Of the Knowledge of God the Creator

As somebody who has devoted many hours to the study of theology, I'm often asked, "Why do you want to study that stuff?" Sometimes the question is asked out of genuine curiosity of what drew me into this field, other times there is a hint of incredulity of the sort that comes when people say that they are moving to L.A. to become an actor or singer. The worst response I've ever got was intentionally unsuppressed laughter, which was followed a moment later by a comment that I didn't know what I was missing by not having cable television. By the way, to the man who said this: Thank you, I'll still take my books though.

Appropriately, Calvin begins his work by answering the same question. For Calvin, true wisdom is knowing who God is and knowing who you are, though it is difficult to pull these two aspects of wisdom apart. On one hand when we truly see and face up to what we've become we can't help contemplate God. This not solely about sin. For Calvin this is as much about what God has endowed us with as His creation as it is about the Fall. He goes so far to say that we can't really know God until we know at least something of our true selves.

On the other hand we don't really know who we are until we have compared ourselves to God. Calvin sees a propensity in humans to always think of themselves as good and just. We need convincing that this is not the case and that convincing comes from contemplating how Good and just God is and then comparing ourselves to Him. Here again, this has both moral and amoral dimensions. We need to see that we are not only not as good or just as we might think, but also that we are not as powerful or otherwise as god-like as we might suppose as well.

There's probably nothing controversial in this chapter for an Evangelical. What my attention is drawn to are the amoral sides to his view of knowledge of self and God. I think that we leave that out of much contemporary evangelism strategy at our peril. Without it, we don't capture the drama of the human predicament: that we were created to relate to God in a way that the rest of creation doesn't, but then we are estranged from Him because of what we've made ourselves. I think much proclomational evangelism simply works at convincing the hearer that he or she is estranged from God, but often does not bother to answer the question, "Why should I or anybody else want to have anything to do with God in the first place?"

I'm back.

So I'm back. As most of you have guessed, my will for reading lots of theology and writing about it went out the window with the cares and psychological wear of unemployment, and stayed out the window when unemployment turned into 40+ hours a week of careening down the road with people who are still learning how to drive.

So I'm back because of Adam. Just before Christmas, we got to talking about a movie he saw about somebody who blogged through a French cook book. He thought doing something like that with either Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion or Augustine's City of God would be fun. We flipped a coin and Calvin won. So here I am. Well, there's more to why I'm back. Ever since I started college, I feel like I've been drinking from a fire hydrant. I've spent the vast majority of my adult life up to this point scrawling notes on paper at a pace that rendered what I wrote illegible and reading through books at a pace that said, "Don't worry about what was said, just read it enough to understand what the lecture will be about tomorrow." Even the Bible, that I claim is God's Word, was something I forced into my head in this manner. I'm back because now is the time for digestion. I want to learn what it is to read without a time limit. Our plan is to take a year and blog through Calvin's Institutes, but I'm trying very hard to not care if it takes me longer.

Despite the random selection process, I've decided that Calvin is indeed a good subject for this sort of study for me. He's probably the theologian that I'm most associated with and that I've read the least of. This fact makes me a little bit of a hypocrite. Many of my friends know of my love of primary documents, that is, the ones written by the people we study themselves, as opposed to those that are about those people or their thoughts. However, though I typically don't shy away from the moniker "Calvinist," I've actually read very little of what Calvin had to write. Calvin will be good for me because he will ease my conscience on this point. Secondly, I started this blog a year ago with the goal of thinking about how to get Christians interested in reading the works that have shaped how they think of God, Christ, the meaning and purpose of life, fellow Christians, and people who do not believe. My method was to simply share my love of these writings by describing them. Now I will go under the ideological knife I have sought to wield and do with Calvin what I have done with others: I will hear what he has to say from his own pen and stop pretending that I already know what he had to say, or that what he had to say isn't important.

I hope that you, my couple of readers, all five or less of you, come away from these future posts more interested in how we, as the Church, have become what we have become and in reading the story for yourself. The hearts and minds of its earlier participants are poured out upon paper for us to admire, argue with and relate to.

On the Incarnation

What do you think of when you see the words 'new life'? Many Evangelical churches bear the name. What do you think we mean by it? My impression is that we think of restored relationships through Christ. I get the feeling that the phrase new life, in the Evangelical usage of it, is meant to appeal to people who have really screwed up their old lives and realize it. Drug addicts and alcoholics need new life. In my mind's eye, when I go to the generic "New Life Community Church" I imagine myself worshiping next to a man in his fifties. His face is worn more than his age justifies. He still has hair but it is greying and thinning. Stubble on his cheeks reveals that he has not shaved in several days. His T-shirt prominently displays a picture of a muscular Jesus crowned with thorns and lifting a cross, it reads, "The Lord's Gym... His Pain, Your Gain." I see the edge of a now indiscernibly worn tattoo stick out along his arm just below the sleeve of the shirt. He sings passionately, though not particularly loudly, in a somewhat hoarse voice and never opens his eyes until we sit down and the offering is collected. If you have lunch with him after the service and ask him what his testimony is, he will tell you about a life filled with motorcycles, women and whiskey that ultimately proved to be empty. Now his life is filled with Jesus. To me this man is the personification of what an Evangelical means when they talk about new life. It is a truly beautiful picture to me. I love that God offers forgiveness and a relationship with Him in Christ, even to those who wander far from Him in their youth.

New life in this sense, as a restored relationship with God, is something that I don't want to demean. What I've learned from the work I've just read is that perhaps we should mean, not something other, but something more when we speak of new life. In Athanasius' On the Incarnation he writes to a new Christian convert about what he takes to be the central tenet of Christianity.

For those of you who are unaware of who Athanasius was let me take a little time to introduce you. He was among the first generation of Christians to see the end of the Roman persecutions. He began his career in the church as a deacon under Clement, the patriarch of Alexandria. After Clement's death, he became the patriarch. The majority of his career was spent defending the catholic faith expressed at the council of Nicaea against what we now know as Arianism. Lewis eulogized Athanasius fittingly when he wrote, "His epitaph is Athanasius contra mundum, 'Athanasius against the world...' He stood for the Trinitarian doctrine, 'whole and undefiled,' when it looked as if all the civilised world was slipping back from Christianity into the religion of Arius - into one of those 'sensible' synthetic religions which are so strongly recommended today and which, then as now, included among their devotees many highly cultivated clergymen. It is his glory that he did not move with the times; it is his reward that he now remains when those times, as all times do, have moved away." (p. 9)

However, this book was written almost ten years before Nicaea. In its time, nobody would have thought of it as a "scholarly" work. It was written to a new convert to Christianity as an introduction to who Christians believe Jesus is. Something truly great about this book is that he speaks both more simply and more profoundly on this topic than I could even hope to do justice to. The faith he would eventually spend his life defending is here, which is another remarkable thing about this book. His tenacious belief in the divinity of the Word was not a response to the Arian crisis, it was already "in his blood" so to speak.

There are several translations of this work available. I recommend the translation by a religious of C.S.M.V in the Popular Patristics Series, published by St. Vladimir's Seminary Press. The cheapest way that I found to own this (and I ardently recommend you put it at the top of your list for books to buy) is to go to St. Vladimir's website and buy it directly from them. But enough of these preliminaries, I hope my words do even scant justice to the few facets of this literary jewel that I will write on.

The primary question that Athanasius is attempting to answer is, "Why did the Word become flesh?" He begins with the Word's motive: the Eternal Word of the Father, the agent through whom everything was created did this out of love for humanity towards the end of our re-creation (pp. 25 - 26). This motif of Christ as both the fitting creator and re-creator of the universe holds the book together like. We need this re-creator because of the Fall. Our sin has allowed death and corruption mar us, God's image bearers. Now instead of the life and immortality we once drew from the Giver of life, we die and become corrupt (ie. rotten). This death and corruption is not merely a physical condition, while it remained unchecked, it came to be a defining characteristic of every aspect of our being. The fall makes us not only physically mortal and susceptible to sickness (though this is certainly his emphasis in the work), but morally corrupt and prone to continue sinning. The Fall set us on a course towards non-being in every aspect.

Now what could a good God do in light of this? For Athanasius, the Incarnation is the only fitting answer to this question. While he briefly considers other possibilities and rejects them, the Incarnation of the Word of God uniquely meets both God's necessity to be consistent in what He has declared (if you eat of the tree you will surely die) and in His design for us to be made in His image. The Word of the Father took a truly human body and inhabited it so he could be considered truly human. His death for all of us and his resurrection in triumph over death give us the possibility of eternal, incorruptible life. Our recreation through the work of Christ, both Word of the Father and truly human, is the most fitting way for death to be abolished.

Not only did the Word re-create the image within us through his death and resurrection, but he also recreated the image before us which we stubbornly and wantonly overlooked. God had given us three means of learning about him, all of which humanity neglected. We had nature, prophets and the Law, but have neglected each of these so completely that we are no longer able to look at them and see God, not because of any defect in them, but because of that inward corruption eating away at our very existence. Since our senses had become so "earth-bound" that we no longer looked to Earth's Maker, the Word became a man and walked among us. This shows us not only his genuine humanity in that the Word meets us "on our level" in the Incarnation, but also His divinity, for no other means, besides God's self-revealing work in the Incarnation, would meet our need to know and relate with our creator.

Christ's death gives us another way to look at Christ's work as the Incarnate Word. He is both an offering to death and the victor over death. In Athanasius' words, "Here, then, is the second reason why the Word dwelt among us, namely that having proved His Godhead by His works, He might offer the sacrifice on behalf of all, surrendering His own temple to death in place of all, to settle man's account with death and free him from the primal transgression. In the same act also He showed Himself mightier than death, displaying His own body incorruptible as the first-fruits of the resurrection." (p. 49). This simultaneous sacrifice on account of and triumph over death changes the way in which Christians look at death. While for the world death is "the end," Christians look beyond death with an assurance for the resurrection.

Athanasius anticipates questions that debate the fittingness of a dying God: If the Word became man to die in place of all, why not do it privately? Athanasius responds that if the Incarnate Word had merely let his body grow old and die in a bed, it would have seemed that he succumbed to something inherent in His nature. The one who healed others would be shown unable to heal himself.

Why not avoid death altogether? Is it not weakness to be condemned by others and hung on a cross? It is not weakness for the Word to undergo death, for he came precisely to overpower it.
Should not the Word died in at least an honorable way? Is it not unfitting for the Word to undergo death on a cross (as an executed felon)? A good wrestler does not demonstrate his strength and skill by overpowering mediocre foes. The Word, by accepting the challenge of the worst that death could contrive, shows that there is no power remaining in death at all.

Next Athanasius takes a question from a believer: Why did the Word die on a cross rather than some other way? Athanasius' response nears poetry that I am simply unable to do justice to in a paragraph. The details of his death make up a sort of dance that displays His atoning work. It is to bear the curse of the Law by undergoing an accursed death upon a tree. We are called through his outstretched arms, one to the Jews, the other to the Gentiles; calling them both to become one people in Him. By dying upheld in the air, the domain of the "prince of the power of the air," he makes a way through Satan's domain.

Finally, Athanasius describes Christ's resurrection as the display of his victory over death. However, this is a victory that doesn't stop with Christ. We are able to participate in it. Athanasius points to the Christian martyrs, some of whom he probably knew personally as an example. They rushed to meet death when all of the world cowered before it in fear. He also goes to some lengths to prove the resurrection to his readers.

So new life... what is it? New life is what Christ our King came to give us. Of course part of that life is a renewed relationship with our Maker, but like Athanasius said: our repentance could have given us that, if it were simply a matter of a transgression. Christ's work deals not only with our transgression of the Law, but also with our corruption. Christ conquered death, plain and simple. New life is not simply entering into a new relationship, but being made into a new creation.

I don't know what I'll be writing on next. It will depend on what my assignments are for my next class..

A Treatise on Grace and Free Will

I found this treatise in A Select Library of the Christian Church: Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Volume 5, edited by Philip Schaff , pp.441ff. Portland Public Library has at least one copy available and most Christian college libraries are sure to have at least one copy available for borrowing and possibly another in their reference section. The easiest way to find it on a library catalog program is to do an author search for Philip Schaff.

What does it mean to be a human being? One aspect of this question has generated a theological debate that continues into the present day. This is the question of to what extent our free will is really free. Now those of you who've been to Bible college will probably instantly recoil at the thought of reliving some late night dorm room conversation that took hours and went nowhere, but before you quit reading, I think this treatise of Augustine's might provide a way forward from those conversations if we just listen.

For Augustine there are two dangers when it comes to expressing to what extent we have a free will. The first is what his audience has succumbed to, that is denying that we have any active part to play in our salvation. We know we have a free will because God commands us. It would be patently ridiculous for God to expect us to obey when we do not have the capacity for obedience or disobedience. The second danger is to think that grace is simply an aid to our free will. Augustine sees it as equally absurd for God to command us to pray that he keep us from temptation if that was in our power to do in the same sense that we carry on the normal activities of human life (chapters 1-10).

After this, he demonstrates how we can talk about free will without falling into Pelagianism. While the Pelagians misconstrue the relationship between God's grace and our will by saying that God gives grace in response to a small amount of human merit, Augustine shows through the life of Paul and a couple of other examples that God actually gives His grace in spite of our bad merit and that grace creates in us the will to do good and to persevere in it (chapters 11 - 18).

The main implication of this, in Augustine's mind, is that we are justified solely by God's grace. However, eternal life is both a continuation of God's grace to us in that we would be utterly incapable of fulfilling the Law without His grace and eternal life is something that we earn because of God's grace working in us in that God calls the result of his outpouring of grace into us, that is good works, genuinely our works because they were accomplished through our wills. He uses Ephesians 2: 8 - 10 to explain this. He sees these verses as a sort of beacon to help us navigate between the two dangers of believing that salvation is given to us by our works (it is by grace through faith) on the one hand and believing that our will and its functions are unnecessary or irrelevant (we are created for good works) on the other (chapters 19-21).

After showing the key role that grace plays in our salvation, both in that we are justified by grace and that we do good works because God's grace enables us to do them, Augustine then explains what this grace is by distinguishing his view from the Pelagians, who say that the Law is the grace which helps us to not sin. Instead the Law gives us knowledge of sin, but not the power to overcome it.

Similarly, this grace cannot be an aspect of our nature. It is not shown in the fact that we have a rational mind and are capable of telling right from wrong. He sees this for two reasons: first, both godly and ungodly people can be rational and, to some extent, moral; second, we did not get rationality through faith. Finally grace is not simply the remission of past sins to the exclusion of it being a help in present and future temptation. For Augustine, grace is that act of God by which he effects our fulfillment of the Law, the liberation of nature (presumably from death?), and the removal of the dominion of sin (chapters 22-27).

As a corollary to his view on grace, Augustine also sees faith as a gift from God. He shows that the Scriptures speak of it as such and that God is able to turn unfaithful people into faithful ones. Once again, this is not done as a result of human preparation for faith, but is preceded by human resistance. This brings Augustine to his point:

We should remember that it is He who says, "Turn and live," to whom it is said in prayer, "Turn us again O God." We should remember that He says, "Cast away from you all your transgressions," when it is even He who justifies the ungodly. We should remember that He says, "Make you a new heart and a new spirit," who also promises, "I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit will I put within you." How is it, then, that He who says, "Make you, " also says, "I will give you"? Why does He command, if He is to give? Why does He give if man is to make, except it be that He gives what He commands when He helps him to obey whom He commands? (chapter 31)

For Augustine, this has huge implications for how we think of sanctification, love, and the limits of our free will. With regard to sanctification, it means that, to some extent that Augustine does not specify, we can follow the Law as believers in Christ. For, "It is certain that it is we that will when we will, but it is He who makes us will what is good..." (ch. 32). So why are we unable to always do good? His answer is that our wills need to grow. We start out on our walk of faith with a weak will and unable to do a great deal of what it is that we want to. God grows our wills through trials and suffering. He works without us in order to shape us to will what is good, and then works with us when we will what is good as the result of his work.

When it comes to love, the end of God's sanctifying work is for us to become people who genuinely love God from the bottom of our hearts with His love. As with grace and faith, this love is given to us by God and not conjured up from within ourselves.

Finally, if this is truly the path that God has us on, then it means that our wills are ultimately in God's power and therefore limited. He is able to harden us so that we commit sin (notice this is not God committing sin, it is still our wills doing it). This hardening is not necessarily tied to extreme cases of wickedness. The primary example of this that he sees is infants. Some are baptized and receive the washing from original sin, while others die before this can be provided and, in Augustine's mind, die separated from Christ. As with God's dealings with all of humanity, we are not to be His judge and it is better for us to be unable to explain his secret workings in the hearts of men than for us to take that seat of judgment and be answered with His answer to Job. We must trust his character when answers are not forthcoming. "God will certainly recompense both evil for evil, because He is just; and good for evil, because He is good; and good for good, because He is good and just; only, evil for good He will never recompense, because he is not unjust. He will, therefore, recompense evil for evil - punishment for unrighteousness; and He will recompense good for evil - grace for unrighteousness; and He will recompense good for good - grace for grace." (chapter 45)

I find Augustine helpful in dealing with the issue of how God's grace and our will interact because he attempts to do justice to both sides of the issue with a sincerity few, if any, have matched. He's the first person that I've read on this subject that really affirms both God's sovereign love and the reality of human will, with all of their implications. Here is neither the dry predestinarianism Calvinists are alleged to hold, nor the "choose your own adventure" Christianity that Wesleyans are caricatured as believing. This is God's sovereign love transforming human wills, not overpowering or acquiescing to them.

I believe that, if I understand Augustine correctly, this is a far more beautiful version of predestinarianism than much of what falls under the category of Calvinism or reformed theology today. I came to this treatise looking for ammunition in a debate with some friends of mine. What I found was a direct critique of my position (our free will had no direct implications for salvation, but needed to be overcome by God's grace) and a helpful, and I think more Scriptural, approach to the concept of free will than I have yet heard from people who take Wesleyan/ Arminian perspective. Tell me what you think. Do you agree with him or disagree? Why? Better still, read the treatise and then tell me what you think.

Since it will soon be Christmas, I plan on reading On the Incarnation by Athanasius. Hopefully, I'll post again before the end of the month. Is there a work you'd like to see discussed on this site? Feel free to post a recommendation.

Why Study Patristic Theology?

This is my second attempt at starting a blog. I suppose my first attempt was successful in that I signed up and wrote something down, but seeing as how I only wrote something on it once, "success" might have some un-warranted connotations when it comes to what actually happened. I believe that my previous blog failed because it lacked clear enough mission. So I've honed this one down something very specific.

This blog will exist to explain the basic premises of theological works that I read so that it might interest the reader enough to pick up some of the works themselves. I will concentrate on patristic theology for three reasons. The first is that I hope to one day become a patristics scholar and this will give me an excuse to spend my free time reading more of that literature. The second is that I think patristic theology is, generally speaking, the most readable theology that there is. The third is that patristic theology is also quite often the most neglected theology in the Evangelical Christian circles I am in.

Just so you know, I'm not the only one who thinks this. C.S. Lewis, in his introduction to Athanasius' On the Incarnation brings up my second point above quite clearly. He says, "There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books. Thus I have found as a tutor in English Literature that if the average student wants to find something out about Platonism, the very last thing he thinks of doing is to take a translation of Plato off the library shelf and read the Symposium... He thinks himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator" (see On the Incarnation, translated and edited by a religious of C.S.M.V. with an introduction by C.S. Lewis, St. Vladimir's Seminary Press).

It is my hope that this blog will encourage you to read patristic theology in the spirit that Lewis sets forth in the above mentioned essay. I expect to write my first summary in the next week.