First, recall from my review of Pannenberg’s doctrine of the Trinity that the triune life consists in mutual submission. The father and the son reciprocally hand lordship to the other, they together hand lordship to the Spirit who upholds the two in love. Two things that I did not include in my review that will be relevant here are his doctrines of ‘revelation as history’ and his location of the Holy Spirit as the inbreaking future of God. Jenson also has much to say on a similar note and discussion of his doctrines will be made in parallel to Pannenberg’s.

First, Pannenberg says on this topic:

When we think of God’s self-revelation we have to think of it as mediated by his action, for that is always the content of biblical ideas of the Word of God, whether it be God’s action in creation, his historical action as it was intimated in the prophetic word, or the action in Jesus of Nazareth to which the primitive Christian kerygma made reference. (Systematic Theology vol. 1 p. 243)

Here he begins making a strong connection between the acts of God in history (economy) to the revelation of God’s being (immanence). He then clarifies that these historical acts – which can also be called promissory acts of God – are fulfilled or to be fulfilled by the eschatalogical Spirit of God and this becomes present in Christ: “The future of God is not merely disclosed in advance with the coming of Jesus; it is already an event, although without ceasing to be future.” (p. 247)

Jenson says something similar in his Systematic Theology vol 1: ”For, precisely, promises not only open a future to our vision but themselves enable that future; they contain and convey the future possibility they signify. And therefore the gospel must itself have history.” (Kindle Locations 252-254) He goes on to clarify: “the God to be interpreted in this work is the triune God. For the doctrine of Trinity is but a conceptually developed and sustained insistence that God himself is identified by and with the particular plotted sequence of events that make the narrative of Israel and her Christ.” (Kindle Locations 852-853)

While I have some criticisms of the two identification theses of Jenson here, I will leave that discussion for another post. For this context, the claims of Pannenberg are sufficient to remind us that God is the inbreaking future (as Spirit), but to stop here is to neglect the fact that this future is God insofar as it is fulfillment, which is to say that there was first promise (or Father as giver of the promise).

Here, I think we are prepared to supplement Haught. If God is the future that brings creatures to higher levels of awareness/consciousness, creation is too easily seen as determined (without Haught’s kenotic proposal, see previous post). But if we develop the doctrine of Trinity in similar fashion to Pannenberg and Jenson, we see that God is not only future but God is Past and is for us Present. Therefore, first and foremost, God does not submit himself to us that we could be free; instead, I would say, God as Father (Past/History/Giver of Promise) hands lordship to the One who mediates to us as Son (Present/Promise) who hands lordship together with the Father to the Spirit (Future/Fulfillment of the Promise). And this same Spirit continues by uniting the Giver and the Promise in love. If we understand God’s activity as such (or something like it) then we can see that for God as Spirit to overpower human freedom from the Future would also mean that God as Spirit overpowered God as Father and Son, the Giver and Bearer of that very freedom.

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Haught, John F. God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution. 2007. Kindle Edition.

Jenson, Robert W.  Systematic Theology: Volume 1: The Triune God. Kindle Edition.

Pannenberg, Wolfhart. Systematic Theology vol. 1. Eerdmans Publishing Company. Grand Rapids, Michigan. 1991

I have now read the first two volumes of Pannenberg’s Systematic Theology and have just begun the third. This post is largely a review of the first, as there he deals with his doctrine of God and of the Trinity. The second volume treats the doctrine of creation, anthropology, incarnation, and atonement, which I will undoubtedly give some thoughts on at some point.

Pannenberg argues that the Father is the ‘fount’ of deity, or the originator, only inasmuch as he hands lordship to the Son and Spirit and they hand lordship back to him. God’s relation as Father and as Deity is dependent upon the identities of Son and Spirit and their unity with him. This does well by not making deity a sort of ‘emergent property’ of the unity of the three, nor is deity a common quality that the three share. Deity is their nature – it is the fact of their Eternity and of their lordship. He explains the eternity of God in somewhat platonic terms. Eternity is that which transcends time and also encompasses it. Therefore, God comprehends time but is not reducible to temporal sequence. So, God is Eternal and the perichoresis of the trinity is comprised of their mutual submission to the divinity and lordship of the other – namely, the Father’s entrusting of his identity and lordship to the identity and lordship of the Son, the Son reciprocally returning lordship by entrusting his own identity and divinity to the Father. He explains:

As Jesus glorifies the deity of the Father by his sending and in his own relation to the Father, he himself, in corresponding to the claim of the Father, is so at one with the Father that God in eternity is Father only in relation to him. (p. 310)

The Spirit is first identified by the action of raising Jesus from the dead (that is not to say that that is the first action of the Spirit, merely the activity by which the doctrine of the Spirit as a divine hypostasis originates). The Spirit is the power  of God in the resurrection – the power of life. Therefore, “for Jesus himself, then, the work of the Spirit was to glorify the Father, as in John, where the Spirit glorifies the Son in his fellowship with the Father, and in this way glorifies the Father as well (6:14).” (p. 316) The Spirit is the unity of the mutual lordship between the Father and Son, and by this relationship the identity and lordship of the Son and Father become dependent also upon the Spirit.

Thus, the doctrine of the trinity is an expression of the “self-distinction and unity” of the internal relations in God. It is also a means of expressing the personal nature of God and of explicating God’s nature as ‘love’. This last point is the main place I would try to challenge Pannenberg’s theory. To explain God’s nature as Love, I need to explain Pannenberg’s conception of the Holy Spirit. For Pannenberg, the Holy Spirit is described as a Field of Force, drawing the metaphor from Michael Faraday’s mathematical developments. One of the activities of the Spirit as a field is that of the unity and power of the Father and Son. As the Spirit is the unity of the trinity, the Spirit’s activities are of love. More directly, the Spirit is the Spirit of Love. So, the Spirit’s nature is love; and inasmuch as the Spirit is the unity of God, God is Love.

This seems lacking to me. Traditionally the Spirit has been defined as love or the love of the Father and the Son, so in this sense he’s in the mainline of the tradition. Nonetheless, the affirmation of God as love is that God is love; ie that God’s essential nature is love, not that part of God’s nature is love or that love is a defining characteristic of one of the hypostases of God. Therefore, I think that he has reduced God’s nature as love too far. The Spirit is, rightly considered, a special manifestation of God’s nature as love but is not the primary locus of the divine love.

To present a constructive alternative, I would draw on the work of moral philosopher Harry Frankfurt. His basic argument in The Reasons of Love is this: to love something is to value it. To love someone is to value them and to value what they value. To love someone/something requires that we love ourselves; ie, that we value what we value (and that we value ourselves as someone capable of valuing). Thus, he claims that we cannot love others unless we love ourselves and vice-versa – we cannot love ourselves unless we love someone or something. With this argument, I would supplement Pannenberg by rewriting Barth’s classic trinitarian statement: God loves Himself. God loves Himself through Himself. God loves Himself. And in this sense, the Spirit is not the source or locus of God’s nature as love. God is, essentially, love.

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*Pannenberg, Wolfhart. Systematic Theology vol. 1. Eerdmans Publishing Company. Grand Rapids, Michigan. 1991

*Frankfurt, Harry G. The Reasons of Love. Princeton University Press. Princeton, NJ. 2005

I recently read a book by Mr. John F. Haught, titled God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution. It was a very interesting book about evolutionary theory, current debates between science and religion, and the authors own contribution to the ongoing dispute. His constructive contribution, I believe, was two-fold. First, he extricated the hidden metaphysical premises of some leading evolutionary naturalists (ie. Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennet). Second, he proposed his own explicit metaphysical framework and demonstrated how it is a more compatible and meaningful metaphysic for evolutionary theory.

1) On the naturalist’s metaphysics – which he refers to as materialism - Haught explains that they “profess to provide the ultimate explanation of living complexity and diversity. (p. 206)” And “for evolutionary materialism the ultimate explanation of all living phenomena, including human intelligence, is unintelligent matter and blind, impersonal natural processes. (p. 206)” This, Haught explains, is an essentially religious claim, ie the claim to a certain process or agency as having Ultimate explanatory power. So, for materialists such as Dawkins and Dennet, the most efficacious of all reality are the processes of determinism and that the past completely determines the future. Haught concludes,

Dawkins and Dennett provide evidence of doing so by their very claim that evolutionary biology rules out God’s existence. For if biology is able to rule out God’s existence, in principle it should be able to confirm God’s existence as well-that is, if God does exist. As Dawkins has explicitly written in The God Delusion, it is within the capacity of pure science-and he means especially Darwinian theory-to remove the idea of God and replace it with blind evolutionary mechanisms as the ultimate explanation of all living phenomena…. For evolutionary materialists (Group 2) such mixing of metaphysics with scientific method is perfectly acceptable as long as the worldview is materialistic rather than theistic. But by promoting their own peculiar alliance of science and philosophical belief they leave themselves with no methodological high ground to stand on… (p. 207)

2) His own metaphysical proposal is very intriguing. He presents in contrast a “metaphysics of the future”. The meaning of this is to locate the kind of position that God has in relation to the physical world and its processes, and thereby to determine the locus of divine action. Haught explains that from the future God draws life to higher levels of awareness/consciousness, and ultimately to the telos or eschaton – the final aim and fulfillment of God’s promise. This very nicely connects to the biblical view of God’s promissory relationship to Israel.

The main flaw that I see in this metaphysics is evident in the kind of acrobatics he has to go through to keep from creating a theistic determinism. By locating God and God’s activity in the future, all of creation is determined by the will of God – and without Haught’s acrobatics, there is no human free-will. To deal with this potential, Haught relies on the kenotic view of God, which means that God’s loving nature disposes God to a sort of self-emptying or self-limiting on behalf of that which is other than God. I’m not unfriendly to the kenotic view of God, but I do believe it creates questions in this sort of setting. If God is the meaning/conclusion of creation, by limiting God’s self is the consummation of creation also limited thereby? How does God experience this ‘self-limiting’; is it ‘painful’? Why should God really even need to empty and limit himself? (this last question is more on the doctrine of God in general; ie. is this kenosis an immanent or economic aspect of God’s identity?) I believe some of this questions are a result of a lack of development of the doctrine of trinity. I’m currently reading vol 2 of Pannenberg’s Systematic Theology and soon will be posting a review of his conception of the trinity as it was presented in vol 1. As Haught draws on the ‘theology of hope’ of Pannenberg, this will be a good opportunity to see how a doctrine of the trinity could strengthen Haught’s metaphysics.

On a final positive note, I brought up some questions in a former post that arise when theology deals with evolution, and believe that Haught’s thoughts on creation as God’s promise as well as sacrament couple well to deepen my own thought of God’s creative election throughout the development of the cosmos.

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*Haught, John F. God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution. 2007. Kindle Edition.

Jonathan, Billy Budd the Bookcase’s owner, cared deeply for the bookcase and was disheartened to see him so sad. So, he scoured the internet, trying to find a satisfying companion to fill the empty hole in Billy Budd’s heart. Then, Jonathan stumbled upon a website, one with great deals and – could it be!? – perhaps the perfect deal for his dear bookcase! Jonathan’s wallet was still very thin, he wasn’t sure that he could afford to buy it – but he must! Fortuitously, Jonathan received the perfect amount of money in birthday gifts! It was time! He ordered the perfect mate for poor Billy Budd; now they just had to wait.

Finally, It arrived!

Jonathan excitedly opened it and organized it so that it would be ready to present to his dear Billy Budd. He gave Billy Budd his dear love; their eyes met, Billy Budd’s and Church Dogmatics, and Jonathan was certain he saw sweet Billy Budd shed a tear. And now, they live together, happily ever after.

In the passage, the prodigal’s logic is I have betrayed my family, if I become like a slave I would be better off than I am now. By being a slave I could show my shame and regret to my father.

The older brother, on the other hand, never left. His frustration presents a thought more like this: I have slaved for my father all these years and have never had this kind of appreciation!

Striking to me in this simple retelling is the common word ‘slave’. Both sons assume to slave for or become a slave to their father. But at this point, where they seem to similar, they couldn’t be more different. The prodigal son confesses to deserving less even than slavery – yet hopes that by presenting himself as a slave to his father that he could be forgiven and reconciled. The older brother on the other hand, he feels that he’s always been a slave, dedicating his whole life to his father’s work. For him this fact entitles him, so he attempts to use his slavery to gain leverage and power against the father.

In Pastor Doug’s sermon, the older brother is like the life-long Christian who has become habituated (at times merely trained) to doing what ‘good Christians’ are supposed to do. The younger brother seems to get easy grace. No matter how we apply these images, we need the grace, the forgiveness, the reconciliation; and this because we deserve nothing more than indebted slavery.

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*image: The Return of the Prodigal Son by Rembrandt

1) We view time in terms of ‘change’. Time is a measurement of the rate, duration, experience of change. In the common view of God, God is perfect. In this view of perfection ‘change’ is an unwelcome element. Let’s break down the argument for this.

P1 (Premise 1): God is perfect

P2: Perfection means unable to be improved upon.

P3: God can not make negative changes (otherwise God would no longer be perfect).

Conclusion: God does not change as God cannot improve upon himself.

So, in the ‘time = change’ view, God is best not to be viewed as temporal; unfortunately this makes for a diestic or impersonal God.

2) This is a hastily chosen alternative, mostly to show how the different view changes our concept of God. Instead of equating time merely with change, let’s broaden the concept to relationship. Here, we would say that all relationships require temporality. Some such relationships would be categorized as ‘change’, so some of the meaning of ‘time’ is incorporated in this view, but hopefully without the negative effects on our concept of God. Let’s consider some of the most basic relationships and see if the temporal is a necessary component for understanding the relationship. Imagine two points in space, point A and point B. They are not identical. It might seem that their relationship is atemporal (not effected by time), but this might be a hasty claim. Consider that you want to define their relationship by measuring from A to B. What does it mean that they are x inches apart? x inches includes the notion that to travel x distance at v velocity will take t time. Even this simple one dimensional relationship requires time for meaning.

Here, we can understand God as having temporality without compromising the divine nature. Also, we have a view of God that does not require creation. God does not gain temporality by creating, for if God is triune – as Christian dogma claims – God is essentially relational.

The question remains, what is time? What conception makes the most sense for our talk of God?

What is the truth-value of our beliefs in God? How do we confirm or decide them? What is the foundation of these beliefs? Is there a foundation for them?

These are the questions that theologians often have to ask, and in this time period the answer determines the credibility of your system – or it at least locates your thinking within a certain “school”. Let’s consider them briefly.

According to Lindbeck (I use his for simplicity, not necessarily because his scheme is the best) there are three main approaches: cognitive-propositional, experiential-expressivist,  and his proposal cultural-linguistic. Let’s translate. The first, cognitive-propositional, says that the claims of religion are primarily informative. In Church, worship, the Bible, Sunday School, and higher education people are taught ‘truths’ about God, ie the nature of God’s existence, the works and attributes of God, human nature, etc. Information such as this, it is claimed, is the essence of religion. What is the ‘foundation’ or this knowledge? Most ‘pure’ proponents of this view would say either Scripture (often, though not always, viewed as inerrant/literal) or reason/philosophy/natural theology. The problem in our time is the authority of Scripture is highly contested (for a number of reasons) especially in the inerrancy/literalist sense, and reason/philosophy/natural theology seems to create an anthropomorphic God.

The second, experiential-expressivist, says that religious experiences are the ‘foundation’ or common element to all claims about God. We first experience the need for God or the intimacy of God and then humans create religions to share those experiences. Here, all religions should share core experiences (which has proven difficult to substantiate) but don’t necessarily have the same value. The truth-claims of religion however become very hard to maintain. Private religion becomes very easy – and is really the slippery slope of this emphasis.

The third, Lindbeck’s own cultural-linguistic, says that religion is the ‘grammar’ or ‘rules for living’ within a certain cultural/religious community. The truth-claims have something to do with the Bible, but the interpretation largely lies with the “interpretive-community” and their living out truthfully/coherently the moral/spiritual/religious claims and traditions presented in the Bible.

The positions all tend to be a bit more nuanced than this, and no one really represents any of these positions in a ‘pure’ sense. But analyzing these concepts can get the ball rolling and the wheels turning about what religious truth is. So, I ask, What is true about God and religion? Do we learn and teach information to become Christians? Do we have religious experiences that identify us with a certain religious group? or Do we find ourselves in a community that claims such are the rules for life?

What do you think?

Statements of belief traditionally begin with “I” (as in “I believe”). This should be considered more a convention than a foundation. There is not cause to begin with the self as if the self is the center or foundation of knowledge and truth. One begins with “I” for a number of reasons that are less than epistemological. The “I” signifies that belief is a speech-act of which I am the embodiment. So, we’ve hinted at the concept “believe”. To say “I believe” is to do something as much as it is to say something. For this reason, little more can be said about belief without the object of belief. Belief designates the form of life and cognitive functions belong to the object. In this sense, one believes from within a context and tradition and into a reality and lifestyle.

The context and tradition within which I locate myself and my believing is the Wesleyan Christian tradition. This tradition places emphasis on four “authorities”: Scripture, Tradition, Experience, Reason. I want to briefly consider the relationship of these “authorities”. Scripture, Christians generally maintain, is the original authority. Historically, via historical-critical method, we understand that there would be no “Scripture” without “tradition”. Already then, we recognize that Scripture and Tradition are intimate allies in authority. In my understanding of the function of Scripture as authority, Scripture could perhaps be characterized as a family of language-games.

Excursus: “Language-games”, in the Wittgensteinian sense, are self-sufficient language systems which have rules for use (grammar), practical aims (telos/teloi), and forms of life (narratives). This, Scripture as a family of language-games, means that Scripture has arisen out of the interaction of God and Israel/Church. The Scriptures have the function of identifying the divine and human interlocutors and establishing the grammar, telos, and forms of life of these interactions.

Because God is identified by and in the Scripture, we see that tradition is not the only contributor to the canon of Scripture; God is an active agent. In light of this, experiences of God should continue among the post-biblical community: we who are formed by the grammar of the Scripture also experience God in those terms. Thus, Experience is an “authority”. Reason, on the other hand, is somewhat a misfit because it cannot be easily located as an agent of authority, but we can recognize that the conclusions of tradition, experience, and Scripture should be confronted if they prove unreasonable or irrational. Consequently, Reason does function authoritatively in the life of the Church and the Christian. So, I believe from within the Wesleyan Christian tradition and into God.

If Scripture presents the grammar and forms of life inherent in the language-game that develops between God and man, then the form of belief is not merely concerned with information (about God and man) but with forms of life and faithfulness to the reality of God. Therefore, I believe in God. This statement of belief requires faithfulness for it to be truthful (thus, the believer’s life and world should be shaped by the God witnessed to in Scripture). So, I believe in one God. The tradition has interpreted from Scripture that the affirmation of the one God (and the experience of interaction with God) includes the three personae of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In Karl Barth’s words: “God reveals Himself. He reveals Himself through Himself. He reveals Himself.” (Barth, Church Dogmatics, I.1) In my supplementary words, this says not only that man finds his existence in God (Father/Creator) and his future in God (Spirit), but that we can live our present life with God through Christ.

Therefore, I believe in one God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Future posts could be considered “experiments” in this creedal statement.

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* Picture found here.

MAKING  A STATEMENT: A modern rendering of a Latin version of the Nicene Creed. Copyright James Matthew Farrow (1995)

I hope that some of my old readers will forgive my absence and welcome my attempt at return. And I hope that this can open opportunities for new eyes and ears to engage my thoughts so that I can be stretched and challenged.

A new post should come shortly!

-jonathan

This comes into play for evolution because the theory centers on themes of competition, death, destruction, survival of the fittest, & violence. If you follow the link on ‘violence,’ you’ll get a small glimpse of why I think these themes are troublesome for Christian theology and ethics.

So, I ask, is violence immoral for Christians? If so, (which I will rest on as a premise based on the arguments I have laid out in those former posts – if anyone disagrees, I welcome that critique; nonetheless, for the purpose of this post I will continue with that premise) is not God also accountable to the same degree of morality as we humans are accountable to? (in other words, if it is immoral for humans to be violent, is it not also immoral for God to be violent/create a system of violence?) Is evolution rightfully categorized as a theory resting on ‘violence’ in a moral sense? If there was not moral accountability for those creatures prior to the homosapien creature, then how did humans attain moral/ethical/spiritual capacities?

I know this sounds like twenty questions, but I believe they are all tied into one issue – theodicy.

My theory or attempt to approach this dilemma is built on the concept of election. In this use of the term ‘election’ I’m not permitting subservient concepts of ‘foreknowledge’ and ‘predestination’. Rather, I intend the definition which articulates God interacting within situations to give all or parts of creation the capacity to move beyond the deterministic course of events. One very clear and generally accepted instance of ‘election’ in the Scriptures is when God chose (or elected) Abram (whom he renamed ‘Abraham’ upon election) to be the father of the elected people of God (Israel). There is no explicit reason to believe or presume that God had chosen this man ‘Abram’ since the moment of creation or primordially. Perhaps God was disposed to choose, but that self-determination of God does not necessitate the individual was also predestined.

So, as Abram became the one whom God chose to fulfill the role of the father of God’s people, I contend that the evolved sentient creature dubbed the ‘human’ creature became the species that God elected to fulfill the role of God’s ‘people’.

We can carry some themes across from the situation of the Israelites to the more general situation of elected humanity. One, the nation of Israel was not chosen over/above all other nations as ‘superior’, ‘sovereign’, or generally ‘better’. Rather, they were chosen to be a ‘priestly nation’. One that was to minister to all nations on behalf of God (therefore, rather than superior and sovereign, Israel was to be submissive and servant-like).

Therefore, I contend the same for humanity – we were elected, not over/above all of creation to abuse, dominate, and domineer it, but to serve it as God’s sentient, self-aware, and morally capable ministers for the sake of all creation.

That’s all for this post, though I haven’t responded to all my question – consequently, I intend to work on a follow-up post.