There Are No Ordinary Christians

More from the Webster interview:

Why should ordinary Christians care about such seemingly recondite matters as how to articulate the immanent being of the Trinity?

There aren’t any “ordinary” Christians; there are saints, a few of whom are appointed to the task of thinking hard about and trying to articulate the common faith of the church. We don’t usually need to use formal theological language and concepts in the everyday life of the church in prayer, preaching and service.

But like any other important human activity, faith has to achieve a measure of conceptual clarity if it is to understand and express itself, and part of that process is the development of abstract concepts like Trinity, incarnation and substance. What’s important is that we don’t treat such concepts as if they were improvements on the ordinary ways in which the saints express the faith; they are simply shorthand terms, a tool kit which helps us keep certain crucial aspects of the gospel alive in the mind and worship of the church. Theology and theological abstractions matter because the gospel matters, because the gospel concerns truth, and because living in and from the truth involves the discipleship of reason.

Here an Apostle Speaks

“Overtaken as we are by such apostolic witness, we surely find that one way of proceeding has been irrevocably barred from us. We are no longer entitled to take up a position vis-á-vis what is said, to handle it as a possible but not inescapably necessary object of our acknowledgement. Still less are we free to peer behind it and give ourselves a satisfactory account of its background and genesis, or to transcend it by conceptual translation. Here an apostle speaks, and what is said transcends and encloses us. It also transcends and encloses our exegetical and dogmatic labours, which will remain disordered until directed by the confession that in these last days God has spoken to us by one who is Son. The historical, literary, and speculative virtues of exegetes and dogmaticians are therefore subordinate to spiritual graces: faithfulness to the apostolic gospel, attentiveness, perseverance, charity in debate and humility under correction, openness to the gifts of God, a desire to serve the church.”

[John Webster, “One Who Is Son” in The Epistle to the Hebrews and Christian Theology, 96]

The Ground of Israel and the Church is God

“Yet there is more: this continuity-within-contrast [found in the exordium to Hebrews, 1:1–4] is grounded in God. What gives shape, direction, coherence and climax to the ‘great drama of history of revelation’ is God as its enduring subject. The simple, absolute noun θεος, unadorned by epithet or appositional phrase, not only holds together the participial statement and the main clause; it announces the fundamental reality in which all else in the exhortation has its ground.…

God as the single speaking subject in the history of revelation is the ‘pledge and ground’ of revelation’s historical unity It is because of God, therefore, that the church cannot overlook ‘the fathers,’ that is, Israel. This history of divine revelation, at whose latter end stands the church, includes the existence of Israel as the sphere of prospect and promise. This means, therefore, that the church’s continuity with Israel is not simply at the level of the history of religions; it is, rather a theological state of affairs which must be elucidated out of the fact that at different points in the sequential history of revelation both israel and the church are addressees of God’s speech.”

[John Webster, “One Who Is Son: Theological Reflections on the Exordium of the Epistle to the Hebrews” in The Epistle to the Hebrews and Christian Theology, 75]

An Embarrassing and Stubborn Discipline?

A Christian doctrine of creation is doubly inhibited: by the ineffability of its object, and by the limits of fallen finite intelligence. The doctrine is chiefly concerned, no so much with causal explanation of what is as with contemplation of the fact that what is might not have been, and of the infinite bliss of God who lies on the other side of that ‘might not have been’. The doctrine’s core, in other words, is not cosmology but theology proper — God’s ‘invisible nature’ (Rom. 1:20), which, even when manifest in the visibilia of created reality, exceeds comprehensive intelligence (a point obscured when teaching about creation is annexed by natural theology). … The rule which governs teaching about the Trinity, and therefore about creation as one of its extensions is: love alone restores knowledge. Love, furthermore, is the end of theological contemplation of the creator and his work.…

What Christian theology says about creation is a function of what it says about God, and what it says about God is a function of what it hears from God. This is why a Christian doctrine of creation is an exercise in dogmatics. Like all dogmatics, it partakes in the movement of created reason as with the illumination of divine revelation it is conducted out of darkness into the light and life of God. Any worth which a dogmatics of creation possesses derives from participation in this movement, above all as dogmatics follows the indications of the prophets and apostles.… In the matter of the triune creator, dogmatics frequently stumbles, and often stands in need of others — especially philosophical theologians — to recall it to its proper matter and task. And yet we ought not to greet this state of affairs with relief as an opportunity to disencumber ourselves of an embarrassing and stubborn discipline.”

[John Webster, “Trinity and Creation,” IJST 12, Jan, 2010]

Do Not Protest Too Swiftly

“The doctrine of the incarnation is an attempt at conceptual expansion of the church’s confession that Jesus Christ is Lord. It is humble, delighted, repentant and joyful repetition at the level of theological concepts of the primary affirmation of the church: that the church’s Lord, Jesus, is the incomparably comprehensive context of all creaturely being, knowing and acting, because in and as him God is with humankind in free, creative and saving love. Theological talk of the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ is thus the orderly intellectual exposition of the divine self-exposition; it is a constructive (and therefore critical) attempt to trace the movement of the being and act of God the Son who takes flesh.

To write in such terms is to invite the reproach that confession and critical inquiry have been fatally confused. But theology would be wise not to rise too swiftly or with too much determination to protest against this reproach. Partly this is because the charge of ‘foolishness’ is a permanent accompaniment for any authentically Christian theology which is serious about struggling against sin in the intellectual realm: the question of the regeneration of the mind can never be laid aside in the way in which theology responds to its critics. Partly, again, theology’s reluctance to make a response of the kind for which its critics might hope is a function of the fact that theology is a positive science, that is, a mode of intellectual activity ordered towards a given reality of a particular character. Theology cannot establish on transcendental grounds the conditions of possibility of its object, either to itself nor to its critics. To attempt to do so would be to adopt a perverse stance towards the object, one which would, indeed, be almost a willful rejection of that object and its claim. For that object — God incarnate, the Word made flesh — is not one more matter for the free play of intellectual judgment. Rather, the object is itself judge, wholly and originally; and perhaps the test of the authenticity of any theology of incarnation will be whether it emerges from that judgment or prefers, instead, to establish an independent colony of the mind from which to make raids on the church’s confession.”

[John Webster, “Incarnation” in Word and Church, 113–114]

Theological to the Bone

“The question, therefore, for Christian eschatology and anthropology in postmodernity is not what may still be said by Christian theology in the postmodern condition, for there is no such simple condition: ‘the possibility of speech about God can be founded on nothing less than God’s own speaking.’ That means that in one important sense, Christian theology in postmodernity must, as Barth once put it, carry on ‘as if nothing had happened.’ In Barth’s case, this was not because nothing had happened; indeed, what had happened in Barth’s context was very grave indeed. But Barth knew better than almost anyone in his context that what that context required more than anything else was the service of a theology which was theological to the bone, which did not allow its context, however stringent, to distract it from the task of clarifying the Christian confession, precisely so that it could indicate to its culture the word of judgment and grace spoken to it by the gospel. Theology’s task, in other words, is neither apologetic nor revisionary, but exegetical and dogmatic, busying itself quietly and confidently with its proper concerns, not in order to sidestep the exigencies of whatever its host culture may be, but precisely so as to be able to address them with the right kind of Christian specificity, determination, and hope.”

[John Webster, “Eschatology and Anthropology,” in Word and Church, 267]

Context Is Not Fate

“Put differently: Christian theology, and therefore Christian eschatology and anthropology, is responsible in its context but not in any straightforward way responsible to its context. For context is not fate; it may not pretend to have a necessary character, to be anything other than a contingent set of cultural arrangements which stands under the judgment of the Christian gospel. And, moreover, context – despite what we are often instructed – is not transparent or self-interpreting. Truthful understanding of context requires the exercise of discernment, and, for Christian faith and theology, such discernment is a gift of the Holy Spirit, a mode of sanctification and a prophetic task; it is not simply a skill acquired through cultural immersion. We do not by nature know who or where or when we are; and if we are to come to know these things, our knowledge itself must be the Spirit’s work, greeted with the obedience of faith.”

[John Webster, “Eschatology and Anthropology,” in Word and Church, 267]

Humanity’s Location

“How does this understanding of the dogmatic task of Christian anthropology relate to the claim that Christian theology now is undertaken in the context of postmodernity? It is important that ‘postmodernity’ should not be allowed to become itself an eschatological term, as if the advent of postmodernity were the new age, such that the church and its theology now find themselves in an entirely altered situation, which requires them to rethink the fabric of Christian culture. Such epochal claims are both historically and theologically deficient. historically, their weakness is that, far from enabling reflective awareness of our present situation and tasks, they are often little more than (rather specious) philosophical-cum-literary proposals masquerading as historical-cultural analysis. Theologically, their weakness is that they promote an account of the church and its theological responsibilities which are largely unchastened by the discipline of the gospel.

Over against such epochal thinking, in which church and theology are simply bit-players in some larger cultural drama, I want to suggest that by the grace of God it is given to the church (and therefore to its theology) to discern the situation of humanity faithfully and truthfully – in faith, not in sight, but nevertheless in truth – and therefore to see the human situation now as that stretch of human history which lies between the first and second advents of Jesus, in whom and for whom all things are created and perfected. Whatever else we may wish to say about the location of church and theology, that, at least, must be said: church and theology stand in the space between Jesus’ coming in humiliation and his coming in glory. That space – and not any cultural space, postmodern or otherwise – is determinative of what church and theology may and must be.”

[John Webster, “Eschatology and Anthropology,” in Word and Church, 266]

One Need Not Pass

“The sufficiency of Scripture means that in Holy Scripture may be found all that is needed for faith to know the gospel. Scripture is sufficient for its end, which is the publication of the saving knowledge of God. Holy reason therefore finds in Scripture its limit—that is, the point beyond which holy reason may not pass because it need not pass.”

[John Webster, Holiness, 20]

Redemption *Is* the Principle

”What should hold lament and polemic in check is a gospel-derived awareness of the necessary pathos which attends theological work, the roots of which lie in the fact that the world is at enmity with the church and is reluctant to learn about the divine wisdom with which the saints have been entrusted. Yet even a due sense of pathos ought not to overwhelm the tranquil pursuit of theology, made possible and fruitful not by the capacities of its practitioners or the opportunities afforded by its cultural settings, but by the infinite power of divine goodness shedding abroad the knowledge of itself. That movement, in its boundless depth and its capacity to overcome the mind’s estrangement from its creator, constitutes the principles of systematic theology.”

[John Webster, “Principles of Systematic Theology,” IJST 11:1 Jan 2009]

The Righteousness of God

“In this is his righteousness: that he, the righteous one, sharing in the inner-divine righteousness and administering the divine law and its just commands, takes upon himself the guilt and alienation of the unrighteous creature. His divine righteousness is not in opposition to this assumption of the creature’s burden; he does not have to lay aside or negate the iusititia Dei interna to come to our aid. Quite the opposite: his taking the part of the unrighteous is the enactment of his righteousness, precisely because in so doing he recreates righteous fellowship. As with God’s holiness, so with his righteousness: God’s holiness in se is made known ad extra not in the destruction of creatures but in the fulfillment of his purpose in election by purging the creature of sin and so perfecting a people for himself. God’s righteousness in se is made known ad extra  not in delivering the creature over to the penalty of the law but in the supreme act of fellowship, in which he takes the creature’s penalty upon himself.”

[John Webster in What is Justification About?, 53]

The saving work of God, including his work as the one who justifies sinners, is a central episode in the gospel. The theme of the gospel, however, is the eternal glory of the triune God, a glory that includes (though infinitely exceeds) the glorification of God’s creatures.
» John Webster in What is Justification About?, p. 46

My Neighbor Obliges Me

“Love involves my ackknowledgement that I am obliged by my neighbour as a reality given to me by God, a reality which I would often like to evade but which encounters me with a transcendent uimperative force. Why is this ‘transcendent’ ground for works of human fellowship theologically decisive? Because thereby my neighbour, the one with whom I stand in relation, is given to me, forming part of my destiny in the company of the saints. My neighbour is a summons to fellowship, because in him or her I find a claim on me that is not casual or fortuitous (and thereby dispensable) but rather precedes my will and requires that I act in my neighbour’s regard. Without a sense that fellowship is (God-)given, my neigbour would not present a sufficiently strong claim to disturb me out of complacency and indifference into active, initiative-taking regard.

Some basic acts of human fellowship—mercy to strangers, fidelity, patient attentiveness to the unlovely, devotion to long-standing and largely unreciprocated care of the comatose and handicapped—require for their sustenance a perception that the neighbour is one with whom I have been set in fellowship independent of (sometimes against) my will. My neighbour obliges me because he or she is the presence to me of the appointment and vocation of the holy God.

Without givenness, without fellowship as more than a contingent fact, without the neighbour as a divine call, there is only my will. But, if fellowship is a condition and not merely one possibility for my ironic self to entertain, then in building common life—in culture, politics and ethics—I resist the relationlessness of sin into which I may drift, and, sanctified by Christ and Spirit, I realize my nature as one created for holiness.”

[John Webster, Holiness, 97]