Not Lost!

“Why did the Son of God become man, one of us, our brother, our fellow in the human situation? The answer is: In order to judge the world. But… in order to judge it in the exercise of His kingly freedom to show His grace in the execution of His judgment, to pronounce us free in passing sentence, to free us by imprisoning us, to ground our life on our death, to redeem us and save us by our destruction. That is how God has actually judged in Jesus Christ. That is why He humbled Himself. That is why He went into the far country as the obedient Son of the Father. That is why He did not abandon us, but came amongst us as our brother. That is why the Father sent Him. That was the eternal will of God and its fulfillment in time—the execution of this strange judgment. If this strange judgment had not taken place, there would be only a lost world and lost men.Since it has taken place, we can only recognize and believe and proclaim to the whole world and all men: Not lost!”

[Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1, 222]

Biblical In the Sense That Mattered Most

“Biblical theology begins with the text and leads back to the text. The systematic theologian is also concerned with discerning, clarifying and extrapolating the unitive patterns of Scripture, and with their articulation in forms accessible (not necessarily amenable!) to the contemporary church. The work of discernment and clarification is closely related to that of the biblical theologian. That of extrapolation may take a further step, but will still be identifiably rooted in the concerns and emphases of Scripture itself. The fourth-century doctrine of the consubstantiality of Father and Son and the fifth—century doctrine of hypostatic union are both evidently several stages down the road of christological development from the language and conceptuality of Scripture.

Yet, properly understood, each is securely rooted in the biblical testimony to Christ, and was offered to the church not as a philosophical complication of its faith, but precisely as a hermeneutical device to secure certain ways of reading key New Testament texts rather than other ways of doing so. No theological school was ever more wiling to cite biblical prooftexts than the Arians. The question which had to be decided in AD 325 was not what the Bible said, but how what it said was to be made sense of; and the NIcene theologians and their successors insisted that the wider pattern or ‘scope’ of scriptural testimony concerning the ‘Son’ of God was secured by the doctrine of the homoousion rather than some of the available alternatives. The key term was certainly unbiblical in one sense (not to be found in any reliable concordance), but thoroughly biblical in the sense that mattered most.”

[Trevor Hart, “Systematic—In What Sense?” in Out of Egypt, 348–9]

Made Capable of Hearing

“Reading Scripture is inescapably bound to regeneration; only after a drastic reworking of spiritual psychology can the language of virtue have its place. What is therefore fundamental in giving an account of hermeneutical conversion is not a theory of moral virtue or the reader’s ‘character,’ but a soteriology and a pneumatology. Through the incarnate Word, crucified and risen, we are made capable of hearing the gospel, but only as we are at one and the same time put to death and raised to new life. Through the Spirit of the crucified and risen Christ we are given the capacity to set mind and will on the truth of the gospel and so read as those who have been reconciled to God.”

[John Webster, Holy Scripture, 89]

By Allowing Himself to Be Made Son

“The thrilling part is that this triumph of Yahweh, whom all the nations now adore, took place in the utter humiliation of the Cross. In order to explain how this could be so, the hymn opens up that perspective on humanity as a whole which has been our topic. Verse six, alluding to a version of the Adam myth in the book of Job reminds us that man wishes to be God. Nor is this desire of his entirely misconceived. Yet man pursues it in the style of a Prometheus, hunting the prey which is equality with God, taking it by violence. But man is not God. By making himself like unto God he sets himself over against truth, and so the adventure ends in that nothingness where truth is not. The actual God-man does just the opposite. He is God’s Son, his whole being a gesture of gratitude and self-offering. In reality, the Cross is but the definitive radicalization of that gesture which the Son is. Not the grasping audacity of Prometheus but the Son’s obedience on the Cross is the place where man’s divinization is accomplished. Man can become God, not by making himself God, but by allowing himself to be made ‘Son.’”

[Joseph Ratzinger, Eschatology, 64–65 (w/ a reminder about the Posting-Is-Not-Total-Agreement policy of this little blog)]

The Most Telling Instance

“The redefinition of the interests and scope of philosophical inquiry which resulted when ‘analysis by quantitative elements broke loose from the subordinate role it had played within an ontological scheme’ was, on [Kenneth] Schmitz’s account, immense and immensely damaging. The history of modern Protestant theology and biblical hermeneutics betrays similar features, their advance retarded but not finally resisted by the flowering of scholastic divinity in the post-Reformation era: a privileging of the elements of the biblical economy, and a reluctance or inability to trace those elements to their cause in the fullness of God’s own life. The reluctance left Protestant theology exposed to the naturalization of those same elements when viewed in detachment from their principles, of which the steady secularization of biblical science is only the most telling instance.”

[John Webster, The Domain of the Word, vii–viii]

Heard in Childish Wailing

“What worthy return can we make for so great a condescension? The One Only-begotten God, ineffably born of God, entered the Virgin’s womb and grew and took the frame of poor humanity. He Who upholds the universe, within Whom and through Whom are all things, was brought forth by common childbirth; He at Whose voice Archangels and Angels tremble, and heaven and earth and all the elements of this world are melted, was heard in childish wailing. The Invisible and Incomprehensible, Whom sight and feeling and touch cannot gauge, was wrapped in a cradle. If any man deem all this unworthy of God, the greater must he own his debt for the benefit conferred the less such condescension befits the majesty of God. He by Whom man was made had nothing to gain by becoming Man; it was our gain that God was incarnate and dwelt among us, making all flesh His home by taking upon Him the flesh of One. We were raised because He was lowered; shame to Him was glory to us. He, being God, made flesh His residence, and we in return are lifted anew from the flesh to God.”

[Hilary of Poitiers, On the Trinity, II.25]

Baptists Without a Theology of Baptism

“That said, believer’s baptism has been a decisive point of identity at various periods in history, and so needs to be considered. The classical Baptist account stresses not just the subject of baptism (one who is already a believer), but its mode (full immersion). I have noted already the unfortunate case of Whitsitt, dismissed from his academic post for making a historically correct observation about the late adoption of the practice of immersion by the seventeenth-century English Baptists; this challenged the mythology that the primitive practice of immersion was preserved by true believers at every point in history and was felt by some to be deeply damaging to Baptist identity. In Britain, there was a significant crisis even earlier, when Baptist supporters of the new Bible Society tried to insist that the Greek word baptizo be translated ‘immerse’ or ‘plunge’, rather than ‘baptize’ in Bibles published by the Society. The mod of baptism had become important.

This insistence on immersion highlights a striking feature of historical defences of the Baptist position on baptism: it is far more based on a recovery of biblical praxis than on any reflection on biblical theology. That is, Baptists have tended to argue that the practice of the New Testament church was the immersion of believers only, and so this should be our practice; any consideration of a theology of baptism is seriously subordinated to this demand that New Testament practice be imitated. Baptist writings on baptism rather rarely get beyond this polemical point concerning praxis, arguing far more about the mode (immersion) and subjects (believers only) of baptism than about the meaning and effect of the sacrament/ordinance. Perhaps bizarrely, Baptists have been remarkably poor at developing a theology of baptism over their history, often resting content with developing an account of proper administration of the rite.”

[Stephen Holmes, Baptist Theology, 90]

Denial of Easy Identification of Divine and Human

“There is doubtless a danger of ‘spiritualizing’ the church with such affirmations. It is clearly important that this emphasis on the priority of divine action over the church as an act of human association not be allowed to eclipse the ‘visibility’ of the church. The polemical portrayal of Protestant religion as bare subjectivism without objective social form or endurance is doubtless a caricature, but it nevertheless identifies a potentially disruptive element in the dogmatics we have just outlined. Can a society which is in its essence ‘invisible’ ever be really human—that is, historical, material, bodily? In an evangelical ecclesiology, the gesture—rhetorical and theological—towards invisibility must certainly be made, and its absence from an ecclesiology may be symptomatic of other disorders—a lavishly over-realized eschatology, an eliding of the distinction between the gospel and its human representations, an atrophied sense of the church’s fallibility, above all, perhaps, a routinization of the operations of the Spirit.

Properly defined, the concept of the invisibility of the church is a standing denial of any easy identification of divine and human work. Talk of the church’s invisibility secures the all-important point that ‘[o]nly as creatura verbi divini [creature of the divine word] is the Church an object of faith, because God’s action in establishing and disclosing the true relationship between the creator and his creation that makes faith possible can be confessed as the content of faith’. Yet when this necessary gesture takes over, and is allowed to become the only constitutive moment for ecclesiology, other problems quickly emerge, and a picture of the church is promoted in which the human Christian community is unstable, liminal, and so incapable of sustaining a coherent historical and social trajectory.”

[John Webster, “The Self-Organizing Power of the Gospel of Christ: Episcopacy and Community Formation”, IJST 3:1 2001]

To Be the Theatre of His Glory

“And if we inquire in to the goal of creation, the object of the whole, the object of heaven and earth and all creation, I can only say that it is to be the theatre of His glory. The meaning is that God is being glorified. Doxa, gloria, means quite simply to become manifest. God wills to be visible in the world; and to that extent creation is a significant action of God. ‘Behold, it was very good.’ Whatever objections may be raised against the reality of the world, its goodness incontestably consists in the fact that it may be the theatre of His glory, and man the witness to this glory. We must not desire to know a priori what goodness is, or to grumble if the world does not correspond to it. For the purpose for which God made the world it is also good. ‘The theatre of His glory, theatric gloriae Dei’, says Calvin of it. But man is the witness; he who is allowed to be where God is made glorious, is not a merely passive witness; the witness has to express what he has seen. That is man’s nature, that is what he is able to do, to be a witness of God’s acts. This purpose of God ‘justifies’ Him as the Creator.”

[Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, 58]

More Modest and More Urgent

“Compare a modern scholarly biblical commentary with one by Calvin. The difference is not simply the availability to the modern writer of considerably more by way of historical materials, but a changed relation to the text itself and to the act of explication. A modern scholarly commentator has the task of accounting for the text, and a set of tools at her disposal to establish how the text came to be. Calvin’s task is at once more modest and more urgent: more modest, because he is simply interested in eliciting the plain sense of the text; more urgent, because his rhetoric positions the reader in such a way as to be accountable to the text, or better, to be called to account by God through the medium of the text. Hence a fundamental criterion for the success of a piece of exegesis is its ability to let the rhetoric of Scripture stand and itself shape the theologian’s discourse.”

[John Webster, ‘Theological Theology’ in Confessing God, 21]

The Cosmic Throne Becomes the Throne of Grace

“Our subject is the divinity of Christ, not his humanity, and so here I merely mention the way Hebrews portrays Jesus as the high priest who can fulfill his ministry only by sharing fully the human condition, becoming like his brothers and sisters in every respect, tested in every respect through suffering and death, so that he understands human weakness and now, from his heavenly throne, exercises mercy and grace to sinners. What is perhaps less well recognized is the connection between lordship (the subject of chap. 1) and high priesthood (the subject that chap. 2 begins to treat) that the author achieves by his use of Ps. 8. 

The latter is used to show that it is only through incarnation, humiliation, and everything it means to be mortal humanity that the Son could attain to his eschatological lordship over all things. This is because his lordship is exercised for the sake of his human brothers and sisters. It is now no longer simply the sovereignty he shared with his Father from eternity, but now a sovereignty exercised in human solidarity with humans. The cosmic throne is now also therefore the throne of grace that sinners can approach with boldness (4:16). So the high priestly work of atonement is the way in which he comes to exercise his sovereignty in the the way that he does — salvifically.”

[Richard Bauckham, “The Divinity of Jesus Christ in the Epistle to the Hebrews,” in Bacukham, ed., The Epistle to the Hebrews and Christian Theology, 26–27]

2 Corinthians has for a long time seemed to me among the most impressive documents of early Christianity. When I need to remind myself that the Christian message is convincing - still convincing today in spite of our great chronological and cultural distance from its first-century origins - I turn as readily to 2 Corinthians as I do to the gospels, and cannot remember failing to be impressed.
» Richard Bauckham (via wesleyhill)

The Text Says So

“Gundry’s antithesis is perplexing: the wisdom is God’s, he says, not Christ’s, even though the text says ‘Christ has become for us wisdom’ and ‘Christ has become for us … righteousness,’ [1 Cor. 1:30] and so forth. Again, this is bound up with the language of union in Christ: ‘you are in Christ Jesus.’ Nevertheless, the next word is a relative pronoun whose referent is Christ, who is explicitly said to have become our righteousness. Why, then, the complete antithesis (‘God’s, not Christ’s’)? This is not far removed from the ideas found in 2 Corinthians 5:19–21: God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself. So yes, this righteousness is God’s; and yes, this righteousness is Christ’s. The text says so.”

[D. A. Carson, “The Vindication of Imputation,” in Husbands & Treier, Justification: What’s at Stake in the Current Debate]

Pure Tones of the Psalm of Grace

“There is no gift that has not been earned by Him. … The covenant of redemption does not stand by itself, but is the basis of the economy of salvation. It is the great prelude which in the Scriptures resounds from eternity on into our own time and in which we can already listen to the pure tones of the psalm of grace.”

[Geerhardus Vos, “Doctrine of the Covenant in Reformed Theology,” in Covenant and Justification, 133]

Foreign to Paul’s Arguments

“While I would agree that the law, far from being set aside, exercises its full judicial role in these proceedings (both in condemnation and justification), it would seem foreign to Paul’s arguments to suggest with Wright that the Torah itself, when helped by the Spirit, becomes the source of life and ‘the required δικαιωμα to God’s people.’ To be sure, the ‘circumcision not made with hands’ is part of the promise of the new covenant in Jeremiah 31. yet as in other rival accounts, justification itself takes on the character of moral transformation, according to Wright. Is Paul’s good news really that now that we have the Spirit, we can have life by the law?”

[Michael Horton, Covenant and Justification: Union with Christ, 121]