The Perseverance of the Saint

Reformed theologians, developing the tradition of Augustine, have always asserted that the work of perseverance is a divine work. There are of course many, many texts in scripture that urge believers to vigilance and perseverance to the end, to remain in Christ, to continue in faith and so on. There are texts that certainly speak as if one could deny the faith: 1 Cor 10:12, 2 Peter 2:1 and so on. Most theological traditions have taught therefore that it is possible to lose grace once one has received it. The question is, however, whether God could allow a grace he begins to be ruined by the power of sin. Even Augustine divided into two the kinds of grace a believer receives, asserting that only the second, superadded grace produced perseverance.

The Reformed have explained by contrast that perseverance is a work of God through believers. In regeneration and faith he gives a grace that is unbreakable and inadmissible. The admonitions and warnings of scripture are ‘the way in which God himself confirms his promise and gift through believers’ (Bavinck). Apostates in scripture (1 Tim 4:1, Heb 6:4-8, 2 Pet 2:18-22) must, according to Bavinck, be either examples of incomplete apostasy (later restored?) or evidence of false conversion in the first place. Although I think his exegesis at these points is stretched beyond credulity, the theological point is a good one: God cannot/does not break his own covenant. Even Paul mourning over Israel does not conclude the God is faithless, even when Israel is. Rightly construed, the doctrine is of great assurance and comfort to Christian believers – God who begins a good work in us will bring it to completion (Phil 1:6). The Christian life is not fragile, even though it is tested.

The Reformed doctrine should not however be the cause of undue speculation as to one's inward state, nor should it give rise to passivity. The warnings to endure and to resist should be heeded as serious, live warnings. Hebrews seems able to blend at the one time both admonishment and comfort – which makes sense if perseverance, like the Christian life itself, is a divine work in and through human agents. It is the inward search for a certainty of one's own heart that makes the doctrine disturbing just when it is claimed it should be most comforting. Actually, the comfort lies in the character of God revealed in Christ: that even human weakness is not an obstacle to his purposes. But human fickleness is not thereby excused.

Perhaps the doctrine is better labelled 'the perseverance of the saint'. There was one who perservered, and so we can hold out confident hope of our own perseverance. Christ was tempted in every way as we are but did not sin.

The Doors of the Sea - Where was God in the Tsunami?

David Bentley Hart's small book The Doors of the Sea has finally reached me. I am surprised how vehemently it is an attack on certain Reformed understandings of the sovereignty of God - but then again, I do think that there is something weird, even perverse, about the way God is celebrated as a pure absolute will by some Reformed writers (though this is probably caricature, Hart provides some gob-smackingly callous examples of Reformed responses to the tsunami).

I thought this point was well made (among others):

...disturbing as it may be, it is clearly the case that there is a kind of 'provisional' cosmic dualism within the New Testament: not an ultimate dualism of course, between two equal princinples; but certainly a conflict between a sphere of created autonomy that strives against God on the one hand and the saving of God in time on the other...To say that God elects to fashion rational creatures in his image, and so grants them the freedom to bind themselves and the greater physical order to another master - to say that he who sealed up the doors of the sea might permit them to be opened again by another, more reckless hand - is not to say that God's ultimate design for his creatures can be thwarted. It is to acknowledge, however, that his will can be resisted by a real and (by his grace) autonomous force of defiance, or can be hidden from us by the history of cosmic corruption, and that final realization of the good he intends in all things has the form (not simply as a dramatic fiction, for our edification or his glory, nor simplay as a paedagogical device on his part, but in truth) of a divine victory. (p. 61-62)

I think provisional dualism is right: it allows for this 'autonomous' force of defiance, with which we have to deal, and whom we are to take seriously, but also ensures that God isn't somehow threatened ultimately by the struggle.

Barth on Election

Please allow me this foray into Barth without labelling me forevermore 'a Barthian'! (Though I think I have a rather cheeky article in me entitled 'the Barthianism of DB Knox'...!!!)

I am currently reading Barth's Church Dogmatics II.ii. In this volume he puts forward perhaps his most remarkable - and controversial - theological innovation: his doctrine of election. He is well aware of the novelty of his position: but his claim is that this is the only biblical way of construing the doctrine. That at least on the face of it is his ground.

Of course, Barth is a Reformed theologian in the tradition of Calvin, and so it is the Reformed commitment to predestination and election that drives him. And it is the Reformed tradition that he must supercede if he is to establish his version. His discussion of the Supra- vs Infra- lapsarian positions - in small print of course - is absolutely crucial. What he claims is that the Supralapsarian position - the least popular and least accepted alternative - is the more consistent and more rigorous. The tendency of Infralapsarianism is to offer the incarnation as God's plan B - a response to the fall rather than a decree from all time. But Supralapsarianism, with its implication that God has decreed some for damnation even before the fall is a tough sell! Which clears the ground for him to offer his correction of both positions.

And it is this: Jesus is the answer. Before the foundation of the world, God in Christ made his double decree of election and reprobation. Where he scores a hit against the Reformed construals is in their tendency to rely on an account of God's decrees which makes them inscrutable and mysterious, invisible and unrevealed. Speculation abounds (and it does!) Whereas, by making Jesus the electing God and the elected man, he is able to talk about the election of God as revealed in full view of humankind.

Now I need to read some critiques of his position - or hear them from my kind readers....

Peter Jensen: Protestant, Reformed, Evangelical

A series recently given by the Archbishop of Sydney to a lay audience:



Why_I_am_Protestant

Why_I_am_Reformed

Why_I_am_Evangelical

John Webster on philosophical theology

I breathe a sigh of relief when I read John Webster, because he is brave in defying the dominance of philosophical 'theology' with its mystifying speculations and its second-rate dabblings in fields far from the camp... as he puts it:

...the distinctiveness of a trinitarian dogmatics of the holiness of God will shown in its lack of interest in making use of religious phenomenology as a foundation for positive Christian teaching, or in correlating its findings with inquiries into the phenomena - cultural, anthropological and religious - of 'the holy'.

Trinitarian dogmatics will necessarily make ontotheological claims, though in its own particular way. When theology addresses the matter of God's attributes,

it is attempting a rich set of conceptual enlargements upon God's concrete simplicity, the rendition of his identity which God gives as the one who is.

Such a breath of fresh air to read in this city of dreary speculations!

Vanhoozer and the atonement, more of.

[For your greater edification and entertainment, a photo of me graduating with the Master of Studies (Research) degree from Oxford, a degree I didn't even know I was enrolled for or intend to achieve! But they let you wear a fancy gown, so - what the hey!]

I have been enjoying re-reading some of the essays in The Glory of the Atonement (ed. Hill and James). The survey of the biblical and historical material is thorough and careful and leaves me in no doubt that, if one wants to excise sacrificial language from the atonement (see below) or remove the substitutionary aspect, one does so against the overwhelming testimony of the scriptures and the tradition. Which is not to say that there isn't a subjective side to the atonement: it is just that if one has only the subjective side, it ain't enough.

Anyhow, Vanhoozer's essay is my favourite so far ("The Atonement in Postmodernity") - partly because it serves as a handbrake on some of the other essays. He goes so far as to accept the postmodern critique of theoria, at least up to a point. He writes:

The postmodern challenge requires us to develop a nonreductive doctrine of the atonement that perceives the saving significance of Jesus' death in terms other than this-worldly economies of exchange...

What the doctrine of the atonement attempts haltingly to articulate is the equal ultimacy of God's love and God's light (justice, holiness). On the cross neither mercy nor justice loses out; the cross is rather their mutual fulfillment. It is precisely for this reason that theories of the atonement must resist explanations that reduce the significance of Jesus ' death either to unconditional mercy or to uncompromising justice.

Pierced for our transgressions

In response to some very silly books attacking Penal Substitutionary Atonement, including those by Steve Chalke and Joel Green, the Oak Hill trio of Mike Ovey, Andrew Sach and Steve Jeffrey have produced a book I am looking forward very much to reading: Pierced for our Transgressions - Rediscovering the Glory of Penal Substitutionary Atonement.

The table of contents looks fascinating: they give exhaustive answer to the many objections raised against PSA. Their account of the heritage of the doctrine is very interesting: the attacks on it have tried to relativise it by making it a product of particular medieval or renaissance conditions. (I would also say that particular conditions of modernity and the way in which we deal with criminality in our culture - ironically because of our Christian heritage - have lead to the doctrine being seen as distasteful and immoral: Foucault's Discipline and Punish is fascinating as an account for the genealogy of punishment in Western liberal society.)

However: there is a tendency in evangelicalism to make the doctrine under attack loom larger than it ought, or to make it the sine qua non of the preaching of the gospel. (PSA is not the gospel, though it is (I believe) a glorious doctrine explaining how exactly the gospel is good news.) This leads in practice to a trotting out of PSA formulae at every point, even when it isn't warranted by the text.
As
K.J. Vanhoozer writes (and his evangelical credentials are sound!):

the economy of covenantal grace is not exhausted by the logic of penal substitution even though the latter has a legitimate place.

Calvin and the Calvinists?

For me, an intriguing question still persisting in historical theology relates to the relation between John Calvin and those Reformed thinkers that followed in his wake. The classic Barthian-influenced account, repeated many times, is that Calvin - as the normative Reformed theologian - represented a genuine break in content AND method from the medieval scholastic theologians. Calvin for his part was committed both to biblicism and to not speculating.Later scholars returned to the things he had repudiated, distorting and unbalancing Calvin-ism from then on. Basil Hall's landmark article in this and other ways set 'Calvin against the Calvinists'.

Richard Muller supported by Carl Trueman in recent years have returned fire. As Trueman writes:

The account of the development of Reformed theology which this definition of scholasticism promotes is one whereby the pristine, non-metaphysical, exegetical theology of Calvin is slowly replaced by a speculative, metaphysical, overly-rational, and hair-splitting dogmatism, as represented by later theologians such as Voetius, Turretin, and John Owen.

I myself have believed and passed this on: and especially the more Barthian thinkers will assume this narrative. Trueman's argument in response is that 1) Calvin isn't the normative figure everyone assumes - rather the great Reformed confessions hold that place; 2) the name 'Calvinism' is actually unhelpful and polemical; 3) we need to look to the occassion and nature of each of the texts under question to fairly evaluate them. 4) Scholasticism as a method (the use of syllogisms and so on) has had a bad press and in fact was just the pedagogical method available for working in the university of the time; 5) Aristotelian metaphysics and rationality were used by everybody because this was the rationality of the day: it is not in itself proof of distortion...

I am not yet convinced. I heed the warning about the complexity of the historical picture and the breadth of Reformed dogmatic theology. However, when we read Calvin we are breathing a different air from that we later breathe. Calvin's humanist background gave him a pedagogical method and style altogether different from the Paris of his youth. It was not an accident that this style liberated him as a theologian. In the Institutes he is quite polemical about exactly the vices you find displayed in the later Protestant Orthodox, because that method and style had produced such skewed results in the past...