What does the Christian term Atonement Mean?

This article addresses what Christ's atonement is, but not its extent (whether unlimited or limited). That idea has been dealt with in other areas of this blog. Please refer to articles on Calvinism and Arminianism to understand discussions related to the "extent of Christ's atonement" upon humanity.

- skinhead

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Did I kill Jesus? Part three of a series on atonement

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2011/08/did-i-kill-jesus-part-three-of-a-series-on-atonement/

by Roger Olson

on August 21, 2011

Returning to my discussion of good books about atonement.

Now I turn to what I consider one of the best recent books on atonement: Scot McKnight’s, A Community Called Atonement.

I suggest to anyone reading this book that they turn first to Chapter Eighteen: Atonement as Missional Praxis: Living the Story of the Word. It might have been good for Scot to put some of this chapter’s material first because it lays his cards on the table with regard to theological methodology and especially the role of the Bible in Christian theory and practice. I could not agree with Scot more about the TENDENCY of many conservative Christians to put the Bible first–even before God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit–in their hierarchy of loyalties. Scot labels many conservative Christians (I think he is talking mainly to and about evangelicals) “Cognitive Behaviorists” who think that knowing more about the Bible automatically makes them better Christians.

Scot views the Bible as the communication of an overarching narrative about God. (I would add with Hans Frei that the Bible’s main purpose is to identify God for us–meaning God’s character.) “Scripture is more than information revealed for our knowledge so that, in knowing more, we will be more.” (145) In brief, Scot’s point is that our loyalty as Christians is to God as revealed in Jesus and to the Holy Spirit dwelling in us and in the church and the Bible is the God-ordained and inspired instrument of strengthening that loyalty and our praxis growing out of it.

Let me add something here that I think is consistent with what Scot says and MAY make his point even clearer. (I don’t know that Scot would agree, but I think he probably would.) Too many conservative evangelicals view the Bible as a NOT-YET-SYSTEMATIZED SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY such that once the correct doctrinal system is drawn out of it and correctly organized and expressed (e.g., in a massive one volume systematic theology seen on the shelves of every Christian bookstore in America!) the Bible is dispensable.

Scot’s point (I think) is that God’s self-revelation (including Scripture) is for the purpose of relationship-community. This happens through the medium of story: “Jesus’ story is to become our story as we identify with him and we are incorporated into him.” (147) The purpose of Scripture, then is “identity-shaping” (146) more than information-giving.

So what about atonement? A major point of the book is expressed on page 147: “Central to my understanding of atonement is the notion of identification for incorporation.” Throughout the book the overarching theme is that “atonement” is not just about what Christ accomplished on the cross but about the entire process of restoring to wholeness we “cracked Eikons” of God through being incorporated into God’s community. Scot rightly points out that the English word “atonement” literally means “at-one-ment”–reconcilation or restored relationship.

(He doesn’t mention this, but my study of the word leads me to believe it was invented by Tyndale for his English translation of the Bible. (Side bar: I remember years ago reading The Kingdom of the Cults by Walter Martin. There Martin took Mary Baker Eddy and Christian Science to task for defining “atonement” as “at-one-ment” as if that was her invention and heretical interpretation of the word. While I agreed with Martin that the CS interpretation, being monistic, is heretical, I now chuckle when I think about how wrong Martin was about the origins and meaning of the term!)

So, for Scot, “atonement” is an umbrella term for salvation (although he never says it quite that way) and his view of salvation is holistic. It includes not just forensic justification or personal conversion. For him salvation, atonement, is incorporation into Christ so that our brokenness is healed and we are restored to what we are meant to be–whole persons in community with God and others through Jesus Christ. Thus, Jesus’ atoning work includes incarnation, temptation and victory over it (Scot loves Irenaeus as do I), death, resurrection, outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the church at Pentecost and the Spirit’s inclusion of us into the church, the continuation of God’s people.

One of my favorite quotes from this book is on page 132: “A thoroughly biblical understanding of atonement, then, is earthy: It is about restored relations with God and with self, but also with others and with the world–in the here and now.” Consistent with that, Scot ends his book with a call for Christians to do justice in the world as part of their participation in the mission of God. I can’t resist offering here another great quote from the book: “God’s redemptive intent is to restore and rehabilitate humans in their relationship with God, self, others, and the world, and when that happens justice is present and established. The followers of Jesus both proclaim and embody atoning justice by fighting injustice and establishing just that kind of justice. Their forward guard is surrounded with the banner of grace and forgiveness.” (133)

But what about the classical atonement theories? Which one does Scot finally embrace? He embraces them all: Christus victor, recapitulation, moral influence, satisfaction/penal substitution, etc. All of these, he argues, are metaphors for something ultimately mysterious–God’s work through Jesus Christ on our behalf for restoring relationship.

In order to understand Scot’s meaning here, and its significance for his account of Christ’s atonement, you have to pay close attention to Chapter Five: Atonement as Metaphor: Metaphor and Mechanics.” On pages 38-39 Scot lays out a view of theology consistent with (if not influenced by) 19th century American theologian Horace Bushnell. Bushnell famously argued, much to the chagrin of his critics mired in Protestant scholasticism (Turretin and all that) that all theological language is metaphorical. But he also argued that ALL HUMAN LANGUAGE is metaphorical. Many conservative evangelicals will balk at Scot’s agreement with Bushnell (whether Scot meant to agree with Bushnell or not, I don’t know): “…we are bound to our metaphors. This is where a moderate postmodern theology or a robust critical realist theology will simply fall down and admit that, to one degree or another, theology is metaphorical. We cannot unpack the metaphors to find the core, reified truth in a proposition that can be stated for all time in a particular formula. We have the metaphors and they will lead us there, but they are what we have. Yes, what we have is metaphors, but the Christian claim is that metaphors do work: they get us there.” [sic, all human interaction (including language, conscience, mental thoughts and visualizations, sociological/psysiological/psychological relationships, etc) is symbolic - and therefore metaphorical - because human beings are primarily and essentially visual beings. - skinhead]

(Again, let me say in a sidebar that these programmatic moves by Scot make him one of my postconservative evangelicals whether he likes that label or not. I won’t apply the label to him if he doesn’t want it, but I will say his overall approach to theology, the Bible, doctrine, theological language, cautious openness to revision, etc., is typical of what I mean by “postconservative evangelicalism.”)

Back to Scot’s reflections on the theories of the atonement. They are all metaphorical; none matches exactly what God has done for us in Jesus and continues to do for us and in us through the Holy Spirit. They all find roots and justification in Scripture and tradition. Each has its place and value.

Scot uses his own metaphor of a bag of golf clubs to make his point. A good golfer uses all the clubs in his bag and not just one. Similarly, the church needs all the biblical metaphors and historical theories of the atonement and not just one. BUT, all the metaphors and theories come UNDER the umbrella of the wider, more holistic metaphor of reconciliation and restoration of cracked Eikons (us).

So let’s get right to it: what about penal substitution? That seems to be the ONLY atonement theory that is controversial right now. Fortunately, Scot does not simply discard it as some tend to do. But his critique is that TOO MANY of its advocates have treated it mechanically rather than relationally. He rightly says “This theory of penal substitution has come in for hard times in current theological discussion, much of the hard times being gross caricature and political posturing.” (40) Let’s stop there and dwell on that for a moment. (Another sidebar coming….)

I’ve already commented in this series of posts about the gross caricatures of the penal substitution theory–depicted as “divine child abuse” and so forth. But what does Scot mean by “political posturing?” He doesn’t explain and the context isn’t very helpful. The only ideology he mentions is radical feminism and he decries SOME feminists’ caricaturing of penal substitution as divine child abuse that justifies abuse of children and women. But he also mentions some very conservative evangelical theologians who treat penal substitution as if it were THE ONE AND ONLY legitimate theory (and not really a theory at all!) of atonement. I THINK Scot means that SOME people on both ends of the spectrum of critics are using their rhetoric against or for penal substitution to score points with their constituents and do harm to others within their theological contexts.

(For example (I’m departing somewhat from Scot here, but I think he might agree) SOME conservative evangelical critics of Recovering the Scandal of the Cross (by Mark Baker and Joel Green) have simply flown off the handle with their criticisms and have depicted the book as cavalierly tossing aside penal substitution in favor of, say, Abelard’s moral example or moral influence theory. (Read: Baker and Green are liberals!) SOME of the accusations aimed at the book and its authors sound more like diatribes meant to marginalize the authors (and positive reviewers) within the evangelical movement than like careful, scholarly examinations of the books argument.)

Back to Scot and his book. Let me quote Scot about critics of penal substitution here. “…it is irresponsible for critics to depict penal substitution as ‘divine child abuse’ because all it takes is love-of-neighbor readings of major theologians–and I will mention here Leon Morris, John Stott, and J. I. Packer–and one will readily discover that for each of them penal substitution is contextualized into a Trinitarian context wherein it is not the Father being ‘ticked off’ at humans and venting his rage on the Son. Instead, atonement for penal substitutionists is prompted by the loving grace of the Father.” (41) And, I would add, ” of the Son.”

Lest anyone get defensive, Scot adds “But advocates of penal substitution should listen to their critics.” (41) “…I am persuaded,” he says, “that penal substitution theorists could help us all out if they would baptize their theory into the larger redemptive grace of God more adequately.” (43) So how does Scot himself do this?

Scot’s actual treatment of the theory comes on page 113 of the book–wrapped into a larger and more holistic treatment of atonement metaphors. And he attempts to shift the focus from the “mechanics” of substitutionary atonement to Christ’s mysterious identification with us in his death that plays ONE ROLE (not every role) in reconciliation and restored community. Here is how Scot expresses it: “He [Jesus] identifies with us, all the way down into death (so, Phil. 2:5-11), so that we can be incorporated into him and find life–both here and now and then and there.” (113)

Scot argues that the Bible “often” teaches that Jesus suffered death “on our part.” (113) And he means, instead of us. That is, “Jesus identified with us so far ‘all the way down’ that he died our death, so that we, being incorporated into him, might partake in his glorious, life-giving resurrection to new life. He died instead of us (substitution); he died a death that was the consequence of sin (penal).” (113) But completely missing from Scot’s account of penal substitution is any thought of God the Father having to have his pound of flesh and taking out his vengeful wrath on Jesus instead of on us.

Here is how I interpret Scot’s “take” on penal substitution. In order express it I have to talk briefly about another theory of atonement–the “ransom theory” that was so popular among fourth century Christians including the Cappadocian fathers. It as, in fact, the reigning theory up until Anselm. The ransom theory picked up on the biblical metaphor of ransom–that Christ was the ransom paid by God to free us from sin, death and the devil. But some early church fathers and most people throughout the middle ages INTERPRETED this to mean that God the Father gave his Son Jesus over to Satan as a ransom in a transaction that included Satan handing over humanity to the Father. Of course, nowhere does the Bible say that! And it makes God crafty and deceptive (because he knew the devil did not know that he could not keep the Son of God). It portrays the atonement as a transaction between God and Satan and depicts them as almost on the same level–as if God has to enter into a bargaining agreement with Satan.

I THINK what Scot is suggesting is that too many explanations of the penal substitution theory of the atonement pick up on substitutionary imagery and metaphor in the Bible and run with it too far–implying (if not saying) that Christ’s death was a kind of mechanical transaction between God and humanity (with Christ representing humanity) involving strict, juridical justice and a kind of impersonal law that even God has to obey. Scot apparently wants to keep the biblical metaphor of substitutionary death without all the baggage the whole penal substitution theory has accumulated throughout the years especially among Reformed fundamentalists. I applaud the effort and largely agree with him about this. Penal substitution is a biblical image I cannot escape. The correlation between Isaiah 53 and numerous New Testament passages that seem to echo this, applying it to Jesus and his death, convince me that, biblically, we cannot escape penal substitution as one metaphor for what Jesus’ death was.

A Community Called Atonement is much more than what I have described here. Overall, the book is a ringing call for Christians to BE THE CHURCH that God intended his people to be–a reconciling, restoring, healing, justice-establishing community that extends Christ’s holistic saving work into the world.

1 One mild criticism I have of the book is that it stretches the word “atonement” almost to the breaking point. Scot uses it for everything God does and we enter into with him that works to restore the damaged goods (cracked Eikons) that we humans are. Most people understand “atonement” much more narrowly–as having to do with Christ’s death and its salvific effects. I’m always a little leery of stretching terms to mean too much.

2 Another mild criticism I have is that nowhere does Scot (like Boersma) deal with the crucial issue of the extent of the atonement. Is Christ’s atoning work FOR ALL or only for the elect. In this day and age when so many voices are being raised on behalf of limited atonement I hope ANY book on the subject will deal with that horrendous, nearly heretical idea that one cannot find even in Calvin himself! Theodore Beza invented it out of whole cloth because it was logically necessary for the Calvinist system. I agree it is necessary for the Calvinist system, but take it away and the system falls. Beza saw that which is why he added it in. (Please don’t remind me that an obscure monk named Gottschalk was held in prison most of his adult life for teaching limited atonement; I know that. But he had no influence in terms of injecting that idea into the stream of theology. Beza is its source if we are talking about a continuity of doctrine beginning today and stemming backwards in time.)

continue to -

 

Index to past articles on "Calvinism v. Arminianism"

 

 




 

A Note from Karl Barth on Collecting Books

Collecting books? A note from Karl Barth

http://www.faith-theology.com/2007/09/collecting-books-note-from-karl-barth.html

by Ben Myers

September 15, 2007

Kurt Johanson kindly sent me a copy of his delightful new volume, The Word in This World: Two Sermons by Karl Barth. And he included a facsimile of an inscription which Barth wrote in Klaus Bockmuehl’s copy of Against the Stream, back in 1954.

It’s such a nice inscription that I thought I’d reproduce it here – a timely reminder to all of us who like collecting books!

Meaning of life?
Collecting books? No, read them!
Reading them? No, think about!
Thinking about? No, do something for God and for your neighbour!

- Karl Barth, Basle, 2.11.195

The Best and Worst Books Ever Written About Karl Barth

http://www.faith-theology.com/2005/07/best-books-ever-written-on-karl-barth.html

by Ben Myers

posted on July 20, 2005

The books about Karl Barth could fill an entire library. And on the whole the quality of all this scholarship is extraordinary. Many of the twentieth century’s leading theologians started out by writing brilliant books or dissertations on Barth’s theology. So it’s particularly difficult to choose the very best books. Still, here is my own list (in chronological order) of the Top Eight—if I had to save just eight from my library, these would be the ones:

Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992 [1951])

G. C. Berkouwer, The Triumph of Grace in the Theology of Karl Barth (London: Paternoster, 1956 [1954])

Hans Küng, Justification: The Doctrine of Karl Barth and a Catholic Reflection (London: Burns & Oates, 1964 [1957])

Robert W. Jenson, Alpha and Omega: A Study in the Theology of Karl Barth (New York: Thomas Nelson, 1963)

Eberhard Jüngel, God’s Being Is in Becoming: The Trinitarian Being of God in the Theology of Karl Barth: A Paraphrase (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001 [1965])

Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts (London: SCM Press, 1976 [1975])

George Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991)

Bruce L. McCormack, Karl Barth's Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development, 1909-1936 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995)

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The worst book ever written on Karl Barth

http://www.faith-theology.com/2005/07/worst-book-ever-written-on-karl-barth.html

While it’s hard to choose the best books ever written on Karl Barth, fortunately it’s very easy to name the worst book ever written on Barth. It is—of course—

Cornelius Van Til, The New Modernism: An Appraisal of the Theology of Barth and Brunner (London: James Clarke, 1946)

This book presents a comically grotesque misreading of Barth—it would be hard to imagine a more drastic and more wilful misunderstanding of Barth’s theology. Unfortunately, this same book influenced the popular American writer Francis A. Schaeffer, and through Schaeffer it influenced a whole generation of evangelical students and ministers in the United States. And so even today you will occasionally meet someone who, without ever having laid so much as a finger on one of Barth’s books, is nonetheless bitterly and adamantly hostile to Barth’s theology.

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 Collecting books? A note from Karl Barth

http://www.faith-theology.com/2007/09/collecting-books-note-from-karl-barth.html

by Ben Myer

September 15, 2007

Kurt Johanson kindly sent me a copy of his delightful new volume, The Word in This World: Two Sermons by Karl Barth. And he included a facsimile of an inscription which Barth wrote in Klaus Bockmuehl’s copy of Against the Stream, back in 1954.

It’s such a nice inscription that I thought I’d reproduce it here – a timely reminder to all of us who like collecting books!

Meaning of life?
Collecting books? No, read them!
Reading them? No, think about!
Thinking about? No, do something for God and for your neighbour!
- Karl Barth, Basle, 2.11.1954

Review Bruce McCormack - Studies on Karl Barth's Theology

Bruce McCormack: Barth in response to Open Theism

 http://fireandrose.blogspot.com/2008/07/bruce-mccormack-barth-in-response-to.html

by David W. Congdon

on July 3, 2008

Bruce McCormack recently edited a volume of essays by Protestant theologians on the doctrine of God, entitled, Engaging the Doctrine of God: Contemporary Protestant Perspectives. The volume is well worth reading, in part because of the range of perspectives represented in its pages—including everyone from D. A. Carson to John Webster. But the book is worth the price just for McCormack’s essay. His article, “The Actuality of God: Karl Barth in Conversation with Open Theism,” is a 57-page exploration of the claims made by open theism over against classical theism as well as the alternative which Barth provides to both of those metaphysical positions. As a way to whet your appetite for more, here is the opening of McCormack’s essay:

For nearly two decades now, the evangelical churches in America have been the scene of a polarizing debate between defenders of classical theism and the proponents of what is typically referred to as “open theism.” After reading through the growing literature generated by both sides, my own conclusion is that each has something important to say; each has “theological values” which would need to be preserved in any truly adequate doctrine of God. The trouble is that both sides are actually occupying a shared ground on which no resolution of the debate is thinkable. It is clearly time for some fresh thinking.

As the subtitle of this essay makes clear, the goal here is to bring Karl Barth into conversation with the open theists. The decision to treat Barth in relation to open theism rather than classical theism is not based upon a belief that he stood closer to the former than the latter. Far from it. As I have already suggested, both sides to the current debate stand finally upon the same ground—a ground which would have to be abandoned if the values now contained in each model were to be brought into a single, unified conception. Barth occupies a very different ground, and as we shall see, it is because he does so that he is able to take up and preserve the values set forth in each of the other two models.

In any event, Barth does not stand closer to the open theists than he does to the classical theists. The decision to bring Barth into conversation with open theism is based simply upon the perception that open theism is attracting a great deal of attention—to the point of disturbing the peace of the churches—and the belief that it is not dealt with adequately where it is met by power plays (e.g., attempts to exclude its proponents from membership in the Evangelical Theological Society). The only adequate response is to provide an alternative which is demonstrably superior to it—something today’s defenders of classical theism have consistently failed to do.

- Bruce L. McCormack, “The Actuality of God: Karl Barth in Conversation with Open Theism,” Engaging the Doctrine of God: Contemporary Protestant Perspectives (Grand Rapids, MI: BakerAcademic, 2008), 185-86.

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Bruce McCormack:

Orthodox and modern: studies in the theology of Karl Barth

http://www.faith-theology.com/2008/09/bruce-mccormack-orthodox-and-modern.html

Posted by Ben Myers

September 19, 2008

Bruce McCormack, Orthodox and Modern: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Baker Academic, 2008), 317 pp. (review copy courtesy of Baker)

Bruce McCormack’s 1995 work on Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology is one of the towering monuments of Barth studies. It casts its shadow over all subsequent interpretation of Barth, just as it has corrected or relativised much earlier work in the field.

Since 1995, McCormack has produced a steady stream of essays on Barth’s theology (a full list here) – essays which have continued to expand the horizons of Barth-interpretation in many directions. Broadly speaking, McCormack’s full corpus of essays can be divided into three categories:

1. historical studies, focusing especially on Barth’s relation to the 19th century; 
2. studies of Barth’s relation to contemporary theology (especially to contemporary evangelicalism – although unfortunately none of the essays on evangelicalism appear in this collection); and finally, 
3. constructive essays on the contemporary significance of Barth’s theological ontology.

To begin, let us review then each of the points above.

1 The essays selected for this volume (all of them previously published, but some appearing now in English for the first time) are organised under these three categories. In the first section, McCormack explores Barth’s relation to the 19th century, particularly the traditions of Schleiermacherian theology and Kantian philosophy. Against the common tendency to find in Barth a complete break with Schleiermacher and with Kantian foundationalism, McCormack situates Barth within the broad Schleiermacherian tradition of “mediating theologies.” He argues that Barth’s thought remains wedded to neo-Kantian categories (even if, admittedly, “Kant is no longer Kant by the time Barth is finished with him”), and he shows the extent to which Barth remained “a 19th-century theologian” who was deeply preoccupied with the questions and problems of the Schleiermacherian tradition.

If Barth’s project was born of an effort to overcome theological historicism and psychologism, this was in fact a struggle not against Schleiermacher but against Troeltsch – although Barth himself persistently confused Schleiermacher with Troeltsch, or at least imagined that a root-and-branch repudiation of the latter had to entail a rejection of the former. Throughout Barth’s career, however, he shared the fundamental concerns of Schleiermacher, and he agreed with Schleiermacher that post-Kantian dogmatics had to be shaped by the epistemological “turn to the subject” and by the problem of the limits of human knowing.

2 In this set of historical interventions, McCormack’s antipathy to “postmodern” readings of Barth is never far from the surface. For McCormack, postmodern and non-foundationalist appropriations of Barth’s thought are based on flawed understandings of Barth’s own questions and contexts – and also on a failure to grasp the real priorities for contemporary constructive theology. The essays in the book’s second section bring this critique explicitly to the foreground.

McCormack analyses and critiques the “postliberal Barth” of Hans Frei and George Lindbeck, together with the “postmodern Barth” of Walter Lowe and Graham Ward. He finds more promise in the work of John Webster – although he observes that, at times, “Webster’s Barth can come across as a bit too ‘premodern’,” too closely wedded to the assumptions of classical metaphysics (p. 164). In any case, McCormack’s main point is that English-language research tends “to move much too quickly to ‘use’ of Barth’s theology before having acquired a proper understanding” (p. 165), so that Barth’s theology too easily becomes a mirror of our own contemporary assumptions and commitments. In short: “The followers of Frei and Torrance must look elsewhere for resources for their various projects” (p. 294).

3 While McCormack’s historical work on Barth is peerless for its depth, range and sophistication, his own recent constructive engagement with Barth’s thought represents a major event within contemporary theology. The essays collected in the third section of the book provide a sample of this recent theological engagement with Barth – beginning with the widely discussed Cambridge Companion essay on “Grace and Being,” where McCormack offers a critical correction of Barth’s doctrine of the Trinity. The argument here is that Barth ought to have reversed his ordering of Trinity and election: properly understood, Barth’s own doctrine of election entails that God’s decision to be God-for-us is the ground of God’s triunity. Simply put: according to its own internal principles, Barth’s dogmatics ought to begin with the doctrine of election, not with the doctrine of the Trinity.

In chapter 8, a magisterial essay on “Karl Barth’s Historicized Christology” (previously published in German), McCormack continues to pursue this revisionist reading of Barth, by exploring Barth’s own revision of Chalcedonian christology. Before developing his doctrine of election, Barth’s thought contained significant traces of “the abstract metaphysical ontology which underwrote the Christology of the Chalcedonian Council” (p. 207). It was only with the development of his doctrine of election that he was able to excise this metaphysics from his thought; the turning-point here was his insight that Jesus Christ is the subject of election, so that election is “a free act in which God assigned to himself the being God would have for all eternity” (p. 216). God’s decision to be God-for-us is an event in which God differentiates himself into the three modes of being – Father, Son and Spirit. The gap between Jesus Christ and the eternal Son is thus eliminated.

The second mode of being in God simply is Jesus Christ. Indeed, this insight can lead McCormack to support Bertold Klappert’s challenging remark that “Barth does not think incarnationally.” For Barth, there is no absolute metaphysical subject which unites itself to a human “nature.” Rather, there is a divine decision in which humanity is taken up into the event of God’s own being, so that “the human history of Jesus Christ is constitutive of the being and existence of [the second Person of the Trinity]” (p. 223).

In these highly creative readings (and constructive revisions) of Barth, McCormack is pressing towards the articulation of a striking new theological ontology. I once remarked that, where theological ontology is concerned, John Milbank’s project is the only game in town – and it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that McCormack’s work represents the only thoroughgoing counter-proposal to Milbank’s ontological vision which is available in contemporary theology.

• While Milbank’s ontology is structured by hierarchical and participatory categories, McCormack articulates an ontology structured by actualistic categories and by a radically historicised doctrine of God.
 
• While Milbank’s thought presupposes an ontological state of primal harmony, peace and fecundity, McCormack issues a direct challenge to “the Trinity of peace and perfection” (p. 276), and he envisions instead a Trinity of act and decision, centered on the insight that “the death of Jesus Christ in God-abandonment … [is] an event in God’s own life” (p. 189).

Although McCormack has never directly engaged Milbank’s work, his essay on “Participation in God” (chapter 9) shows how much is at stake in the question of creaturely deification, and in the ontological categories through which “participation in God” is understood.

In all this, McCormack’s writing is shaped by Karl Barth and by the distinctive problems of modern German theology; but his proposals have a much wider theological significance, and they deserve close attention and deep reflection. Within the narrower field of Barth studies, of course, McCormack’s work is not only a towering presence – it is also highly contentious and divisive. As McCormack himself observes, his recent work on ontological actualism “has incited a controversy that threatens to divide Barth scholars in the English-speaking world into two rival camps” (p. 295).

I can only speak for myself here, but I think this division is a productive and important one – and I hope it is sharpened all the more by the appearance of this book. As I suggested in an earlier post (against Paul Molnar), I believe the future of theology lies not in any incarnational realism, nor in the recovery of a metaphysical Chalcedonian objectivism, but rather in a far-reaching appropriation of Barth’s christological actualism. And for this task, there is no better guide than the work of Bruce McCormack.

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Karl Barth: Of

Calvinism and Armeninianism

I had a conversation with Dr. Roger Olson about Karl Barth on another matter

but in that conversation we talked about Barth's position on Calvinism and

Armenianism. He was the jist of that discussion....

- skinhead

Russ says:

August 22, 2011 at 1:05 pm

If you have not done so already I would be interested in what Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, Dietrick Boenhoffer taught as vs. evangelical and emergent Christian thot today. For me Barth is complex and simplifying him may not be possible. Still Barth seems to offer some 3rd-way alternatives to the discussions of Calvinism v. Arminianism, as well as to Open Theism (or so I’ve read). Thank you. (Roger's reply did not include references to Open Theism)

rogereolson says:

August 23, 2011 at 11:57 am

• Great question. My study has led me to believe the following about these theologians and the whole Calvinism vs. Arminianism debate. Barth was basically a monergistic universalist (salvation without the interaction of the human will). Someday I’m going to defend that thesis here. I have friends who know Barth just as well as I do who disagree, but my study of Barth’s doctrine of election has led me to that conclusion. Of course, that would put him at odds with Arminianism as well as with traditional Calvinists. Barth called his own view “purified supralapsarianism (a double predestination position that God consigns the non-elect to hell with foreknowledge).” That alone should prove my thesis–especially in light of his adamant insistence that Jesus Christ was the only reprobate man. 
• Brunner reveled in paradox, but I see his soteriology as very close to Arminianism. Some of my students over the years have written papers on Brunner and Arminianism and I’m convinced their conclusions are right. They all concluded that there is real affinity between them. Brunner despised double predestination while affirming single predestination but without the monergistic, individualistic flavor one finds in much traditional Calvinism. He affirmed divine self-limitation throughout his Dogmatics. 
• Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran. That should settle it. Lutherans generally reject both Calvinism and Arminianism as too rationalistic and simply embrace paradox (if not contradiction). But I’m not aware of whether he ever addressed the Luther versus Melanchthon issue over monergism versus synergism.

Of Calvin, Barth and Poetry

David Congdon issued a challenge to write of Calvin in Barthian terms earlier this year (http://fireandrose.blogspot.com/2007/05/as-barth-poetic-challenge.html). Here are some of the better entries below:

As Calvin
Make of me no Calvinist,
God of Calvin and of me,
Cause me not to follow him
Who would follow only Thee.

Make of me no Calvinist,
Swallowing each word he penned,
Make of me a thinker, God,
As was he, Thy intimate friend!

Make me, God, as Calvin was,
Now, while yet in days of youth,
Delving from the Depths of Thine,
Sovereign, soul-exalting truth.

Make me like the Christ, O God,
Give me not a Calvin's ire,
But withhold from me the spark
For a new Servetus-fire.

Make me like a Calvin, God,
Just as humble, just as brave,
Like a Calvin who refused
E'en a stone upon his grave.

 - Albert Piersma
published in The Calvin Forum II:2 (1936), p. 39



Barth & Rumi Advise the Theologian

"We and our existences are really non-existence;
thou art the absolute Being which manifests the perishable."

You can’t find Him in there, go ahead, look hard,
with all the commentaries you may buy - or write yourself.

His domain we cannot discover,

and this shore has no port.

Does one arrive only by shipwreck?

“Come and dwell with me and be my Beloved,” is His call.

His love gives birth to hurricanes,

takes everything,

and gives more than all things back in Him alone.

(You have caused this shipwreck.

My secret stores of comfort,

hidden rafts of self-reliance,

hidden even from myself,

you have utterly destroyed, dashed against

the rocky shore of your desire for me.)

"But when the eye is turned toward the Light of God
What thing could remain hidden under such a Light?"

- Ann Chapin, July 2011http://www.iconsexplained.com/iec/byz_ann_chapin.htm
Quotes at the beginning and end of the poem are from the Persian philosopher, Rumi



Bonhoeffer Argues with Barth Over Heaven and its Songs

Not the angels who skim across pins,
en familie to Mozart and his lighted love of the air

Not the robed wonders who trade their antiphonal orders,
the patterns of Palestrina from, first, the East, then West, the home of human sins

Nor the simplest common chorales, broken off
as the Psalters of Geneva, of Plymouth, of Jerusalem and its steps

We believe in the prison and its concrete, impermanent walls,
in the sermon for all those held captive

We revel in the God become flesh and the old world
of tangential dust gathered to touch, though not touch, the new

Bach rewrote the world from the ground, bowed down
where the back can receive a blessing or thrashing, God knows

When our mist burns away in the sun we will know
Deus non est in genere,

Praise will be made from the fugue of the earth,
all its broken voices silent at first

Then circling to intone Vor deinen Thron tret ich hiermit,
Amen, amen, erhore mich

- David Wright, July 2011

David teaches literature and writing at Wheaton College, and is an advocate for arts in the Mennonite church. He has two volumes of published poetry: A Liturgy for Stones (2003) and Lines from the Provinces (2000). He also has three poems in the most recent issue of the Princeton Theological Review.

Four Limericks on Karl Barth

A scholar of God who was Swiss,

whom some sods like me think is sheer bliss,
drives conservatives nuts
and burns liberals’ butts,
while God thinks, “Karl, they’re taking the piss!”

There once was a gourmet named Barth,
who had tasted Rousseau and Descartes,
and though Hegel bar none
was his haute cuisine Hun,
he dogmatically dined à la carte.

To Wilhelm Karl lifted his stein,
and old Søren was fine vintage wine,
but what Rudolf would brew,
made him hack, heave, and spew,
while to Emil he roared and cried, “Nein!”

Now what was Karl’s favourite sweet
(as I end my poor prandial conceit)?
He thought Jürgen too tart,
while too stale was Wolfhart,
Eberhard, though, now there was a treat!

- Kim Fabricius, July 2011

Kim is a minister at Bethel United Reformed Church in Swansea, Wales, and also serves as a chaplain with the United Reformed Church at the University of Wales, Swansea. While Kim does not have a blog of his own, he hovers around the theo-blogosphere and is most well known for his always insightful and often brilliant series of ten propositions.



For Additional References

John Calvin - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Calvin
Karl Barth - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Barth
Emil Brunner - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emil_Brunner
Dietrich Bonhoeffer - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonhoeffer

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Biblical Authority & Incarnation vs. Analytic Theology

Some rather unanalytic thoughts on analytic theology: reflections on Logos 2011

http://fireandrose.blogspot.com/2011/06/some-rather-unanalytic-thoughts-on.html

Posted by David W. Congdonat

Monday, June 6, 2011

I returned on Sunday from Logos 2011, a superb three-day conference at the University of Notre Dame, sponsored by the Center for Philosophy of Religion and under the specific auspices of the Analytic Theology Project. Let me begin by thanking Michael Rea and the other organizers of the conference for inviting me to participate in the conversation. It was an honor to be there and I greatly enjoyed my time at Notre Dame.

After writing a number of tweets (#logos2011) about it, I’ve naturally been asked to comment at length about the experience. I will do so now, though my assessment here is merely provisional in nature. Larger issues raised at the conference will have to be addressed at another time. This year’s topic on divine revelation, scripture, canon, and biblical authority is a central interest of my work, and for that reason, many of the most interesting theological insights from the conference will have to wait for a future occasion. Here I only want to raise some concerns that I have about the project of analytic theology more broadly, in light of the conversations I had at the conference.

But first, let me gush about the fantastic people I was so privileged to meet. I very much enjoyed conversing with Evan Fales (Iowa), whose paper was a favorite of mine at the conference, and whose use of Leach, Durkheim, Levi-Strauss to interpret scripture is immensely interesting to me. Getting to know Tamsin Jones (Harvard) was a highlight of my time. I was also happy to meet and interact with Andrew Dole (Amherst). It was a pleasure to interact with Oliver Crisp (formerly of Bristol, now at Fuller) and Michael Rea (Notre Dame); both graciously answered my questions and Crisp especially is a lot of fun at a bar. After years of reading his work, I finally met Kevin Vanhoozer (Wheaton) for the first time, as well as his family. More recently, I have taken a great interest in Kenton Sparks (Eastern), whose book God’s Word in Human Words is perhaps the best evangelical treatment of modern biblical scholarship—a work I cannot recommend too highly. Sadly, however, I had to miss the opening session with Peter Enns, a man I highly respect and admire. The reason for this is a little long, but suffice it to say, my luggage was lost during a layover at O’Hare airport. I received it the next day around noon at our hotel, but the last shuttle for the morning session left at 11 am. I also did not have a chance to talk personally with William Abraham (SMU), who provided what was for me the highlight of the trip (see below).

Second, let me also state the obvious: for a conference organized under the auspices of analytic theology, there were very few actually analytic theology or philosophy papers. Unlike previous Logos conferences (from what I’ve heard), this conference broadened the scope of participants considerably. They also chose scholars known for their work on this particular doctrinal topic, as opposed to picking analytic scholars to speak about the topic. The result was an excellent discussion about scripture, though perhaps not as satisfying on a philosophical level for those working in analytic philosophy of religion. Since I’m not interested in analytic theology myself, I found the papers very interesting and worthwhile. Some of the papers were even critical of analytic theology, whether implicitly (Paul Nimmo) or explicitly (Vanhoozer, Abraham).

In the rest of this post, I want to raise some concerns I have about the whole project of analytic theology. I raise these as part of a good faith effort to understand what the project is trying to do. If I have misconstrued anything, I do hope those in the analytic theology circles will correct me. I view myself as a friendly critic, an outsider interested in helping those “inside” do their work better.

My general critique is a classically “continental” one: viz. that I am concerned with the apparently ahistorical and non-social conception of reason with which the analytic people appear to be working. That is to say, there seems to be a sense that theological claims and concepts can be evaluated in abstraction from the historical, cultural, and political contexts within which such claims and concepts originate and develop. So we can evaluate someone like Schleiermacher or Barth by distilling a set of propositions and deciding whether the conclusions rationally follow from the premises. While this appears quite objective, it does not properly take into account both the inherently contextual nature of these theological texts but also the intrinsically social nature of reason itself. The former comes from the fact that these and other theologians are writing within a particular tradition, responding to developments within that tradition, and seeking to speak for this tradition within a new historical situation. The latter is a larger claim that goes back at least to Hegel (see Pinkard’s The Sociality of Reason), with whom I agree. But I cannot defend that tradition of thought here. That’s not to say analytic philosophy cannot take up this Hegelian line of thinking. People like Robert Brandom and John McDowell have done just that, within an analytic pragmatism or a particular reading of Wittgenstein that socializes our thinking, speaking, and doing in the world. (One could justifiably say that the analytic tradition is divided between two different readings of Wittgenstein. By and large, those I met at Logos don’t read him the way I do.)

I bring up this “continental” argument, because I think it illuminates a lot of the disagreements and misunderstandings that I overheard at the conference. I don’t just mean the dismissal of Barth I encountered, or the statements about Schleiermacher having a God who cannot act in the world and does not love humanity. These were certainly very bad and did not inspire confidence about the future, but these are not views unique to analytic theologians; many people hold such notions out of a general lack of knowledge of these theologians and an unwillingness to charitably engage them on their own terms. The problems I am referring to are things like the incredulous stares of some at the notion that I or another person are happy to get rid of inerrancy. While it wasn’t made entirely clear, I gathered that this is because the doctrine of inerrancy is a key premise in a syllogism regarding the authority of scripture. If one dispenses with this doctrine, one dispenses with the logical argument for scripture’s authority and meaningfulness. It became clear to me that many of these analytic grad students are simply ignorant of the entire theological tradition regarding this doctrine. They’ve never read the Protestant scholastics on verbal-plenary inspiration, never studied the writings of Hodge and Warfield in their historical context, never examined the arguments Barth gives for rejecting these doctrines or assessed the cultural and historical reasons for his claims. What these philosophers of religion want to know is: is this doctrine rational or irrational? is scripture authoritative or not? The idea that inerrancy could be a culturally-loaded term, with a complex web of historical relations that have to be entangled before it can be rightly evaluated, is viewed as either irrelevant or foreign or both.

This is why I think people like Enns and Sparks—both of whom, like Barth, make a very sharp distinction between the “humanity” of the text and the “divinity” of God’s word—provoked looks of puzzled astonishment, as if they’ve heard a new language for the very first time. The analytic crowd seemed to insist that unless we could directly predicate inspiration, revelation, and authority of the biblical text (qua text, i.e. words on the page), the whole Christian game would be up. The Barthian/actualistic position—that revelation is directly identified with the person of Christ himself, and that the word of God is a christic-pneumatic event in the encounter between text and reader—got no hearing at all at the conference. I’m not sure anyone in the analytic crowd knows what to do with it. An event resists any logical proposition. It is an existential disruption, not a syllogistic conclusion. Every analytic evaluation of Barth that I’ve read ends up greatly misunderstanding Barth’s christocentrism. They seem to forget that what distinguishes Barth from someone like Charles Hodge is not the various doctrinal propositions with which each agrees; it is rather the entire nature of what theology is as a discipline: its origin, ground, and telos. Between the systematic arrangement of discrete timeless, universal, propositional facts and the contextual-historical reflection on the faith and proclamation of a particular community—between scripture as (i) the revelation of universal truths about God and (ii) Christ as the contingent actualization of God’s being that demands ever-new interpretation within new contingent situations—yawns a great chasm.

Returning to Enns for a moment: I think at the end of the day much of this conflict comes down to a christological disagreement regarding the very nature of incarnation. Enns and Sparks could both use some greater sophistication in their use of christological categories, but their essential insight is quite sound: scripture is a fundamentally and thoroughly human document, bearing all the marks of our finitude and fallenness. But precisely as a human document, God speaks in and through it in a way that remains truthful and normative. The incarnational analogy that Enns uses helps to illuminate this very point. Jesus is not God “in spite of” his human form, but precisely “as” a human, including everything that being human implies and demands (insofar as what is not assumed is not redeemed).

However, this is where we run into problems, because we have to clarify just what we mean by incarnation. The classical Chalcedonian tradition is both helpful and dangerous in this regard, because people like Cyril of Alexandria were quite willing to instrumentalize the human nature. The divine Logos was understood to be the sole active agent in the incarnation, while the flesh functioned passively like a garment worn by God in the world [(basic gnostic dualism known as (semi)pelagianism - skinhead)]. So the incarnational analogy can easily support a very instrumentalist doctrine of inerrancy, even a full-blown theory of dictation [(sic, autonomatism, unjoined robotic human reactions - skinhead)] (which a couple people at the conference came very close to accepting outright, and are at least sympathetic with). A better incarnational analogy requires a better christology, one that affirms the full human agency of Jesus. The way to do so, in my view, is through Barth, Jüngel, and McCormack—where Jesus is God precisely in his historical existence, where the “human nature” is not something appended onto the “divine nature” because the human existence is precisely where divinity is ontologically located (which to the analytics appears like a collapse of the natures).

I say all this because I think the lack of comprehension regarding incarnation and inerrancy is really indicative of a larger disagreement regarding the very nature of theological reasoning. This became clear at the after-dinner talk given by Billy Abraham (title: “Turning Philosophical Water into Theological Wine”!), in which he made it very clear that all Christian theology is a “spiritual enterprise,” which has spiritual formation as its rightful telos. Theology cannot escape things like diversity of tradition, historical and intellectual diversity, and the diversity of audiences. In short, the very idea of a universal rational discourse is, at least for theology, an illusion. He didn’t put it quite this way, but his point was that theology is about Christian discipleship, and discipleship involves concrete human beings within concrete historical contexts. It speaks from and for a particular group of believers, seeking to upbuild them in the faith and orient them toward love of God and neighbor. I do think most everyone in the room was on board with this, but there were some clear misgivings by some of the analytic types. The most telling moment occurred when one young man asked, “I really don’t understand why theology has to be concerned with spiritual formation at all. Why can’t it be just about logic and reason?” Abraham’s response was to the point: “Go do philosophy.” In other words, don’t call yourself a theologian, because you’re not doing theology. This particular man wasn’t the only person to raise this concern, and I suspect many people in the audience agreed with him.

So let me step back and assess what I take to be the general issue here. Is there such a thing as universal truth? Does theology trade in universally-valid propositions? Do we have access to timeless facts whose validity is universal in scope because [they are] not historically-conditioned? These are the kinds of questions that really divide the camps. I don’t want to get into how I would answer those questions here, since that would make this post even longer than it already is. For now, I’ll just say that even if there is universal truth, it’s not universal in the sense of being accessible to all—it is only truth for faith, i.e., within the context of the community of believers. The universality of truth is thus inseparable from the contingency and particularity of history.

My position thus stands in stark contrast to those in the analytic theology school, and I think there is a fairly obvious reason for this. Analytic theology is a subset of analytic philosophy of religion. According to proponents of analytic theology, this field is simply the systematic extension of the analytic philosophy of religion to every doctrinal locus. The aims of analytic theology are not fundamentally different from the aims of the philosophy of religion; there is a quantitative, rather than qualitative, difference between the two. Now the academic discipline of analytic philosophy understands its task to be the logical analysis of propositional arguments about various topics. Those who have not swallowed the Wittgensteinian, much less the Hegelian, pill—who still operate within the sphere of so-called universals—see themselves as capable of abstracting concepts from the historical contexts within which they are used; they can be analyzed apart from their concrete uses in particular situations for particular ends. A logically-justified claim has universal significance. Contrary to the “postmodern” continental tradition, everything is not hermeneutics.

[(It is noted here that David rightly is saying that Christians have been making bald, universally abstract statements about God and faith for a very long time in the Modern-era of Enlightenment, and that Post-Modernistic statements (or even perhaps, Emergent Christian statements) wish to localize and enmesh biblical truths into both the subjective and worship experience of believers. To back away from abstract "truths" of God and bring rather the pragmatic entanglements of God's person and being into the Christian faith. - skinhead)]

For me, on the contrary, everything is hermeneutics. Every concept is culturally situated, every claim is determined by its location within history [(sic, everything has a (Meta)Narrative, - skinhead)]. There is no universally-valid ontology, no metaphysic that is not conditioned by a particular sociopolitical context. Now I think there are many ways of reaching this “continental” conclusion, but my reason is purely theological: Jesus Christ is the historicization of God, thus the historicization of theology. Speech about God is not speech about a universal concept of deity; it is contextual speech about the concrete reality of God in the world. This means that the very being of God is the ground for the hermeneutical nature of all theological discourse. There is no speech about God that is not essentially a matter of hermeneutical understanding. All talk of God is interpretation.

Is this an absolute divide? Are these two approaches to theology mutually exclusive? I’d like to think they aren’t, because I do want to engage these analytic theologians in constructive conversation that will be to our mutual benefit. But I am deeply skeptical. I am concerned that we have such radically different views of God, Christ, scripture, and revelation that we will never be able to move past prolegomena to actually do joint work in doctrinal reflection. I hope I am proved wrong and that my suspicions and worries are misguided. Based on the conference, however, I am left with decidedly mixed feelings.

Personally, I do not believe you can start with philosophy of religion and ever reach Christian theology. I am with Barth on this one. Or as Bultmann put it, “There is no alternative; [philosophy] must be either maid or mistress.” With Barth and Bultmann, I want the former (philosophy as maid). There are many at the conference that would probably agree with this, making theology the queen of the sciences. But exactly what they mean by this is often unclear. It seems that, in practice, philosophy is in fact the mistress—or, rather, they see no qualitative distinction between philosophy and theology, and whenever such a view is held, philosophy is inevitably the one in control.

I must reiterate again my deep gratitude for the invitation to attend Logos 2011. It was a pleasure to be there. I had some of the best conversations of the year (including some of the best drinks!). I met many incredible people, whom I look forward to seeing again in the future. I hope my misgivings are themselves misguided. I eagerly await future opportunities to discuss these important topics in more depth. In the meantime, consider me a friendly but critical outsider wishing the analytic theologians the best. There is still time to turn the philosophical water into theological wine.

Evaluating "God Wins" by Mark Galli

The real impasse in the debate over Rob Bell

http://fireandrose.blogspot.com/2011/07/real-impasse-in-debate-over-rob-bell.html

Posted by David W. Congdon
on Sunday, July 17, 2011

Mark Galli’s book, God Wins—a response, obviously, to Love Wins—was the topic of discussion last week. The book has been available on Kindle for a few weeks, though it doesn’t appear in print until August 1. In it, Galli explains why he thinks “love wins” is an insufficient understanding of the gospel, because it bypasses the question of God’s judgment and wrath. Hence, “God wins.” One almost wants to ask Galli whether he’s forgotten 1 John 4:8. But that’s a cheap shot. Since I haven’t read the book yet—and since I’ve already written a few thousand words on Galli in my series responding to his deeply misguided and misinformed review in Christianity Today—I defer to the recent blog posts by Roger Olson, a man I highly respect and deeply admire.

Olson, a friend of Galli, wrote about God Wins on July 7. There he made a number of ambiguous remarks that were clearly an attempt to praise the qualities of the man while criticizing the claims of the book. He begins by stating that “Mark is a serious evangelical scholar with an irenic approach to controversial material.” He then goes on to say, “I get the sense that Mark felt things that I did not feel and that I felt things Mark (and others) did not feel.” And later: “I think that may be because Mark is a member of a denomination struggling with rampant liberalism in which conservatives (by which here I mean people who value traditional, orthodox, biblical Christianity) feel embattled. I, on the other hand, have been beset by fundamentalists and aggressive neo-fundamentalist heresy-hunters.” The rest of the review is just filler: Mark is a great guy, but he’s approaching this book from a perspective I do not share. Translation: his criticisms of Love Wins are not really about Bell; they are instead about Galli’s own issues within his ecclesial context.

Olson followed up that review of God Wins with another post on “Why I defend Rob Bell’s Love Wins (and other controversial books).” In this fascinating post, Olson puts forward the claim that what is really driving a book like God Wins is the whole Calvinism-Arminianism debate. He then states:

I think SOME evangelical Calvinists are so allergic to both Arminianism and liberalism that they tend to lump them together and not see their differences. There’s something in American evangelical Calvinisms’ DNA that makes it see a trajectory from Arminianism (or anything like it) to liberalism. I deny that trajectory and, in fact, tend to think it is the other way around (if anything): Calvinism leads to liberalism.

Olson compares Love Wins to the books related to the open theism controversy. He observes that the attacks made against both by Calvinists are the very same arguments used by Calvinists against Arminianism. What happens in these debates is that the particularities of open theism and Bell’s “open eschatology” (if I may put it thus) are lost amidst polemics about divine sovereignty and human free will. In Olson’s words, “the crux of the debate has to do with two different interpretations of 1 Timothy 2:4,” and “the deep, inner logic of the attacks on Love Wins” are rooted in “Reformed assumptions about God rather than out of Arminian assumptions about God.” Olson then makes a very interesting comment that warrants further reflection:

Simply to respond that God Wins is to raise some questions from the Arminian side. In what sense does God win? Does God get everything he wanted? Does God want hell–antecedently as well as consequently? If you say no, then why does hell exist? It has to be because of free will and that has to be because of God’s loving self-limitation. If you say yes, then that raises a host of questions about God’s goodness. There don’t seem to be alternatives. Either God wanted hell antecedently, in which case God is a monster, or God only wants hell consequently (to the fall) and that means God doesn’t exactly “win” in every sense, right? But love can still win IN THE SENSE that love wants free response and not coerced or programmed response.

There is much here worth examining in detail, but in the interests of brevity, I will summarize my thoughts with the following points. These are not meant to be exhaustive. They only hit on some of the key issues for the sake of further discussion.

1. The Calvinist-Arminian debate is an old one, but it seems blissfully unaware that there are serious alternatives to this rather stale binary opposition. It might seem a bit obvious, since it’s been suggested many times before, but a really compelling alternative is that of Karl Barth. Why? Well, it all comes down to understanding what we mean by freedom. The problem with both Calvinism and Arminianism is that freedom—whether the freedom of God or the freedom of the human being, respectively—has been defined in the abstract. The Calvinist freedom of God (i.e., the absolute sovereignty to determine the elect and the reprobate) and the Arminian freedom of humanity (i.e., the free will to determine one’s eternal identity in response to the gospel message) are both known prior to and apart from how God has actually exercised freedom in the person of Jesus. In other words, both are metaphysical conceptions of freedom. They are abstract notions not determined by the concrete particularity of God’s self-revelation. Now it may be that both sides simply don’t care; they like their metaphysics and cling to it tightly. That could very well be the case. But it’s important to point out just what is being assumed on both sides. In both cases, Christ is not definitive for what divine and human freedom means theologically.

2. Of course, to lift up Barth as a possible solution to the debate is not new, nor is it very persuasive to hard-core adherents of both positions. I suspect Calvinists and Arminians want their abstract conceptions of freedom, not because they care about the debates over metaphysics but because they are both deeply afraid of what it [may] mean to go a different route. To put it directly, both Calvinists and Arminians are afraid of universalism. Calvinists need an abstract divine freedom (that is, an abstract decision of predestination) because their commitment to irresistible grace and the efficacy of God’s election means that a divine freedom determined by Christ’s reconciling promeity would result in the salvation of all people. Arminians need an abstract human freedom because their commitment to God’s universal desire for all to be saved (see Olson’s reference to 1 Tim. 2:4 above) would mean, again, that all humans would be saved were it not for our ability to thwart God’s will. But maybe—just maybe!—the problem is the presupposition by both sides that the salvation of all people is absolutely prohibited as a possible option in theology. Maybe our abstract commitments to a non-universalist eschatology and to certain notions of what freedom means for God and for human beings are at the root of the problem. Maybe we should let the reconciling mission of Christ determine what we can say about freedom and eschatological consummation.

3. In other words, the following claim by Olson is a false binary: “Either God wanted hell antecedently, in which case God is a monster, or God only wants hell consequently (to the fall) and that means God doesn’t exactly ‘win’ in every sense, right?” The answer is no and no. I agree with Olson that God would be a monster for willing hell in advance. The old doctrine of double predestination is indeed a diabolic position to hold. But the Arminian alternative fares no better. Is a God who sends people to hell really much worse than a God who is impotent in the end to save those who reject the gospel (or never hear it in the first place)? The former is a God who is sovereign but cruel; the latter is a God who is weak but loving. The former is protologically monstrous, while the latter is eschatologically monstrous. But it’s unacceptable either way. If all are not finally saved, then God cannot be said to have “won.” And a God who does not “win”—who does not fully and finally accomplish God’s own perfect will—is simply not the God attested in scripture.

4. We can put the problem another way: for both Calvinists and Arminians, love and justice have been defined in the abstract, i.e., apart from God’s concrete self-communication in Christ. They both pit love and justice in a competitive relationship. Calvinism grounds the competition in God’s eternal predestination—so that God determines where love will “win” and where justice will “win.” Arminianism grounds the competition in the conflict between a loving God and a sinful humanity: God loves everyone, but this loving divine will is overpowered by a human refusal of this love that, according to the rules of the game, forces God to exact justice. If we begin with Christ, however, it turns out that love and justice are non-competitively related, since it is precisely the love of God for all that God’s cruciform justice serves to accomplish. Justice is simply the form that God’s love takes in the event of the cross. The notions of love and justice are not theologically meaningful independent of and prior to the actualization of God’s just love in the concrete reality of Jesus Christ. The attempt to define them in advance and then figure out how they relate theologically results in this intractable debate.

5. This whole debate also seems to take for granted the notion that eschatology refers to something “beyond death,” that is, beyond each person’s individual perishing. Maybe that’s something we need to reconsider as well.
 

 

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Index to past articles on "Calvinism v. Arminianism"