theology, rendering almost unintelligible the conceptual idiom of the doctors and creeds of the Church. Barth did not hide this, and he worked hard to square his dogmatics with Christian tradition, replacing appeals to nature and causality with appeals to history and narrative, but the result was that he could not properly and consistently distinguish God’s nature from his actions in the history of salvation.

Barth’s second and deeper mistake was to sever the mind’s speculative relation to God. He dissolved the classical synthesis of faith and reason, collapsing all theological understanding into an exercise of faith. Unable to appeal to truth besides Jesus Christ, Barth was powerless to explain how truth could be known and communicated without supernatural assistance. He was even pressed to invoke divine revelation as proof of the existence of the external world, a sign something had gone very wrong.

His basic error is evident in his rejection of natural theology, which holds that careful observation of contingent beings can disclose the necessary being of God. This argument comes in several permutations, most of which are sketched by Thomas Aquinas, but its success in demonstrating God’s existence was arguably a secondary concern. The primary purpose of traditional natural theology was to show the indissoluble connection between the human intellect and a transcendent God who is Being itself.

Barth’s charge that some natural theologies compromised divine transcendence was true enough, but his indictment was indiscriminate. He did not appreciate that classical natural theology aimed at clarifying the proper reach and function of natural reason: that we can know with certainty that God exists but cannot understand his divine essence in itself. This teaches us both the nobility of reason (knowing that God is) and its radical insufficiency (not knowing what God is).

He simply could not allow that a genuinely philosophical understanding of God is demanded by the intellect’s desire to know. He wanted to sharpen his dispute with classical theism so as to make it entirely about the revealed nature of God. But this could not succeed, if only because what one holds about God is informed by a host of philosophical commitments. For its part, classical theism maintained that Christian belief both presupposes and propels philosophical inquiry. It acknowledged, even celebrated, that Christian belief is committed to philosophical positions concerning the intelligibility of the natural world, the power of the human intellect to understand that world, and our capacity to communicate truth. (Hence the First Vatican Council’s condemnation of those who denied that God can be known with certitude by the natural light of human reason.)’

Note on the Atonement in the ante-Nicene Fathers

The consensus of the ante-Nicene fathers on the nature of the atonement is firmly Christus Victor – actually, I’m hardly able to find any kind of dissenting viewpoint at all. Virtually every father saw the atonement as the triumph of Christ over the powers – while it’s not as developed as it would come to be, I think it’s safe to say that the early church’s view of the atonement was Christus Victor, and almost nothing else.

Note on Barth and Wright

I’ve been reading Wright’s ‘Justification’ alongside Barth’s C/D IV.1, specifically the sections on justification. The similarities are interesting, as well as the differences. Both see justification as being a declaration, and both see Jesus’ vindication in his being raised from the dead. Wright places considerable weight on justification being the declaration that one is a member of the people of God, while Barth places more emphasis on the act/event of justification in the context of the relation of the man of sin to God, who stands over against him as Judge. I’ll read more on Barth though, as this is an area of his thought I’m not super familiar with.

David Bentley Hart on Transcendence and Metaphysics

‘The dogmatic definitions of the fourth century ultimately forced Christian thought, even if only tacitly, toward a recognition of the full mystery—the full transcendence—of Being within beings. All at once the hierarchy of hypostases mediating between the world and its ultimate or absolute principle had disappeared. Herein lies the great “discovery” of the Christian metaphysical tradition: the true nature of transcendence, transcendence understood not as mere dialectical supremacy, and not as ontic absence, but as the truly transcendent and therefore utterly immediate act of God, in his own infinity, giving being to beings. In affirming the consubstantiality and equality of the persons of the Trinity, Christian thought had also affirmed that it is the transcendent God alone who makes creation to be, not through a necessary diminishment of his own presence, and not by way of an economic reduction of his power in lesser principles, but as the infinite God. In this way, he is revealed as at once superior summo meo and interior intimo meo: not merely the supreme being set atop the summit of beings, but the one who is transcendently present in all beings, the ever more inward act within each finite act. This does not, of course, mean that there can be no metaphysical structure of reality, through whose agencies God acts; but it does mean that, whatever the structure might be, God is not located within it, but creates it, and does not require its mechanism to act upon lower things. At the immediate source of the being of the whole, he is nearer to every moment within the whole than it is to itself, and is at the same time infinitely beyond the reach of the whole, even in its most exalted principles. And it is precisely in learning that God is not situated within any kind of ontic continuum with creation, as some “other thing” mediated to the creature by his simultaneous absolute absence form and dialectical involvement in the totality of beings, that we discover him to be the ontological cause of creation. True divine transcendence, it turns out, transcends even the traditional metaphysical divisions between the transcendent and the immanent.’

– David Bentley Hart (stolen from Eclectic Orthodoxy)

Another Trinitarian Thought

Gregory Nyssa holds that the Godhead isn’t a description of God’s nature but rather an operation which unites the persons of the Trinity. Gregory gets into what the term actually means in ‘On Not Three Gods’:

‘…we suppose that “Godhead” (theotes) is derived from “beholding” (thea) and that by general custom and the teaching of the Scriptures, he who is our beholder (theates) is called God (theos). Now if anyone admits that to behold and to see are the same thing, and that the god who oversees all things both is and is called the overseer of the universe, let him consider whether this operation belongs to one of the Persons we believe to constitute the holy Trinity, or whether the power extends to the three Persons. For if our interpretation of “Godhead” is the right one, and the things which are said to be beheld (theata) and that which beholds them is called God (theos), no one of the Persons of the Trinity could properly be excluded from this form of address on the ground of this meaning of the word.’ (‘On Not Three Gods’)

So, again, Nyssa basically grounds the unification of the three persons in the operation of the Godhead – the operation(s) flow in one motion from the Father, through the son, to the Spirit.

Trinitarian Thoughts

– Barth’s way of thinking about the Trinity is very interesting, because it proceeds after the fact of God’s revelation. God has spoken, so what must be true of God for this to be so? Kevin Davis helpfully noted that the ‘what must be true of God’ bit is given in revelation – Barth basically (in a manner that should be familiar to those who know Barth) makes all the conditions for revelation depend on God. McGrath notes that the Spirit does seem to fare a bit poorly in Barth.

– N.T. Wright’s focus on the ways of speaking about God acting in the world within a Jewish framework is interesting to me (and something I’ve mentioned here before). Wright sees the classical ways of thinking about the Trinity not as wrong but perhaps a bit conceptually confused – persons, nature, essence, substance, etc. Sometimes he plays the ‘greek philosophy’ card a bit too strongly but I think a lot can be said for his overall point – which is, in a nutshell, that Scripture contains a built-on trinitarian grammar or framework. Wright is a bit more strictly biblically focused than most trinitarian formulations in that he sees the ways of thinking about God in the OT and in 2TJ as being fairly prescriptive of how we should think about the Trinity.

– I don’t see a way for social trinitarianism to avoid being tritheistic.

– Analytic philosophy does not make for good trinitarian theology.