Engaging the Doctrine of God: Contemporary Protestant Perspectives

by Bruce L. McCormack (Editor)

Evangelical theologians have traditionally affirmed a classical theism that emphasizes God's unchangeableness and all-knowing nature. Recent years, however, have seen the development of a variety of opinions, including the controversial ideas connected with "open theism."

The contributors to this collection represent the broad range of creative thought characteristic of contemporary evangelicalism. Figures such as N. T. Wright, D. A. Carson, Paul Helm, John Webster, and Bruce McCormack discuss an array of ideas currently under debate by evangelical theologians. Both ministers and students of theology will find this a helpful and insightful volume. The contributors offer readers a valuable look at contemporary evangelical perspectives on the doctrine of God and the importance of theology for other areas of belief and practice.

Genres: Theology

272 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2008

About the author

Bruce L. McCormack (PhD, Princeton Theological Seminary; DrTheol hc, Friedrich Schiller University) is Charles Hodge Professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary in Princeton, New Jersey. A world-renowned Barth scholar, he is a frequent writer and lecturer on topics of Reformed theology.

Reviews

[Johnny · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a seminary student, I remember a professor stating that a theology book was insightful, but rather out of date. I remember being slightly amused at that comment. After all, if God is eternal, what could there be about the “study of God” which could be out of date? Now, I realize that the reason combined with mystery necessary to gain a better (but never completely adequate) understanding of God requires constant consideration, meditation, and investigation. Fresh analogies and adapted/evolved metaphors are necessary to communicate to oneself within one’s contemporary environment as, indeed, to attempt any evangelical connection with modern humanity.
So, today, I read a mixture of new and old efforts at theology. Published in 2008, Engaging the Doctrine of God: Contemporary Protestant Perspectives is an anthology of essays by some outstanding turn of the millennium and present theologians (of which, I was particularly excited to see Henri Blocher, D. A. Carson, Bruce L. McCormack, Stephen N. Williams, and N.T. Wright among the contributors). Reading it meets my intent to stay reasonably current while my re-reading of Barth’s Church Dogmatics (admittedly, my first systematic close-reading volume-by-volume instead of section-by-section) is an attempt to connect with an earlier perspective.

I suppose the thesis of the book could best be expressed in the introductory essay (address) by David F. Wright when he observes that first-century (hence, earliest) Christianity was not “… asking theoretical questions about the attributes of God as practical questions about actions.” (p. 24) They were, he contends, more concerned with what God was doing, who was speaking on God’s behalf, how did one know God was acting, and what should one personally do? To speak to the 21st century, it is legitimate to speak of God’s attributes, but it is much more relevant (as George Earnest Wright perceived in the 20th century) to consider God’s action and the practical application for human believers/followers.

This concept is not undermined by the N. T. Wright essay which concludes: “The early Christians were early Christians because the event that brought them into being was the event that showed the Creator dynamically at work within his world, renewing both it and his own intimate relationship with it in incarnation and resurrection.” (p. 36) Yet, one of the most stimulating essays was D. A. Carson’s six major conclusions about “The Wrath of God.” Carson asserts, #1) It is illegitimate to depersonalize God’s wrath into an impersonal force/law for justice (p. 42). He admits, however, that God’s position in dealing with good and evil is asymmetrical with the good directly accredited to God, but the evil traces back to God (ultimately) with many secondary complications. [Carson doesn’t specify these complications here, but one must assume that laws of creation, acts of human will, and the defiance of inferior powers have some impact on God’s relationship to evil and judgment thereon.]

Arguing with both Terence A. Fretheim’s argument that God’s wrath is provoked by human actions far beyond the limits of God’s intentions as well as Eberhard Jungel’s idea that God’s judgment is always indirect working of the consequences of sin, Carson contends, #2) It is illegitimate to soften the personal involvement of God in judgment by making it impersonal (pp. 46-47). Fretheim builds upon concepts of God’s self-limitation to distance God from the act of judgment and Jungel almost devolves into a mechanistic formula in attempting to rid God of the stain of seeming emotional. #3 involves the so-called immutability of God and demonstrates how the text can say that “God is love” because of God’s constant essence of loving, but one cannot say that “God is wrath” because that isn’t his constant state. Essentially, he presents wrath is a response to sin while love is a decision based on God’s very being (pp. 48-49).

#4 in Carson’s discussion is that one must consider the wrath of God in order to understand the human situation as a position against God, trying to “de-god God” as he puts it (p. 51). #5 in the discussion revolves around the wrath of God as integral to understanding the cross (pp. 56, 59). And finally, Carson leads us to #6 in the discussion: “If wrath is the expression of God’s holiness when it confronts sin, wrath will not be found when sin is not found.” (p. 60)

There is an interesting essay comparing Karl Barth’s Christocentric perspective on the doctrine of God compared to Calvin’s insistence upon Jesus as logos asarkos (not flesh) and logos ensarkos at the same time (p. 70). Barth felt that discussion about logos asarkos was “fatal speculation” about “…a God whom we think we can know elsewhere than in and from the contemplation of His presence and activity as the Word made flesh” (as quoted on p. 71 from Church Dogmatics IV/I, p. 181). Yet, since Barth emphasizes that “God assigns himself the being He will have for all eternity,” Paul Helm (author of this essay) considers Barth to have tripped himself up. “The God of Karl Barth, who wills his essence in the act of electing, is by definition, a hidden, undetermined God.” (p. 79) Hence, Helm undermines Barth’s criticism of Calvin with Barth’s own thesis.

Yet, in the penultimate essay in the volume, the anthology’s editor, Bruce L. McCormack, observes that where classical theology asserted that the “essence” of God was universally unknowable (p. 213), Barth’s idea that God defined Himself in “election,” in being “God for us” meant: “Thus divine election stands at the root of God’s being or ‘essence.’” (p. 210) But, Barth would assert that even though we know the most of what we can know of God’s being from God’s divine action, we cannot presume that God is only that action. “In speaking of the essence of God we are concerned with an act that surpasses the whole of the actuality that we have come to know that we have come to know as act…” (p. 214). McCormack goes on to show how Barth’s approach may help resolve some of the issues of the so-called “open-theists” regarding omniscience and omnipotence. This essay alone was worth the investment in the book.

The most disturbing and disappointing moment in the book (at least, for me) was Henri Blocher’s unfortunate designation of kenosis (the Son’s self-emptying of His divine attributes as in Philippians 2) as heresy (p. 136). He seems to have overlooked what McCormack notes as the most common opposition to the idea of kenosis as the strict “liberal” idea of the theory that Jesus “extinguished” His divine attributes in this emptying process. But he states: “…it does not apply to the evangelical kenotic theory, which simply asserts that Jesus willingly gave up the use of those attributes that would have conflicted with his human nature.” (p. 200) Henri Blocher should have observed this distinction before casting aspersions of heresy (p. 136). Blocher even draws from Pannenberg’s use of “Person” to negate the tension between the divinity and humanity of Christ using the kenotic idea. Unfortunately, this ignores Pannenberg’s later conversion to an idea of kenosis in which the self-emptying is linked to the eternal uniqueness of the Son as such in his relation to the Father (Systematic Theology: Volume 2, p. 378, n. 154).

The essays in Engaging the Doctrine of God: Contemporary Protestant Perspectives are worthy of consideration, further study, and dialogue. While some essays/papers seem better conceived and argued than others, the overall effect is quite solid.

[Jacob Aitken · Rating 4 out of 5]

The underlying theme in this book is how to appropriate the teaching that God is impassible in light of the many Biblical narratives that seem to suggest otherwise, alongside numerous theological reflections. The contributor fall among the spectrum of those advocating a classical substance-metaphysics (Paul Helm) and those who are quite critical of substance-metaphysics (Bruce McCormack). Others, such as Oliver Crisp, offer penetrating critiques of several Christian thinkers on the doctrine of the Trinity. This review will not cover every essay, but will focus on the more notable ones.

Paul Helm (“John Calvin and the Hiddenness of God”) seeks to defend the reading of the extra-Calvinisticum and a contention of classical metaphysics that “God” stands behind, if only logically, the identity of Jesus of Nazareth. Of interest, though not the central point of the article, is Helm’s fine summary of the “extra calvinisticum.” Helm is specifically challenging Barth’s reading of Calvin and thus proposes two theses (68):

Is the second person logically prior to the decree to become incarnate? Helm, pace Calvin, says yes.
Does this necessarily infer a hidden “God behind God”? Helm answers no.

As an aside, and I don’t think it fundamentally changes his argument, I think Helm is either guilty of ambiguity or the editor overlooked a typo. On p.68 Helm affirms, as would I, that the Logos is asarkos at the decree. Yet on the next page he says that Calvin and Barth “held that there was no time when the Logos was asarkos.” Nevertheless, I get the gist of his argument.
Helm then gives a helpful summary of what the extra-Calvinisticum entails. He develops this as a foil against Barth, yet Barth never fully rejected the “extra.” He simply says it is very badly phrased, which it is.

AN EXCURSUS ON SIMPLICITY

I don’t want to seem like I am nit-picking, and I cannot help but note a certain irony: Barthian scholars like McCormack and Jenson are accused of being soft on divine simplicity, yet I can’t help but think that their readings of Barth best preserve it. If God is simple, and there is not multiplicity of ideas in the mind of God, since this kind of discursive reasoning implies division (diastasis, to use the Origenist term), then every other idea, and hence an idea to act x, y, and z, must inhere in that one initial idea/act. The importance of this will be seen later.

END EXCURSUS

Helm’s reading of Calvin rightly wants to preserve the freedom of God against some external force necessitating God. Hence, Helm argues, “So the Logos Asarkos was free not to become incarnate. Any additional choice that the Logos was free to make...is of secondary importance” (emphasis mine 72). The problem here, as noted above, is that the doctrine of divine simplicity precludes any real talk of the Logos reasoning discursively in pre-temporal eternity. If by this Helm means by this “logical priority” (which he indeed states on p.68) then he can avoid the difficulty posed by simplicity. However, terms like “any additional choice” are time-sensitive and seem to suggest otherwise than his argument. Barth’s model of election as the event of the Trinity’s modes of being, whatever legitimate difficulties it may have, is much closer to preserving simplicity.

Helm rebuts Barth’s charge that this view of God leads to speculation, and quotes Calvin for support (73). Surely, anyone who has read Calvin knows he is blessedly free from speculation. For myself, I think Barth is using the wrong term--speculation--and Helm is not seeing the real difficulty. Per Barth’s reading of Calvin, which I am not necessarily endorsing at the moment, the Logos asarkos already has a fully-formed identity before the decision to save the world. To be fair, McCormack, whose essay Helm is reviewing, further expanded these ideas in Orthodox and Modern. This is tied in with Barth’s claim that Jesus is both the Object and Subject of election. Helm says this is simply “incoherent” (79). How can an object of an act be present as the subject of that same act? It is a fair question and probably the best raised against Barth’s program. Helm notes, “The act of electing is the act of someone; it cannot be the act of no one which, upon its occurrence, constitutes a someone.” By way of response one can ask if the Trinity is incoherent, for how can the Son be present in the eternal generation of the Son? For Helm would agree that the Son, in the eternal generation, doesn’t come from a state of non-being to a state of being, yet is present in the Father’s very giving of being.

Helm ends his essay with different challenges to Barthians. Overall, this is a fine essay, even if I have some critical reservations. I think Helm filled in several lacunae that were missing from his John Calvin’s Ideas. His discussion of the extra-Calvinisticum was quite lucid. My only concerns are that he didn’t realize that Barth actually held to the Calvinist line over the Lutherans on this point. Other good questions he has raised have already been answered by McCormack and Eberhard Jungel.

“The Actuality of God: Karl Barth in Conversation with Open Theism” by Bruce McCormack.

McCormack gives us a very interesting critique of open-theism: open-theism is simply parasitic on the very classical metaphysics it seeks to overcome. True, it can find texts that posit a “moved God,” so to speak, but its opponents can do likewise to the contrary. McCormack notes that open theists simply had no way of winning this debate: they engaged in very little Christology and shared the same metaphysical presuppositions as their opponents.

To begin, it should be helpful to define classical metaphysics. This these types of thinking “are all ways of thinking which would treat the ontological otherness of God as something that can be defined and established by humans without respect for the incarnate life of God and, therefore, as something complete in itself apart from and prior to all acts of God” (McCormack 201). And Pinnock is very clear: God doesn’t change in his essence (Pinnock 119).

The question for both sides to answer, and this is the brilliance of McCormack’s essay, is “Does the Logos undergo change?” Answering this question is actually quite difficult. No Christian tradition--even Open theism--is willing to say that the divine nature suffers (though I grant Moltmann and his disciples spoke this way). This is also tied in with a discussion of claims about “God in himself.” As McCormack notes, “Classical theologians wanted to say that God would have been the same in himself without his works--a claim that would make sense only if it could be known what God is in himself. On the other hand, they wanted to say that what God is is essentially unknowable” (McCormack 203-204). This problem found itself at the heart of the Christological controversies, to which we now turn.

For the fathers working in the Chalcedonian tradition, two values had to be preserved: divine impassibility and divinization soteriology. On one hand, God cannot suffer (even Arius agreed with this claim!), so the divine and human natures had to be kept far apart. The clearest expression of this is found in John of Damascus, who, to borrow McCormack’s nice phrase, used the mind as a mediating principle between the two natures (219). This is why Lutheran and Orthodox analogies of “fire and iron” fall short: the fire never becomes “iron-ish.”

McCormack’s conclusion on this reading, which I think accurate, is that this commitment to impassibility inevitably drove even the more Cyrillene theologians to a Nestorian tendency. Cyril, for example, might want to say that “God dies,” but even he won’t ascribe pathoi and suffering to the divine nature. All of this reduces back to a classical ontology. McCormack notes: “To the extent that human predicates can be ascribed to the Person of the union without ascribing them at the same time to the divine nature, the person is being treated as something that can be abstracted from the divine nature and stand “between” the natures, mediating between them” (220 n.84).

Making it worse for the ancient tradition was its commitment to theosis. In this model the Logos “instrumentalizes” the human nature and infuses it with life. The problem, though, on this reading was that the communication goes only one way: the divine is not humanized.

The above essay was perhaps not immediately relevant to McCormack’s larger argument; however, it does show that the problems open theists faced were there all along. Even more, it shows that open theism’s project could not have gotten off of the ground without the very system it seeks to undermine.

Other essays: D.A. Carson’s essay on the wrath of God is a helpful summary of key texts on the wrath of God. He notes that for whatever problems critics of penal substitution may have, they all collapse on the fact that they really haven’t interacted with the idea of God’s wrath. John Webster has a nice essay showing how the necessary doctrine of God’s aseity has been warped in recent years. Instead of it being doxological in focus, it is defended--ironically!--by an appeal to contingent reality. Donald MacLeod ends on a pastoral note, summing up the themes of the conference.

[Brent · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent complication of esays by solid renound evangelical theologians. McCormack's essay on open theism vis-à-vis Barth's theology of God was fantastic. Themes explored here seem to center around mediation between impassibility vs passibility of God in light of various other doctrines and disciplines.

[Jonathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Got this book primarily for Crisp's essay on the trinity in Jonathan Edwards and Helm's essay on Calvin and the hiddenness of God. Those were good essays and so was Carson's and sone others. Bruce McCormack's own chapter seemed to drone on for far too long.

[Josh Shelton · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a treasure trove of excellent theologians. Very interesting section on Karl Barth. This is also the first time that I read N. T. Wright.

[Bart · Rating 2 out of 5]

A work stemming from a Protestant academic conference, with all the strengths and weaknesses that spring therefrom.