(American
Academy of Religion, November 2006)
The Torrances and the Logic of the
Reformation
Victor
A. Shepherd
When
I was asked to speak at the 2006 meeting of the Thomas F. Torrance
Theological Fellowship, I indicated that I would speak on “The
Torrances and the Logic of the Reformation.”
To this I planned to speak on David Torrance and his appreciation
of the Israel, both biblical and contemporary, with respect to God’s
covenant faithfulness, comparing his appreciation of Israel to that of
the Reformers, especially Calvin; on James B. Torrance and seeming
deficits in his theology with respect to faith, contrasting his
under-attention here to the biblically-delineated understanding of faith
found in the Reformers; on Thomas F. Torrance, with respect to extending
to a consideration of the homoousion of the Spirit the theological
trenchancy that Torrance displayed concerning the homoousion of the Son.
I began with TFT, only to find that with
him alone I had exceeded the time-limit assigned me by the Theological
Fellowship. For this reason
I shall not speak on David or James B., but rather restrict myself to TF.
----------------------------------------------------
Thomas
Torrance has become notorious for his insistence on the homoousion
as essential to any sound doctrine of the Trinity, arguing that the homoousion
safeguards the Incarnation against Arianism and any of the ingredients
of Arianism (e.g., Docetism and Ebionitism), even as it safeguards the
Trinity against any form of sabellianism or modalism, and the doctrine
of God against any form of unitarianism or polytheism.
While TFT’s insistence can be found somewhere, however
fleetingly addressed or alluded to, in virtually everything he has
published (not least his sermons), his major discussions of the homoousion
appear in three overlapping books on the Trinity; namely, The
Trinitarian Faith (1988), Trinitarian
Perspectives (1994), and The
Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons (1996).
Unrelentingly TFT has shown that without
the homoousion of the Father
and the Son the gospel is forfeited.
While the difference between homoousion
and homoiousion is iota
subscript, the smallest letter of the Greek alphabet, this difference, I
tell my students, is precisely the difference between asking someone to
run your business and asking her to ruin it; namely, the smallest letter
of the English alphabet, with catastrophic outcomes in the balance.
The homoousion estops
any suggestion that the being of the Son is like the being of the
Father, however elevated the degree of likeness.
As TFT has made plain over and over, it matters not whether the
being of Father and that of the Son are a lot like or only a little bit
like. No degree of
similarity can substitute for identity.
Absent identity of being of the Father and the Son, the gospel
disappears, leaving behind no more than religious mythology (the
“gospel”, so-called, is now no more than tales humans spin in order
to try to make sense of their existence) or no more than a human
construct (here we could think of the constructs pertaining to the
never-ending “quest for the historical Jesus”) that leaves us doing
what the apostles never urge us to do; namely, infer a deity lying
behind Jesus as the latter is reduced to no more than a “window” by
which we may apprehend the deity that he himself is not.
In other words, while all docetic Christologies leave us
mythologizing in the pursuit of truth, all ebionite Christologies leave
us deducing truth, when the gospel announces itself as truth, reality,
since it is God’s incursion, self-bestowal, self-communication, and
self-interpretation. Therein
the gospel eclipses all mythological speculation and all inferential
processes. (Incidentally,
with respect to the lattermost, the process whereby the nature of God
is inferred from a Son who isn’t quite God, present-day Ebionites –
e.g., the questers of the historical Jesus seem not to understand that the characteristic of the biblical God, the Holy One of Israel, is
that he speaks.
When he speaks, those addressed know that they have been
addressed by an “other”, by the
Other; they know what has
been spoken and therein know as well who
has spoken. According to the
logic of scripture, any deity who is inferred or deduced or concluded is
ipso facto an idol.
In other words, the quest for the historical Jesus appears to be
able to yield no more than an idol.)
All that TFT has brought forward concerning
the homoousion of the Father
and the Son is pregnant concerning the homoousion of the Son and the Spirit.
TFT has admitted this in many places, not least in his most
recent work, The Christian
Doctrine of God. Here,
for instance, he has written, “…we must think of our being in the Spirit in the incarnate economy of God’s saving acts in
Jesus Christ as deriving from and grounded objectively in the homoousial
Communion of the eternal Spirit and the eternal Son in the Holy
Trinity.” (149) Plainly
the homoousion of the Spirit is as crucial as that of the Son in any
Christian understanding of God and the participation in God’s own life
that constitutes the salvation of God’s people.
In the same way TFT has recognized the manner in which the homoousion
of the Spirit protects God’s infinite transcendence against a human
encroachment wherein it is assumed that because such terms as
“father” or “generate” are used of God, humans can co-opt God or
domesticate God or even comprehend God.
In this vein TFT writes, “Let us recall further here the fact
that classical Christian theology placed the homoousion
of the Spirit alongside the homoousion
of the incarnate Son. While
the homoousion of the Son
expresses the truth that what God is in Christ Jesus he is antecedently
and eternally in himself, the bracketing of it with the homoousion
of the Spirit has the effect of excising from our thought any
projection into God of the creaturely, corporeal or sexist ingredients
in the terms ‘father’, ‘son’, ‘offspring’ or
‘generation’ into God. (158) Educing
yet another implication of the homoousion
of the Spirit, TFT
writes, “If the ontological bond between the historical Jesus Christ
and God the Father is cut, then the substance falls out of the Gospel,
but if the ontological bond between the Holy Spirit and incarnate Son of
the Father is cut, so that there is a discrepancy between the economic
Trinity and the ontological
Trinity, or between the saving activity of the love of God in history
and the transcendent activity of God in eternity, then we human beings
are left without hope and can have no part or lot in God’s saving activity in Jesus Christ.” (197)
While TFT and others have given no little attention to homoousion
with respect to the Son, little work appears to have been done with
respect to homoousion of the
Spirit. The result is that
while the deity of the Son has been highlighted in such a way as to
forestall Christological speculation, projection and non-biblical
deduction, neglect of the deity of the Spirit has allowed a non-Christologically
normed, non-Christologically formed, non-Christologically informed
notion of the Spirit to arise. It
should be no surprise, then, that the Spirit is invoked to legitimize
pantheism, panentheism, the salvific significance of “the world’s
great religions” (even as greatness seems to be defined by no more
than the number of adherents), the salvific significance of
religiosity-in-general (as much of the current preoccupation with
“spirituality” suggests), or the salvific significance of irreligion
(even though such thinkers as Calvin would deny that humans can ever be
irreligious, the fallen human heart and mind remaining a ceaseless
factory of idolatry).
The question, then, “Do the Son and the Spirit possess the same
nature or merely similar natures?” is no less urgent than the question
concerning the Son and the Father. TFT has alluded to this briefly in
several places of The Doctrine of God (e.g., pp. 61, 72, 148.) I wish now to propose
several considerations concerning the homoousion
of Son and Spirit that parallel, where possible, the points that TFT has
made passim concerning the
cruciality of the homoousion
of Son and Father.
[1]
If Son and Spirit are only ontically similar, then there is no
protection against that rationalism which appears to be the Achilles
heel of the Reformed tradition. The
Christo-logic of the Reformation (which Christo-logic, we should note,
always entailed a Pneumato-logic) maintained that as Jesus Christ surges
over people in the power of the Spirit, this one action of God forges
within them the capacity to understand God’s incursion, the categories
by which to understand it, and the vocabulary with which to speak of it.
Reformation understanding of the nature of God’s action upon
people rendered unnecessary, even counterproductive, any rationalist
precursor that qualified the beneficiaries of God’s salvific action to
understand it and speak of it. Herein
the classic Sixteenth Century Reformers differed from what Calvin called
the “schoolmen” and their rationalist apparatus.
Quickly, however, the logic of the Reformation gave way to the
logic of Protestant Scholasticism. Aristotelianism
returned and occupied the place in Reformed theology that it had
occupied in late Mediaeaval scholasticism.
We need only recall the aftermath of Calvin wherein
post-Calvinism, Arminianism, and Roman Catholic thought appeared
incommensurable on the surface while more profoundly all were aspects of
an Aristotelian commonality. While
Arminius, for instance, was execrated by post-Calvin Calvinists, few of
the latter appeared to understand that the most frequently quoted
thinker in Arminius remains Thomas Aquinas, whose Aristotelianism is
never in doubt. Post-Calvin
scholasticism recrudesced in several manifestations: Roman Catholic and
predestinarian (de Baie and Banez), Roman Catholic and non-predestinarian
(Suarez and Molina), Protestant and predestinarian (Beza, Gomarus and
Junius), Protestant and non-predestinarian (Arminius, Episcopus and
Limborch). Regardless of
apparent divergences or even apparent theological incommensurables, all
of the aforementioned presupposed an Aristotelian substratum in their
theology.
As the classic Sixteenth Century Reformers
were aware, however, the logic of the substratum alters the logic of the
stratum. Despite the
theological differences between Arminius and his Calvinist neighbours
(e.g., the doctrine of election and the reading of Romans 7), they were
one in the foundation of their thought.
Rationalism remains the “default”
position of the Reformed tradition (although not of the Reformed
tradition only). Rationalism
in some form arises when the homoousion
of the Spirit is overlooked. While
Jesus Christ is acknowledged to be the Son Incarnate without
qualification with the result that the nature of the Father isn’t
inferred or deduced from scripture’s portrait of the Son, now to be
inferred is the effectual presence
of this deity. Now effectual
presence is what’s to be humanly supplied.
Now a deity lying behind Jesus of Nazareth isn’t concluded;
rather, an activity of a spirit lying behind Jesus is concluded, which
activity isn’t one with the activity of the Son, and therefore which
spirit is less than holy. At
this point speculation or mythologizing pertains not to the Son (as
happened in the Arian controversy) but instead pertains to the Spirit.
Here there is an “orthodox” acknowledgement of the Son
(acknowledgement but not understanding, since a proper understanding of
the Son entails the homoousion of the Spirit) that is accompanied by a human projection
of the Spirit’s work. Not
infrequently one finds in the church an uncompromised acknowledgement of
the Son – without qualification or hesitation – even as this
acknowledgement is now co-opted for a purpose that diverges from the
purpose of scripture. In
this situation the Son Incarnate is conscripted to support aspects of
liberation theology or feminist theology (or patriarchal theology) or
ecological theology or religious pluralism or psycho-spiritual theses
that fall short of scripture’s portrayal of the Spirit.
At this point the Spirit is the principle
whereby the Incarnate Son is deemed to energize or empower an agenda of
transformation where that agenda of transformation isn’t entirely
congruent with scripture’s depiction of the definitive, eschatological
transformation wrought by the Spirit as the effectual presence of God.
A formally correct acknowledgement of the homoousion
of the Son now fuels social or sexual or religious programmes that bear
some relation to that “new heavens and a new earth in which
righteousness dwells (2nd Peter 3:13) – that is, the
acknowledgement of Jesus Christ subserves the correction of what the
church rightly pronounces unrighteous – even as, absent the homoousion
of the Spirit, what Wesley called “the general tenor” or scripture
is truncated. Often church
members who resist all such agendas are disdained, subtly or frontally,
as lacking theological sophistication when in fact (as TFT never tired
of saying, thanks to his reading of Michael Polanyi, and not least the
latter’s Personal Knowledge)
these “simple” church members know more, vastly more, than they can
articulate. In other words,
without being able to state it precisely or defend it cogently, in fact
that they have “scented” a newer unrighteous that is proffered as
the proper redress of what is widely admitted to be an older
unrighteousness or injustice. A
properly articulated homoousion
of the Spirit, needless to say, would strengthen immeasurably those who
possess what TFT called a theological “instinct”, however little
they are able to articulate it at present.
Where the homoousion
of the Spirit isn’t operative, effectiveness in the church’s
teaching, preaching, and evangelism are sought elsewhere; not only
sought, but found to the detriment of church and world alike.
Frequently my students in Introductory Systematic Theology,
rightly zealous for the gospel, protest, “But shouldn’t the church
be concerned with converting people, concerned with seeing them
converted?” These
questions, however, are not identical.
Witness, proclamation, evangelism – this is always the
church’s business. Throughout
the book of Acts no one comes to faith apart from the mission and
ministry of the Christian community.
And in Acts no one comes to faith apart from the ministry of the
Holy Spirit, that activity of God whereby he alone renders the
church’s ministry saintly effective just because he alone can.
Throughout its history the church has shown
itself to lack the patience of God as well as an agenda-free grasp of
the purpose of God, with the result that the church overreaches itself
and attempts to do God’s work in the face of God’s unendurable
slowness, even negligence. The
result, as the world is aware where frequently the church isn’t aware,
is that the church persecutes. Whenever
the church upholds the homoousion of
the Son but fails to uphold the homoousion
of the Spirit, the church turns its unexceptionable recognition of the
Son into a weapon that it wields against people whose recalcitrance has
imperilled them spiritually, such coercion being able to move them along
to a saving confession. The
coercion can be physical, social or psychological; but it remains
coercion, and it arises through a defective understanding of the
relation of the Spirit to the Son, as the vulnerability of the crucified
Son is contradicted by the non-vulnerability of a coercive church.
Tragically, pathetically, in the name of
its Lord the church advertises its unbelief in its Lord, for plainly its
resorting to coercion announces that it doesn’t trust God to do what
God insists God alone can do; namely, quicken faith in the sin-ravaged
heart by means of the Holy Spirit. Not
to put too fine an edge on it, non-recognition of the homoousion
of the Spirit issues in a seeming Christological zeal that merely
publicizes the church’s atheism. To
be sure, in his dispute with Erasmus on the bondage of the will Luther
said that apart from Jesus [i.e., apart from the cross] God is
indistinguishable from the devil. Luther
was aware, without mentioning it in this one instance, that it is only
as the Spirit renders us beneficiaries of the cross, only as the Spirit
quickens faith in the crucified, do we know
the God who is forever distinguished from the devil.
While much has been said about Luther’s theologia
crucis and his disavowal of theolgia
gloriae, little attention has been paid to the cruciality of the
identity of the crucified and the Spirit.
Briefly, a theology of glory occurs whenever it is thought that
God can be derived from metaphysical speculation, whenever it is thought
that the truth and nature of God can be read off nature or read off the
face of history, and whenever the church becomes triumphalistic.
Concerning the church’s confusion between its triumphalism and the
true triumph of the crucified (triumphant in that he is raised from the
dead, as the church correctly notes, but is raised wounded, suffering
still, vulnerable yet in the suffering of the world, as the church too
often fails to note) enough has already been said.
Concerning the first point of Luther’s theologia
crucis, the derivation of God from metaphysical speculation, Luther,
eschewing all forms of rationalism (his vehement “faith seizes reason
by the throat and strangles the brute” must be kept in mind), was
always aware that only that Spirit whose activity is the action of God,
and therefore the action of God the Son according to Luther’s
conviction, could bring humans to a knowledge of God by means of the
crucified. Beneficiaries now
of the mercy of the crucified God, they can recognize assorted
theologies of glory for what they are.
Apart from Spirit-wrought living faith in the crucified God,
however, biblically orthodox theology remains an ideational construct
and therein akin to philosophical speculation, from which one must infer
or deduce God. The
difference in content between biblically orthodox theology and
philosophical speculation doesn’t of itself protect the former from an
ideational construct whose lack of Holy Spirit renders its “miss” as
good as a mile.
In a somewhat “softer” form of
rationalism there isn’t a conclusion or inference to be drawn entirely
naturalistically; instead the Spirit is said to facilitate illumination.
The Spirit operates at the level of mind, but at the level of
mind only without reference to the heart.
Here the truth of God can be known without the knower herself
being brought into the orbit of the “new creation”, without the
knower herself being rendered a new creature within the new creation.
The Spirit is little more than the influence of a Deistic deity
who provides the conditions for a humanly engendered knowledge of God;
i.e., there is an outer structure of “grace” (admittedly a soft,
dilute “grace” that is less than scripture’s understanding of
grace as the living God’s uncompromisable faithfulness to his
covenant). The outer
structure of “grace” is complemented by an inner content of human
possibility and human achievement. The
Spirit, then, is the divinely-supplied condition by which human
achievement occurs. This
notion, of course, is epistemic semi-Pelagianism.
Where such Spirit-facilitated illuminationism is said to operate,
“knowing” is closer to the outlook of the Enlightenment than to that
of scripture. In scripture,
to know God is to participate in the reality of God and therein,
thereby, be rendered forever different.
Our knowledge of God is the precisely the difference
our engagement with this “Other” has made to us when we meet this
“Other” as Person.
Only as the Spirit is admitted to be God is the activity of the
Spirit that act of God whereby God renders us participants in God’s
own life. Only as the Spirit is God (i.e., homoousially identical with
Father and Son) is the activity of the Spirit that act of God whereby
the God who knows himself includes us in his self-knowing.
[2]
In what follows I aim at tracing item-by-item with respect to the homoousion
of the Spirit some of the points that TFT has emphasized with respect to
the homoousion of the Son
[a]
Whatever we say of the Son we can say of the Spirit except “Son”.
To deny this is to deny the deity of the Spirit, and therefore to
deny the eternal Tri-unity of God. To
deny the eternal Tri-unity of God is to deny the immanent or ontological
Trinity. The result is that
there remains only an economic Trinity, an economic Trinity ungrounded
in an immanent Trinity. The
problems that arise here are legion.
Whereas the non-identity of being between Father and Son means
that we can no longer be certain that the “face” of God that we know
by revelation is one with the heart of God in God’s innermost,
intra-triune life, the parallel non-identity of being between Son and
Spirit means that the “face” of God that we seen in the Son might
not be one with the act of God whereby the Spirit supposedly brings us
to Christ and Christ to us. What,
then, is the work of the Spirit? Where
might the Spirit be taking us? To
what end? And how shall we
be able to “discern” or test the spirits if the nature or being of
the Holy Spirit is that which is most in question?
Plainly the denial of the homoousion
of the Spirit is no less catastrophic than the denial of the homoousion
of the Son. (Non-congruence
between economic and immanent Trinities for
any reason, i.e., whether on account of the Son or the Spirit, lands
theology in all the problems Paul Molnar has discussed in his
Divine Freedom and the
Doctrine of the Trinity and David Lauber in his Descent
into Hell.)
[b]
TFT earlier pointed out that any detraction from the Son detracts from
the Father; i.e., whatever the Father as giver might give, he doesn’t
give himself, with the result that giver and gift aren’t identical.
The consequence of this has to be that while God gives, he
withholds himself. The
apostle’s cry “He didn’t spare his own Son” has the force of
“God didn’t spare himself” – and this is now denied.
In the same way detraction from the Spirit
detracts from the Son since the gift (the Son) is now willed by the
Father yet fails to accomplish the purpose for which the Father gives it
even as the Son longs to be given effectually.
(See John 12:27: “Now is my soul troubled.
And what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’?
No, for this purpose I have come to this hour.”
Here the Father grants the Son’s profounder request
[profounder, that is, than “If it be possible….”].)
In short, where the homoousion
of the Son is upheld but that of the Spirit is denied, giver and
gift are one but they remain ineffectual.
God can be said to be alive, even be said to merciful (he spares
not his own Son) but ultimately ineffectual in that his Word “goes
forth from [his] mouth” but in fact does “return to me empty”,
since it did not “accomplish that which I purpose, and prosper in the
thing for which I sent it.” (Isaiah 55:11)
Only as the disobedient sinner is brought
to faith by God the Spirit, and rendered a new creature is the
purpose of Incarnation and Crucifixion accomplished.
[3]
Just as the Father isn’t Father in that he is the Father of believers
(therein requiring something creaturely in order to be who he is) but
rather is Father in that he is the Father of the Son and is therefore
eternally, intrinsically Father, so the homoousion of the Spirit means that God is eternally, intrinsically
the ceaseless activity, the
“doing”, of the Father loving the Son and the Son reciprocating that
love in the bond of the Spirit. In
other words, the homoousion of
the Spirit is essential if love as “doing”, act (rather than mere
attitude) is to remain operative. This
truth is freighted concerning Christian discipleship. For instance,
Leviticus 19:2 can be defended as the “root” commandment of
scripture (in contrast to the “great” commandment): “You shall be
holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.”
One the one hand, God’s holiness is his unique Godness and
therefore he alone is holy. On
the other hand, God’s people are commanded to be holy, the “root”
commandment of scripture gathering up all others.
Since God is love eternally in the sense of ceaseless activity or
“doing”, God’s people are holy inasmuch as the “root”
commandment is seen to be related to the “great” commandment”: we
are to love the Lord our God, together with our neighbour. We love God
and neighbour alike, however, not through adopting an attitude or
assuming a posture; we love God and neighbour by being “doers of the
Word” (James
1:22
). We are not to “love in
word or speech but in deed and in truth.” (1st John 3:18)
What’s real is not merely to be apprehended; what’s real
(ultimately God and his claim upon us and our concrete obedience in the
sphere of his love and in fellowship with him) is to be done.
(John 3:21) Love as
ceaseless activity expressing one’s nature characterizes God’s
people inasmuch as it first characterizes God himself.
[4]
The homoousion of the Spirit
is a bulwark against all forms of unitarianism.
Absent the Spirit, a unitarianism of the Father arises wherein
the God who is infinitely
transcendent is one-sidedly
“high and lifted up” so as to be inaccessible – and unknowable,
since if God were only
infinitely transcendent, humans couldn’t even know this much.
Absent the Spirit, a unitarianism of the Son arises wherein Jesus
is rendered our “chum”, lending himself to all our agendas, never
challenging us or correcting us. Absent
the homoousion of the Spirit,
a unitarianism of the Spirit arises wherein God is indistinguishable
from a subjectivism that has surrendered all appreciation of truth and
has elevated religious “inwardness” uncritically.
The homoousion of the
Spirit means that the Spirit is Holy
Spirit only in conjunction with the Father and the Son.
A profounder grasp of this point would do much to spare the
church charismatic distortions that arise from a unitarianism of the
Spirit, even as the charismatic dimension of the church has highlighted
the frigid unitarianism of the Father and the naturalistic unitarianism
of the Son.
Similarly the homoousion
of the Spirit is a bulwark against polytheism, for the Spirit
isn’t a second deity or a different sort of deity or a subordinate
deity. The Holy Spirit is simply God.
And of course the homoousion
of the Spirit is a bulwark against dependency on the church.
Earlier it was noted that the Father needs nothing creaturely in
order to be Father. In the
same way the Spirit, whose activity is related much more closely to the
church than to the creation, needs nothing ecclesial in order to be
Spirit. (This point is to be
noted with respect to those theologies that suggest the Spirit to be
tied to the church or to inhere the church or to be anything other than
lord of the church.)
[5]
In his discussion of the homoousion
of Father and Son TFT has highlighted its gospel-significance by asking
“What is implied if Father and Son are not
of one being?” The same
question must be put concerning the homoousion
of Son and Spirit: What is implied if this latter truth ceases to remain
embedded in the church’s consciousness?
[a]
God is utterly unknowable. Arius
had said that no creature (e.g., the Son) can mediate knowledge of God.
If the Spirit isn’t God, without qualification, then God
isn’t known in the biblical sense of “know”, where knowledge
isn’t characteristically the acquisition of information by means of
mastery but rather is transformation through engagement with an
“other” who is person, and all of this by means of surrender.
If the Spirit isn’t God, our knowledge of God is no more than a
matter of “reading off” God from the face of Jesus, not necessarily
“advancing” to a God behind a Jesus who is no more than a window to
him but nonetheless confusing everyday knowledge as the accumulation of
information with that biblical “knowing” which is transmutation.
Human knowledge of God, it must be remembered, is precisely the
difference, the transformation, arising in the knower through her
self-abandonment to the Person of God.
Where the homoousion of
the Spirit is neglected, knowledge of God (so-called) is a one-sided
cerebralism or “informationism” where orthodox truths (abstractions
by definition) are assimilated even as the heart remains unaltered by
the concreteness of that Truth which is reality.
It can reasonably be proffered that an
operative denial of the homoousion of the Spirit underlies evangelicalism’s preoccupation
with apologetics. Few
Christians would object to the heuristic apologetics that helps doubters
past those matters that appear to impede people from embracing the
gospel (e.g., naturalistic, reductionist arguments against faith, which
arguments can readily be exposed as lacking cogency).
Entirely different is the apologetics that establishes, and
maintains there needs to be established, the conditions for the
possibility of God, then for the possibility of incarnation (for
instance), then for the possibility of faith, the actuality of faith,
and finally for the assurance of faith.
In its commitment to apologetics has much contemporary
evangelicalism tacitly denied the homoousion
of the Spirit, assuming that philosophical demonstration can do what
the Spirit ought to do but seemingly fails to do?
In the same vein, does the preoccupation with apologetics deny
that the integrity (albeit not the structure) of reason is compromised
in the Fall? All of this is
undercut by the efficacy of that Spirit who is God; specifically God
working to bring the human putative knower into the sphere of God’s
self-knowing. None of this
can be accused of countenancing faith as no more than an exercise in
irrationality. Faith reasons
as surely as faith trusts. It
is, however, to admit that while the structure of reasoning survives the
Fall, the integrity of reasoning concerning God and humankind’s
relationship to God is compromised by the Fall.
Such compromised integrity can be restored only by means of
grace, in faith. In other
words, grace/faith restores reason to reason’s integrity.
(Hans Urs von Balthasar’s articulation here is a salutary
reminder:
"…the word of God is not of this
world and hence can never be discovered in the categories
and accepted patterns of human reason."(Prayer
p. 61)
"I was appointed by God from all eternity to be the
recipient of this…eternal
word of love, a word, which, pure grace
though it be, is…more rational than
my
reason, with the result that this act of obedience in faith is in truth
the
most reasonable of acts." (p.
62)
[b]
TFT has pointed out that absent the homoousion
of the Son it can’t be held that there is oneness between what the
gospel presents as the revelation of God and God himself.
Absent the homoousion of
the Spirit it can’t be held that there is oneness between what the
gospel presents as the revelation of God and that appropriation without
which “revelation” as such hasn’t occurred, since revelation is
revelation only if there is a human participant.
Absent the homoousion of the Spirit, “revelation” would be no more than
rationalistic ideation or non-rationalistic emotion stimulated by human
proximity to a depiction of the Son, however orthodox.
In other words, apart from the homoousion
of the Spirit the apostolic portrayal of Jesus Christ becomes the
stimulus to concepts and affects to which the Holy Spirit is applied as
a means of sanctifying what the apostolic depiction of Jesus Christ
arouses naturalistically but doesn’t in truth generate as a
concomitant of apprehending Christ as the One who bears and bestows that Spirit who magnifies him.
In short, it appears that to overlook the homoousion of the Spirit is to find even scripture, and specifically
its depiction of Jesus, advancing a religious paganism within the
church.
[c]
TFT has stated that absent the homoousion of the Son the gospel can’t be God’s self-bestowal
or self-communication; i.e., God may be said to bestow and communicate,
but now necessarily something less than, other than, himself
– and all of this on account of a deficiency in the Son.
Absent the homoousion
of the Spirit the gospel can’t be God’s self-bestowal,
God’s self-communication.
Here there is a frustration in God in that what God wills in
himself and accomplishes in the Son, God can’t effect in us.
Such divine “frustration” leaves the church looking elsewhere
for effectiveness.
The Protestant Reformation, aware of the
deity of the Spirit, didn’t undervalue the experiential dimension of
faith; indeed, the Magisterial Reformers, concerned with the correction
and re-articulation to be sure, nonetheless gave far greater place to
“the Word in the heart”
than they are commonly thought to have done. One
need only read Luther, where he speaks of “hearing the voice”
together with grasping the doctrine; the bridegroom saying ‘you are
mine’, and the bride saying ‘you are mine’; etc., or read Calvin
and the latter’s use of “feel” (Calvin’s Institutes
and Commentaries abound in “feel” and similar terms as Calvin
ever remains a theologian of the heart.) The
Reformation’s concern for assurance, the assurance of faith (i.e., the
assurance of one’s salvation) is attestation enough.
For this reason the Reformers acknowledged the experiential
aspect of crucial biblical texts; e.g., Galatians 3:2 – “Let me ask
you only this: Did you receive the Spirit [an unambiguous reference to
an event in their lives whose vividness was undeniable and therefore
could serve as the foundation of the point Paul wanted to make with
them] by works of the law or by hearing with faith?”
In other words, was the startling vividness of their
Spirit-wrought immersion in Christ the result of their appropriating the
gospel in faith or the result of having endeavoured to conform
themselves to a lifeless code? What
they could never deny or forget was the vividness of the Spirit within
them.
In light of the normative place of
scripture in the thought of the Magisterial Reformers, there is no
stepping around, e.g., the force of Paul’s experience:
the
Damascus Road
arrest, subsequent visions and voices and trances.
And then there are his “revelations”.
On the hand he doesn’t preach them, content to preach only
Christ crucified. On the
other hand, apart from his revelations, he wouldn’t be an apostle at
all and therefore would have nothing to say.
The apostle candidly admits the “abundance of revelations” (2nd
Cor. 12:1, 7; cf. Gal.
1:12
; 2:2). They have all left
him as one of those who “love
our Lord with love undying.” (Eph. 6:24)
In the history of the church Roman
Catholics appear to have visions while Protestants do not.
Does a tacit neglect (to say the least) of a homoousion
of the Spirit result
in large areas of scripture remaining closed to Protestants?
Abraham is the prototype of faith in older and newer testaments.
We are told “…the word of the Lord came to Abram in a
vision” (Gen15:1). To be
sure, the vision was given to convey the word. Still, the vision can’t
be discounted. Yet
Protestants, rightly Word-oriented, do little with other scriptural
depictions of God’s approach and self-impartation.
Why? (Recall Jean Brebeuf,
Jesuit missionary to the Huron aboriginal people of
Georgian Bay
. Just as visions had been
crucial in the spiritual formation and vocation of Loyola one hundred
years earlier, vision would be no less crucial in the spiritual life of
missioner and people, for Jean de Brebeuf was privileged to
"see", one night amidst his comfortable life in France, a
flaming cross suspended above the Huron encampment in the New World.
Thereafter he never doubted what he was to do or why.
How is his vision/dream different from mere fantasy or wishful
thinking?
Jonathan Edwards spoke much of “Religious
Affections”: a felt response to an object grounded in an understanding
of the nature of that object. Edwards
distanced all such affection from emotion or passion.
Emotion presupposes no understanding whatever of anything
supposed to have aroused it. Passion,
said Edwards, is problematic in that its passivity contradicts the act
and event that faith and obedience are; in addition, passion entails
loss of self-control, whereas the fruits of the Holy Spirit include
self-control. Nonetheless,
while religious affection (Edwards’ way of speaking of faith)
presupposes an understanding of the nature of God, affection ever
remains affective, as Edwards
never tired of pointing out in his exploration of the phenomenon of
Spirit-wrought faith.)
Similarly John Wesley, in his landmark
tract “The Almost Christian”, maintained that unbelievers
are characterized by lack of
faith in God, while believers are characterized by – faith in God?
By love for God, insists Wesley, even as he immediately goes on
to speak of their faith. Wesley
can never be read hereby as upholding justification by love.
From the moment of his Aldersgate awakening he never ceased to
insist on justification by faith, even as he praised the Book of Common
Prayer for insisting on it and faulted Quakerism for neglecting it.
Wesley’s point, rather, is that faith in Christ and love for
Christ presupposed and imply each other.
Without love for Christ, faith in Christ degenerates into
“beliefism” where the assimilation of doctrine is equated with
living engagement with the living Lord.
Without faith in Christ, love for Christ denies the necessity of
the atonement and hinges justification on the quality of the
believer’s love.
The Pauline corpus is where Protestants customarily look first; certainly where
the Magisterial Reformers looked first – even as their descendents,
post-Reformation Protestant scholastics, overlooked
a major dimension of Paul himself.
What can be vouchsafed to the apostle can be vouchsafed to
anyone. The question the
church must ask is “How are genuine revelations to be distinguished
from religious ‘boilovers’?” In
truth, the Spirit-formed, Spirit-informed, Spirit-normed affective or
experiential aspect to faith is a matter the church neglects only at is
peril, for deficits in the church spawn the sects.
As a pastor (for 36 years) I have come to see that people suffer
enormous affective deprivation; specifically, Christians suffer from
affective deficits related to faith.
It is little wonder that needy, vulnerable people are thereby
exposed to the blandishments of psycho-religious nostrums that don’t
deliver what they hold out. Always
to be kept in mind are two facts: human affective need, both natural and
spiritual, and the affective, experiential dimension of genuine gospel
faith.
[d]
TFT had intimated that absent the homoousion
of the Son, then in Jesus Christ God has not condescended to us, and his
love (so-called) has stopped short of becoming one with us.
TFT’s point is incontrovertible.
The Father would have given us something to fix us, even given us
the “fix-me-up” out of love, but it would have remained a fix that
allowed him to fix us at arm’s length – not unlike a surgeon who
remedies a patient, to be sure, yet who always does so by not undergoing
himself the surgery he prescribes for the patient.
(Here we need to recall psychiatrist Gerald May’s insight:
“Something deep inside us knows we can’t love safely; either we love
defencelessly or we don’t love at all.”)
Absent the homoousion
of the Spirit none of the foregoing would apply, in that God would have
loved us defencelessly; but this time his love would have stopped short
of saving us as his self-giving remained finally ineffective.
Self-giving to the point of self-immolation would have remained
self-inhibiting, even self-defying as the self-giving failed to result in a people that lives for the
praise of God’s glory. (Eph.
1:12)
[e]
Once again, TFT insisted that absent the homoousion
of the Son, there is no ontological, and therefore no
epistemological, connexion between the love of Jesus and the love of
God. God could be said to
love us in Jesus even as God isn’t actually that love in himself.
This being the case, there might be a dark, unknown God behind
the back of Jesus Christ. (Surely this is one problem with Calvin’s
doctrine of reprobation: there is an act of the Father that isn’t an
act of the Son.) The giver
of grace and the gift of grace are not the same.
In other words, while God can be said to love us, does his love exhaust his will and way and work concerning us?
Or does God love us as an act of his even as there remains (or might remain) some other
attitude/act wherewith God visits us, whose nature or purpose we don’t
know, even can’t know?
Absent the homoousion
of the Spirit, there is no ontological connexion, and therefore no
epistemological connexion, between the Son and that “spirit” which
may infuse us and inspire us to lofty human heights, even as that spirit
has to be less than holy,
since such a spirit has to be
less than God, creaturely by definition.
While giver and gift may remain one, the “giving” of grace
isn’t one with giver and gift. Then
who or what effects the giving? And
what are the implications of this for giver and gift?
Plainly “another spirit” has to be operative.
Then what is ultimately the nature and purpose of such a spirit?
Spirits abound, to be sure, yet absent the homoousion
of the Spirit we can only regard them as self-defined (rather than,
as is the case of the Holy Spirit, the power that Jesus Christ bears and
bestows and therefore the power in which Jesus Christ acts); we can only
plead our ignorance of what such spirits intend or what they achieve.
It must never be forgotten that spirits
abound not only in the world but in the church, perhaps especially in
the church, since the idolatry of religion appears to be a greater
problem in the church, given the church’s chronic difficulty in
distinguishing religion and faith. In
addition, in light of the greater problem religion poses for the church,
the spiritual discernment needed in the church is now inherently
impossible. Martin Buyer’s
perceptive remark – “Modernity is open to religion but closed to
faith” – appears to go unheeded in the church, if it is even
understood. Not only is the
lack, now the impossibility, of such discernment in the church tragic,
it is puzzling in that the book of Acts depicts discernment as the
principal manifestation of the Holy Spirit in the nascent church –
which discernment, of course, is possible only if the Spirit is
homoousially identical with Father and Son.
[f]
TFT has indicated that absent the homoousion
of the Son the acts of Jesus Christ are not the acts of God, and
there is no final authority for anything he said or did.
Absent the homoousion of
the Son “spirituality” can’t be distinguished from
self-indulgence. Faith
always presupposes Jesus Christ as author, as he acts in the power of the Spirit; faith also always
presupposes Jesus Christ as object,
as he effects in the spiritually inert both the capacity and the desire
to embrace the One who has first embraced them.
Apart from the homoousion of
the Spirit, faith is reduced to a natural, intrapsychic capability that
we “choose” to vest here or there.
Such a notion renders the Holy Spirit entirely superfluous.
(The church today, intoxicated with “spirituality” and its
inherent naturalism, hasn’t yet seen that the contemporary church’s
deity is bi-une and its soteriology pelagian.)
The result of viewing faith as a natural, human capability is to
render faith a human virtue, to render faith in Christ a subset of
“faith-in-general”, and to say that it is faith as contribution, albeit faith correctly vested, that saves.
Stung by the world’s accusation regarding
its putative narrowness, the church attempts to redress its reputation
by means of a non-Christic Spirit. It
forgets that the effectiveness of a knife depends on the narrowness of
its cutting edge, and therefore only a precisely delineated Christology
and Pneumatology add up to an effective theology.
That surgery required for the most profound heart transplant
(Ezekiel 36) can’t be performed with something as broad and therefore
as blunt as a crowbar. In
addition, the church today appears in danger of forgetting that only a
Christological exclusivity is Pneumatologically comprehensive and
therefore salvific. If faith
ceases to be quickened only as the risen, victorious Crucified acts on
people in the power of the Spirit, and if faith is thereby reduced to a
natural talent or virtue, then the predicament of those lacking such a
talent is hopeless. To say
the same differently: if Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, brings with
him a renewed cosmos and therefore a renewed humanity, and if this is
ours only as we are rendered participants in it through the power of the
Holy Spirit, then only the exclusivity of Incarnation, Cross and
Pentecost are salvifically inclusive.
[g]
TFT maintains that absent the homoousion of the Son we shall be judged by a God who is arbitrary
in that he bears no relation to Jesus Christ and all that the latter
stood for.
Absent the homoousion
of the Spirit we shall be judged by a God who made provision for us,
admittedly, but merely made provision for us; in the course of which
made himself proximate to us in our fallen humanness, but merely
made himself proximate. By
whom, then, are we to be judged? Plainly
by someone who left it to creaturely spirits, left it to us to “make
the connexion”. We
shan’t be judged by a God who is arbitrary in that he bears no
relation to Christ, but rather now by a God who in effect teased us,
tantalized us with the sufficient provision he made and placed before
humans with their “freedom of choice” that, of course, is no freedom
at all but simply the randomness of indeterminism as the fallen creature
continued to flounder.
-----------------------------------------
The
last word today has to be given to Thomas F. Torrance himself:
“…unless the Being and Activity of the Spirit are identical with the
Being and Activity of the Father and the Son, we are not saved.” (The
Christian Doctrine of God, 169)
