god-in-our-image-september-october-1999

IS ALL THEOLOGY CHRISTOLOGY? | THE TRINITY | THE FOREKNOWLEDGE DEBATE

MODERN REFORMATION

GOD IN OUR IMAGE: Why some evangelicals are challenging the traditional view of God k

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8, NUMBER 5, SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1999, $5.00

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GOD IN OUR IMAGE: Why Some Evangelicals are Challenging the Traditional View of God

11 Is the New News Good News?

Shifting Views Concerning God in Our Day Quite surprisingly, the first article of the creed—“I believe in God the Father Almighty”— is becoming increasingly unpopular in evangelical circles. by Michael Horton Plus: The Incommunicable Attributes of God

20 Does God Know the Future?

Your Sunday School teacher, in spite of the objections of many evangelical scholars, taught rightly when she said that our God is the sovereign Lord of time. by William C. Davis Plus: Does God Know the Future via “Middle Knowledge”?

28 “All Theology Is Christology” Recent Lutheran debates have helped clarify how every passage of Scripture points not to some abstract God, but to Jesus Christ. by David P. Scaer

33 The Splendor of the Three-in-One God Reading Scripture in the communion of saints can help us recover the doctrine of the Trinity, and thereby escape today’s often warped conceptions of God. by R. S. Clark Plus: The Athanasian Creed

39 Why the Glory of God Is at Stake in the “Foreknowledge” Debate COVER PHOTO BY TONY STONE

Gregory Boyd and a growing chorus of evangelical theologians insist that the future is “open” to God. Why is this defective view so dangerous? by John Piper Plus: What Theological System Does the “New” Model Propose?

In This Issue page 2 | Letters page 3 | Ex Auditu page 5 | Speaking Of page 9 | Resource Center page 26 Free Space page 45 | Reviews page 48 | On My Mind page 52 S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 1 9 9 9 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 1

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MODERN REFORMATION A publication of Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals Editor-in-Chief

Dr. Michael Horton Executive Vice President

Diana S. Frazier

by Michael Horton

Challenges to the Classical Doctrine of God

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Benjamin E. Sasse Production Editor

Irene H. DeLong Book Review Editor

Dr. Mark R. Talbot Column Editor

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ndoubtedly, most of our readers have heard Augustine’s familiar line concerning the

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“God-shaped vacuum” in every person which only God can fill. But in our day, this

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idea seems to be expressed in reverse: In God there is a human-shaped vacuum which only

we can fill. There have always been powerful arguments in favor of diminishing or even eradicating the sharp distinction between the Creator and the creature. So it is no wonder that secularists from Ludwig Feuerbach to Sigmund Freud regarded religion as nothing more than the projection of the ideals, longings, and felt needs of the practitioner. As someone has wisely said, “God created us in his image and we’ve been returning the favor ever since.”

But what makes this tendency toward a scaled-down image of God such a challenge today is that it is being defended by a growing chorus within evangelical scholarship. These critics are taking aim at the following aspects of the classical doctrine of God: • Impassibility, the belief that God does not suffer.

At stake: whether God is intrinsically dependent on creation.

• Immutability, the belief that God does not change.

At stake: whether God is perfect (i.e., in what direction could a perfect being move other than imperfection?) and thoroughly reliable.

• Omniscience, the belief that God knows the future exhaustively. At stake: Next Issue whether God’s promises A Biblical concerning our future desTheology of tiny can be trusted, given Worship the suggestion that God cannot know the future decisions and actions of free agents.

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Susan West

• Omnipotence, the belief that God is all-powerful, capable of fulfilling whatever God wills. At stake: everything, of course.

Given Modern Reformation’s format, we can only begin to address the classical doctrine of God proper, let alone all of the challenges to the doctrine. Nonetheless, in this issue, we will hear from several leading representatives of the classical position as they interact with problematic evangelical trends. Many of the revisions or repudiations of the classical view seem to us to be guided more by philosophical abstraction (i.e., “God”) and human experience, than by exegetical and Christological considerations (i.e., the God whom Jesus reveals because he himself is God). That’s why we have included articles on the Trinity and the doctrine of Christ as well. In our estimation, what we need today in facing the problem of evil and suffering is not a God who is too much like us to do anything about it, but a God who is sovereign and yet deeply involved. Isn’t that what is meant by the Incarnation: “The Word became flesh”; “… made in all respects like his brothers, yet without sin”; “Immanuel: God With Us”?

After the horrors of the Holocaust and the daily atrocities appearing on CNN or in our own lives, it is not difficult to see why confidence in a God who is completely distinct (though not aloof) from creation is a tough business for some to maintain. Can it be maintained? In this issue, we’ll explain why we think we can—and must. Let us know what you think. ■

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The Rev. Alistair Begg Dr. James M. Boice Dr. W. Robert Godfrey Dr. John D. Hannah Dr. Michael S. Horton Mrs. Rosemary Jensen The Rev. Ken Jones Dr. J. A. O. Preus Dr. Rod Rosenbladt Dr. R. C. Sproul Dr. Mark R. Talbot Dr. Gene E. Veith, Jr. Contributing Scholars

Dr. Allen C. Guelzo Dr. D. G. Hart Dr. Carl F. H. Henry Dr. Arthur A. Just Dr. Robert Kolb The Rev. Donald Matzat Dr. John W. Montgomery Mr. John Muether Dr. Richard A. Muller Mr. Kenneth A. Myers Dr. Tom J. Nettles Dr. Leonard R. Payton Dr. Lawrence R. Rast Dr. Kim Riddlebarger Mr. Rick Ritchie Dr. David P. Scaer Ms. Rachel S. Stahle Dr. David F. Wells Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals

© 1999 All rights reserved. The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals exists to call the church, amidst our dying culture, to repent of its worldliness, to recover and confess the truth of God’s Word as did the Reformers, and to see that truth embodied in doctrine, worship and life. For more information, call or write us at: Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals 1716 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, PA 19103 (215) 546-3696 ModRef@Alliance Net.org www.AllianceNet.org SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION

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cannot present only Christ; it must also show us God’s righteous demands on our lives and remind us of our failures. Then can the soothing balm of Christ’s Gospel be applied to the believer and extended to the unbeliever.

This edifies the believer, and for the non-believer “the secrets of his heart are disclosed; and so he will fall on his face” (1 Cor. 14:25). Removing the demands of the law could produce antinomianism within God’s people and fail to demand repentance from the unbeliever.

I realize that my Redemptive-Historical preaching Wondering About Redemptive-Historical Preaching brothers would say that I am confusing the law and the Your new preaching column, “Ex Auditu,” is an interGospel by applying the biblical text and showing its esting addition. And having recently visited a United demands on our lives. However, this is not blurring the Reformed (URC) congregation, I see that this “redemptwo; God’s law is never to be offered as a means of salvative-historical method” of preaching is common in some tion. It hangs our guilt before us and propels us to our of these circles. While I fully agree with and utilize this Savior. Law and Gospel are most often confused in method of interpretation, I find Redemptive-Historical preaching that is “practical.” When we are given “Moses’ preaching lacking in the area of application. This is, of Five Keys to Happy Families” or “Three Steps to Biblical course, by design.

Manhood” or other such messages, we’re told only what But a wise pastor who first taught me to preach once God demands from us and its practical benefits to our told me: “If you don’t apply it, they won’t apply it.” If we, lives, as if we could do it on our own. We regularly fail as ministers of the New Covenant, are to follow the in these things and, therefore, need a Savior, not more law! “…preaching cannot present only Christ; it must also show us God’s righteous demands on our What the Church needs is not a seminary lecture on justification lives and remind us of our failures. Then the soothing balm of Christ’s Gospel can be applied to every Sunday. God uses his Word—taught, preached, and the believer and extended to the unbeliever.” studied—as the means of sanctification. The law demands, Christ satisfies, believers conApostles in their preaching and teaching, I believe we must form to Christ’s image. I fear that Redemptive-Historical present in our preaching both the law and the Gospel, preaching misses this critical application of the Word. without blurring the distinction between the two. God righteously demands from us our obedience to his law.

Tim Etherington (Why else would he write it on our hearts? Jer. 31:33) Edwards, CA A biblical example of my point is the book of Galatians. In the first four chapters, Paul presents the grace of the Gospel. He forcefully demonstrates that Editors’ Response grace alone and no works of man save us. However, in The charge is often raised against Redemptivechapter five, he puts up a barrier against the antinomianHistorical preaching that it, by design, lacks application. ism this teaching might produce: “You, my brothers, This, of course, begs the question: “What does one were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to mean by application?” Most people who raise this quesindulge the sinful nature; rather, serve one another in tion seem to be concerned that a sermon which is cenlove. The entire law is summed up in a single command: tered on the work of Christ will thereby de-emphasize ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’” (Gal. 5:13-14). that portion of the sermon which they have come to Based on Paul’s method, I would say that preaching

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regard as the point of preaching: the pastor telling me what I shall then do.

But Rev. Etherington has asked a much better question than this. For his excellent letter, in our view, rightly defines “application” more broadly than simply “what should or shouldn’t I do on Monday.” Etherington has implicitly defined application as the presentation of the law and its incessant demands on our lives—in both the first and the third use. (The “first” use of the law is the condemnation that drives us to Christ; the “third” use is

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Gospel is not preached in a vacuum; knowledge of the law (first use) is fundamental to a proper understanding of the Gospel. It is the law which Christ fulfills in its entirety, both in its positive demands and its horrific penalty. It is the law which he wields to the great devastation of all Pharisees. And it is the perfect obedience of the law in glory, already begun in part (third use), for which we are saved.

The Reformation hermeneutic, or interpretation, of law and Gospel recognizes that all Scripture can rightly be divided into these two senses.

Lutheran preaching in particular “…the Redemptive-Historical preacher recognizes that the Gospel is not preached in a picks up on the idea that the preached Word is always active vacuum; knowledge of the law (first use) is fundamental to a proper understanding of in both of these ways, the law killing and the Gospel giving life. the Gospel.”

Though differing in method, the more characteristically Reformed Redemptive-Historical the direction of the saints in their godly walk.) approach also recognizes this fundamental distinction The short answer, then, to this common charge that between law and Gospel.

Redemptive-Historical preaching undercuts application is Both agree that sanctification springs from faith, and that the charge is based on a false premise. Yes, faith comes from hearing—“Ex Auditu” as Romans 10:17 Redemptive-Historical preaching seeks to explain how is translated in Latin—that is, from hearing the Gospel. the redemptive work encompassed in the life, death, and The law stands at the entry to our worship, it fills a domresurrection of Christ is at the very center of all the inant position in our catechisms, and it is both presumed Scriptures. Yes, such preaching declares the glorious mysand expounded in our sermons. But if you seek the source tery of the believer’s present participation in the fullness of of the transformation of sinners—sanctification—seek it eschatological blessings through his union with Christ. nowhere else than the glorious indicative of the Gospel!

The dominant note, therefore, is certainly the indicative It alone fills the regenerate heart with true gratitude, declaration of what Christ has accomplished, and the from which flows obedience in faith. It is by means of resultant status of the believer who is found in Christ. the application of the Gospel that God grants sanctifyBut the proclamation of the completed work of Christ ing faith to his Church. (and thereby the justified status of the believer)—that is, the Gospel—does not come at the expense of the law, in either its first or third use. May it never be! For the Redemptive-Historical preacher recognizes that the

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Galatians 3:1

Christ Alone!

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ou foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was clearly por-

eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified.”

What is the alternative to the trayed as crucified” (Gal. 3:1). ¶ You never mature beyond the cross! Rather, the whole cross of Jesus Christ? The only of the Christian life from beginning to end, day by day, moment by moment, is sim- alternative is to fall back once again upon my own resources.

Of course it is foolish to take my ply eyes off the cross of Christ. learning what it means to live by grace through faith From What resources do I have? alone in Christ alone. That, of course, is what the DAVID B. What strength do I have? What Protestant Reformation was all about. That is why it was MCWILLIAMS merit do I have? What do I have important, and is still important to us. to offer a holy and just God? It Cicero made the statement: not to know what has is a foolish thing indeed. happened in the past is to remain forever a child. And This is precisely what the indeed the Church is childish when she does not care Minister, Galatian churches were doing. about what happened in her history. It is essential that Covenant Presbyterian Paul had only recently founded we understand God’s mighty work of grace in the sixChurch these churches and he had proteenth century that recovered for us the Gospel of freeclaimed to them the doctrine of dom. In order to really understand what Luther, Calvin, justification by grace through and the other reformers were preaching and proclaiming faith. We see this in 2:16: “… know that a man is not and why it is so important to our lives today, we have to justified by observing the law, but by faith in Jesus get behind the sixteenth century. We have to go back to Christ. So we, too, have put our faith in Christ Jesus that the Bible, back to the New Testament and back to the we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by observapostle Paul. There we read in his epistles those constant ing the law, because by observing the law no one will be reminders that the Gospel is a Gospel of grace. What justified.” Those are words of freedom! Paul is saying to Christ did for you and me was done for us freely. It cost God’s Son everything, but it costs us nothing. We need us: justification is not by the good works that you do this frequent reminder both because we still are sinners which are filled with flaws and error. It is not by your and because we really don’t believe as we should. merit. It is not by your attempt that you can come into When we turn to the book of Galatians, perhaps after the presence of a holy God and be accepted. We know a week of many, many failures in serving God, all of the that a man is not justified by his attempt to obey the law; sudden flowers start to burst forth! We see red, we see rather, a man is just in the sight of God by the work of purple, and we see green. It is as if we turn to the book another: Jesus Christ. That is why the apostle is and there is Spring. There is life in this book! It is almost absolutely dumbfounded that these apostolic churches as if the life’s sap of all the Bible that extends to all of are deserting the Gospel that he had just proclaimed to God’s word, flows out of this book and out of this Gospel them. of grace that Paul the apostle sets forth so clearly. What We see how shocked he is by looking at the introthe apostle Paul underscores to the congregations in the duction to Galatians. Compare this to the other introchurches of South Galatia, we also underscore now in the ductions of Paul’s letters. In other places, he eases into his preached Word: To forget the grace of God in Christ is comments. He has a lengthy thanksgiving and he says a foolish! Do you see how he puts it? “You foolish great deal about the churches. But here, the apostle just Galatians! Who has bewitched you? Before your very dives in and with urgency tells them: I am astounded at

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When Paul asks, “Who has bewitched you?” (3:1), he is not being funny. (He had never heard of Elizabeth Montgomery.) The apostle is using a term that means the evil eye. Who has put the hex on you? Who has put this evil eye on you? The way you are acting—you who have heard the Gospel and are now deserting it—it is almost as if you are under some kind of a strange spell. It is almost as if you are bewitched. It leads to despair.

This is what you must see. If you think you can begin the Christian life with the cross and then somehow leave the cross behind and go on in your own strength, it will let you down and it will let you down hard. It leads to despair every time.

Martin Luther recognized this. He offers the very pathetic t is foolish to exchange the good news of heaven for the bad news of case of Dr. Krause of Halle who was driven to the point of my own strength. It is foolish to exchange the infinite merit of Christ despair and then committed suicide. Dr. Krause, in a fit of for my infinite demerit before God. despair, had exclaimed: “I have denied Christ; therefore, he is now standing in the presthe law came to crush all of your self hopes and to drive ence of the Father accusing me.” Luther says that this you out of yourself to Christ. It is foolish to return to the poor man believed a sheer lie, a bewitchment of the law again as a means to be accepted by God when the devil, and a fanatical definition of Christ about which purpose of the law was to crush your hopes of being Scripture knows nothing at all.1 For the Word depicts accepted by God on your terms and to drive you to Christ that you may be accepted on his terms, by his Christ, not as judge or a tempter or an accuser, but as the provision. It is foolish to exchange what is free for the Reconciler, the Mediator, the Comforter, the Savior, and relentless demands of the law. The Gospel of grace says: the Throne of Grace. Luther pastorally observes that to God gives and gives! The law says: you must do and do! think of Christ accusing you to the Father—standing Law demands. It’s avaricious; it never quits; it always against and not for you—is diabolical. wants more. It is foolish to exchange the good news of Imagine such despair. I have sinned against God, I heaven for the bad news of my own strength. It is foolhave done something horrible this week. Therefore, ish to exchange the infinite merit of Christ for my infiChrist must be accusing me before the Father rather than nite demerit before God. accepting me before the Father. Some of you have been This is why those little questions that follow there; some of you probably live there. That is how you Galatians 3:1 are so important: see Christ, that is how you see God. You see him as against you rather than for you. But the whole message of I would like to learn just one thing from you: Did the reformation, the whole message of Galatians is that you receive the Spirit by observing the law, or by Christ is pro me! He is for me, he is not against me! God believing what you heard? Are you so foolish? receives me through my Reconciler, my Redeemer, my After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trySavior, my Master, my Lord. ing to attain your goal by human effort? Have you Salvation by works? Even a Christian can slide back suffered so much for nothing—if it really was for into this dark way of thinking. That kind of theology is nothing? Does God give you his Spirit and work a theology of doubt, a theology of despair, a theology of miracles among you because you observe the law, hopelessness and a theology that breeds fear in the soul. or because you believe what you heard? (3:2-5) So, let me ask: Have you forgotten the good news of the Gospel? Have you become, in some measure, bewitched Look at all the wonderful things that God has done by some gospel of works which is no gospel at all? Have for you in your Christian life. Did those things come to you forgotten Christ crucified? How do you see God? you because of your effort? Do those things come to you Do you see him as for you? Despite your sin and your because of your merit? Did those things come to you failure this week, he is for you. But do you see him as because you have obeyed the law perfectly? So the aposagainst you? tle Paul says don’t you see how foolish this thinking is?

The answer to these doubts and temptations is found You must begin your Christian life, continue your here in our text: “Who has bewitched you? Before your Christian life, and end it when you go to heaven, trustvery eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified.” ing in the cross of Christ and looking to him alone.

He was clearly portrayed—or, better translated, “placyou, absolutely shocked at you! This is a pugilistic passage. The apostle Paul is coming out with his boxing gloves on, ready to fight! He is ready to fight because there are those who will cause these churches to desert the only hope that they have of a right relationship with God, which is through the cross of Jesus Christ. So he is urgent, he is amazed and he comes out fighting.

Why is it foolish to turn from the cross of Christ?

Because turning from the cross means turning from the only way of coming to God, the only way of having fellowship with God. It is foolish to exchange the free grace of God for the bondage of your own works. The law did not come to reform you and to make you good;

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arded.” He was “bill-boarded,” if you will, as crucified.

Keep your gaze fixed on Christ crucified. That is the whole point of the passage in Romans 3 also. Christ was set forth as a propitiation to satisfy the anger of God and to remove it that we might be accepted freely through the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Why Christ crucified? Why him placarded on the cross? Because a perfect substitute was needed in order to reconcile you to God. Because a perfect substitute was needed in order that God’s justice be satisfied, because I cannot live on a pass/fail basis before God. We cannot live that way. Fear is dispelled in no other way but the cross of Christ. In Word and Sacrament this morning, Christ is placarded before your very eyes as crucified.

Every time one of your pastors stands to preach in this pulpit, Christ is placarded as crucified. It is the Gospel that we long to preach, and that you desire to receive.

This word that he uses for “placard” is a typical word for a public notice, an announcement. And so, what Paul is saying is: when I was among you, when I was preaching to you, it was as if Christ himself were placarded before your very eyes through the heralding of the Gospel. He was placarded—“bill-boarded”—for you to see as the Gospel was preached and proclaimed. That takes us all the way back to another verse referred to in this epistle, Deuteronomy 21:22. Here we are told that the man that is hung upon a tree is cursed. But that is the glory of it all! The infinite Son of God became man and there he hung upon a cross and was cursed, so that you might not be cursed but be free from the curse.

How foolish then to walk in this labyrinth of works, of self-righteousness, of my own merit, when it is Christ who bore my sin and took my curse for me. The Gospel is not insight for living; the Gospel is not tips for living.

The Gospel will have effects upon how we rear our children and how we live our marriages, but that is not the Gospel. The Gospel is Christ crucified for sinners. That is what the Gospel is. Placarding before your eyes an ugly portrait of a crucified Jew with blood, dirt, filth, pain, gore and flies. The Son of God bearing your sin no matter what that sin has been.

That is the reality of the cross. Now hear this, and if you do not remember anything else (though I hope you will), remember this: the Gospel is outside of you! The importance of that is that so many of us get wrapped up in thinking that the Gospel depends upon how I feel on any given day. So the Gospel is for me when I feel that it is, and when the Gospel doesn’t seem to be for me then God is against me. The Gospel is not based upon your feelings! The Gospel is not something that is based upon your changing moods. The Gospel is outside of you.

A Lutheran theologian for whom I have a great deal of respect tells of a friend who was walking down the street one day when he was met by a street evangelist who asked him: “Brother, are you saved?” He responded: “Yes, I am saved.” The evangelist continued: “When

were you saved?” The man answered: “I was saved 2,000 years ago about 20 minutes outside of Jerusalem.” That is the Gospel. The Gospel is outside of you; it is what God has done for you. It does not depend upon your whims or your changing emotions. Faith has no virtue of its own whatsoever. That is why Calvin can say that even the weakest faith is justified by its object. We are saved on account of Christ through faith, not making faith into some kind of merit or work.

So seeing Christ placarded before you as crucified— or hearing him placarded in preaching—makes all the difference. It is the difference between the life of joy and freedom filled with grace, and the life marked by self-torture and introspection. For there is no hope curved in on yourself, looking to yourself, looking within. Hope is in Christ. The Gospel is not based upon your moral condition; it is based on his moral condition. “I failed this week.” Didn’t Christ die for our failures? That is what Paul is proclaiming. So, I am not saved because of the quality of my contrition. It is not my worth, but the worth of Christ that saves.

People of God, continue to see Christ as placarded before your eyes as crucified. Continue to live by grace.

You are not only saved by grace initially, you continue to live by grace. Many Christians are returning to the law again. (I am not talking about law as a guide to my life— which it indeed is—but as a way of being accepted with God.) You hear it all the time. The struggling believer is told that he needs to take the next step. “You haven’t taken that next step. You haven’t had that second work of grace. You haven’t surrendered sufficiently. You haven’t had a Keswick experience.” That is law that’s returning to works. Live in the Gospel and on the basis of the Gospel. That is what Paul is calling us to do.

Now, Martin Luther’s friend Philip Melanchthon was prone to being curved in on himself. On one occasion, as he often did, he wrote to Luther questioning whether he had trusted Christ enough. Luther thought the best way to handle Melanchthon’s introspection was to shake him out of his complacency. Luther wrote back: Melanchthon go, sin bravely, then go to the cross and bravely confess it! The whole Gospel is outside of us.

Now I know that Luther has been misunderstood.

That passage has often been misused. Luther is not saying, disregard God’s law, don’t care how you live.

Luther’s point is simply this: As you live life with your best intentions, you are going to fail! Be brave about it and go to the cross bravely and receive bravely the cross that is offered to you. Go live your life; don’t be timid.

Live it for Christ, knowing that you are going to fail but knowing that there is always the cross of Christ to which you return. Luther is right. Even if his words could have been phrased differently, Luther is right.

There are only two religions in this world. There is the religion of law and there is the religion of Gospel.

Which characterizes your life? Are you living in the

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bondage of the law? Perfectionism? Do you live thinking, ”I must do those works of the law or God will crush me?” Or are you living on the basis of the freedom of the Gospel? “Yes, I sin, yes, I fail, and, yes, I hate it—but I thank God for the cross.” For there is freedom in the cross of Christ.

There was a man named Frederic Myconius (14901546), of whom Gustav Freytag writes in his biography of Luther. In 1510, Myconius heard John Tetzel preaching. As usual, Tetzel was preaching indulgences and that sinners could only make amends for their sins by works. On one occasion, Tetzel actually preached that soon the price of the indulgences was going to increase.

Buy them as quickly as possible! But an appendix was added on authority of the pope saying: to the needy, the letters of indulgence are to be given for nothing, without money, for the sake of God. When Myconius, a poor man, attempted to obtain the indulgence gratis, Tetzel insisted that he must do something. (“God helps those who help themselves”—it is really a medieval idea.) Tetzel offered the indulgence for a few pennies.

Myconius did not have a few pennies. So, Tetzel offered to provide a few pennies on the condition that Myconius give them back with a purchase of the indulgence. But Myconius insisted that the pope’s appendix required nothing. Tetzel refused to give this poor man his indulgence by which he would be assured that certain sins were pardoned.

Myconius went back to his little room and there he knelt before his cross. Myconius who could not get an indulgence from Tetzel began to pray.

to be accepted by God. The good news of the Gospel declares you must get rid of the idea that you can do anything to be accepted by God! It is one hundred percent Christ; it is zero of what you do. It is all of grace from first to last. So, you see the apostle Paul says: “O! foolish Galatians!”—he is exasperated, even angry. He says, “O! You foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you?

Before your very eyes, Jesus was clearly placarded as crucified.” Paul is not saying that Christ is crucified over and over. Rather, he is saying the eternal efficacy of the cross of Christ is placarded before your eyes every time the Gospel is preached, and every time you turn to him, and every time you read this book. What Paul heralded is God’s eternal truth. The question is: Is the cross staked at the core of your being? ■

Rev. David B. McWilliams is minister of Covenant Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Lakeland, Florida. This sermon was preached in November 1997.

SPEAKING OF

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od from all eternity, did, by the most wise and holy counsel of His own will, freely, and unchangeably

ordain While doing this I was so moved that I, on returning to my inn, almost gushed forth and melted into tears. Thus I came to my inn, went to my room, and took the cross which always lay upon the little table in my study room, placed it upon the bench and fell down upon the floor before it.

I cannot describe it here, but at that time I was able to feel the spirit of prayer and divine grace which you, my Lord and God, poured out over me. The essential import of the same was, however, this: I asked that you, dear God, might be willing to be my Father, that you might be willing to forgive me for my sins, that I submitted myself wholly to you, that you might make of me now whatsoever pleased you, and because the priest did not wish to be gracious to me without money, that you might be willing to be my gracious God and Father.2 Then Myconius adds: Then I felt that my whole heart was changed.

Do we have a Myconius here this morning? It might not be an indulgence, but you’ve been thinking that you have to do something—some little something—in order

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whatsoever

comes

to

pass:

yet so, as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures; nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established.

Although God knows whatsoever may or can come to pass upon all supposed

conditions; yet hath he not

decreed any thing because he foresaw it as future, or as that which would come to pass upon such conditions.

—Westminster Confession of Faith, III.1-2

Speaking of...

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o not be deceived, my beloved brethren.

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning.”

James 1:17

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he problem of sin and evil is, as everybody knows, one which all religions have to face, especially those that postulate an all-good and all-powerful God. “If,” we say readily, “God is holy and omnipotent, He would interfere and stop all this kind of thing”—meaning by “this kind of thing” wars, persecutions, cruelty, Hitlerism, Bolshevism, or whatever large issue happens to be distressing our minds at the time. But let us be quite sure that we have really considered the problem in all its aspects.

“Why doesn’t God smite this dictator dead?” is a question a little remote from us. Why, madam, did He not strike you dumb and imbecile before you uttered that baseless and unkind slander the day before yesterday? Or me, before I behaved with such cruel lack of consideration to that well-meaning friend? And why, sir, did He not cause your hand to rot off at the wrist before you signed your name to that dirty little bit of financial trickery?

Dorothy Sayers, Creed or Chaos?, 12-13

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very once in a while in my discussions someone asks how I can believe in the Trinity. My answer is always the same. I would still be an agnostic if there were no Trinity, because there would be no answers. Without the high order of personal unity and diversity as given in the Trinity, there are no answers.

Francis A. Schaeffer, He Is There and He Is Not Silent, 14

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oses said, … “When I come to the children of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they say to me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?”

And God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” Exodus 3:13-14

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or His dominion is an everlasting dominion, and His kingdom is from generation to generation. All the inhabitants of the earth are reputed as nothing; He does according to His will in the army of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth. No one can restrain His hand or say to Him, “What have You done?”

Daniel 4:34-35

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k G O D I N O U R I M A G E | Why Some Evangelicals are Challenging the Traditional View of God

Is the New News Good News?

Shifting Views Concerning God in Our Day vangelical theologian Clark Pinnock appears to be the leading spokesperson for a growing trend toward what he and his colleagues call the “openness of God” theology. In this system, “God does not control everything that happens,” or, for that matter, know everything that will happen. Rather, “In loving dialogue, God invites us to participate with him to bring the future into being.” What is desperately needed, Pinnock and other progressive theologians say, is a theology “that reinforces, rather than makes problematic, our relational experience with God.”1 Although this criterion—measuring truth according to “its cash-value in experiential terms” (William James)—is most obviously identified with modern theology from Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) to Paul Tillich (1886-1965), the tendency toward what Yale

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theologian George Lindbeck calls “experientialexpressivism” is thriving in evangelical circles these days. In some ways, given the pietistic orientation of the evangelical movement, this should not be surprising. But what is amazing is the extent to which some of the group’s leading thinkers are willing to reject the traditional understanding of God in order to find a theology “that reinforces, rather than makes problematic, our relational experience with God.” At least in theory, evangelicals have historically been unwilling to give normative status to human experience, believing instead that experience should be interpreted in light of special revelation. To understand just how far these evangelicals are from historic Protestantism, consider that the Reformation itself was, at least in part, a claim that Christian theology is specifically charged with the task of making problematic our relationship with God!

suffering and evil, or he is good, but cannot change things. But both cannot be true. God cannot be both sovereign and good simultaneously, given the realities of human existence. That is the dilemma that is at the heart of these discussions. It drives related debates concerning human sinfulness, divine judgment, and a host of other issues. Especially in light of the Holocaust, these challenges cannot be dismissed casually. And yet, it has been stated profoundly that in our day the understanding of God that is captured in the title of Jonathan Edwards’ famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” has been inverted to read, “God in the Hands of Angry Sinners.”

Another reason one might suggest for this shift is the increasingly abstract notion of “God.” We do not have the space here to pursue it sufficiently, but surely a case could be made that much of modern theology has been at least implicitly unitarian.

That is, there has been little interest in the Trinity and, more specifically, in the person of No one has ever claimed “God the Father Almighty” as forcefully—and Jesus Christ. A major reason for the success of Karl Barth’s neoevangelically—as Jesus Christ. orthodox theology during this century was its passionate reassertion of Christ’s centrality in the doctrine and life of the Church. We could For the law of God comes to throw us off our high challenge even Barth’s approach to this question in a horse, to make God a problem for us rather than one of number of ways, but he did at least point up the humanmany “solutions.” And, as for the Gospel, it is centered and unitarian tendency of liberal theology. “foolishness” to us all by nature. One may reasonably People came up with a god who suited the spirit of the suspect any message aiming to reinforce, rather than “modern man,” a god who was safe for modern make “problematic, our relational experience with God.” consumption, and was an ally of secularization rather After all, didn’t the children of Israel gathered at Mount than its enemy. Today, it seems, we are still living under Sinai fashion the golden calf precisely as an alternative to the same specter.

God’s terrifying words? Didn’t the fear of God clash with But what do I mean by the “unitarian” tendency? their needed experience?

Critics of Calvinism are fond of charging it with And yet, doesn’t our experience count for rationalism. Our Lutheran brethren brand us with this something? very charge, especially in connection with our doctrine As a brief introduction to a difficult debate, this of the Lord’s Supper—despite the fact that Calvin article will be concerned primarily with defining the himself declared of this matter, “I would rather classical doctrine of God in light of these new criticisms.

But first, let us sketch briefly the motivation for this trend. experience than understand it” (Institutes, 4.17.32).

Nevertheless, critics within Calvinism have sometimes charged the official Reformed teaching concerning the Why a Different View of God? Supper with “mysticism,” and these criticisms often do evisions to the classical doctrine of God betray a certain tinge of rationalism. In the over-ripening cannot be traced to just one or two motives; of New England Congregationalism, Dutch Arminianism, rather they have been encouraged by and English latitudinarianism, the tendency was definitely numerous factors.

Some progressive toward Socinianism—that sixteenth-century heresy that theologians are persuaded chiefly by technical arguments, others by very personal experience, but most repudiated the doctrines of the Trinity, the deity of advocates of revision have been influenced by both.

Christ, divine sovereignty, original sin and justification, What many of these critics share in common, however, and other doctrines deemed insufficiently rational. is an unavoidable interest in the problem of evil— Among some later Puritans, “God” had become someone theodicy, as it is technically known. other than the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the Nearly everyone is familiar with the conundrum: Trinity was not as prominent as a single, unitary being of Either God is all-powerful, but chooses not to abolish blinding glory and power. It was against this deity,

R

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wholly unknown and unknowable—perhaps even capricious, that modern theology reacted in favor of humanity.

Although this caricature has no resemblance to the God who has revealed himself in Jesus Christ for our salvation, nor with the confessional Reformed and Presbyterian tradition, both the sickness and the cure seem to have a common ingredient. They both accept a unitary god, abstracted from Christ, as the one with whom they have to deal. Either this unitary deity is “wholly other” than creation (with the emphasis on divine sovereignty) or is wholly identified with it (with the emphasis on human freedom). But in either case, there is little place—especially among Christian philosophers of religion—for talking about the Incarnation and Jesus Christ’s role as God’s saving revelation and actor in history. Perhaps Christian philosophers (those who seem these days to do most of the heavy lifting on this subject) feel uneasy about bringing Christology into the mix, since this appears presumptuous with their non-Christian colleagues. But, at least from a Christian point of view, if questions such as the problem of evil are to be solved, it is hoped that Christian philosophers will have a better place to stand than mere theism. From a Christian perspective, mere theism has no solution whatsoever to the problem of evil. Here it is true that “God” is the problem, not the answer. Here we have only a god of total transcendence or total immanence, either sovereign or good.

The result of this mistake is that God is regarded either as totally uninvolved and uninterested, or as dependent. Like a large building with only one point of stress, such a unitarian concept of God can easily collapse. To say that God is not dependent on the world is not to say all that needs to be said: God did become flesh. And yet, God the Son became flesh in such a way that his everlasting Godhead never changed, but added a human nature in a personal union. When either conservatives or progressives do theology without paying attention to Christ, the answers are superficial, either-or, and ultimately unsatisfying for everyone.

Challenges to God’s Might ow are we to understand these modern and evangelical theological departures from orthodoxy? Perhaps it is useful to view them as challenging the first article of the creed: “I believe in God the Father Almighty.”

We will consider the rejection of God’s fatherhood later; let us first look at the current argument against his power. As mentioned earlier, the theology of the “suffering God” is largely a product of Auschwitz. If God is good, some theologians argue, he would surely have stopped the Holocaust if he could have.

Therefore, he simply must not have been able to do so.

This view so identifies God with the world that the

H

Creator and his creation are nearly fused. An extreme version of this position is rooted in the German philosopher G. F. W. Hegel (1770-1831), who identified God with everything that is real and, therefore, rational.

According to Hegel, history is God’s self-realization, as Spirit progressively transforms everything by radical swings from thesis to antithesis, resulting in a higher synthesis. As appropriated by theology, this meant that the cross is symbolic of the death of everything (thesis) that is required for the resurrection of everything (antithesis), resulting in a new stage of history (i.e., God’s) self-realization. For Hegel, this process was marked by a cheerful optimism, but war and injustice on a massive scale challenged the so-called progress. In the 1960s, the “Death of God” theologians argued this so forcefully that Time magazine carried the cover story, “Is God Dead?”

Others have been more restrained: God is not dead, but he is suffering. This view has become quite popular even in evangelical circles. In a 1997 issue of Christianity Today, for instance, there were two articles on this trend—both of them arguing for the suffering of God, and therefore against the classical Christian view!

One article even asserted that the “error” of the classical view can be traced to the Chalcedonian Creed (A.D. 451).2 Appealing to the biblical references in which God is described as “afflicted,” “repentant,” “pleased,” and so forth, proponents of God’s suffering do not accept the traditional interpretation that these are anthropomorphisms—that is, figures of speech in which God describes himself in human terms so that we can better understand his character.

Although hardly an orthodox theologian himself, Hans Kung offers a sound critique of this position, as it is “inspired more by Hegel than by the Bible.” No one has attempted to grapple more with the Holocaust—and suffering in general—than Kung. Yet he correctly observes that we cannot do away with the “godness” of God in order to find an easy explanation of suffering. He writes: A look at scripture may sober up such speculative boldness…. Granted, in anthropomorphic language the Hebrew Bible sometimes attributes the whole range of human feelings and attitudes to God…. But nowhere is the difference between God and human beings done away with, nor is human suffering and pain simply declared to be the suffering and pain of God…. Nowhere does God’s Godliness become ungodliness, his faithfulness unfaithfulness, his reliability unreliability, his divine mercy human pitifulness. For the Hebrew Bible, though human beings fail, God does not fail; when human beings die, God does not die also. For “I am God and not man, the holy one in your

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midst,” states Hosea 11:9 against any humanization of God, although at this very point as elsewhere there is anthropomorphic talk of God’s “compassion” on his people.3 Concerning God’s unchanging character, the New Testament tells the same story. Jesus cries out to God, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” for the suffering God-Man is not the suffering of the divine nature itself. Kung encourages us to, “emphatically protest against a masochistic, tolerant understanding of God according to which a weak God has to torture himself to resurrection by suffering and death if he is not to suffer eternally.”4 If God is affected by events outside of himself, he is dependent on these factors for his pleasure or pain. He is, therefore, a victim of evil, along with the rest of us. It

may help some people to learn that God feels their pain, but if it is at the expense of his invulnerability to change, frustration, despair, and suffering, God is no more helpful in a crisis than is the therapist or sympathetic neighbor.

If one is trapped inside the elevator of a burning building, a fireman outside the elevator who can break down the door is preferable to a fellow victim who is also trapped but understands the problem. Being omniscient, God knows our pain and hears our cries. And in Christ, God did experience our human suffering inasmuch as he was the God-Man. But as God, he was able to rescue us because he possessed the very attributes that we do not possess. Because he is in himself beyond suffering, he cannot be affected or hindered by anything that happens in the world. When he does act, it is out of strength, abundance, self-sufficiency, and freedom, not out of weakness, lack, dependence, or constraint. Although

The Incommunicabl

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s great Christian minds have scoured the Scriptures they have been able to discern a number of God’s attributes— that is, characteristics affirmed by God as belonging to his nature. These fall into two categories: communicable and incommunicable. The former are those attributes that humanity can share with God as his image bearers (e.g., holiness, relationality); the latter are those attributes that belong to God alone (e.g., omnipotence, immutability). Especially as so many of these incommunicable attributes are coming under attack in our day, it is useful to review briefly the biblical basis for these incommunicable attributes:

Self-Existence and Self-Sufficiency First, God is self-existent and self-sufficient. One of the oldest questions in philosophy, and perhaps the most frequently asked theological question among children is: “Who made God?” The question is based on the dilemma as to whether there is anything in the universe that is eternal.

If we say that nothing that we see could have come into existence without a cause, we eventually work our way back to God himself. So, who caused God to be? Aristotle insisted that God was the First Cause, the eternal being who causes all things to exist but who himself is uncaused and uncreated.

While these notions became increasingly trapped within Greek philosophy, the Scriptures do affirm the basic thrust of Aristotle’s point. It is impossible for us to grasp fully God’s self-existence because we do not have any analogous reference point in ourselves or in the world. For us, everything is in some way the product or effect of something else.

However, when God revealed his name to Moses, there was no question that God’s self-existence and self-sufficiency were not only true, but that God’s whole nature could be summarized this way.

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From the burning bush (itself a symbol in that it burned but was not consumed), God called to Moses, and in the course of conversation the patriarch asked, “Indeed, when I come to the children of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they say to me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” “And God said to Moses, ‘I AM WHO I AM.’ And he said, ‘Thus you shall say to the children of Israel, I AM has sent me to you’” (Ex. 3:13-14).

Far better than any philosophical speculation, God’s own selfdisclosure of his name offers the clearest expression of his self-existence and self-sufficiency. “To whom then will you liken God? Or what likeness will you compare to him?” (Is. 40:18). When it comes to God’s incommunicable attributes, there is no analogy of being. We cannot point to another selfexistent and self-sufficient person and say, “That is what God is like.”

Paul declared in Athens that, unlike the gods of Greek mythology, the true God is “not served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he gives to all life, breath, and all things” (Acts 17:25). God did not create us because he was lonely or because something was missing in himself. He enjoyed the eternal company of inter-trinitarian fellowship, each person of the Godhead contributing inexhaustible pleasure, joy, and delight. He created out of strength, not weakness; out of abundance, not lack; out of an excess of joy, not because he was unfulfilled.

Immutability A second incommunicable divine attribute is immutability. A mutation is a change from one thing to another. To attribute immutability to God is to say that he never changes. Many modern theologians have attacked this and related attributes (such as impassibility) as owing more to Greek philosophy, with its celebration of static, unchanging, perfect being,

this may not fully resolve our curiosities about the problem of evil and suffering, it is good news to those who are actually suffering. Our Father is strong to save.

Challenges to God’s Fatherhood ut the second way that “God the Father Almighty” has come under attack recently concerns whether we should even think of God as a father. This position has its source in Karl Marx’s critique of power and hierarchy which has been influential in both liberationist and feminist theologies.

Marx said that the criticism of religion as “the opiate of the people” was the point of departure for an unrelenting criticism of the status quo in every field. According to theologian Sallie McFague, for instance, Jewish-Christian patriarchalism which pervaded the early church, was the product of a monarchical conception of God.

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A male king rules over a hierarchy of lesser powers, all of whom reign over women and other marginalized members of society. Thus, the theory goes, theology justified and produced hierarchical and patriarchal cultures. The picture represented in the “Hallelujah Chorus” of Handel’s Messiah (“King of kings and Lord of lords,” “for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth”) is “a very dangerous one,” writes McFague.5 (Of course, these attributions of monarchical sovereignty do not originate with Handel, but with the Scriptures themselves.)

Closely related to the notion of a “suffering God,” the alternative picture suggested by feminist theologians is that of a vulnerable deity who, unlike the “masculine” God of power and stoic indifference to feeling, is a fellow traveler. Process theology, even when it does not explicitly draw on feminist themes, is another popular expression of these basic ideas. God, proponents suggest,

le Attributes of God which opposes growth and evolution. But is this really the reason for centuries of Christian commitment to this teaching?

First, Greek philosophy has never been united on immutability, although surely Plato and the disciples of Stoicism exercised an enormous influence over Western thought. It must be acknowledged that some formulations of such attributes do sound much more like philosophical speculation than biblical self-disclosure, but Scripture does indeed declare that God is immutable: he never changes.

The divine name, “I AM WHO I AM,” not only points to God’s selfexistence, but also to his changeless character. He did not say, “I AM BECOMING ABSOLUTE BEING,” as Hegel and many modern philosophers and theologians would have preferred. The Psalmist notes that while God changes the ancient heavens and the earth as a nurse changes diapers, he himself does not change: “They will perish, but you will endure; yes, they will all grow old like a garment; like a cloak you will change them, and they will be changed. But you are the same” (Psalm 102:26). In fact, the word “same” here is the Hebrew name translated in Exodus 3 at the burning bush: “I AM.” Thus, the qualitative distinction between God and all that he has made is measured by the fact that everything changes, while he remains what he has always been and will always be.

God declares of himself, “I the LORD do not change” (Mal. 3:6). He says Israel can take comfort in this (v. 7). After all, if he did change, he would certainly have broken his covenant with his disobedient people and consumed them with fire by now! Paul refers to the nations as exchanging the glory of a changeless, perfect God with that of a changing, imperfect deity (Rom. 1:22). That is, after all, the point of God’s immutability. If he is changing in his very essence and being, it suggests that it is possible for him to move from imperfection to perfection, from a lack of knowledge to

fullness, from a lack of love or mercy to a plentitude of grace, from a lack of power over a particular situation to a victory over rival forces. These points, Paul asserts, are the products of Greek idolatry rather than the Christian confession of “God the Father Almighty.”

There are, of course, passages that suggest that God does change. For instance, we read of God “repenting” that he had ever created humanity.

This expression is used in other places as well. Similar questions could be asked of the Scriptures that speak of God’s coming and going, judging and forgiving, condemning and then showing mercy when the people turn to him. Do these not clearly indicate change? Of course, they do. But what kind of change? In each of these cases, there is a change in God’s relation to his creatures, but never is change ascribed to his being. Although he himself does not change, his voluntary involvement with creatures who do change means that his actions in this ever-changing realm of history can only be described for us in these terms.

When Scripture, therefore, speaks of God repenting or changing his mind, we are forced to one of two conclusions. Either we can say that Scripture contradicts itself, which is impossible for those of us who take it as God’s own self-disclosure. Or we can say that God is speaking in anthropomorphisms, as if he were a human being.

God often speaks this way so that we will understand him, the way a parent speaks to a child. For instance, when the Scriptures speak of coming under God’s wings for refuge (e.g., Ruth 2:12), we understand the author to be describing a truth about God in a way that is not literally true. God is not a giant bird, and the author does not expect us to believe that he is one. Even though it is said in a context of historical narrative rather than poetry, it is intended as a figure of speech, the way America is referred to as a melting pot. The reality is that God is tender and covers us with his saving mercies [ C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 1 6 ]

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is not the king over all, but a lover who invites us to become co-creators, co-sufferers, and co-redeemers.

First, we must say that this is a complicated critique and deserves far more attention than we can give it here.

It is true that the Church has sometimes strayed beyond the biblical story to borrow from Greek philosophy in its defense of a God who does not suffer. To be sure, the Church for centuries abused its authority with incredibly blatant exercises of tyranny and injustice. In many places, it still does today. American Protestantism and Latin American Catholicism remind us of the dangers of a church that loses its prophetic role by propping up the status quo in politics and society. But this critique engages in what logicians call “the genetic fallacy.” That is, while the historical realities cannot and should never be denied, it is wrong to blame Christian theology per se unless there is a clear causal link. Many of the examples cited (forced conversions of pagans, the Crusades, the Inquisition) actually took place in a setting in which theology revolved more around the veneration of Mary than around “God the Father Almighty.” Nevertheless, this did not produce a feminist hierarchy. Similarly, in many Catholic countries today, severe oppression of women continues to take place in cultures deeply committed to the cult of the Virgin.

The Incommunicable Attributes of God

Furthermore, Jesus was deeply critical of the social injustices of his day with respect to tyranny and oppression, breaking taboos concerning women, foreigners, and social outcasts. And yet the Scriptures show us that God was his father, not his mother (or “parent”), and Jesus was God’s Son, not a genderless child, and the sovereign God of the prophets and apostles was none other than the one to whom even Jesus acknowledged subordination in his earthly ministry. No one has ever claimed “God the Father Almighty” as forcefully—and evangelically—as Jesus Christ.

The critique of God as both father and almighty has deep difficulties. Beyond the obvious biblical challenges, it is flawed even in its analysis of the problem. It assumes that patriarchy is inherently oppressive, never minding the many contradictory examples one can find in history.

After all, since most societies throughout the ages have been patriarchal, how could one single this factor out as definitive? Christians have historically explained fallen societies in terms of sinful human hearts, not in terms of good people imprisoned in evil institutions. While certainly not minimizing the point that institutions as well as individuals are sinful, Scripture nowhere identifies patriarchy as inherently oppressive, despite the fact that many patriarchies have been so.

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as if he were a bird. Because God’s changeless character is not something that we find in ourselves, he appropriates rich metaphors and similes from the natural world and everyday experience in order to help us know him.

Omniscience and Omnipotence Third, God is omniscient and omnipotent—that is, he knows everything and he has power over everything. We may know some things and have control over others, but God’s wisdom and power know no limitations. God does not have to arrive at knowledge through reason or observation. Rather, he possesses all knowledge in himself in every moment (Job 37:16). God’s knowledge is not like ours, either in content or in mode.

In content, it is perfect and infallible: God cannot possibly err in his knowledge of what will come to pass. In mode, it is immediate and intuitive. In other words, unlike us, God does not arrive at an item of knowledge. He knows the end from the beginning in one act of reflection: Remember the former things of old, for I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like Me, declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things that are not yet done, saying, “My counsel shall stand, and I will do all My pleasure….

Indeed I have spoken it; I will also bring it to pass” (Is. 46:9-11).

Scores of biblical passages relate God’s foreknowledge of the future actions of creatures. Prophecy rests on the belief in God’s foreknowledge: “Behold, the former things have come to pass, and new things I declare;

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before they spring forth I tell you of them” (Is. 42:9). Furthermore, God not only knows the future; he controls the future. His omniscience and omnipotence are in perfect harmony. In fact, it is because he has decreed everything that comes to pass that he knows the future in every detail.

Hardly a passive spectator, merely knowing future acts of his creatures, God is actually the active architect of history. He is “God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth.” Even the results of a throw of the dice are determined by God already in every case (Prov. 16:33).

The prophecies of Scripture rest on this assumption: that God not only knows the past, present, and future in every detail, but that he does so precisely because he has decreed the end from the beginning according to his own secret counsel. As the Westminster Shorter Catechism puts it, “The decrees of God are his eternal purpose, according to the counsel of his will, whereby, for his own glory, he hath foreordained whatsoever comes to pass” (Q/A 7). Paul writes, “In [Christ] we have also obtained an inheritance, being predestined according to the purpose of Him who works all things according to the counsel of His will...” (Eph. 1:11).

If this is true, how can humans have any free agency? This has been the question that has puzzled theologians and philosophers for ages. Yet, God seems to think that it is enough for us to know that he is sovereign and that we are responsible. God always gets his way, but in such a manner that human agency is not undermined or destroyed. While Scripture does not seem to resolve this mystery, some theorists choose to reject either divine sovereignty or human agency. This option for either position is not available to us, however tempting it may be.

The divine patriarchy does not sanction unjust and oppressive systems of power; rather, it is precisely their judge. Who can ignore the indignation of God against the powerful who oppress the weak in society, including the poor, the alien, and women? As one example, we learn that women in Israel’s civil legislation were given rights that did not belong to women in antiquity. It was a good Father who created, preserves, and saves, a Father who “is opposed to the proud but gives grace to the humble” (James 4:6), who tenderly cares for his children, and uses his power to reconcile the wicked to himself despite their sin and resistance.

Instead of projecting our modern experience of patriarchal societies and impoverished fatherhood on religion, we must allow the biblical story to reorient our very notions of fatherhood and power. We can empathize with women and men who have been victims of inadequate and even destructive father images. Given our culture, it is no wonder so many women identify patriarchy with oppression, violence, and injustice. And we can never simply dismiss our personal experience from the process of interpretation.

But the sociological “is” does not reflect what of necessity has to be. Despite their enduring wounds, those whose fathers were absent, judgmental, or cruel

can have their concept of “father” transformed by the story of an “Eternal Father, Strong to Save.” The more we get to know God’s redemptive actions in history, the greater our chances of overcoming the prison of our own narrow experience. Instead of abandoning these models, we must allow God’s version to redeem our experience of fatherhood and sovereignty. To the weak and oppressed, a sovereign liberator comes as good news.

Critics are correct to point out that patriarchal religious views can create oppressive cultures. When we project our earthly father-images onto God, we set them in concrete. If this is what God is like, we reason, then who is to question? So if we happen to live in a culture in which men grow up thinking of women as objects or tools for their own ends, they will likely erect a chauvinistic deity to lend credibility to the projection.

But this is sheer idolatry. Far from sanctioning such destructive patriarchy, God’s self-revelation judges it as nothing else could. If, for instance, one were simply to jettison the male images and substitute female ones, this would hardly be capable of solving the problem of violence against women. Only a Good Father can judge a bad one and show us what real fatherhood is all about.

So both chauvinists who “project” their distorted masculinity onto God and feminists who try to meet this

It is actually God’s unlimited sovereignty that makes human decisions and activity both meaningful and possible. If God had not planned the future in every detail, there would be no reason to believe that his promises would be fulfilled, that salvation would triumph over destruction, or that life would gain victory over death. Our actions take on meaning because they are part of a larger plan that we ourselves do not even comprehend.

God can work all things together for good (Rom. 8:28) only because he has control over every variable in the equation. This should comfort us in the realization that there is nothing that happens purposelessly or meaninglessly, even though it may seem that way to us. To know that there is a point to it all, even if we do not yet know how particular pieces of the puzzle fit, is a great assurance when life’s storms reach our shore. Those who reject God’s providential control over every event do not thereby gain freedom, but find themselves in slavery to some form of determinism: chance, fate, the power of others, or their own self-will.

Omnipresence Another incommunicable attribute of God is his omnipresence. God is everywhere and fills the whole universe. After all, he is spirit and is not limited to a particular spatio-temporal place. It is difficult for us to conceive of God as a person when he is not really like any person we have ever known, so we project images of God that more nearly reflect our own relatives.

In the popular imagination, for instance, God is sometimes viewed as “the man upstairs,” a grand old patriarch with a long white beard. But God

is different from any person. Just as he does not possess a physical body (apart from the Son’s incarnation), God is present everywhere. Thus, according to Romans 1 and 2, God’s invisible attributes of power and majesty are everywhere on display. This means that we must outgrow the popular image of God as located in a particular place “up there,” remote from this world. God is as present on the streets of New York as he is in the highest heavens. There is no place where God is not. Even in hell, God is present in judgment.

In spite of the curse of the fall and our own sinfulness, we know that God exists. But this sense of his universal presence sometimes becomes an occasion for us to turn away from the true God and to worship ourselves through the idols of our imaginations, hearts, minds, and hands. Because of this sense of God’s universal presence in the beauty of nature, we identify God with the creation, confusing the Creator and creature. But the Christian faith insists—against those who push God out of this world (deists) and against those who regard him as indistinguishable from it (pantheists) or indwelling it somehow (panentheists)—that the God who is present everywhere is nevertheless distinct from the cosmos which he has made. Our minds must be restrained here, for this is where explanations give way to humble adoration of God’s mysterious hiddenness. ■

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challenge by “projecting” their own unscriptural images end up engaging in idolatry. It is not our images, but God’s Word that must shape our faith and practice.

One reason why this affirmation can actually heal rather than reinforce malevolent parental relationships is that God’s fatherhood is the source of all fatherhoods. At first, this sounds somewhat strange because we are used to working our way analogically from that which we know best (human relationships) to that which is more remote (divine relationships). But God built his intertrinitarian paradigm into our human psyche. The Son is eternally begotten by the Father and from both proceeds the Holy Spirit. There was not a time when the Son was not, and therefore, no time when the Father was not a father. Relationship is built into the very fabric of the Trinity. Thus, while in practice we cannot help but be influenced in our views of God’s fatherhood by our earthly experiences, the Good Father can heal our broken images. He can do this because we learn that good fatherhood is not from good human fathers, but

Recovering the Incarnation he contemporary rejection of the incommunicable attributes of God (his selfsufficiency, immutability, omniscience, omnipotence, etc.) is not a new development in theology—just a new development in evangelical theology. Blurring, or even erasing, the line between Creator and creature has been a major trend within contemporary theology, especially in the form usually known as “process theology.” Panentheism,7 the view that all of creation dwells in God, is now accepted by a fair number of evangelical theologians as a live option for the future. Much of this trend, I am convinced, is due to a weak Christology which plagues most theological proposals in the modern (and postmodern) age. Lacking a strong doctrine of the Incarnation, the active and passive obedience of the Suffering Servant, and his triumphant conquest as both God and man, a monistic rather than trinitarian deity has to carry the weight of Immanuel: God With Us. It all serves to remind us that there is no saving revelation of God apart from Christ.8 But at the end of the day, isn’t this “openness” of God—a It is the Gospel that makes the affirmation of God’s omnipotence welcome theology “that reinforces … our relational experience of God”— rather than fearful news. precisely the theology which Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud regarded as from God himself. After all, he invented the idea. the substance of religion in general; namely, projection But we must remember that the knowledge of “God of human ambitions, felt needs, and wish-fulfillment? In Almighty” is hardly comforting by itself, especially when other words, doesn’t this development simply prove that we know that deep down we are at odds with God, and Feuerbach was right when he said that theology is really he is our Judge. God is almighty in wrath, in justice, and anthropology; that religion is really about humanity in blinding glory. But when we add that intimate title rather than God after all? There is no doubt that classical Father to the equation, and by our incorporation into formulations need to be evaluated and reevaluated in the Christ can call him our Father, the unlimited power and light of the Scriptures. It may be that there are some indestructible will of God become good news to us: He classic expressions which unnecessarily prejudice critics is strong to save. against the classical doctrine simply because of their This is an important warning for some who seem to captivity to alien categories and terminologies. All of regard God’s sovereignty as the center of the Christian these concerns are worth reexamining. message. As important as it is, this emphasis can only But if God is not the unchanging, impassible (i.e., lead to fear, doubt, and despair unless it is read through non-suffering), all-knowing, all-powerful, self-sufficient, the lens of God’s saving will made certain in Christ and all-wise Yahweh of Scripture, he is not the Savior through the promises of the Gospel. It is the Gospel that either. Anselm was right: Jesus is fully human because makes the affirmation of God’s omnipotence welcome only a man should pay the debt to restore justice and rather than fearful news. peace; he is fully divine because only God could pay We must eliminate both the idol of a loving but such an infinite debt and conquer death itself. But if God weak god, and the idol of a strong but graceless god. is not God, then what would it mean to affirm the deity For neither is great enough to capture the hearts and of Christ? Ultimately, then, these are not theoretical, but minds of our disenchanted age, especially in the face of practical, questions. If God is already identified with the evil, oppression, violence, and death.

More world in any other way than the Incarnation, what does importantly, neither vision represents the God of the the suffering of Jesus actually mean, much less Bible. The grand vision is found in the orthodox accomplish? And if such suffering is purely relational conception of the Trinity, where Jesus the Son reveals to and therapeutic rather than judicial and propitiatory, us “God the Father Almighty.”6 what does it mean to speak of “salvation”?

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T

When Paul stood on Mars Hill, he took on both Epicurean and Stoic philosophers, the former basically deistic (pushing God out of sight so they could live irresponsibly), while the latter were basically pantheistic (identifying God with the creation). Ironically, given the typical criticism of the classical doctrine of God as too determined by Stoic elements, it is in this context— against Stoicism that the Apostle to the Gentiles proclaims “Jesus and the resurrection” on the foundation that…

SPEAKING OF

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en are reluctant to pass over from the notion of an abstract and negative

The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. (Acts 17:24-26)

deity to the living God. I

do not wonder. Here lies the deepest tap-root of

Pantheism and of the objection to traditional imagery.

It was hated not, at bottom, because it pictured Him as man but because it pictured Him as king, or even as warrior. The Pantheist’s God does nothing, demands

In other words, despite its idea of a static, unfeeling, unchanging deity, the Stoic view had collapsed Creator and creation in a manner quite similar to the contemporary trends. It is the Christian doctrine of God, as maintained within orthodoxy, that invalidates both hyper-immanence and hyper-transcendence. God is not needy; we are. God is not dependent on us, but we are helpless without him. God determines the future and, therefore, we can be confident that his suffering for us in Jesus Christ will yield the promised fruit: everlasting peace in a world where suffering is no more and God will be all in all. ■

nothing. He is there if you wish for Him, like a book on a shelf. He will not pursue you. …[But it] is always shocking to meet life where we thought we were alone. ‘Look out!’ we cry, ‘it’s alive.’ And therefore this is the very point at which so many draw back—I would have done so myself if I could—and proceed no further with Christianity.

Michael Horton (Ph.D., Wycliffe Hall, Oxford and the University of Coventry) is associate professor of historical theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in California, and serves on the Council of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals.

An ‘impersonal God’—well and good. A subjective God of beauty, truth and goodness, inside our own heads—better still. A formless life-force surging through us, a vast power which we can tap—best of all. But God Himself, alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, perhaps approaching at an infinite speed, the hunter, king, husband—that is quite another matter.”

—C. S. Lewis, Miracles, 93-94

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k G O D I N O U R I M A G E | Why Some Evangelicals are Challenging the Traditional View of God

Does God Kno D

oes God know the future? As a child in Sunday School, I was taught the answer to this question. My teachers comforted me with the certainty that God knows the future just as well as he knows the past and the present: in its entirety, down to the minutest detail. Moreover, I learned that God knows the whole of history because he is the Lord of history, not just in the weak sense that he can cause good to

come out of evil, but because he determined it all.

History—past and future—is the outworking in time of his extra-temporal sovereign decree. This decree extends not only to every natural event (earthquakes, eclipses, electron orbits), but also to his own free actions and even to the morally culpable actions of moral agents.

My Sunday School teachers led me to trust in God’s sovereign knowledge of the future because they were teaching me the Bible.1 Repeatedly God claims to know the future, not only in general (Matt. 6:8, Is. 46:10, Job 14:5), but also in detail (Is. 45:1, Jer. 25:12, Luke 22:34 Matt. 24:36). Scripture teaches that some of the most important events (Jesus’ crucifixion, the proclamation of the Gospel, and our own particular justification) happen precisely as—and when—God planned for them to happen (John 19:11, Acts 2:23, 1 Cor. 2:7, Rom. 8:29-30).

The Bible consistently presents God as the sovereign Lord of all things, the one who accomplishes every last detail of his plan and does it without needing our help and without ever being thwarted by our resistance. His knowledge of the future is just one implication of his providential control of all things.2 The God who knew all my days when I was in my mother’s womb superintends all those days in their every detail. The God of the Bible is not dependent upon his creatures or anything outside of his own nature and free will. And although independent,

he graciously chooses to act in time on our behalf and even at times to announce future events in advance. The most obvious reading of the Bible’s many prophecies is that God knew the future while it was still future and made it known through his prophets. Any attempt to deny that God knows every detail of the future has vast stretches of biblical data to overcome.

It shouldn’t be surprising that those not greatly concerned with biblical data have found it easy to deny God’s knowledge of the future.3 Much more surprising, though, have been the recent objections to God’s sovereign knowledge of the future which have arisen from evangelicals claiming to offer an account that is faithful to the Bible.4 Their objections are numerous, and in many cases subtle and challenging, but they all spring from a common assumption about human freedom. This assumption about human freedom is seen in two popular current alternatives to the Sovereign Knowledge position. The “Openness of God” alternative proposes to replace classical conceptions of God, bringing God into time to face the indeterminate future along with us. The “Simple Foreknowledge” alternative preserves God’s knowledge of a determinate future by making that knowledge dependent upon persons or things outside of himself.

I will explain and answer both of these alternatives to

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b y W I L L I A M C . D AV I S

ow the Future?

God’s sovereign knowledge of the future after considering the assumption that drives them.

The Root of the Alternatives Recent objections to God’s sovereign knowledge of the future all depend upon an old concern, the desire to establish human responsibility securely. Calvinists have long known that God’s sovereign knowledge of the future raises questions about how we can be held morally responsible for our actions. Since the Enlightenment, most philosophers have thought that unless we are the absolute masters of our fate, we can’t be held morally responsible for what we do. From this conviction has followed the conclusion that a determinate divine decree and human freedom (responsibility) are incompatible. Accounts of human freedom that insist on our complete autonomy from God’s decree are called “libertarian” or “incompatibilist” accounts. Theologians and philosophers who embrace libertarian accounts of human freedom contend that there is no way to reconcile human responsibility and God’s sovereign knowledge of the future. And since they can see no way to preserve moral responsibility without libertarian freedom, they have found it necessary to adjust their expectations about God’s knowledge.5 But the Bible does not teach that libertarian freedom is necessary for responsibility. Consider first the most obvious instance of evil in history: the crucifixion of Christ. The Bible’s account of that event presupposes that human responsibility and God’s determinate decree are compatible. Three separate times in the first four chapters of Acts, Peter argues that the men

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of Israel who delivered up Jesus to death were responsible for their action. He also says, “They did what God’s power and will had decided beforehand should happen” (Acts 4:28; similar claims in Acts 2:23, 3:13-20). Peter calls them to repent for actions that God had determined according to his own set purposes. In calling people to repent for acts God had determined beforehand, Peter affirms the compatibility of the divine decree and human responsibility. And Peter’s pattern of reasoning in this specific case is repeated throughout Scripture: God announces through his prophets what he has determined to bring about (Pharaoh hardening his heart, Assyrians despoiling Israel, Cyrus restoring the Babylonian exiles), and then holds those very agents responsible for bringing it about. Human responsibility and God’s determinate decree (and determinate knowledge of the future outcome) are clearly compatible in the Bible. It isn’t necessary to abandon God’s sovereign knowledge of the future in order to maintain human responsibility.

The biblical data is so clear on this point that it is hard to see how preserving libertarian human freedom (to safeguard human responsibility) can provide a sufficient motive for overturning my Sunday School understanding of God’s knowledge of the future.6 Unfortunately, the

moving through time with us. Although process theologians haven’t typically been committed to the authority of the Bible, their analysis of the classical doctrine of God has influenced others who have professed a high view of Scripture. Process theology contends that “classical” conceptions of God as immutable (unchangeable) and impassible (without passions) depend more upon Greek thought than the Bible. The God of classical theology, in their reconstruction, ends up a Parmenidean abstraction,8 eternal and absolutely independent, but nothing like the active, responsive, repenting God of the Bible. Then, as an alternative to this “straw God” they have created as the classical model, process theologians propose a God who is thoroughly in time, suffering with his people in their pain, and laboring through persuasion (with varying success) to minimize the effects of human sin. According to this view, God doesn’t know the future; he needs to wait to see how things will turn out.

Recent proponents of the “openness of God” such as William Hasker and Clark Pinnock reject process theology’s limitation of God’s power to mere persuasion,9 but they retain the conviction that God is moving through time with us. They argue that in order for God to be truly loving, he must enter into genuinely mutual relationships with autonomous creatures.

Sustaining these relationships means facing an indeterminate future together with us, committed to Process and Openness theologians conclude that the only way to rescue using coercive power only sparingly.

Advocates of this view of God insist God’s genuine love for us is to abandon belief in God’s foreknowledge and that this is the picture of God that “emerges” from the Bible. They determinate decree. contend that the God of the Scriptures is preeminently loving,10 desire to safeguard human responsibility does not appear and that real love requires both lovers to take risks.11 Many to be the only goal in defending the libertarian account. argue that although God has the power to determine future At work is also a desire to understand human freedom in a events (and thus know them), out of love for his free way consistent with how our freedom seems to us, and in creatures he chooses not to. He limits his knowledge of the a way adequate to preserve our dignity. If we aren’t future to an intimate knowledge of his creatures’ tendencies autonomously free, then we must be mere puppets, and and dispositions, enabling him to predict with great accuracy what seems like the genuine ability to do otherwise is a what they will do, and to revise his plans accordingly. cruel illusion. Here hard choices need to be made, but if Openness of God proponents are comfortable with the idea our notion of dignity can be preserved only at the expense that God waits to see what his free creatures will do, and that of God’s independence and majesty, then the price is all prophecy can be explained even though the future is simply too high. Some claim that God is so great that he “open” to God. Even though many prophecies appear to can make independent creatures upon which he must depend on knowledge of a determinate future, in fact, all ultimately wait, but this suggestion rests on an unbiblical prophecies are either promises about what the perfectly account both of our freedom and of God’s majesty.7 faithful God will bring about directly, or they are conditional claims about what God will do when his creatures do what their tendencies make exceedingly likely.12 The “Openness of God” Alternative The libertarian account of human freedom raises Both the process and Openness alternatives to serious questions about thinking that God’s knowledge of classical conceptions of God make generous use of the the future is based in his eternal decree, and these questions thesis that “future contingents” (propositions about future have led many in this century to reexamine the assumption events that could happen more than one way) can’t be true. that God is outside of time. For some this review of God’s “Al Gore will be elected President in 2000” is an example of nature has led to the conclusion that a superior a future contingent, and these theologians join with many understanding of God results if we accept that God is philosophers in asserting that it is neither true nor false:

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until the election, this proposition doesn’t have a truth value.13 God knows everything that can be known, because God knows all truths. But there are no truths about the future to know, so simultaneously God doesn’t know the future and God is omniscient. While this may seem like a peculiarly postmodern thesis (since it holds that some propositions are neither true nor false), the view is actually Aristotle’s.14 Defenders of God’s knowledge of the future have been contending with this concept for millennia.15 The Inadequacy of the Openness of God Alternative This family of objections to God’s sovereign knowledge of the future would be profoundly troubling if the choice really were between a static deity outside of time and a dynamic deity hurtling through time with us.

Fortunately, there is no compelling reason to link dynamic activity and temporality. Even if some Scholastics use Parmenidean terminology to emphasize God’s immutability, the orthodox majority (from Augustine through Calvin) explicitly reject static accounts of God. The Reformed position is that God is the Lord of time, providentially active in every detail of history according to an extra-temporal decree.16 Paul Helm’s recent work on The Providence of God develops this Calvinist understanding of God, dealing specifically with difficulties surrounding God’s knowledge of the future and finding no sufficient reason to sacrifice God’s sovereign knowledge of the future in order to save God’s ability to act in time.17 The issues here regarding God’s immutability and impassibility are complex, but for my purposes the upshot is certain: God’s sovereign knowledge of the future, his biblical immutability, and his activity in time are logically compatible.18 Admittedly, it is not merely the threat of an inactive God that renders God’s sovereign knowledge of the future unacceptable in theologies of process and Openness. In fact, it is not even the primary motivation. Their principal worry is that determinate knowledge of the future would make it impossible for God to be actively involved in a loving relationship with his creatures. Unless God faces the future with us, then his responses are not to our actions; they are instead responses to his own decisions. His comfort in times of difficulty is hollow (he planned it), his admonitions concerning sin are perverse (he has ordained our response), and his pleasure over our repentance and worship is pathetic (he programmed those actions as well).

The challenge here is intuitively compelling. A robot master who comforted, admonished, and praised his robot creations in these ways would be sadly confused. And the suggestion that his relationship to his robots was one of mutual love would be pathetic. So if God has programmed everything by a determinate decree, then why wouldn’t it be equally sad and pathetic for him to claim (as the Bible clearly does) that his relationship to us is loving? Process and Openness theologians conclude that the only way to rescue God’s genuine love for us is to abandon belief in God’s foreknowledge and determinate decree.19 But the

problem is not with the decree. Rather it lies in allowing what is intuitively obvious about human relationships to control our thinking about God’s relationships. The conclusion that genuinely loving relationships require openness to an indeterminate (and therefore unknowable) future follows only if a loving relationship is defined as requiring risk; but why think that? It may be true of human love relationships, but why think that divine love must be modeled after human love? Shouldn’t our thinking run the other way? Doesn’t the Bible call us to conform our love to his, rather than his love to ours?

Of course, if the future really is indeterminate (as Aristotle argues), then it would be necessary to revise the Sunday School understanding of God’s knowledge accordingly, along with all the other matters implicated by the revisions. But the Bible doesn’t directly teach that the future is indeterminate. Aristotle does, but that’s not the same thing. The Bible teaches a vast amount about God, his lordship over all things, and our responsibility for what we do. The question of whether the future is indeterminate must not be approached in abstraction from the totality of the biblical account. Taking God’s loving regard for his creatures as the sum of the relevant biblical data is inadequate, as is focusing exclusively on any restricted part of the Bible. Many passages involve prophecies about a determinate future more than a generation away (beyond what a temporal God might know just by knowing current individuals’ tendencies), but it would also be wrong to consider only those. Our method must endeavor to understand God’s attributes in a way that takes seriously the truth of absolutely all that the Bible says. I am convinced that the Sunday School answer sketched above meets that demand, and that the process and Openness accounts do not.20 The Simple Foreknowledge Alternative Proponents of the Openness of God object to God’s knowledge of the future because they believe it makes human freedom and divine love impossible. But the desire to preserve libertarian human freedom need not lead to a rejection of God’s knowledge of the future. Many theologians and philosophers hold that freedom and foreknowledge are compatible provided that the source of God’s knowledge is not his decree. Two accounts of this kind are currently popular. One account contends that the source of God’s knowledge of the future is his sight but not his decree (simple foreknowledge), and the other account maintains that the source is an inference based on what God knows free creatures will do in every possible circumstance. This second position, exploiting God’s supposed “middle knowledge” of free actions,21 is extremely popular among evangelical philosophers (see the sidebar), but its complexity has limited its appeal outside academia.

The appeal of the simple foreknowledge account of God’s knowledge of the future is easy to understand, since the position is easy to state: God knows the future because

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he looks ahead and sees what his free creatures will do.

The source of God’s knowledge of future free actions is not his decree; rather it is the free decisions of his creatures that God sees ahead of time.22 Since merely seeing what happens seems far short of causing what happens, God is thought to see what the future holds without causing it. If God determines what the future will be by means of his decree, then human freedom is threatened. However, if God knows the future simply because he sees what it will be beforehand, then human freedom and responsibility can be maintained along with his knowledge of the future. God’s perfect omniscience is secured, prophecies even regarding free human actions can be taken at face value, and human responsibility can rest on real (libertarian) freedom.

The Inadequacy of the Simple Foreknowledge Alternative The Simple Foreknowledge account promises to deliver determinate knowledge of the future and libertarian human freedom, but ultimately it costs more than Christians should be willing to pay. For one thing, the view may not be coherent. It is hard to see how God could know that something will happen in the future without also removing the real possibility that it could happen any other way. The hallmark of libertarian freedom is the “power to do otherwise.”23 If it isn’t possible for me to will to do other than what God saw that I would do, then I don’t have real (libertarian) freedom: I don’t have the power to do otherwise.

Whether God knows by sight or by decree, the future

can only be the way he knows it will be. No one, not even God, can know something that is false; and if I really could will to do otherwise, then I could cause him to “know” something that was false. I would have the power to destroy God’s omniscience! This is, of course, an unacceptable conclusion; and the source of the difficulty is the suggestion that God can have infallible knowledge (by sight) of something that could turn out other than God (by sight) knew that it would. Simple foreknowledge of free actions of the libertarian kind depends upon the possibility of knowledge that is both fallible and infallible. Something must give: either God really knows what will happen, or humans have the power to do otherwise. It can’t be both.24 An even greater cost of the Simple Foreknowledge position is that it requires God’s foresight to be just like simple human sight. The position gains its plausibility by reducing God’s foresight to the passive reception of information about completely independent events.

When we know by sight, we are dependent upon the independent objective truth of what we know. If I see a friend freely sin, my knowledge of the sin depends upon my friend’s independent choice. Moreover, our knowledge by sight involves learning, passing from ignorance to knowledge. Because of these features of our knowledge by sight—dependence and learning—it poses no threat to the freedom of those whose actions we know. If God’s foreknowledge (or foresight) were just like our knowledge by sight, then freedom and foreknowledge would not conflict.

Does God Know the Futur

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ost evangelical philosophers today affirm God’s knowledge of the future, but they deny that the source of God’s knowledge is his decree. They insist that God’s knowledge of the future does not conflict with libertarian human freedom because God’s knowledge is based on an inference. Knowing precisely what every possible free creature would do in every possible circumstance, God directly decrees the (freedom-neutral) circumstances, and deduces what his free creatures will do as a result. This knowledge of what free creatures will do is called God’s “middle knowledge.” The position is often referred to as “Molinism,” since Luis de Molina first proposed it in the sixteenth century as part of a commentary on Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica.

The heart of this position is God’s supposed knowledge of every true “counterfactual of freedom,” statements about

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what a specific free creature would do in a specific circumstance. An example of a counterfactual of freedom would be “If he hears the Gospel on June 17, 1969, Bill Davis will freely receive Christ as Savior and Lord.” Since 1969 is in the past, I now know that this if-then statement about me is true; but God has always known it, along with every other if-then statement of this kind about me and every other possible creature. This knowledge is “middle” knowledge because its source is neither God’s nature nor God’s will. He doesn’t know these truths by knowing his nature, and they aren’t true because he willed them to be. Their truth is an immutable “given” for God. Moreover, although they refer to creatures in time (like myself), since they are propositions, they are outside of time. God has always known all of these truths. Thus, when God freely decided to create a world where I heard the Gospel on that date, he could infer that I would freely receive it with joy. God knows the future while

But while dependence and learning can be features of human knowledge, they can’t be features of God’s knowledge. God is not dependent upon anyone or anything else, even in his knowledge. The suggestion that God needs us, or that he learns from our choices, necessarily detracts from his independence and lordship.

The God of the Bible doesn’t submit to the choices of his creatures. Simple foreknowledge is not a biblical alternative to sovereign foreknowledge.

Practical Implications My focus has been on the biblical and theoretical inadequacy of rejecting God’s sovereign knowledge of the future, but much more than theory is at stake. If God is not the sovereign Lord of time, the one who holds the future in his hands because he has established it by decree, then our Christian faith and practice has been built on a serious error. And once we admit this error, we will need to make serious changes. If we adopt the Simple Foreknowledge alternative, we will need to remove from our worship all praise to God as the absolutely independent, sovereign Lord of all things. And if we embrace either the Process or Openness alternatives, we will have to correct even more.

Along with the worship of God as independent, we will need to revise our worship to remove false or misleading references to God’s lordship over history and over our lives, including our redemption. Instead of worshipping God as the sovereign Lord, we will need to worship the Grand Manipulator of Events, the one most amazingly (but not infinitely) able to get his way despite capable opposition.

We will need to revise our doctrine of Scripture, translating more carefully the passages that inaccurately suggest that God announces what his morally responsible creatures will do in the future while it is still future. We will need to curb our confidence that God’s eschatological pronouncements are sure, at least insofar as they depend upon the free actions of his creatures. And most significantly, we must abandon the “myth” that we were known in Christ before the foundation of the world, since at the foundation of the world our salvation was unambiguously a future event involving a morally significant action by us.

Thankfully, these changes are not necessary. God knows the end from the beginning, not just because he saw it, or because he can deduce it, or because he’s really sure he can find a way to bring it about. No, he knows it because he has decreed it. Based on this decree we can rest confidently in his promises that we have been predestined to be called, justified, conformed to the image of his Son, that he has prepared good works for us to walk in, and that he will complete his work in us (Rom. 8:29-30, Eph. 2:19, Phil. 1:6). These are not the promises of a God who waits upon anyone or anything else. This is the word of the God of the Bible, the allknowing, sovereign Lord of time.25 ■

William C. Davis (Ph.D., Notre Dame) is associate professor of philosophy at Covenant College. He is also the author of “Theistic Arguments” in the recently published Reason for the Hope Within, edited by Michael Murray (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998).

re via “Middle Knowledge”? it is still future, but he didn’t decree it, at least not directly.

The thesis that God’s knowledge of the future is mediated through his middle knowledge is thought to solve a number of problems for orthodox theology. Its most important advantage is allowing for libertarian human freedom while maintaining God’s complete providential control. Another supposed advantage of the thesis is that it lays the foundation for what many consider to be a powerful response to the problem of evil. Although a world without evil is logically possible, God’s knowledge of the counterfactuals of freedom rendered that world (and many others) infeasible. The amount and intensity of evil in the world is as little as was possible given these constraints.

Unfortunately, this attempt to reconcile human responsibility and God’s knowledge of the future compromises his independence. This view ultimately forces God to submit to someone or something outside of himself

and beyond his control. If the counterfactuals of freedom have an author, then God submits to their author and there is someone distinct from God to whom God submits. If the counterfactuals do not have an author (and if we can make sense of authorless truths that are not expressive of God’s nature), then God submits to an independent uncreated thing—a set of propositions! The Bible authorizes neither of these alternatives, and one of them must be true if God’s knowledge of the future depends on middle knowledge. The Westminster Assembly appears to have explicitly rejected this error over three hundred years ago: “Although God knows whatsoever may or can come to pass upon all supposed conditions, yet hath he not decreed any thing because he foresaw it as future, or as that which would come to pass on such conditions” (WCF III.ii). ■

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In Print September/October Book Recommendations The Trinity in a Pluralistic Age: Theological Essays on Culture and Religion Kevin Vanhoozer, ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997) The essays in this book show how a full-orbed Trinitarian doctrine, with a proper emphasis on both the One and the Three, provides the necessary resources for successfully addressing the problems and the possibilities of contemporary pluralism. B-VANH-2 PAPERBACK, $20.00 Creed or Chaos?

Dorothy L. Sayers (Manchester, NH: Sophia Institute Press, 1949, 1974) In these pages, Dorothy Sayers turns the full force of her keen intellect and piercing wit against those who water down the faith. You've heard the cry too often: "Away with doctrine! Just preach that simple, uncomplicated religion that Jesus taught." With commanding logic, and devastating humor, Sayers shows how such naive "religion" is dangerous: it betrays Christ and falsifies His teachings. B-SAYE-1 PAPERBACK, $11.00 The Eternal God Paul Helm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) Many theologians and philosophers of religion now claim that the classical Christian view that God exists in timeless eternity is incoherent. Challenging that claim, Helm argues that divine timelessness is grounded in the idea of God as Creator, and that this alone makes possible a proper account of divine omniscience. B-HEL-2 PAPERBACK, $20.00 The Providence of God Paul Helm (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1994) Helm outlines the doctrine of divine providence—focusing on metaphysical and moral aspects and paying particular attention to divine control, providence and evil, and the role of prayer in relationship to providence. B-HEL-3 PAPERBACK, $16.00 We Believe Michael Horton (Nashville: Word Publishing, 1998) With succinct and probing analysis, We Believe introduces the Apostles' Creed to a new generation, proving that its message is much more than abstract concepts to be argued by theologians, and that it contains timeless answers for today's Christian.

B-HO-11 HARDCOVER, $19.00 The Doctrine of God Herman Bavinck (Grand Rapids: Banner of Truth, 1996) The Doctrine of God is the foundation of Christian theology and the prerequisite of all true faith. This translation provides a "spiritual treat" for the serious reader.

B-BAVI-1 HARDCOVER, $37.00 To order, complete and mail the order form in the envelope provided.

Or call 215-546-3696 between 8:30 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. ET (credit card orders only).

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On Tape From the Alliance Archives The Theology of the Cross 1997 Philadelphia Conference on Reformation Theology To judge from what is heard in thousands of pulpits across America Sunday by Sunday, not only do we not glory in the cross, we do not even think about it very much. Yet the cross stands at the very heart of Christianity. Christianity without the cross is not Christianity at all. Alistair Begg, Michael Horton, James Boice, and John Armstrong take an in-depth look at the theology of the cross.

C-97-P0A 6 tapes in an album, $33.00 Desiring God 1994 Philadelphia Conference on Reformation Theology This conference explores the hunger of the human soul for God. The focus is on corporate worship: whom we worship, how we should worship, the ways we fail to do so, and worship as the chief end of man. Featured speakers include John Piper, James Boice, Robert Godfrey, and Michael Horton.

C-94-COA 6 tapes in an album, $33.00 Developing a Christian Mind James Boice Sometimes it’s hard not to be conformed to the thinking of this world. Our culture says happiness is everything. Truth is what you want it to be. God is a myth for weak minds. But the Bible speaks a different message. And when you learn how to think and act biblically, not only will your thinking be transformed, but you'll know God better. You’ll understand God’s perspective so you’ll be able to make decisions according to his will.

C-DCM 4 tapes with notebook in an album, $27.00 Here We Stand James Boice & R.C. Sproul “Evangelicals have become worldly,” notes Dr. Boice. “We have

abandoned the truths of the Bible and the historic theology of the church, which expresses those truths, and we are trying to do the work of God by means of the world’s theology, wisdom, methods, and agenda, instead. This seminar series shows that truth is recovered only when the Bible has its rightful place as the supreme authority in the life of every Christian and every church.

C-S99R05N 4 tapes with notebook in an album, $27.00 Amazing Grace This six-part White Horse Inn radio series was taken in part from the 1999 Philadelphia Conference on Reformation Theology, where the focus was God’s amazing grace. In this edition, the White Horse Inn hosts dissect and discuss the major points presented at the conference, such as the means of grace, the extent of grace, and living by grace.

C-WHIAG-S 3 tapes in an album, $18.00 White Horse Innterviews II The White Horse Inn hosts interview a diversity of guests on the program, and if you missed these on radio, you can find out what was said about Puritan preaching with Don Kistler; “Pagan Lies and Gospel Truth” with Peter Jones; and a debate with R. C. Sproul on the New Pelagianism.

C-WHINN2-S 3 tapes in an album, $18.00 American Religion Is American Christianity more American than it is Christian? Have the secular ideals of consumerism and pragmatism replaced the biblical doctrines of sin and grace? In this six-tape White Horse Inn series, Michael Horton, Kim Riddlebarger, and Rod Rosenbladt show us the difference between historic Christianity and religion across the American landscape.

C-AR-RS 6 tapes in an album, $33.00

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k G O D I N O U R I M A G E | Why Some Evangelicals are Challenging the Traditional View of God

“All Theology Is Christology” How Does Every Passage of Scripture Reveal Christ? n Lutheran denominational politics over the last decade, the phrase “all theology is Christology” has been exhaustively debated. Yet, though the statement and the resulting controversy arise from a particular Missouri Synod context, I submit that the substance of the debate is important to all who stand in the line of the Reformation tradition. Moreover, in an issue of Modern Reformation devoted to exploring current debates about classical theology, the centrality of Christology is particularly relevant.

Initially, we should clarify what the phrase “all theology is Christology” does not mean, for there are several ways this statement could be misleading, or even wrong. On an elementary level, it could be taken to mean that Christology is the only topic in theology and, hence, the only course in a seminary curriculum. A student studying theology would learn nothing besides the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth and their meaning. Obviously, no serious theologian in either classical Protestantism or the Roman Catholic tradition holds to this

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view. Alternatively, it might suggest a “Christomonism” with an anti-trinitarian flavor that would deny or subordinate the existence of the Father and the Spirit to the Son. This would amount to a “Jesus religion,” a unitarianism of the Second Person of the Trinity (a view which has been proposed by some American sects). If this were true, baptism in the name of Jesus alone would be preferable to one administered in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

Perhaps more reasonably, one might think that the phrase aims to describe Karl Barth’s theology, which defined the moment of revelation as an “encounter” with Christ. For neither the rationalism of the eighteenth century, nor Friedrich Schleiermacher and his followers (against whom Barth was reacting), properly distinguished between the natural and the supernatural knowledge of God. Instead, religion was simply another category among the arts and sciences. The rationalists came to their conclusions about God from nature, while Schleiermacher used the Christian consciousness and culture. In both of these systems, Christ was no longer the only way to salvation. Barth reacted against this deemphasizing of Christ by insisting that Christ was the first and only revelation of God. So perhaps one might conclude that the phrase “all theology is Christology” applies to his program.

Given the context, orthodox Protestants might have thought that Barth’s solus Christus would spawn a revival of Reformation belief. But when Barth redefined this Reformation slogan, it proved disastrous. By making Christ the sole revelation of God, he denied the natural knowledge of God, devalued the Scriptures as the Word of God, and had no necessary role for the Sacraments.

Gospel was placed before the Law, reversing the Reformation order of Law and Gospel. His “encounter theology” with Christ proved to be little more than a substitution of his own mysticism for that of Schleiermacher’s Christian consciousness.

Ironically, when his view that Christ was God’s only revelation was put into practice, it produced contradictory results. On the one hand, it eliminated the basis for much common grace activity, provided a blueprint for legalism, and undermined the distinction between Church and society. Not surprisingly, his theology quickly came to resemble the Social Gospel of liberal Protestantism. Yet, on the other hand, Barth’s Christological program, a program embraced by some Lutherans, spawned an antinomianism that had little or no use for the Law. This narrowly defined Christology relegated biblical injunctions, especially the Pauline ones, to ethical parentheses. It was argued that since Paul intended these regulations for particular churches in specific times and places, they were not universally binding. (This argument was used for women’s ordination.)

Christology became the trump card which took every trick. Freedom in doctrine and practice is allowed

as long as the doctrine of Christ remains in place, Barth’s followers argued (and still argue). This position came to be known as “Gospel reductionism,” a phrase which originated with the majority position of the faculty of Concordia Seminary, Saint Louis, in the 1970s, and is still used for this radical “Christomonism.”1 The Recent Historical Context of the Phrase ore directly than any Barthian inferences, though, the statement that “all theology is Christology” is the product of a controversy at Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This debate, however, had more than exclusively Lutheran significance, partly because of the role of Robert D. Preus (1924-1995) at the center of the controversy. Evangelicals will remember Preus as a leader on the International Council of Biblical Inerrancy, and later on the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. In the course of his lifetime, Preus worked with Carl F. H. Henry, Kenneth Kantzer, and Earl D. Radmacher, as well as with James Montgomery Boice, Robert Godfrey, and Michael Horton. Especially for his The Inspiration of Scripture, Preus became recognized as a defender of biblical inerrancy, and thus an ally to many evangelicals.2 To Missouri Synod Lutherans, Preus is better remembered for his role in helping to prevent the denomination from sliding into the liberalism which had engulfed all the mainline Protestant churches by the 1950s.

As Barthianism and Rudolf Bultmann’s demythologizing became more entrenched at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis in the early 1970s, some wondered if Missouri had yielded completely to that slide. In 1974, a majority of that faculty, many of whom had been strongly influenced by Barth, staged a walkout. Preus then became the chief administrative officer of the seminary, and oversaw much of its reformation.

But in the late 1980s, Preus was at the center of another controversy. Though the terminology was similar, it is important to understand that the issues were quite different. Unlike the 1974 St. Louis incident, this debate was not about the Bible’s historicity and inerrancy.

(All parties in this later dispute were agreed on these points.) Instead, about the same time he was removed by board action as Fort Wayne seminary president (1989), Preus was charged with doctrinal aberration for defending the phrase that “all theology is Christology.”

Preus insisted that all doctrines had to be defined Christologically. The debate raged: Could something be biblical and at the same time not be Christological?

The problem originated in an article on sanctification written by a colleague. The piece contained this statement: “Any attempt to make Christology preliminary to theology, or even only its most important part, but not its only part, is a denial of Luther’s doctrine

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and effectively destroys the Gospel of the message of a completed atonement.”3 In other words, Lutheranism insists that Christology is not a subset of, but is rather the whole of, Christian theology. This position came to be summarized as “all theology is Christology.”

Ultimately, in hearings before district and synod panels, the statement was found to be doctrinally acceptable. Preus’ removal was reversed, and he remained a part of the synod’s ministerium. Nonetheless, the doctrinal charges brought against him reinforced his opponents’ view that he had no place at the seminary and in the church.

the Law as an unbeliever and pronounced righteous in Christ. In this scheme, the Gospel, the message of salvation in Christ, is the word of God in a sense that the Law as condemnation can never be. Gospel is God’s last word not only because it follows the Law but because it is the true revelation of who God really is.

The Law is God’s opus alienum, a work which he performs to redeem the sinner.

Asserting that all theology is Christology does not remove justification as the central doctrine. On the contrary, Christology is the content of justification and completely informs it: Christology is what the Gospel is all about. Therefore, Christology is what the Bible is all about. This does not mean that every part of the Bible The Theological Accuracy of the Statement or every verse or collection of verses is Gospel by itself, fter Preus was vindicated of all charges but it means rather that everything in the Bible serves the brought against him, he delivered a series of Gospel. Unless one finds Christ in a passage, the essays that provided specific references from interpreter, no matter how scholarly he is, has not Luther and the Lutheran Confessions to correctly understood it and, hence, cannot preach on it. demonstrate the correctness and the necessity of the Historically this had significant consequences. As is Christological approach to theology.4 While citing well known, Luther questioned the canonicity of Luther may not finally be convincing to the broader Hebrews, James, and Revelation. Apart from the evangelical community, the charges brought against historical question of their apostolic authorship, these Preus had been leveled within the framework of the books did not, in Luther’s view, preach Christ. For most Lutheran Confessions, to which ministers of the Lutherans today, his interpretation was wrong, but his Missouri Synod are bound at ordination. Obviously, principle was right. To demonstrate this, I wrote a within this scheme, Luther’s writings play a special role. commentary on what Luther called “the epistle of straw,” the book of James. With the title Christology is what the Bible is all about. Unless one finds Christ in a passage, the James the Apostle of Faith, the work was intentionally subtitled: A interpreter, no matter how scholarly he is, has not correctly understood it and, Primary Christological Epistle for the Persecuted Church.6 Some hence, cannot preach on it.

Lutherans were unhappy with the book, not because I argued It was not simply about what was permissible within the for James’ canonicity (something to which they already context of biblical revelation generally, but within a agreed), but because I provided a Christological conservative Lutheran community particularly. interpretation. But this was only the application of the Since the Reformed also see Christ as the center of Lutheran principle that no word can be God’s word revelation, Lutherans do not have an exclusive claim to a unless it is a word about Christ, and a word in which Christological approach.5 Christ comes. This principle requires that theology However, different understandings of the relation of Jesus’ human and divine (which means a word about God) must be natures will predictably assign different roles to the Christology—a word about Christ. Hence all theology Christological principle in the theologies of the two great is Christology. In handling James this way, canonicity Reformation churches. In unraveling the understanding was not sacrificed for Christology, and Luther’s that all theology is Christology, the defining Christological principle was not sacrificed for the sake of characteristics of the Lutheran and Reformed churches preserving a fixed number of books in the biblical canon. have to be identified. In Reformed theology, Christology and justification must be coordinated with their view of The Biblical Basis God’s sovereignty, which is central to their program. o have any standing in evangelical circles, For Lutherans, the central doctrine is justification, the Christological principle must be derived which is said to be the doctrine by which the Church from and proven by the biblical documents stands or falls. Justification becomes operative in the themselves. With some books of the Bible, preaching of the Law and Gospel. This principle this is easier than with others. Asserting that the Gospels assumes that the Christian is simul iustus et peccator; that is, are Christological is in a sense tautological, since they as long as he lives, he is at the same time condemned by claim to be written about Jesus and contain his word

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(Matt 28:20; Luke 1:1-4; John 20:30-31; 21:25).

Similarly, the Epistles serve no other purpose than to foster his teachings. The argument for the Christological character of the Old Testament can be advanced on the basis of the claims of Jesus and the apostles that it comes to completion in him (Matt 26:56, 58; Luke 24:26-27).

Nevertheless, the total Christological character of the prophetic books is not held by all Christians.

Zionism, a fundamental belief for some evangelicals, finds in the Bible predictions about the modern state of Israel. Alternatively, some exegetes attempt to limit the Christological character of the Old Testament to the predictive prophecies, and only to those types specifically designated in the New Testament. Both of these approaches are hermeneutically deficient, and fail to recognize that all theology is Christology. Let us be clear, though: Reading Christology back into the Old Testament from the New Testament is not to ignore the immediate context. Rather, a Christological hermeneutic focuses first on the historical situation in which the words were written, then on Christ, and then on his Church through him (Rom. 15:4).

How does this work? Because of space constraints, we will look at only two challenging examples. First, Ecclesiastes, with its description of the futility of human existence, seems devoid of Christological content (3:2021). Surely this must be a candidate for the most miserable book in the Bible! For on first glance, it appears to be all Law, and no Gospel—but this is deceptive. Only when human beings recognize the vanity of human life are they able to accept God’s deliverance. In the end, Solomon confesses that man’s spirit will return to God who gave it (Eccl. 12:7). This same message of the uselessness of pursuing earthly treasures reappears in the Sermon on the Mount.

Christians look to treasures in heaven where there is no corruption (Matt. 6:19-20).

Another passage that some have argued lacks Christological content is the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. But we must recall that Jesus cites their destruction to describe the fate of his unbelieving hearers (Matt. 10:15; 11:24-25). In both cases, destruction comes only after the Gospel has been preached. And we should recognize the Christological imagery of the Genesis story where Abraham’s priestly prayers bargain to spare the cities for the sake of righteous persons (Gen. 18:24-28).

This anticipates Christ’s prayer to forgive his torturers (Luke 23:24), and his continual prayers with all Christians to the Father for the world’s redemption (Heb. 2:17).

Christology and Inspiration of Scripture he Christological element is so essential to the biblical message that when it is not located, that section is not properly understood. This lack often results in a

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legalism which requires a behavior of the listeners unrelated to their faith. Some well-meaning Christians crusade for the Ten Commandments to be placed in such public places as court rooms and school rooms, but they fail to understand that the Decalogue was intended for Israel, whom God led out of Egypt, and not for all people, at least not in the biblical form. The Christological interpretation of the Old Testament should not replace grammatical and historical studies of the biblical texts, but it does provide the preacher with the underlying content and purpose of these texts.

Christology also informs the content and the purpose of biblical inspiration, which is almost solely defined in relation to the Holy Spirit. Christ is not only the Bible’s content and purpose; he is its author, a point which Luther insisted upon in his Lectures on Galatians (1535). So, from the viewpoint of inspiration, theology must be Christological. The Spirit of Christ was working in the prophets (1 Pet. 1:11), but the working of Christ through the Holy Spirit on the writers of the Bible is only the necessary extension of the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. The Spirit who inspires the holy writers proceeds from the Father and the Son. He is as much the Spirit of the Son as he is the Spirit of the Father. Incarnation takes inspiration to another level, albeit a lower and human one, since the Spirit of the Son has become, by the Incarnation, the Spirit of Jesus. The Holy Spirit does not come to the Church directly from God, but through the human nature of Jesus. Perhaps to accept the Bible’s inspiration requires that its heavenly origins remain unchallenged, but the most proximate source of the inspiration is Jesus’ crucifixion (Matt. 27:50, quite literally “Jesus released the Spirit,” and John 19:30, quite literally, “he handed over the Spirit”) and resurrection (John 20:22). The Spirit who shared in the humiliation of Jesus and raised him from the dead is the same Spirit who inspired the biblical writers. Simply on account of this, the Scriptures are thoroughly Christological. If the Son can only know what the Father reveals to him (Matt. 11:27), so the Spirit’s knowledge of the Father is only through the Son, a knowledge which is further circumscribed by Incarnation with its humiliation.

Christology and the Trinity hristians do not have an equal or direct knowledge or access to each person of the Trinity; our access is only through Jesus to God. In Jesus, we know God as Father by the working of the Spirit who is sent by Jesus. Thus, a prayer to God or the Father without reference to Jesus not only offends this Christological principle, but is a clear denial of the faith. Hence, the ancient prayers of the church are directed to the Father through Jesus Christ in the unity with the Holy Spirit. God is not first

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known in himself or even in his trinitarian majesty, but in Mary’s child and the man who hung on the cross. Luther gets to the heart of Christian faith in saying that “we must look at no other God than this incarnate and human God.” The crucifixion is the only door to heaven and the only key to understanding God. Thus, we confess that all theology is Christology. Modern charismatic gifts are suspect not merely because they lack biblical warrant, but because, in their claim to great faith, they obscure the Christological principles of selfeffacement and self-sacrifice.

All doctrines have a Christological focus. The Augsburg Confession states that original sin has its ultimate meaning in baptism where infants find salvation in Christ. A denial of original sin, thus, “destroys the glory of Christ’s merits and benefits.” The Lord’s Supper is at the same time a participation in and proclamation of Christ’s death, which is, after all, what Christology is all about. Justification is only the other side of the coin from Christology. The article on Christ in the Augsburg Confession anticipates justification, and the article on justification is thoroughly Christological in that it directs Christ’s benefits to believers. Lutherans had little or no quarrel with Rome’s Christology. The problem was that, by insisting that salvation was by faith and works, Rome was taking away with one hand what it had given with the other.

Lutherans saw that justification by works was unacceptable not only because this doctrine lacked biblical support, but chiefly because it deprived Christ of his glory.

Christology and Sanctification he area of theology where the principle that “all theology is Christology” is most frequently undermined is probably sanctification. This is so even among those who are committed to the principles of solus Christus and sola gratia in their doctrine of justification. Whereas synergism is disallowed in defining justification, a bit is often seen as permissible in sanctification. But if this is so, then Christology is not an all-permeating principle for doctrine or biblical interpretation. Pelagians and Arminians pointed to the use of the grammatical imperative to support the view that Christians can cooperate in their salvation. But such an argument is completely overdrawn. For Jesus’ command (imperative) to Lazarus to come out of the grave no more allows for his cooperation than the commands to believe or do good works allow for it. An imperative can also be a form in which the Gospel is presented: “Come unto me all ye who labor.”

Understanding sanctification from a Christological perspective sees good works as Christ’s sacrificial life and death played out in the lives of Christians. Their good works are not admirable simply because they refrain

from moral evil, but because they do the good works Christ did, especially in sacrificing themselves for others.

So the Good Samaritan, in danger to himself, comes to the aid of someone who is not only helpless, but an enemy. Here is the purest form of the sanctified life— but at a second glance, here the Good Samaritan is Christ himself. Even in the doctrine of sanctification, all theology is Christology.

The strength of Luther’s explanations of the Ten Commandments is not focusing on the negative behaviors forbidden to the Christian (hurting the neighbor), but on the good he is required to do: “help … him in every bodily need.” It is not a matter of refraining from gross idolatry; rather we should fear, love, and trust in God above all things. Like all controversies, the one over whether “all theology is Christology” had bitter personal consequences for those who were charged, even though they were later vindicated. On the positive side, though, it allowed for this most important aspect of biblical theology to be more fully developed. This aspect still needs even more complete development, for it will never be exhausted until Christ becomes all in all for us. ■

Dr. David P. Scaer (Th.D., Concordia, St. Louis) is the chairman of the department of systematic theology at Concordia Theological Seminary (Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod), Fort Wayne, Indiana. He has served as editor of Concordia Theological Quarterly and academic dean of the seminary. His most recent book is the Baptism volume of the Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics series (St. Louis: Concordia, 1999).

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SPEAKING OF

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f youweretoaskayoungchild,“Myboy,whatkindofGodhaveyou?

Whatdoyouknowabouthim?”hecouldsay,“First,myGodisthe

Father,

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made

heaven

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earth.

ApartfromhimaloneIhavenootherGod,forthereisnooneelsewhocould createheavenandearth.”

—Large Catechism, The First Article of the Creed, in The Book of Concord, 412

k G O D I N O U R I M A G E | Why Some Evangelicals are Challenging the Traditional View of God

The Splendor of the

Three-in-One God The Necessity and Mystery of the Trinity among orthodox, catholic ear, O Israel, the Christians on the essentials of the LORD our God, the doctrine of the Trinity has greatly LORD is one!” In outdistanced agreement on many contrast to the other doctrines (e.g., the doctrine polytheistic religions of her of salvation).1 neighbors, Israel was made deeply conscious of the fact that there is Given the centrality to our only one God (hence, the term, faith of our teaching about the “monotheism”). The monotheTrinity, it is profoundly ironic istic doctrine of God is at the that for most believers this headwaters of the Christian faith, doctrine is practically disposable. but it is the doctrine of the Trinity In my experience, most North which makes our doctrine of God All attempts to provide an image of the Trinity emphasize American evangelical Christians distinctively Christian. Islam, one the One over the Three, or the Three over the One. The when asked to state the doctrine clover, for example, wrongly implies that the Father, Son, of the world’s fastest growing and Spirit (the Three) are merely outcroppings from an of the Trinity (if they can do it at religions, is monotheistic, but essential (One) divine stalk. We must reject the suggestion all) will almost always give a that there is a unitarian god behind a trinitarian mask. rejects entirely the doctrine of the heretical answer. The most Trinity as unreasonable. Jewish critics have long regarded common heresy among Western Christians has been the doctrine of the Trinity as polytheistic. Clearly the “modalism,” which is the notion that God is not really one doctrine of the Trinity is a stumbling block to vast numbers God in three persons, but rather only appears to be three of people, but without it we are no longer Christians. The persons. This is what we often teach in our Sunday Trinity is among those doctrines by which heresy (as Schools by way of the illustrations we use which imply distinguished from error) against the “catholic, undoubted that God wears a series of masks (first Father, then Son, Christian faith” is properly judged (Heidelberg Catechism, then Spirit) or takes different forms under different Q. 22). Since the fourth century AD, the agreement conditions (e.g., water in solid, liquid, and gas forms).2

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The Christian view of God is, as the Athanasian Creed teaches, that:

the God one finds revealed there. Christians, being trinitarian, read the Bible as a unity. That is, because God is one, the Scriptures are one. If God is revealed to be triune in the New Testament we should expect to find …we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in him so revealed in the Old Testament. God’s Word itself Unity; neither confounding the Persons, nor recommends this hermeneutic: 1 Peter 1:10-12 teaches dividing the Substance. For there is one Person of us that the same Holy Spirit who inspired Moses and the the Father, another of the Son, and another of the prophets also inspired the apostles as they interpreted Holy Ghost. But the Godhead of the Father, of the Law and the Prophets for us. the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one, the It also means, as John 1:1 teaches us, that the Son has Glory equal, the Majesty co-eternal. always been God’s Word. He did not become the Word only in the incarnation, but rather he was the Word “in As this creed continues, “the Father is Almighty, the the beginning.” More than that, he was “with” God the Son Almighty, and the Holy Ghost Almighty. And yet Father, which means that he has always been personally they are not three Almighties, but one Almighty.” In distinct from the Father. At the same time the Word “is biblical, creedal, and Christian teaching, God is one God” which means that God the Son and God the Father substance (Deut. 6:4). Whatever it is which makes the are, as the Nicene Creed states, “of the same substance” Father to be God, is that which makes the Son and the (consubstantial). Thus, the Apostle John teaches us not Spirit to be God: “Such as the Father is, such is the Son, to read the Son into the Old Testament, but to refuse to and such is the Holy Ghost” (Athanasian Creed). read him out of it.

At the same time, tri-personality is also essential to the Hence, when we consider the fundamental Israelite Deity: “For there is one Person of the Father, another of the confession about God, “Hear O Israel, Yahweh our God, Son, and another of the Holy Ghost” (Athanasian Creed). It Yahweh is one” (Deut. 6:4), we understand that this is possible to conceive of a god who is unipersonal, but the unity not only permits but entails tri-personality. history of theology shows that any such god would Indeed, read from the perspective of the New necessarily be impersonal and so transcendent as to be Testament—how else can a Christian read Scripture?— unknowable, which is practical atheism.3 If we lose God’s trithe Old Testament is rich with trinitarian revelation. personality we forfeit our Christology. We believe that Jesus The New Testament turns to several places in the Old Christ is God the Son in the flesh, that he is of the same Testament for its doctrine of the Trinity. Psalm 110 is substance as God the Father and God the Spirit. We would cited more than any other Old Testament passage (see Matt.

22:44; 26:64; Mark 12:36; 14:62; Luke 20:42-43; 22:69; We must repudiate the root of the Arian heresy: rationalism, the notion that one Acts 2:34-35; Heb. 1:13; 5:6, 10; 7:17, 21). The psalm speaks should believe only that which one can comprehend entirely. of the accession and rule of a Davidic Priest-King. The New Testament, however, focuses consistently on the doctrinal teaching of the psalm and, also forfeit our Pneumatology (that is, the doctrine of the therefore, regards it as a promise of the ascension and Holy Spirit) since we also believe that God the Spirit is of inter-advental reign of Christ. In that case, the primary the same substance as the Father and the Son. If this is so reference of the psalm is not (as Peter reminds us in Acts (and without these truths one cannot be a Christian!), then 2:34-35) to David, but to the intra-trinitarian relations God must be triune. As the Athanasian Creed puts it: “Unity in Trinity and the Trinity in Unity is to be worshipped.” between the Father and the Son and the outworking of How this can be is a mystery, but it is a necessary those relations in redemptive history. mystery. It is necessary because “we are compelled by the A second strand of trinitarian revelation in the Old Christian verity” to confess this doctrine. It is necessary Testament is the revelation of the Son in the history of because: “Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is redemption in the person of the Angel of the Lord (Malak necessary that he hold the catholic Faith. Which Faith Yahweh). When the Angel of the Lord appeared he was except everyone do keep whole and undefiled, without treated not as a mere heavenly representative of God, but doubt he shall perish everlastingly” (Athanasian Creed). as God himself; he did not reject worship, but accepted it It is a necessary doctrine because our very destiny is at as only God can. (Typically it is only after one has had stake, not merely fine points of doctrine. an encounter with the Angel of the Lord that one realizes that, in fact, it was no mere angel but God himself; see The Necessity of the Trinity Gen. 16:9-13; 22:11-18; 32:28-30; Ex. 3:2-6; Judg. 6:11The way one reads the Bible is intimately related to 14, 22; 13:22.) Both Augustine and Calvin interpreted

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these manifestations as wonderfully cryptic revelations of God the Son in a pre-incarnate state.4 John 1:1-3 teaches that when Genesis 1:1 says, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” we should understand that creation occurred through the agency of God the Son and that his work was essential to the act of creation because the Creator God is triune.

The work of redemption was also a trinitarian work.

Think, for instance, of the deliverance of God’s people from Egypt. On the principle that the God who revealed himself to Israel is triune, and that the Son has always been the Word (God’s authoritative selfrevelation), we should consider that it was God the Son who met Moses in the burning bush, and at the top of Mount Sinai: “No one has ever seen God; God the only begotten who is in the bosom of the Father, this one has revealed him” (John 1:18). Jesus declared, “Anyone who has seen me, has seen the Father” (John 14:9). The writer to the Hebrews teaches that Christ is not only the “radiance of the glory” but the “exact manifestation” of the “divine being” (hypostasis), “sustaining all things by his powerful word” (Heb. 1:3).

Hebrews 12:18-24 contrasts Mount Sinai with that mountain to which we have come. In so doing, however, it also tells us how we should think about the God who revealed his “hindmost quarters” to Moses. The mountain to which Moses came was covered in darkness, fire, gloom, and storm. In the New Covenant believers have come, however, to thousands of angels, to “the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven. You have come to God, the judge of all men, to the spirits of righteous men made perfect, to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel” (Heb. 12:23-24).

Notice how the writer to the Hebrews uses a series of parallel expressions to drive home the same point: “church of the firstborn” (i.e., the risen Christ), “God, the judge of all men” who is “Jesus the mediator of a better covenant.”

It was the Son who was revealed awesomely at the top of Sinai, who met with the elders, before whom they ate and drank, whom they “saw and did not die” (Ex. 24:9-11), and it is the Son with whom we have to do today.

There is significant evidence that God the Spirit was also active in creation. The New International Version is right to spell Spirit with the capital “S” in Genesis 1:2.

The “Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” That such work is proper to the Spirit is suggested in 1 Peter 4:14 which uses the same image to describe the Spirit’s relations to the New Covenant temple people. By the analogy of Scripture we understand that it was God the Spirit who guided us through the wilderness. The pillar of divine presence, surrounds and protects God’s people, hovering over his creation and new creation, indwelling and sanctifying, as he ever has.5 God the Father was also active in creation, speaking the Word, present in the redemption of Israel in the

The Athanasian Creed Athanasius (293-373 AD) was the champion of orthodoxy against the Arian attacks on the doctrine of the Trinity. Though Athanasius was not actually the author of this creed (which is now widely believed to have been written in the early fifth century), it was generally attributed to him until the seventeenth century.

It has also often been called the “Quicunque Vult” (Latin for “Whosoever will”) from its opening words.

After setting forth the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity, the creed also spends significant space dealing with the incarnation and the two natures of Christ.

Though the Eastern Orthodox Church does not recognize the Athanasian Creed, both Protestants and Roman Catholics do.

Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the catholic Faith. Which Faith except everyone do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.

And the catholic Faith is this: That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity, neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance. For there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost. But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one, the Glory equal, the Majesty co-eternal. Such as the Father is, such is the Son, and such is the Holy Ghost. The Father uncreated, the Son uncreated, and the Holy Ghost uncreated. The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the Holy Ghost incomprehensible. The Father eternal, the Son eternal, and the Holy Ghost eternal.

And yet they are not three eternals, but one eternal. As also there are not three incomprehensibles, nor three uncreated, but one uncreated, and one incomprehensible. So likewise the Father is Almighty, the Son Almighty, and the Holy Ghost Almighty.

And yet they are not three Almighties, but one Almighty. So the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Ghost is God. And yet they are not three Gods, but one God. So likewise the Father is Lord, the Son Lord, and the Holy Ghost Lord. And yet not three Lords, but one Lord. For like as we are compelled by the Christian verity to acknowledge every person by Himself to be [ C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 3 7 ]

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person of the Son, by the power of the Spirit. Who else could have passed over Israel for the sake of the blood of the lamb, but God the Father? One has only to think of how the Father provided earthly manna for his people and how he gave that ultimate manna which gives eternal life to all who eat by faith (John 6:31-33).

Certainly one sees wonderful evidence of his providence throughout the Hebrew Scriptures. At each turn the Father was meeting our needs, with drink from the rock and food from heaven (Num. 20:11, 1 Cor. 10:1-4). All this establishes not only that God revealed personal distinctions in the Old Testament, but that he revealed

about God. Frequently he used the noun “God” to refer to the Father (e.g., Rom. 1:1, 7, 8; 8:14-17; 15:5-6; 1 Cor. 1:3; 8:6; 11:3; 2 Cor. 1:2; Gal. 1:3; Eph. 1:2, 17; 4:6; 5:20).

He refers to the Son as “Christ” and to the third triune person as the “Spirit.” Read this way, his epistles are replete with allusions to the Trinity.

It is no wonder then that the earliest Fathers of the Christian church developed the biblical trinitarianism almost immediately. This teaching was crystallized in the great ecumenical creeds: The Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed (325 AD), the Athanasian Creed (381-421 AD) and the Chalcedonian Definition (451 AD).7 Against the Arians, Athanasius (c. 293-373), an Alexandrian archdeacon, We are morally obligated not only to read Scripture carefully, but also to assemble defended stoutly the doctrine of the eternal generation of the its truths, to make good and necessary deductions from scriptural truth to edify Son. When Scripture says “only begotten God,” it means that the God’s people, and to array those truths against unbelief.

Son has always been begotten of the Father (see John 1:18). himself as tri-personal.

There has never been a point (remember we’re speaking The New Covenant Scriptures make explicit what of eternity) when the Son was not. The Son has always was implicit in the Old Covenant. We may begin with been the Son and the Father has always been his Father. our Lord, himself a trinitarian theologian. His This eternal begottenness of the Son does not mean, conception of himself and of his relations to the Father however, that the Son is a creature. Because he is the and the Spirit was unreservedly trinitarian. This is not same substance (homoousios) as the Father and the Spirit, surprising given that he was himself a member of the he was also uncreated. triune Godhead, God the co-eternal, eternally begotten The biblical and Christian doctrine of the Trinity is a Son incarnate. necessary mystery to the faith so that without it, there We have already reviewed Jesus’ revelation of the would be no faith. It is necessary primarily because the personal distinction between himself and the Father. He Scriptures teach it. Because it is a biblical doctrine, the also made clear that God the Spirit has his proper work creeds teach it and for the same reasons our theologians drawing sinners to the Son; “the Spirit blows where he have taught it. Despite all the attempts by students to will” and without the work of the Spirit no one is able to investigate it and despite all the attempts by critics to level see the Kingdom of God (John 3:8). it, the doctrine of the Trinity remains a glorious mystery.

Christ’s trinitarian consciousness is clearly evident in his command to baptize in the triune name of God. The Mystery of the Trinity “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, “So the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son Ghost is God. And yet they are not three Gods, but one and of the Holy Spirit…” (Matt. 28:19). Notice that God” (Athanasian Creed). How can God be truly one— Jesus said, “in the name.” This is a most significant and also three distinct, co-eternal, subsistences or expression in Scripture. Out of the burning bush God persons is a mystery; and yet we are bound to say that he the Son revealed the divine name to Moses: I AM. God’s is. To confess these truths is to commit oneself to a great name is who he is in himself, and also who he is in and glorious mystery—that is, something which is relation to us, the self-existent one. Thus, Herman necessarily true but which transcends our ability to Bavinck was right to say that, in this passage, Jesus drew explain fully.8 together all the trinitarian revelation of God in In this case, then, we must repudiate the root of the Scripture.6 Arian heresy: rationalism, the notion that one should believe only that which one can comprehend entirely.

Paul was equally explicit about God’s tri-personality in the benediction contained in 2 Corinthians 13:14 in With Athanasius, we know that if “there was when the which he named each of the trinitarian persons: “May the Son was not,” the Son could never be a Savior. He also grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and knew that we can confess Jesus to be “very God of very the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” (This God” only if God is triune; otherwise we are polytheists. expression is doubtless linked to the Aaronic benediction “So we are forbidden by the catholic religion, to say, of Numbers 6:24-26.) This was Paul’s consistent language There be three Gods, or three Lords” (Athanasian Creed).

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As trinitarians we also acknowledge that it is possible to apprehend revealed truths about God and to develop them, but it is not possible to comprehend him in our formulae. Therefore, it is impossible to remove mystery from the Trinity and remain Christian. At the same time, it is also evident that Christianity is a theological religion.

That is to say, it is not sufficient to quote Scripture in the face of heresy, but rather we are morally obligated not only to read Scripture carefully, but also to assemble its truths, to make good and necessary deductions from scriptural truth to edify God’s people, and to array those truths against unbelief.

For example, our trinitarianism separates us utterly from unbelief. There is no other article of the Christian faith which so alienates unbelievers as our claim that there is one God in three persons. When we come to the doctrine of the Trinity, we Christians realize that we are completely dependent upon God’s Word for saving knowledge of God. Since the patristic-creedal period, perhaps no theologian has meditated on the Trinity more profitably than John Calvin (1509-64).9 With the breakup of the medieval Church, the sixteenth century was littered with sects including anti-trinitarians. Calvin responded to the unitarians by defending both God’s essential simplicity (God is one) and his tri-personality or tri-subsistence (Institutes 1.13.2, 6).

He used the term subsistence to distinguish between the divine essence and his tri-personality. These sorts of considerations are sometimes developed under the heading ontological Trinity, i.e., the Trinity regarding God’s being. He reminded us that there are certain attributes which belong to each trinitarian person which are not shared among the persons of the Trinity. Recognizing these distinctions is part of not “confounding the persons” (Athanasian Creed). These properties unique to each person distinguish (not separate) each person from the others. For example, only the Father is unbegotten. “The Father is made of none, neither created, nor begotten” (Athanasian Creed). The Son, because he is such, is eternally begotten. “The Son is of the Father alone, not made, nor created, but begotten” (Athanasian Creed).

Only the Spirit is able to proceed from the Father and the Son. “The Holy Ghost is of the Father and Son, neither made, nor created, nor begotten, but proceeding” (Athanasian Creed). Considered distinctly, however, each divine person can be said to be God “of himself,” i.e., the Father, Son and Spirit subsist of themselves. “And in this Trinity none is afore, or after other; none is greater, or less than another” (Athanasian Creed).

At the same time, Calvin also reminds us of another heading in the doctrine of the Trinity, the economic Trinity.

This relates to the outworking of creation and redemption. For example, it belongs to the Son to become incarnate. It belongs to the Father to elect people to faith in Christ. It belongs to the Spirit to draw

The Athanasian Creed [ C O N T I N U E D F R O M PA G E 3 5 ]

both God and Lord, so are we forbidden by the catholic religion, to say, There be three Gods, or three Lords. The Father is made of none, neither created, nor begotten. The Son is of the Father alone, not made, nor created, but begotten. The Holy Ghost is of the Father and of the Son, neither made, nor created, nor begotten, but proceeding. So there is one Father, not three Fathers; one Son, not three Sons; one Holy Ghost, not three Holy Ghosts.

And in this Trinity none is afore, or after other; none is greater, or less than another; but the whole three Persons are co-eternal together and co-equal. So that in all things, as is aforesaid, the Unity in Trinity and the Trinity in Unity is to be worshipped. He therefore that will be saved must thus think of the Trinity.

Furthermore, it is necessary to everlasting salvation that he also believe rightly the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ. For the right Faith is, that we believe and confess, that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and Man; God, of the Substance of the Father, begotten before the worlds; and Man, of the Substance of His mother, born in the world; perfect God and perfect Man, of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting; equal to the Father, as touching His Godhead; and inferior to the Father, as touching His Manhood. Who although He be God and Man, yet He is not two, but one Christ; one, not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by taking of the Manhood into God: one altogether; not by confusion of Substance, but by unity of Person. For as the reasonable soul and flesh is one man, so God and Man is one Christ; who suffered for our salvation, descended into Hell, rose again the third day from the dead.

He ascended into Heaven; He sitteth on the right hand of the Father, God Almighty, from whence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead. At whose coming all men shall rise again with their bodies and shall give account for their own works. And they that have done good shall go into life everlasting; and they that have done evil into everlasting fire.

This is the catholic Faith, which except a man believe faithfully, he cannot be saved. ■

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sinners to Christ and to sanctify them through the Word.

Under this heading, we can think of the Father primarily as the Creator. The first articles of the Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds both encourage this sort of thinking.

The Son can be said to have voluntarily subordinated himself to the Father, for the sake of redeeming his people, and the Spirit voluntarily subordinates himself to the Father and the Son for the sake of sanctifying his people, as the Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds both teach.

Thinking in these categories does not imply, however, that either the Son or the Spirit became less than they were, otherwise we would be “dividing the persons” (Athanasian Creed). Rather, these distinctions are a part of the administration of salvation, not changes in the divine being.

Both the personal distinctions within the Trinity and the trinitarian character of God’s works of creation and redemption witness to the fundamental unity in the divine being. They also witness to the eternal fellowship and love which exists within the Trinity. The Greek Fathers spoke of God’s perichoresis or what Francis Turretin called the “mutual intertwining” of the persons of the Deity.10 In this case, we know that the Trinity we worship is no static deity, but rather that there are dynamic relations among the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. It is out of that dynamic, loving fellowship that both creation and redemption have issued.

Conclusion The doctrine of the Trinity is of the essence of our religion. We cannot and should not think of creation or redemption as anything but trinitarian operations. This is a duty of the Christian faith. Christianity is more than duty, however. Being drawn to greater wonder and awe before the face of God is one his best gifts. The Trinity reminds one that the Christian religion is not about us, but about God and his glorious grace. The Father to whom we pray is the eternal Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray, and the Spirit in whose power we pray is of the same substance as the Father and the Son and he is their gift to us to draw us by Christ to the Father.

Since the Trinity is such a necessary mystery, though woefully misunderstood or forgotten in our churches, how can we recover this truth? Three sources have helped me. First, God’s Word is thoroughly trinitarian and it is the fundamental source of all Christian teaching.

Second, it was through meditating on the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds that I began to read Scripture with renewed trinitarian eyes. Third, the Athanasian and Nicene Creeds also alerted me to the fact that Reformed theology is unreservedly trinitarian.11 It structures our theology. Calvin’s Institutes (1559) were laid out along the lines of the Creed. The Heidelberg Catechism (1563) is in three parts, each roughly corresponding to the work of the economic Trinity.

The benefits of reading the Bible in the communion

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of the saints (e.g., Athanasius, Basil, Calvin) have been revolutionary. Recovering the doctrine of the Trinity has delivered me from a warped conception of God. I have learned again that there is no other God than the God who is one substance in three subsistences (persons); that the Christian is not entitled to think of God in any other way than he has revealed himself (Heidelberg Catechism Q. 25, 96); that with Calvin and before him Gregory of Nazianzus (330-89) we must say, “I cannot think on the one without quickly being encircled by the splendor of the three; nor can I discern the three without being straightaway carried back to the one.”12 For Gregory, for Calvin, and for us, to think of God as triune is not a second blessing, reserved for the illuminati. Rather, it is how anyone must think of God, for any other god is an idol to be rejected.13 ■

R. S. Clark (D.Phil., Wycliffe Hall, Oxford), a minister in the United Reformed Church, is assistant professor of church history and academic dean at Westminster Theological Seminary in California.

He is co-editor of the recently published Protestant Scholasticism: Essays in Reassessment (Carlisle, UK: Paternoster, 1999).

SPEAKING OF

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ternal Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who out of nothing created heaven and earth with all that is in them and dost uphold and

govern them by thy eternal counsel and providence, we thank thee that for the sake of Christ thy Son thou art our God and our Father.

Help us to trust thee so completely that we may have no doubt that thou wilt provide us with all things necessary for body and soul.

Help us to know that whatever evil thou dost send upon us in this troubled life thou wilt turn to our good, even as thou art able to do it, being Almighty God, and determined to do it, being a faithful Father. Amen.

— Prayer based on Heidelberg Catechism’s Answer 26, Guilt, Grace, and Gratitude, ed. Donald J. Bruggink, 17-18

k G O D I N O U R I M A G E | Why Some Evangelicals are Challenging the Traditional View of God

Why the Glory of God Is at Stake in the

“Foreknowledge” Debate his article presupposes that true doctrine is the foundation of true delight. If we do not get our doctrine of God right, we will destroy the foundations of delight. Joy may flourish for a generation when the root is severed, but in the end, delight in God will die without true doctrine. And the glorification of God—through both understanding and enjoying him—will vanish. So, for the sake of God’s glory, I write with a very specific burden about the doctrine of God. Let Martin Luther set the stage:

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If I profess, with the loudest voice and clearest exposition, every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be

professing Christ. Where the battle rages there the loyalty of the soldier is proved, and to be steady on all the battle field besides is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.1 Personally, this has meant a twenty-year battle with the attack on God’s foreknowledge of his creature’s moral choices. This engagement has been sporadic until recently, and intense for the last two years. Back in 1977, a book was published called Did God Know? The book affirmed that “God’s knowledge is perfect and boundless.” But it argued that omniscience cannot include what is by nature unknowable, namely, future choices made by free creatures. “[God] cannot know something which is nothing,” said the author, and future choices are not yet in existence to know. They are nothing.2 So it is not limiting God’s foreknowledge to say he cannot “know nothing,” namely, the future his creatures create.

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I knew someone close to the author, and this person, not agreeing with his view, prevailed on me to meet with him. So this issue became a pressing personal reality for me in the late seventies. The position, of course, is not new. The Socinians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries made the same argument. “God does not know,” they said, “in such a way that whatsoever he

isn’t anything to know until we make it there to know. So God can’t foreknow the good or bad decisions of the people He creates until He creates these people and they, in turn create their decisions.5

I cannot treat this view as though it belongs to historic, orthodox Christianity, much less biblical Evangelicalism. It is a profoundly defective view of God and therefore will lead, if unchecked, to the uprooting of The denial of Jesus’ foreknowledge is, I believe John would say, (whether intended true delight in God and to the depreciation of his glory. or not) an assault on the deity of Christ.

Jonathan Edwards shared this negative assessment of the denial of God’s exhaustive definite foreknowledge, and therefore devoted a major section of knows will surely come to pass.”3 In other words, in his greatest book, The Freedom of the Will, to the defense of regard to human choices, God knows future possibilities, God’s foreknowledge of moral choices. The title of this but not future certainties. section is, “The Evidence of God’s Certain Foreknowledge Thankfully, the Socinians did not carry the day. And of the Volitions of Moral Agents.”6 Paul Ramsey, the editor both Calvinists and Arminians have, as a whole—along with virtually all Christendom—affirmed God’s of this volume of Edwards’ Works explains Edwards’ driving foreknowledge of human choices. John Calvin wrote, motive: “Into the writing of [The Freedom of the Will] he “[God] foresees future events only by reason of the fact poured all his intellectual acumen, coupled with a that he decreed that they take place” (Institutes, 3.23.6). passionate conviction that the decay to be observed in the religion And Jacobus Arminius wrote, “[God] has known from and morals followed the decline in doctrine since the founding of New eternity which persons should believe … and which England.”7 In other words, doctrine matters for life and 4 should persevere through subsequent grace.” Denying worship. Edwards believed passionately that a defective doctrine of God would, in the end, destroy delight in God God’s foreknowledge of human choices has never been and devotion to God. And above all, this meant that the an option within orthodox Christianity. glory of God would be lost in the Church and in the world.

I think he is right. The issue of God’s foreknowledge The Current Version of an Old Error is ultimately about the glory of God. ut the astonishing fact is that, here at the end of the twentieth century, it is not just quirky, selfGod’s Deity Connected with His Foreknowledge published books like Did God Know? that make this denial, but scholars of evangelical repute, in dwards makes this point clear in three primary books by publishers that once would have regarded such ways. In the first place, he says that if God views as far from orthodox. Ironically for me, the most can’t foreknow our choices, then “in vain has popular proponent of this view today is a pastor in my God himself often spoken of the predictions of denomination who also teaches at our denominational his Word, as evidences of … his peculiar glory, greatly school and has published this view with Scripture Press distinguishing him from all other beings.”8 The texts he (Chariot Victor Publishing) and InterVarsity Press. Greg has in mind are the very powerful texts in Isaiah that Boyd’s most popular book is Letters from a Skeptic. The explicitly connect God’s deity with his foreknowledge. book contains many helpful insights to strengthen faith.

In Isaiah 41:22b-23, God calls the idols to give an But here he explains his view of God’s omniscience and account and challenges them to show that they are gods: foreknowledge: “Announce to us what is coming; declare the things that are going to come afterward, that we may know that you are In the Christian view God knows all of reality— gods.” In other words, in God’s mind, the capacity to everything there is to know. But to assume He predict the future belonged to God. It was part of his deity knows ahead of time how every person is going to to be able to “declare things that are to come afterwards.” freely act assumes that each person’s free activity He makes the same connection in Isaiah 42:8-9, and is already there to know—even before he freely connects his power to foreknow with his glory: “I am the does it! But it’s not. If we have been given LORD, that is My name; I will not give My glory to another, freedom, we create the reality of our decisions by nor My praise to graven images. Behold, the former things making them. And until we make them, they have come to pass, now I declare new things; before they don’t exist. Thus, in my view at least, there simply spring forth I proclaim them to you.” You see the

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connection: I am Yahweh, and this is part of my divine glory: before they spring forth, I proclaim them to you.

Knowledge of what the future will bring is my glory.

Perhaps the most famous word of all on God’s claim on the future is Isaiah 46:9-10, “Remember the former things long past, for I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is no one like Me, declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things which have not been done, saying, ‘My purpose will be established, and I will accomplish all My good pleasure.’”

Those who deny God’s exhaustive definite foreknowledge object that the predictions in view here are only of things God intends to bring about himself.

And, they say, of course he knows what he intends to do.

But they deny that God claims to foreknow certainly what others will do.

But that assumes there are two classes of future events: those God predetermines and therefore foreknows; and those that arise from some other source than his plan, and which he does not know are coming, namely, those that arise from human and demonic choices.9 But does Isaiah make this distinction? I don’t think so. For virtually all the predictions God has in mind in these texts in regard to Israel’s future judgment and rescue involve thousands of human choices to bring them about; yet God foreknows them; and this knowing is what it means for him to be God. Isaiah does not separate what God is planning to do and what man will choose to do. Virtually all God’s judgments and deliverances involved choices that humans would make as instruments of God’s plan.

So Edwards is right when he says that God’s predictions of human events are “evidences of … [God’s] peculiar glory, greatly distinguishing him from all other beings.” The issue of God’s foreknowledge is the issue of God’s glory. And if evangelicals hope to seek and see and savor and show the glory of God, we should defend this doctrine and define ourselves as those who believe in it.

Jesus’ Precise Predictions he second way Edwards defends the glory of God in his exhaustive, definite foreknowledge is to focus our attention on the precise predictions of Jesus, especially concerning the choices of Judas and Peter for which they were morally accountable. Edwards says, “What a contradiction is it, to say that God certainly foreknew that Judas would betray his Master or Peter deny him, and yet certainly knew that it might be otherwise, that is, certainly knew that he might be deceived!”10 In other words, it would be utterly inglorious of God if he claimed to know that something is a future certainty and at the same time that it is only a future possibility, rather than a certainty. The glory of Christ is to know what is coming upon him with certainty and specificity.

John’s gospel makes this explicit by connecting

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Jesus’ foreknowledge with his deity, similarly to the way Isaiah made God’s foreknowledge evidence of his deity.

For example, in John 13:19, Jesus says at the Last Supper, “From now on I am telling you before it comes to pass, so that when it does occur, you may believe that I am.” With the words “I am” Jesus lays claim on deity in words that God uses of himself in texts like Isaiah 43:10 (“‘You are My witnesses,’ declares the LORD, ‘And My servant whom I have chosen, so that you may know and believe Me and understand that I am’”). And the warrant for believing that he is divine, he says, is that he is telling the disciples what is going to befall him before it comes to pass.

Then two verses later, in John 13:21, Jesus specifically predicts the betrayal of Judas. “Truly, truly, I say to you, that one of you will betray Me.” The disciples wonder who he is talking about, and Jesus says in verse 26, “‘That is the one for whom I shall dip the morsel and give it to him.’ So when He had dipped the morsel, He took and gave it to Judas.” Jesus had known it from the beginning, as it says in John 6:64, “Jesus knew from the beginning … who it was that would betray Him.” And he not only knew that it would happen and who would do it, but also when it would happen. Matthew 26:2: “You know that after two days the Passover is coming, and the Son of Man is handed over for crucifixion.” And it says that when he had given the morsel to Judas he said, “What you do, do quickly” (John 13:27). He knows that it is coming, who will do it, and when.

Two things are crucial to note here: one is that Jesus foreknows the evil deed of Judas with certainty. The other is that Jesus himself says that this foreknowledge is part of his glory as divine: “I am telling you before it comes to pass, so that when it does occur, you may believe that I am” (John 13:19). If evangelicals have a passion for the glory of Christ, we must join him in affirming, not denying, his ability to foreknow with certainty human choices without removing moral accountability. It’s his glory to know them.

His knowledge of Peter’s threefold denial is even more remarkable. Jesus not only predicts that Peter will deny him three times that very night, but treats the act with such certainty that he is already praying for Peter’s future repentance and future ministry.

“Simon, Simon, behold, Satan has demanded to sift you like wheat; but I have prayed for you, that your faith may not fail; and you, when once you have turned again, strengthen your brothers.” But he said to Him, “Lord, with You I am ready to go both to prison and to death!” And He said, “I say to you, Peter, the rooster will not crow today until you have denied three times that you know Me.” (Luke 22:31-34) This absolute knowledge that Peter would sin, how often he would sin, when he would sin, and that he would

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repent does not remove Peter’s moral responsibility in the least, which is made plain by the fact that Peter weeps bitterly precisely when he remembers the words of Jesus’ prediction. Peter does not say, “Well, you predicted this sin, and so it had to take place, and so it can’t have been part of my free willing, and so I am not responsible for it.” He wept bitterly. He was guilty and he knew it.

Jesus was glorious in the prediction, and Peter was guilty. Why do all four gospels tell this remarkable prediction in detail? Surely the most profound answer is the one given by John 13:19, “I am telling you before it comes to pass, so that when it does occur, you may believe that I am.” His foreknowledge of “all the things that were coming upon him” was an essential aspect of his glory as the incarnate Word, the Son of God. The denial of this foreknowledge is, I believe John would say, (whether intended or not) an assault on the deity of Christ.

Foreknowledge and the Fall third way that Edwards upholds God’s glory in the foreknowledge of human choices is in his treatment of the fall and all of redemptive history that God brought about in response to it. Edwards argues like this:

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If God [doesn’t] foreknow the volition of moral agents, then he did not foreknow the fall of man, or of angels, and so could not foreknow the great things which were consequent on these events; such as his sending his Son into the world to die for sinners, and all things pertaining to the great work of redemption; all the things which were done four thousand years before Christ came, to prepare the way for it; and the incarnation, life, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ … etc.11

in response to the misery and destruction and condemnation resulting from the fall that he foreknew.

Now add to this the teaching of Paul in Ephesians 1:4-6, and you see clearly how the glory of God is at stake in the denial of God’s foreknowledge of Adam’s fall and its consequent miseries. Paul says, “[God] chose us in [Christ] before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him. In love He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace.” In other words, before the foundation of the world—before the sinful choice of Adam (which Boyd says was not foreknowable by God)—God chose us in Christ and predestined us for sonship through Christ so that the free and sovereign grace of God would be seen as glorious: “unto the praise of the glory of his grace.”

But if God did not foreknow the fall, and (as some argue) was surprised by it, then Paul’s argument for the glory of God’s grace manifest in his eternal plan to rescue us from the fall is not valid. So again: if evangelicals love the glory of God manifest in Christ’s redeeming work planned before the foundation of the world, then we should affirm and cherish—and not deny—God’s exhaustive, definite foreknowledge of human choices.

Scriptures that Seem to Deny God’s Foreknowledge fair and earnest person will ask at this point: How do Greg Boyd and others defend their view biblically? The answer is that Boyd directs our attention to passages of Scripture that seem to demand a denial of God’s foreknowledge of human choices. For example, he refers to Isaiah’s prophecy to Hezekiah in Isaiah 38:1, “Set your house in order, for you shall die and not live.” Then Hezekiah weeps and prays. To which the Lord responds, in verse 5, “I have seen your tears; behold, I will When Samuel protests in 1 Samuel 15:29, “The Glory of Israel will not lie or add fifteen years to your life.”

Boyd argues that this change in repent; for he is not a man, that he should repent,” what is he protesting against?

God’s expressed intention shows And what is he protesting for? He is protesting against making God like a man. that God did not know what Hezekiah would do when he threatened to end his life. But when God saw Hezekiah’s (unforeknown) sorrow and heard his (unforeknown) prayer, God changed his plan But in fact, Edwards observes, God must have and added fifteen years to his life. foreknown the fall of Adam with all its disastrous moral But the fact is that both Boyd and I would say that effects, because, for example, Paul says that from all eternity God has planned to give us saving grace in Christ Jesus God’s first prediction contained an implicit condition. as our Savior. “[God] has saved us and called us with a Both of us solve the problem of the apparent holy calling, not according to our works, but according untruthfulness of the first prediction (“You will die”) in to His own purpose and grace which was granted us in the same way: God was saying in his own heart: “This I Christ Jesus from all eternity” (2 Tim. 1:9). In other will do unless you repent.” The difference between Boyd words, God not only foreknew in eternity the sinful and me is that he thinks God was thinking implicitly, “I choice that Adam would make (and Lucifer before him), will do this unless you repent, and I don’t know if you are but he also planned to give us grace through Jesus Christ going to repent.” And I think God was thinking

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implicitly, “I will do this unless you repent, and I know you are going to repent.”

Boyd would ask, “What’s the point of saying Hezekiah is going to die (if he doesn’t repent), when God knows that he will, in fact, repent?” I would respond by saying, God has his reasons for the way he acts that we cannot see (“Who has ever been his counselor?” Romans 11:34). But another answer would be: God warns him that he will die because he wants to move him to repentance and save him. In other words, the threat of death is the means of life.

Scriptures that Refer to God’s Repenting nother group of texts to which Boyd refers are the texts concerning God’s being sorrowful that he did something. For example, in 1 Samuel 15:11, God says, “I repent that I have made Saul king; for he has turned back from following me.” And Genesis 6:5-6, “Then the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth…. The LORD was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart.” Boyd asks, “How could the Lord possibly have regretted something he created if he was perfectly certain what would happen an eternity before he created it?”12 The implication for Boyd is that God could not regret or repent of what he foreknew. Therefore, God could not foreknow the fall and its disastrous consequences. And he could not foreknow that Saul was going to be a disobedient king.

My answer to this is threefold. First, these texts do not say or teach that God does not foreknow the future in question. Rather, Boyd infers this. In fact, no text in the Bible says that God does not foreknow human choices. This is always an inference based on what someone thinks is possible for God to do or say.

Second, we have seen from 2 Timothy 1:9 that God “has saved us … according to His own purpose and grace which was granted us in Christ Jesus from all eternity.” So the gracious work of Christ, redeeming us from the curse of the fall, was planned in eternity, and grace was given to us “from all eternity.” The implication of this verse is just as strong that God foreknew the fall in Genesis 6:6 as that he did not foreknow the fall.

Third, in the very context of God’s repentance over Saul (1 Sam. 15:28-29), Samuel says to Saul, “‘The LORD has torn the kingdom of Israel from you this day, and has given it to a neighbor of yours, who is better than you.

And also the Glory of Israel will not lie or repent; for he is not a man, that he should repent.” So in verse 11 God says, “I repent that I have made Saul king.” And in verse 29 Samuel says, “The Glory of Israel will not lie or repent; for he is not a man, that he should repent.”

So my alternative way of thinking about these texts is: God foreknows the grievous and sorrowful effects of some of his own choices—for example, to create Adam

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and Eve, and to make Saul king. These effects are genuinely grievous to God as he sees them in themselves. Yet he does not regard his choices as mistakes that he would do differently if only he foreknew what was coming. Rather, he wills to do some things which he then genuinely grieves over in part when the grievous effect comes to pass.

Now if someone should say, This does not sound like what we ordinarily mean by “regret” or “repentance,” I would respond that this is exactly why Samuel said: God “will not lie or repent; for he is not a man, that he should repent” (1 Sam. 15:29). In other words, Samuel means something like this: when I say “[God] repented that he made Saul king” (or when Moses said that God repented that he created Adam and Eve), I do not mean that God experiences repentance precisely the way ordinary humans do. He is not a man to experience “repentance” this way. He experiences it his way—the way one experiences “repentance” when one is all-wise and foreknows the entire future perfectly. The experience is real, but it is not like finite man experiences it.

God’s Glory Is at Stake hich brings us to the main and final point. When Samuel protests in 1 Samuel 15:29, “The Glory of Israel will not lie or repent; for he is not a man, that he should repent,” what is he protesting against?

And what is he protesting for? The wording of the verse gives the answer. He is protesting against making God like a man. “God is not man.” And he is protesting for the glory13 of God. “The Glory of Israel will not … repent.”

Therefore I say again, as earnestly and hopefully as I know how: the issue of God’s foreknowledge of human choices is about the glory of God. And if you love the glory of God, if his glory is your treasure and your portion in this life and the next, then I urge you to say with Samuel, “The glory of Israel is not like a human being, he does not repent”—as though he did not know the future! Rather, as Jonathan Edwards said, God’s foreknowledge is “his peculiar glory, greatly distinguishing him from all other beings.14 ■

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John Piper (D.Theol. University of Munich) is the senior pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis. Among his many books is The Pleasures of God: Meditations on God’s Delight in Being God (Multnomah Press, 1991).

[Editor note: For current information on this debate within the Baptist General Conference see WORLD, July 17, 1999, p. 23.]

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What Theological System Does the “New” Model Propose?

Issue

Classical Model

“New” Model

Infinite, personal Creator: Eternal, unchangeable, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent.

Emphasis on God’s transcendence (i.e., distinction between creature and Creator).

Finite Creator: Dynamic view of God concerned with emphasizing his immanence (i.e., partnership between Creator and creature) and divine change. A denial of God’s immutability, impassibility, omnipotence, omniscience, etc.

Man:

Created in God’s image, man chose to transgress God’s law, rendering the entire human race condemned by God’s just sentence. Original sin renders everyone sinful (corrupt) and guilty (condemned) from birth. Sin is a condition (i.e., we sin because we are sinners).

Created in God’s image, man follows Adam’s poor moral example. The human race is condemned by following that example.

Nevertheless, people are not guilty for Adam’s sin. Each of us is a sinner because of our sins. Emphasis on sin as act.

Major Problem:

Condemnation: Apart from Christ’s imputed righteousness, God’s wrath hangs over us.

Education: We don’t know how much God loves us.

Solution:

Because sin demands a legal consequence of judgment, salvation centers on the legal consequences of God’s redemptive activity in Christ. The atonement is chiefly objective, emphasizing the notion of penal substitution.

Because sin is mainly a moral rather than a legal issue, salvation centers on the moral and emotional effect of the cross, moving us to repentance. The atonement is chiefly subjective, emphasizing the moral influence or governmental theories of the atonement.

Finality of Christ:

Ordinarily, there is no salvation apart from the new birth and faith in Jesus Christ.

There is also no saving revelation apart from the written and living Word incarnate.

While all who are saved are saved by Christ, many are saved apart from confessing him.

In fact, even atheists will be in heaven. The Holy Spirit saves and reveals apart from the knowledge of Christ. Focus is on the Holy Spirit.

The Eternal State:

God has given immortality to the human soul and every person will continue to exist for all eternity, in both body and soul, after the general resurrection and judgment.

The idea of the soul’s immortality is Greek, not biblical, and those who are eventually judged (if any) will be annihilated and will not endure everlasting conscious punishment.

Dominant Metaphor:

Courtroom: God’s fatherhood is only possible after the “not guilty” verdict and subsequent adoption.

Family room: God’s fatherhood is universal.

The issue is not his justice or wrath but our own rejection of his love.

Historical Representatives:

Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Edwards, Warfield, Barth

Origen, Justin Martyr, Pelagius, Abelard, Socinus, Arminius, Grotius, Finney, Schleiermacher.

God:

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Interview with Nicholas P. Wolterstorff

Does God Suffer?

MR: What precipitated your interest in the doctrine of impassibility? Was it a theoretical or practical catalyst, or both?

NW: The classical doctrine of divine impassibility affirms that God is not affected by anything that transpires outside of God—by anything that transpires in God’s creation. In particular, it affirms that God is not negatively affected by any such happenings. God does not suffer; God experiences nothing like grief, no negative affects.

NICHOLAS P. WOLTERSTORFF Noah Porter Professor of Philosophical Theology, The Divinity School, Yale Univesity.

Professor Wolterstorff is currently working on a book about the debate over God’s impassibility.

Three different considerations combined to get me interested in reflecting on whether this traditional doctrine is true. One of the areas within philosophy in which I work is philosophical theology. Over the years in working in this area, it became clear to me that though nowadays the traditional understanding of God is often presented as if it were an assortment of distinct and separate “attributes,” in fact, it is as far from being an assortment as anything could possibly be. The attributes were traditionally understood as hanging together in an extraordinarily tight and profound manner; pull out one, and most of the others come along with it. The picture that comes to my mind is of those sweaters knit in such a way that when you pull on one thread, the whole thing unravels before your eyes. Impassibility is one component in that tightly integrated traditional way of understanding God. My interest in the structure as a whole accordingly led me to become interested in eternity, in simplicity, in aseity (unconditionedness)—and then also in impassibility.

A second factor which sparked my interest in the doctrine was coming across a passage in John Calvin one day in which he speaks of the doing of injustice to someone as “wounding” God: when one wrongs someone that a person loves, one wounds that person himself. My reading of this passage occurred sometime during the late 1970s or early 1980s when I was intensely interested in issues of justice in South Africa and the Middle East; Calvin’s remark cast, for me, an entirely different light on my endeavors. To wreak injustice is to wound God; I had never thought of it like that. In speaking of injustice as the wounding of God, Calvin was obviously departing in a most dramatic way from the traditional understanding of God as impassible—though whether Calvin saw himself as speaking metaphorically or literal-

ly was not entirely clear to me at the time. In any case, what this experience did was give me an additional motivation for reflecting on divine impassibility.

No doubt, however, it was the death of our son, Eric, which proved the principal energizer. Any Christian who reflects on living with grief has to reflect on living with God in grief; and that immediately leads into the issue of impassibility. I knew the traditional picture: God surveys with uninterrupted bliss what transpires in this vale of tears which is our world. In the situation of my son’s death, I found that picture impossible to accept—existentially impossible. I could not live with it; I found it grotesque. Perhaps if I had firmly believed it was the correct picture I could eventually have brought myself to the point where I no longer rebelled against it.

But by this time I had already, for more or less theoretical reasons, found the doctrine questionable; this experience pushed me over the edge, one might say. It did more than that though: it led me to reflect on the doctrine much more thoroughly and seriously than I had before. For I knew that in rejecting the doctrine, I was disagreeing with the greatest minds and hearts of the Christian church; I was not, and I am not, willing or even able to do that lightly.

MR: How would you summarize the development of impassibility as an element of the classical doctrine of God? NW: One can discern two lines of thought leading the church fathers to their affirmation of the doctrine of impassibility. One consisted of ethical reflections shaped by the thought of late antiquity. We can take Augustine as prototypical. Augustine regarded it as a truism that every person seeks happiness as his or her sole

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end in itself; disagreement arises only on the means to that end. To attach one’s love to anything mutable, Augustine argued, was to run the danger of that thing changing or disappearing and thus bringing disappointment to one in its wake. Only if one loves the eternal, God, can one be assured of uninterrupted happiness. Yet in this present age it would be wrong not to desire the

covenant. And when read in context, God’s answer, “I am who I am,” does not mean that God is pure being, as the tradition held, but that I, God, as who I have always been, namely, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

But let’s also look at it from the other side. There are a few biblical passages which the traditional theologians have cited as supporting their doctrines of divine eternity, immutability, simplicinceyoupullonthethreadofimpassibility,alotofotherthreadscomealong. ty, and impassibility. But there are a good many more which Aseity, for example—that is, unconditionedness…. One also has to give up appear to attribute change to God—God is spoken of as “repenting,” for example—and immutability (changelessness) and eternity. literally thousands which attribute emotion-predicates to God. Of course, the fathers welfare of one’s fellow human beings, and accordingly, had a way of interpreting these; one doesn’t refute their not to feel disappointment when that welfare is not doctrine of impassibility simply by pointing to these pasachieved. Accordingly, we live in the hope of true hapsages. They knew their Bibles better than most of us do. piness, in the age to come. But God already enjoys such Nonetheless, the surface meaning of these passages is happiness. Often Augustine rejects out of hand, as needthat emotions are being attributed to God; the traditioning no argument, the suggestion that God suffers negaal interpretation needs good reasons for holding that tive affect. they don’t mean what they appear to mean. In short, the Yet he and his fellow theologians did have an argugreat bulk of biblical passages appear to be against the ment. Negative affect, so he assumed, is something that classical conception. happens to one—it overtakes one. It occurs when someThe proper conclusion to be drawn, however, is thing in which one is invested disappears, or is threatthat one gets nowhere on this issue by just citing proof ened with disappearance. But the existence and charactexts; each side has ways of interpreting the texts which ter of God cannot be conditioned by anything outside of appear not to be on its side. There is no option but to God. Reality is such that there must be something which engage in careful, serious theology and philosophy. is the condition of everything but is itself not conditioned by anything; God is that being. Hence God cannot “suffer”—that is, undergo—any form of negative experience.

MR: It seems that this debate is bound up with the problem of evil, especially after the Holocaust: although we can’t help but come to Scripture in our own skin, our own time, place and experience, isn’t it also the case that Scripture can judge our experience and that many of MR: Aren’t there a lot of biblical passages which support impassibility and its related notions of immutability (changelessness), eternity, these denials of impassibility surrender too much to the reader’s horizon? transcendence, and so forth? Can these texts, most of which come from the Old Testament, be charged with a Greek (especially Stoic) bias?

NW: That’s always a worry: that we are distortedly interpreting Scripture in the light of our own experience.

But it’s important to realize that the traditional theoloNW: There are indeed passages of this sort—though considerably fewer than one might think. Just to give gians were also interpreting Scripture in the light of their one example: in his discussion of eternity in Summa conexperience; doing so is not some questionable practice tra Gentiles, Aquinas cites Psalm 101:13, 38,1 in support of which first emerged in the modern world. Augustine was the doctrine: “But thou, O Lord, endurest forever;… interpreting Scripture in the light of a blend of Platonism thou art always the selfsame: and thy years shall not fail.” and Stoicism which he found compelling—and in the The passage to which the traditional writers return over situation where the Roman Empire, the only mode of and over again, as the most decisive, is Exodus 3:13-14, government which anyone in the Mediterranean basin where God answers Moses’ question as to how he shall had known for a thousand years, was coming crashing identify to his fellow Israelites the speaker in the flaming down. His view of ideal personal existence, of God and bush: “I am who I am.” human beings, had considerable social plausibility in that It’s my view, however, that none of the frequently circumstance. cited passages is susceptible to the metaphysical interBut I don’t myself accept, as a proper description of pretation placed upon them by the traditional theolothe situation, that we are to interpret Scripture in the gians. When God is proclaimed as “always the selfsame,” light of our own experience. Rather, our challenge is to what is meant is not that God is metaphysically eternal bring our interpretation of Scripture and our interpretaand immutable, but that God is ever faithful to God’s tion of experience into harmony with each other—regu-

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larly allowing Scripture to shape and correct our interpretation of experience, but also being open to the possibility that our experience will open our eyes to some part of Scripture. Let me add that I don’t think it’s the massive tragedies of the twentieth century that have been the main factor in making many of us question the doctrine of impassibility; Augustine was well acquainted with tragedy. I don’t question that that has been a contributing factor; nonetheless I think it has mainly been the slow loosening of the grip of Platonism and Stoicism on the Christian mind that has brought about the change.

MR: What would you say to a parent who has just lost her daughter in an apparently meaningless tragedy and believes that the only thing she can hold onto is the conviction that God is not a victim along with her?

NW: I would say to her that though God is as much grieved by the death of her daughter as she is, God is not a victim. I think we have to have the Christian courage to say forthrightly that things have gone awry in the world; things are not as God wants them to be. Which of course is why God has set about redeeming humanity and the world. The biblical picture of God is simply not that God surveys with undisturbed bliss what transpires in the world; this is the picture of the philosophers. The biblical picture of God is that God is dismayed by what is happening, and that God is engaged in battle with the forces of evil. Recall the pervasiveness of battle metaphors when Scripture describes God’s relation to the world!

What Christ’s resurrection means is that the victory in this battle belongs to God. The powers have been led captive. That’s why I say that God is not a victim. God is the ultimate conqueror—against all those forces that dismay and oppose God.

is that Christ suffered in his person, not just in his human nature. And that the Father suffered in and with Christ’s suffering.

MR: What other components of classical theology would have to be revised or rejected in the light of divine suffering?

NW: Once you pull on the thread of impassibility, a lot of other threads come along. Aseity, for example—that is, unconditionedness. The biblical witness seems to me clearly to be that God allows himself to be affected by the doings of the creatures God has created. What led the traditional theologians to affirm aseity was their philosophical argument that the world is such that it can only be explained if we postulate a being which is the condition of everything but itself, itself being conditioned by nothing. To give up aseity is then to give up a certain argument for God’s existence. But that argument is questionable in any case.

One also has to give up immutability (changelessness) and eternity. If God really responds, then God is not metaphysically immutable; and if not metaphysically immutable, then not eternal.

A good many of the current objections to the classical concept of God strike me as “cheap shots.” I regularly tell my students that I will not allow them to take cheap shots against the tradition; they have to earn their right to disagree by working through the tradition and understanding it at its deepest level. Every now and then when they do take what I regard as cheap shots I say to them: “Would you still say what you just said if Augustine were sitting right across the table from you?” Or Anselm, or Aquinas, or Calvin? In short, it is our duty to honor those forebears in the Christian tradition. That said, I do think, nonetheless, that those forebears took some wrong turns, and that impassibility was one of those. ■

MR: The previous question raises the issue of Christology. So many arguments on both sides of this debate seem to be more interested in an abstract “God” than in the triune God who has been revealed in Christ. Isn’t it enough to say that God is involved in our suffering because the Son became incarnate, but that because Jesus was and is God, he is not trapped in suffering and can, therefore, conquer for us?

If a firefighter is trapped with the victim in the elevator of a burning building, there may be moral support, but doesn’t one really need rescue from someone outside the elevator?

NW: The question suggests, if I understand it, that Christ suffered in his human nature but not in his divine nature; and that was, indeed, the traditional view. But I don’t think it’s correct. The fact that God is grieved does not imply that God is not and will not be the victor. It’s God’s being grieved by what has gone awry in this world that motivates God’s engagement in the battle. My view

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What Is the “Evangelical” Theology of Salvation?

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his work promises to be the first volume of a multi-author series entitled Foundations of

and union with Christ. At times, Demarest’s disagreements with the Evangelical Theology. The title itself may raise some eyebrows, in light of the spectrum of Reformed position seem primarily semantic, though some substantheological opinions expressed in the evangelical community. Is there any distinctive tive differences certainly exist.

Demarest follows a consistent pattern in dealing with each particular doctrine: he system of doctrine that can coherently be called “evanintroduces the topic, summarizes different interpretagelical theology”? This question is never specifically tions of the doctrine advocated by various theological answered in The Cross and Salvation, and the ambisystems, gives a biblical defense of his own position, and guity, which will be discussed below, never goes concludes with some practical implications. away. Nevertheless, Bruce Demarest has offered In summarizing different interpretations of the docus a theology of salvation (“soteriology”) that is trine, Demarest often discusses the traditional Roman firm in its convictions and, with some excepCatholic, Arminian, Lutheran, and Reformed views, as tions, Reformed in its doctrine. well as some modern movements such as classical liberDemarest, a professor at Denver Seminary, al, neo-orthodox, process, and liberation theologies. On divides his book into twelve chapters that prothe whole, these sections are very helpful. They describe ceed through the elements of soteriology in a the key issues at stake and leave the reader with no illulogical and orderly fashion. Following an introsions about the controversies which soteriology has duction, he considers grace, election, atonealways engendered. Lutheran readers may often find ment, calling, conversion, regeneration, union themselves disappointed with these sections, however. with Christ, justification, sanctification, perseDemarest frequently discusses Luther himself, but treatverance, and glorification. Demarest addresses some subjects that are often not considered, ment of the confessional Lutheran tradition is often curistrictly speaking, part of soteriology, such as the docously absent. Lutheranism is usually addressed only in trines of election and atonement. However, because of contexts where Demarest rejects its theology; in some the intimate connection of these doctrines with soteriolcontexts where he may find Lutheran sympathy for his ogy proper, this seems to be a good move. departures from Calvinism (e.g., reprobation and limited The Cross and Generally, the author falls in line with Reformed atonement), Lutheran views are not even mentioned. It Salvation soteriology. In short, he unapologetically affirms the is also notable that Eastern Orthodox theology is almost

by Bruce Demarest sovereignty of God in the salvation of sinners and entirely neglected. Given the increasing contemporary defends the key soteriological insights of the interaction between conservative Protestantism and Crossway Books, 1997.

Reformation. There are a few exceptions to Calvinist Orthodoxy, at least some treatment of Orthodox soteri$20, 481 pages, paperback thought, however. Demarest backs away from the tradiology, especially its doctrine of theosis,1 would have been tional Reformed views of reprobation and limited atonequite useful. ment, believes regeneration and union with Christ are In his biblical defenses of the positions he adopts, the results of faith and repentance rather than their source Demarest usually takes a big-picture approach, surveying (though he does believe in total depravity), and denies the Bible’s teaching on the subject from the Pentateuch that Old Testament believers experienced regeneration through the New Testament epistles. This means that he

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he disagrees with Reformed positions, Demarest is somewhat unfair in his descriptions of Calvinism. Occasionally, he also slips in unnecessarily pejorative comments about the work of Calvinist theologians.

But Demarest deserves nothing but commendation for his treatment of those most critical issues, justification and sanctification.

Readers of this magazine will find his expositions clear and faithful to the Reformation tradition in a day when they remain contentious battlegrounds. He unabashedly affirms that the character of justification is forensic/judicial, that faith is its only instrument, and that the imputation of Christ’s righteousness is its only ground. In explaining sanctification, Demarest avoids several contemporary and perennial traps to the Reformation doctrine. For example: against Roman Catholicism, he clearly distinguishes sanctification from justification; against some Wesleyan and Pentecostal traditions, he teaches that sanctification will always remain imperfect in this life; and against those who assert the possibility of “carnal Christianity,” he affirms that all Christians are being sanctified. Here, I believe, Demarest is at his best.

As a final reflection, I return to my opening comments on the ambiguity of an “evangelical theology.” In contemporary North America at least, calling a theology “evangelical” opens a wide range of often flatly contradictory doctrinal positions. Such a label leaves it uncommitted to a distinct confessional tradition or ecclesiastical heritage. Though he usually adopts “Reformed” positions, Demarest is still merely an “evangelical” theologian, in that there seems to be no confession or church that he can fully call his own. I believe there is something important here that Demarest’s book, for all its strengths, still lacks.

He is generally effective in describing various soteriological opinions and in presenting biblical evidence. Yet he goes about this by treating the various soteriological opinions as options that are just there, arranged in smorgasbord fashion for our sampling. In each case, he chooses the one item best fitting his analysis of the biblical witn contemporary North America at least, calling a theology “evangelical” opens a wide ness, usually the Reformed item.

What is missing, in my judgment, is a sense that in expoundrange of often flatly contradictory doctrinal positions. Such a label leaves it ing biblical soteriology we are also expounding the historical uncommitted to a distinct confessional tradition or ecclesiastical heritage. soteriology of the Church of Jesus Christ. If this is really the way of salvation, then it is the same way of salvation experienced and al nature of questions about the bondage of the will and the effectuconfessed by all true Christians throughout the ages. Certainly, al character of grace. many of these Christians could not explain it as fully or accurately as The chapter on election is also noteworthy. Like the doctrine we might explain it now, but it is nevertheless the same salvation. of grace, the doctrine of election is important in its foundational sigDoes not soteriology, then, consist of more than just picking items nificance for soteriology. Unfortunately, this chapter contains from a neatly arranged buffet? Does it not involve explicating a sysambiguous language on a matter that undoubtedly will be of concern tem of doctrines that most faithfully reflects and develops the one to many readers of Modern Reformation. From a Reformed perspective, way of salvation that theologians have been describing and for which Demarest does an admirable job defending the traditional Calvinist martyrs have given their lives? Should it not display some concern view of individual, sovereign, divine election. But he departs from for how the one doctrine of salvation has been grasped, defended, and the Reformed view in rejecting reprobation, or double predestination. developed throughout the whole history of the Church?

In the larger scope of Demarest’s project, this issue is a minor conThis, I think, is more than just an apologetic concern. It is an cern. What is disappointing is that Demarest is not precise in his use acknowledgment that though we, with Luther, have taken our stand of terms like “double” or “single” predestination, “infralapsarian” and on the Bible alone, we also, with Luther, Calvin, and their followers, “supralapsarian,” and “hyper-Calvinism.” Reformed readers should be have been raised and nurtured in the Church and through the diswarned that here, and in a few other places, usually in contexts where spends less time with detailed exegesis of key passages. There are strengths and weaknesses associated with this method. But the overall result of his biblical work, which demonstrates Demarest’s commitment to sola Scriptura and grounds Reformed soteriology in the whole of Scripture, is largely effective.

As mentioned above, the author concludes each section by discussing the practical implications of the doctrine under consideration.

In an age when theology is so often thought to be irrelevant for how one lives the Christian life, Demarest’s demonstration of the inextricable connection between doctrine and practice is refreshing. Placing application concerns as a separate section perhaps subtly perpetuates the idea that theology and life can be considered separately. Maybe their connection would have been displayed better had Demarest worked the practical implications into the biblical expositions themselves. Nevertheless, the author’s concerns are right on target.

It is worth reflecting briefly on several chapters that stand out in one way or another. First is Demarest’s chapter on grace, which comes early in the work. Here, while interacting with the various shades of Pelagianism, Semi-Pelagianism, and Augustinianism, he deals with the nature of sinful man and the character of the grace that rescues him. Choosing to include such a chapter was a wise move.

Though Demarest may have been tempted to leave it out, on the ground that most of the issues it treats arise repeatedly throughout the book, the chapter serves an important function: it introduces the general concerns about nature, sin, and grace which are so fundamental to understanding salvation and which Demarest will discuss repeatedly. I must confess a few disappointments with the chapter itself. For example, he does not use the crucial term “Semi-Pelagian” consistently throughout the chapter, and he makes the historically questionable claim that Augustine was forerunner of the medieval maxim “grace perfects nature.” Nevertheless, Demarest provides his readers a service by setting out, from the beginning, the foundation-

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cerning exegetical and theological labors of our ancestors. Our exegesis, our systematizing, our polemics are, in large part, not original with us—nor should they be. This, it seems to me, is a great strength of confessional theologies, of which Lutheran and Reformed theologies have traditionally been examples. They are theologies attached to a church, rooted in a history of confessing the same salvation, organically and covenantally united with the faith of our fathers.

Doing a confessional theology is, it seems to me, an appropriate and even necessary way of expressing the continuity of our efforts with those who have gone before.

As one consciously standing in the Reformed confessional tradition, I gratefully acknowledge the work Demarest has undertaken in clearly and boldly setting forth the Gospel. He does cite many of the same biblical arguments, theologians, and confessional statements that I recognize as my own heritage. But what is missing, I fear, is a consistent demonstration of how his soteriology is organically rooted in history, in the Church, in the one perennially confessed way of salvation. Because Demarest’s soteriology does, in fact, clearly uphold this one way of salvation in a day of so much doctrinal apathy and confusion, this book is recommended. Yet, it is a recommendation with caveats. ■

David VanDrunen is a Ph.D. student in theology at Loyola University, Chicago.

Westminster Theological Seminary in California is pleased to announce THE ANNIVERSARY SCHOLARSHIP

Westminster Theological Seminary is offering scholarships for promising African-American and Hispanic-American students for this coming fall. Expenses covered by this scholarship include full tuition and a living stipend.

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Anniversary Scholarship Committee Westminster Theological Seminary in California 1725 Bear Valley Parkway Escondido, CA 92027 USA FAX: (760) 480-0252 | Phone: (760) 480-8474 E-mail: admissions@wtscal.edu

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E N D N O T E S Ex Auditu by David B. McWilliams 1 Martin Luther, Works (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1961), vol. 26, 195. 2Gustav Freytag, Doctor Luther (Philadelphia: Lutheran Publication Society, 1916), 47-48.

Is the New News Good News? by Michael Horton Clark Pinnock, et. al., The Openness of God: A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1994), 7-8. 2See the entire issue of Christianity Today, February 3, 1997. 3Hans Kung, Credo: The Apostles’ Creed Explained for Today (New York: Doubleday, 1993), 86. 4Ibid., 87. 5Sallie McFague, Models of God (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987), 64. 6For further discussion of the Father and the Trinity, see my We Believe: Recovering the Essentials of the Apostles’ Creed (Nashville: Word, 1998), chapters 2-3. 7“Panentheism” differs from ”pantheism.”

Panentheism is that view that God is dependent on the world for his fulfillment; creation is in him, but he is still larger than it. Pantheism, on the other hand, identifies God with all, and all with God. 8For an excellent, more detailed discussion of the place of the incarnation in responding to these challenges, see Richard Muller, “Incarnation, Immutability, and the Case for Classical Theism,” Westminster Theological Journal 45 (1983), 22-40.

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Does God Know the Future? by William C. Davis 1 I will use “God’s sovereign knowledge of the future” to refer to God’s comprehensive knowledge of the future based on his determinate decree. The Westminster Confession of Faith includes God’s decree as part of his sovereignty in III.1. 2See John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1.16-1.17, as well as Paul Helm, The Providence of God (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1994). 3For example, A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, ed. by David R. Griffen and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1976); Charles Hartshorne, Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984); and John B. Cobb, Jr. and David R. Griffen, Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition (Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox Press, 1977). 4David Basinger’s “Can an Evangelical Christian Justifiably Deny God’s Exhaustive Knowledge of the Future?”, Christian Scholars’ Review, vol. 25, no. 2 (1995), 135-145 discusses the possibility of denying God’s exhaustive knowledge of the future. But see also his “Divine Control and Human Freedom: Is Middle Knowledge the Answer?” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, vol. 36, no. 1 (1993), 55-64. 5Typically, they buttress this claim with the suggestion that the problem of evil is insoluble unless humans have libertarian freedom. See William Hasker in The Openness of God (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1994), 143. “Free will” solutions to the problem of evil also depend upon this view of human freedom. See Al Plantinga’s The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), his God, Freedom and Evil (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978), and Kelly Clark’s Return to Reason (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990). 6“Sunday School” does not mean philosophically simplistic. This is the position defended by both Leibniz and Thomas Aquinas. See Jack D. Davidson, “Untying the Knot: Leibniz on God’s Knowledge of Future Free Contingents,” History of Philosophy Quarterly, vol. 13, no. 1, Jan. 1996, 89-116. 7This suggestion that God’s power extends to overturning his own independence is found very clearly in Soren Kierkegaard; see his Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Princeton: Princeton, 1974), 232, as well as his Journals and Papers, ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Bloomington: Indiana, 1970), citation number 1251.

8 Parmenides of Elea (c. 500 BC) concluded that all that is must be an immutable and eternal One. 9William Hasker, The Openness of God, 138, as well as Clark Pinnock, The Openness of God, 113-117. (See also the interview with Pinnock in MR, Nov./Dec. 1998.) 10Richard Rice, The Openness of God, 18-22. 11John Sanders, The God Who Risks: A Theology of Providence (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1998).

12 William Hasker, The Openness of God, 153; but see also Rice, 50-53, and Pinnock, 122-23. 13This is the standard version of the thesis. Some (like Lequyer) argue that all propositions about the future are false; see Donald Wayne Viney, “Jules Lequyer and the Openness of God,” Faith & Philosophy, vol. 14, no. 2 (1997), 212-235.

14 Aristotle, De Interpretationes, chapter ix. 15Both Boethius (c. 500 AD) and Thomas Aquinas (c. 1250 AD) wrote commentaries on Aristotle’s De Interpretationes, rejecting Aristotle’s thesis. 16Calvin explicitly rejects static accounts of God’s immutability; see his Institutes, 1.16.3, as well as Gary B. Deason’s “Reformation Theology and the Mechanistic Conception of Nature,” in God & Nature, ed. David C. Lindberg and

Ronald L. Numbers (Berkeley: California, 1986), 167-191. 17 Paul Helm, The Providence of God (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1994). See especially Chapter 2: “Providence: Risky or Risk-free?” 18For more on God’s atemporality and action in time, see David Braine, “God, Eternity and Time—An Essay in Review of Alan Padgett, ‘God, Eternity and the Nature of Time,’” Evangelical Quarterly, vol. 66, no. 4 (1994), 337-344.

19 Clark Pinnock, The Openness of God, 122. 20See also Timothy George in “Has God Been Held Hostage by Philosophy?”, Christianity Today, vol.

39, no. 1 (1995), 33-34. 21The first to offer this account of God’s foreknowledge was Luis de Molina in the sixteenth century. See his Liberi Arbitri cum Gratiae Donis, Divina Praescientia, Providentia, Praedestinatione et Reprobatione Concordia (The Harmony of Free Will with Divine Grace, Divine Foreknowledge, Providence, Predestination and Reprobation), 1588. The English translation is by Alfred J. Freddoso: Luis de Molina, On Divine Foreknowledge (Ithaca: Cornell, 1988). A good introduction to this issue can be found in Thomas Flint, “Two Accounts of Providence,” in Divine and Human Action: Essays in the Metaphysics of Theism, ed. by Thomas V. Morris (Ithaca: Cornell, 1988), 147-181. 22For one statement of the simple foreknowledge position, see David P. Hunt, “Divine Providence and Simple Foreknowledge,” Faith & Philosophy, vol. 10, no. 3 (1993), 394ff. 23See, for example, Roderick Chisholm, “Human Freedom and the Self,” 360-366. 24William Hasker, The Openness of God, 148. See also John Sanders, “Why Simple Foreknowledge Offers No More Providential Control than the Openness of God,” Faith & Philosophy, vol.

14, no. 1 (1997), 26-40. 25For their patient help with earlier drafts of this article I am indebted to my wife, Lynda, to R. S. Clark, and to my Ancient to Renaissance Philosophy class at Covenant College.

“All Theology Is Christology” by David P. Scaer 1 This phrase was adopted to describe the position of Concordia Seminary, Saint Louis, in the 1970s. Carl Braaten, an Evangelical Lutheran Church in America clergyman and then a professor at its Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago, who had supported the “Gospel reductionists,” as those who held this position were called, is now described as “dissatisfied with ‘gospel reductionism.’” (Philip E. Thompson, “A New Question in Baptist History: Seeking A Catholic Spirit among Early Baptists,” Pro Ecclesia 8/1 [Winter 1999]: 51).

“Gospel reductionism” has more recently allowed the ELCA to enter into full fellowship with churches whose doctrines are condemned by the Lutheran Confessions. 2His fifth chapter was dedicated to the topic of inerrancy, a term, ironically, which was not known by the seventeenth century Lutheran dogmaticians about whom he wrote.

3 David P. Scaer, “Sanctification in Lutheran Theology,” Concordia Theological Quarterly 49/2 and 3 (April/July 1985):194. 4Robert D. Preus, “Luther: Word, Doctrine, and Confession,” Lutheran Synod Quarterly 32/4 (December 1992): 3343. This series of essays was delivered on October 28-29, 1992, at Bethany Seminary, Mankato, Minnesota, three months after he was restored to his post. 5Jan Rohls, Reformed Confessions: Theology from Zurich to Barmen, trans. by John Hoffmeyer (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998), 30. 6(Saint Louis: Concordia, 1983). See especially pages 87-96.

The Splendour of the Three-in-One God by R. S. Clark 1 For example, semi-Pelagianism, whether in its Roman or Arminian form is a grave error, but it is not heresy, at least not in the same way as antitrinitarianism. It is true, however, that certain modern developments in Roman dogma (e.g., the alleged assumption of the Virgin Mary) threaten seriously the catholicity of their doctrine of God. 2Some other well-meant but errant illustrations: the egg, forms of gold, apple, the lover, beloved and love and the shamrock. On the dangers of such analogies, see John Calvin, Institutes, 1.13.18. L. Berkhof gives a more favorable view of some analogies. See idem, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1939), 90. 3This is true of Islam. Strictly speaking Allah is not personal.

Personal speech about him is mere convention. This is true of most other forms of unitarianism. 4See Peter Toon, Our Triune God: A Biblical Portrayal of the Trinity (Wheaton: Victor, 1996), 82-85, 90-92. See also Herman Bavinck, The Doctrine of God, trans. W. Hendriksen (Grand Rapids:

Eerdmans, 1955); and Hermann Witsius, The Apostles’ Creed, trans. D. Fraser, 2 vol. (Edinburgh, 1823; [reprint: den Dulk Foundation & P & R Publishing, 1993]), especially vol. 1. 5See Dennis E. Johnson, “Fire in God’s House: Imagery from Malachi 3 in Peter’s Theology of Suffering (1 Pet. 4:12-19),” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 29 (1986), 28594. See also M. G. Kline, Images of the Spirit (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1980); Bavinck, 255-56, 271-74. 6Bavinck, 264-66. 7See Gerald L. Bray, “The Patristic Dogma,” in Peter Toon and James D. Spiceland, eds., One God in Trinity (Westchester: Cornerstone Books), 42-61; idem, “Explaining Christianity to Pagans: The Second Century Apologists,” in Kevin J. Vanhoozer, ed., The Trinity in a Pluralistic Age: Theological Essays on Culture and Religion (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997). The Chalcedonian Definition was primarily a Christological statement, but it presupposed the creedal doctrine of the Trinity. 8The great Reformed theologian Francis Turretin spoke of the “adorable mystery” of the Trinity. See F. Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, 3 vol., trans. by G. M. Giger, ed. by J. T. Dennison, Jr. (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Publishing, 1992-1997), 1:3:23. 9See Calvin, Institutes, 1.13. Also see B. B. Warfield, “Calvin’s Doctrine of the Trinity,” The Princeton Theological Review 7 (1909), 553-652, reprint in Calvin and Calvinism (New York, 1931). The latter edition is used here. See also R. S. Clark, “The Catholic-Calvinist Trinitarianism of Caspar Olevian (153687),” Westminster Theological Journal (forthcoming). 10Turretin, Institutes, 1:3:23:13. 11On this point, see Clark, “The Catholic-Calvinist Trinitarianism”; Carl R. Trueman, The Claims of Truth: John Owen’s Trinitarian Theology (Carlisle, UK: Paternoster, 1998); idem and R. S. Clark, ed., Protestant Scholasticism: Essays in Reassessment (Carlisle, UK: Paternoster, 1999). 12On Holy Baptism, oration 40.41, cited in Calvin, Institutes, 1.13.17.

13 Witsius, ibid., 1:129, 135.

Why the Glory of God Is at Stake in the “Foreknowledge” Debate

by John Piper 1 Quoted in Parker T. Williamson, Standing Firm: Reclaiming Christian Faith in Times of Controversy (Springfield, PA: PLC Publications, 1996), 5. 2Roy Elseth, Did God Know? A Study of the Nature of God (St. Paul, MN: Calvary United Church, 1977), 55, 103. 3A Religious Encyclopedia, ed. by Philip Schaff, vol. 3 (New York: Christian Literature Co., 1888), 2209. 4Carl Bangs, Arminius, 352. 5Gregory Boyd, Letters from a Skeptic (Colorado Springs: Chariot Victor, 1994), 30 (emphasis added). See also Boyd, God at War: The Bible and Spiritual Conflict (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1997), 50, 304-305; and from the same publisher, the forthcoming Satan and the Problem of Evil. 6Jonathan Edwards, The Freedom of the Will, ed. by Paul Ramsey, in: The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale, 1957), 239-269. 7Ibid., Ramsey, introduction, 1-2 (emphasis added). 8Ibid., 252. 9Greg Boyd develops the significance of demonic free will as ultimate self-determination. “A self-determining, supremely evil being rules the world.” God at War, 54. 10Edwards, The “Miscellanies,” 208. 11Edwards, The Freedom of the Will, 252. 12Gregory Boyd, “The Bible and the Open View of the Future,” unpublished paper dated May 4, 1998, 13, quoted with permission. 13The Hebrew word here is netzach which is rendered here as “eminence” by the standard lexicon, Brown, Driver and Briggs. But the connotation most often is temporal, in the sense of “enduringness” and “everlastingness.” It may be very significant that this particular word is chosen to highlight the difference between man and God since the issue is one of God’s capacity to know the future and not regret his decisions in view of what he knows is coming. 14Edwards, The Freedom of the Will, 252.

Free Space interview with Nicholas P. Wolterstorff In modern versification, this likely refers to Psalm 102:12, 27.

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Review by David VanDrunen “Theosis” is the Eastern Orthodox view that salvation consists of a process of “deification,” by which Christians become united with the divine nature of Christ.

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number of years ago I came across an unsigned editorial in Israel My Glory magazine titled

To do that well we need to accomplish three things.

First, we need to recognize the “Salad Bar Sanctuaries.” It was about the return of the Yuppies to the churches, which it hunger these changes express and described as a good news/bad news situation. The good news is that many of the younger affirm it. If this spiritual hunger is from God, it may be the beginning of a true spiritual awakening. But even if it is only a search generation seem to be disillusioned with their barren born of desperation, we can affirm that too, for it will be an materialistic lifestyle and are returning to the churches. expression of the grim downhill path described in Romans 1.

The bad news is that they are seeking churches modeled Christians should understand where unbelievers are coming only after themselves and their personal interests. from and what they actually need more than anyone else, The editorial included quotes from an article that had especially secular therapists or false religious teachers. appeared in Newsweek magazine several months earlier.

Second, we must major in truth, meaning the truth of One representative of the new generation said, “Instead of the Bible. We must not fall into a spirit of accommodame fitting religion, I found a religion to fit me.” The writer tion in which we treat the human condition as due to observed of this new church-going element, “They don’t JAMES anything less than sin. If we fail at that point, the gospel convert—they choose.”

He called the customer the king, MONTGOMERY we proclaim will be a gospel without meaning, for it will adding perceptively, “The market place is now the most BOICE not be a solution to any real problem. But, at the same widely used system of evaluation by younger churchgoers,” time, we will have to speak the truths of the Bible in ways and that “by this standard, the most successful churches are Senior Minister, Tenth Presbyterian the new generation can understand. We will have to those that most resemble a suburban shopping mall.”

Church abandon clichés and challenge some thinking.

That is not an entirely new observation, of course.

Third, we will need to minister in a context of commuChurches have been bending over backward to become nity. Most people are deeply and desperately alone. Most spiritual shopping malls for some time. But we need to take of their felt needs as well as their real needs stem from this a hard look at that response. We can say that salad bar sad lack, and genuine Christian fellowship among those sanctuaries work—up to a point. Churches that allow peowho have found God in Jesus Christ is the answer to it. The ple to choose from things they might want rather than proclaiming what they actually need will grow, just like Apostle John must have seen a situation that was similar to churches that major in religious entertainment. Vaudeville, ours in his day because he expressed much of what I have talk shows, pop concerts, free therapy, and aerobic dancbeen writing about when he explained his approach, saying, ing, whether secular or religious, may bring in crowds. But “We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that these things do not satisfy genuine spiritual hunger. you may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is Therefore, although they attract large crowds, they also with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ” (1 John 1:3). detract people from finding what is truly worthwhile, just In teaching a generation that knows almost nothing as the secular entertainment industry does by its diversions. about the Bible, Jesus Christ, or the way of salvation, we may Some churches have chosen a different path. They have to begin with the milk of the Word before serving the have ignored the changes altogether and have gone on meat. But we will have to have meat on the menu. It will not doing religion as before. This is better than the first do to offer lettuce alone, still less a salad bar from which one response in my opinion, but the price of failing to change can choose only what looks good. It won’t help to skip the at all is often to forfeit perceived relevance and growth. main courses and serve nothing but sweet desserts either. ■ I propose another way: recognizing and affirming this new openness to religion but addressing it from the Dr. Boice is the president of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals perspective of authentic New Testament Christianity. and senior minister of Tenth Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia.

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