Bizarrely, more Turretin

Turretin argues strongly that the doctrines of faith and practices can be legitmately proved by 'consequences' drawn from Scripture. Which is to say: the lack of an express word of Scripture about a certain doctrine is not a sufficient argument to countersay the claim it makes. Turretin points to the famous heretics of the church who have used exactly this strategy - the Arians and the Macedonians in particular. The Arians denied the homoousion just because it was not contained in so many words in Scripture (says FT). Gregory of Naziansus called the Macedonian (who denied the divinity of the Spirit) 'an ABC Sophist and a pettifogger of words'. In Turretin's time, he observed this strategy being used by his Catholic opponents.

A thing may be in Scripture kata lexin or kata dianoian: expressly, or implicitly. To say that all things necessary for Christian doctrine are contained in Scripture and that Scripture is sufficient means the latter rather than the former. So the sufficiency and perfection of the Scriptures does not consist in their condemning all errors and heresies by name, but only in their announcing all positive doctrines clearly (1.12.7).

Turretin could point to a number of evidences for the use of consequences to establish authoritative teaching and practice - and even the practice of Jesus and the apostles as they read the OT. Proving that Jesus was the Messiah was not a matter of explicit statement in the OT, but rather inference.

It is appropriate for the theologian to use reason in the development of consequences from Scripture because, though fallible reason is an inappropriate foundation for knowledge, it is a suitable instrument for it. In adducing theological conclusions, there is need for faith and the operation of the Holy Spirit; but reason may be the means for the operation of these. So:

Although reason concurs in educing consequences, it does not follow that faith is established by reason; as, although faith cometh by hearing, yet the senses are not the foundation of faith; faith uses readon, is not built upon it. It uses it as an instrument of application and mode of knowledge, but is not built upon it as a foundation and rule of things to be believed.

All wonderful and interesting stuff.

JI Packer on the atonement

Packer's classic 1973 essay 'What did the cross achieve?' is a terrific corrective to what he calls 'rationalistic' versions of atonement theology of both conservative and non-conservative types. Some of the most interesting stuff comes at the beginning of the essay when he puts out some methodological insights...

Thus:

Here as elsewhere methodological rationalism became in the seventeenth century a worm in the Reformed bud, leading in the next two centuries to a large-scale withering of its theological flower. p. 5

Packer asks 'what sort of knowledge of God's actuon in Christ's death may we have?' (p. 6)

The answer.. is faith-knowledge: by faith we know that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. Yes, indeed, but what sort of knowledge is faith-knowledge? It is a kind of knowledge of which God is both giver and content. It is a Spirit-given acquaintance with divine realities, given through acquaintance with God's word. ....it is a unique kind of knowledge which, though real, is not full; it is knowledge of what is discernible within a circle of light against the background of a larger darkness; it is, in short, knowledge of a mystery, the mystery of the living God at work.

The theological task

Alistair McFadyen (I have been re-reading his work for reasons that will become apparent after September 11 ;-) ) writes this of the theological task:

The theological task...has two poles: to understand and critically reflect upon Christian doctrine, tradition and history on the one hand, and the social, cultural and intellectual world in which we are living on the other. Christian reality is always nbound up with its social world, and that is one very important reason why, even when the theologian is attending to the understanding of faith through its past, theology should always involved critical reflection on the wolrds of which the Church is and has been a part. These are not two tasks but dual elements of a single task... (The Call to Personhood, p. 10-11).

I think this is one way of saying that theology has a missionary calling.

Richard Muller, and the uses of tradition accounts/genealogies in theology

I have finally started reading Richard Muller's The Unaccommodated Calvin. And a scholarly work with a more authoritative tone I have yet discovered. Muller knows his stuff, and knows he knows his stuff. In a nutshell, his thesis is that Calvin needs to be understood in his own context and on his own terms, and that this yields a more complicated picture than the one we usually get. Calvin must not be accomodated to any latter-day matrix or theological system, whether Barthian or even 'Calvinist'. Furthermore, you cannot see him as utterly divorced from the intellectual context that preceeded him, even when he differed from it. And again: you can't conclude from a simple reading of the later edition of the Institutes that 'Calvin's doctrine of XYZ was...'. His writings are more complex and variegated than that. He showed more development and more subtlety.

So, is it possible to learn from Calvin, or indeed any figure from history, without the historian always blowing the whistle? Muller concludes, nicely that

A clever theologian can accomodate Calvin to nearly any agenda; a faithful theologian - and a good historian - will seek to listen to Calvin, not to use him. p. 188

But I want to know: how? Given all the caveats that Muller has laid down, is there any way of accessing Calvin for today? How would he have us do this?

Whch leads me to a methodological point. It is standard practice in theological (and some philosophical) thinking to give an account of the tradition in which you stand, and also to show how you are correcting a tradition that went wrong at point X with thinker Y. It's a rhetorically powerful move, of course. Theology does this much more than other disciplines, because it believes in continuity as essential: even Luther and Calvin were at pains to show that they were not merely innovators, for example. And yet, this is a process that is evidently fraught with danger. We can give a wry smile now at the neo-orthodox accounts of 'Calvin against the Calvinists', for example, which have been proven to be simplistic. John Milbank has been taken to task for his sloppy readings of Dun Scotus (Milbank cites Scotus as the point at which theology got it all wrong and it has been downhill ever since).

But, under Muller's method, is such a process even possible? Is it possible to narrate the tradition in the way that theologians of all colours do as a matter of course?

Post-It label Theology...

In his impressive book Bound to Sin, Alistair McFadyen makes an appeal against ‘Post-It™ label theology’, which, he explains, is when God is ‘stuck on’ to secular analyses and descriptions of the world. For it to carry explanatory force, theology must add something significant to our level of explanation and understanding of the world. As McFadyen puts it with regard to his study of sin:

If God is the most basic reality and explanation of the world, then it must be the case that the world cannot adequately be explained, understood, lived in, without reference to God in our fundamental means both of discernment and action.

Which means that theology ought to be more attentive to its own way speaking and to its own concepts than to concepts drawn from elsewhere.

(Alistair I. McFadyen, Bound to Sin: Abuse, Holocaust, and the Christian Doctrine of Sin, Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine; 6 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) p.12. )

Of the use of literature in theological work

In my doctoral work I have made a use of TS Eliot's play Murder in the Cathedral as a framing device and a stimulus to theological and scriptural reflection.

This strategy could be objected to on the grounds that:

• Eliot was at best an amateur theologian (he himself used this term)- and, in fact, had some heterodox tendencies (for example, the influence of Eastern non-Christian mysticism is evident even in his later work).
• His purpose was aesthetic rather than theological - this isn't serious theology
• in fact, there is a long Christian tradition of suspicion of drama

To which I reply:

• the tradition of Christian theological reflection includes quite a number of literary/aesthetic works, and should not exclude them. In fact, exclusion of them would greatly impoverish the tradition of Christian thought.
• a number of significant contemporary philosophers are using literary narratives and plays in their work. Martha Nussbaum and Richard Rorty are but two examples. Narratives necessarily embedd discussion of human life in relationships with others and in time - ie, they enable a complex discussion of the human situation.
• what is more, serious theologians - Hauerwas for example, and Rowan Williams and Paul Fiddes and David Ford - are using literary works in precisely this way. They do so not merely in a 'literature and theology' mode, but to enrich their discussion of theological concepts - ie in 'serious' theology.
• imaginative works have always had an influence on Christian theological thought and it is just a kind of academic snobbery to exclude them, or to question their place in the debate.
• in fact, narratives of imaginative power have a capacity to do what abstract theological work cannot. They are perhaps more suited to the business at hand - because they deal with humans in the midst of life, under the eye of providence etc.
• And, the obvious point: the Bible is more 'literary' than it is 'philosophical'!