Church Doctrine, Volume 2: God

CHURCH DOCTRINE

The Faith and Practice of the Christian Community

Volume II: God

Paul C. McGlasson

CHURCH DOCTRINE

Volume Two: God

Copyright © 2014 Paul C. McGlasson. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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isbn 13: 978-1-62032-695-4

eisbn 13: 978-1-63087-404-9

Cataloging-in-Publication data:

McGlasson, Paul C.

Church doctrine : volume two : God / Paul C. McGlasson.

xvi + 162 p. ; 23 cm. — Includes bibliographical references.

isbn 13: 978-1-62032-695-4

1. Theology, Doctrinal.

2

. Doctrine of God.

I. Title.

BT75 M152 2014

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

To Bob and Barbara Moore, in grateful memory.

Preface

This year (2014) signals a couple of significant anniversaries of profound importance for church doctrine, and for the doctrine of God in particular.

The first of course is the onset of the First World War (1914–1918). The war is remembered as the moment at which European humanity, European high-culture, European imperial nationalism, entered a brief but deadly period of self-destruction unparalleled at the time for its sheer, wanton, barbaric, inhumanity. For church doctrine the issue strikes deep; despite the differences between Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox, there was in 1914 what can be called a Common Christendom to which all bore allegiance, in deeds of charity, if not in full doctrinal agreement. That was the beginning of 1914; by the winter of 1914—with a scar of trenches running across the entire face of Europe, west and east—the tribal god of religion swept aside anything like a common Christianity. Each belligerent country prayed to their God for the defeat of their enemies. Any claim to a Christian Europe was now buried beneath the barbed-wire, dead bodies, and rubble of no-man’s land.

It would take the church twenty years of hard theological reflection to sort out the issues raised by the war, as it faced the oncoming crisis of the Second World War. And that brings us to our second anniversary: the Barmen Declaration of 1934. At Barmen the tribal god of religion was condemned as an idol; that was the negative side of the Confessing Church movement. In fact, the entire project of neo-Protestant liberalism which led to the outbreak of World War I (as evidenced for example by the vigorous support of the war effort by the leading liberal theologian of the time, Adolph Harnack, who railed against Mongolian Muscovite civilization, referring of course to his fellow Eastern Orthodox Christians; whatever happened to the brotherhood of man so championed by Harnack in the Essence of Christianity only a few years before the war broke out?), and which now was behind the German Christian support for Nazism in Germany, was condemned as false doctrine. The only answer to the tribal god of religion—always needing new sacrifices of human blood—was the light of the gospel. That was the positive side of Barmen: the declaration that God is not known by a correlation of human experience and revelation, but only through Jesus Christ attested in Holy Scripture. Only the light of Christ shatters the tribal god of religion, breaking down walls of division, crossing boundaries, and calling into being a new humanity of all peoples, all nations, all corners of the world.

Fast-forward to the present. Few would deny that the tribal god of religion is certainly alive and well. Nations, tribes, and peoples still call upon their god—often the Christian God—to support their causes and agendas, including in wartime. Even in peacetime, the tribal split between conservatives and liberals in matters of political and social policy is heavily dependent upon prayers to God for support. Whether in war or in peace, the tribal god of religion stalks the halls of the US Congress, sets nations and peoples against each other, and yet again demands human sacrifice.

The present work on the doctrine of God begins with the confession of Barmen well in mind: Jesus Christ as attested in Holy Scripture alone is God’s one word to humankind. Where Barmen was historically directed against liberal neo-Protestantism—and I agree with and continue that critique—the thrust of Barmen needs to be extended in the present to include conservative evangelicalism, which no more than liberalism before it has escaped the correlation of human experience with revelation, which is at the root of tribal religion.

To summarize: I have tried to do one thing in this volume to the very best of my ability, which is to let God be God. This is not a Protestant insight, or a Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox insight; this is an insight of the confessing church of Jesus Christ universal. In the light of the gospel, the tribal god of religion is dead, defeated on the cross; the living God of the Bible—who is God indeed—is alive, forevermore . . .

Abbreviations

BAG Bauer, Arndt, Gingrich, A Greek English Lexicon of the New Testament.

BTONT Brevard Childs, Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments.

CD Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics.

CCFCT Jaroslav Pelikan and Valerie Hotchkiss, Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition.

CNCT John Calvin, Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries

DP Otto Ritschl, Dogmengeschichte des Protestantismus 1-4.

GNET Emanuel Hirsch, Geschichte der Neuern Evangelischen Theologie I-V.

HDThG Handbuch der Dogmen-und Theologiegeschichte 1-3, 2nd edition.

LCC Library of Christian Classics

LW Luther’s Works (American Edition)

ODT Dumitru Staniloae, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology 1–5 (6 in preparation)

ST The Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas I-V (Christian Classics—the Benzinger Bros. edition).

Introduction

In the church of Jesus Christ, we begin our doctrine of God, not with the question of God, but with the reality of the knowledge and service of God. We do not come to the doctrine of God in an ahistorical vacuum, seeking to know and understand One whom we have never encountered before; we come in order to know and understand better him who is the joy of our existence, the comfort of our wounds, the heart of our life in community, the one hope of all the ends of the earth. Indeed, questions will be asked in our doctrine of God, and answers eagerly sought to the very best of ability; but the questions are asked from him, not about him; the answers are sought to him, not concerning him. God is the living truth of our very being, more real to us than our own experience of the world; we can therefore only learn to seek him, because we already know him, or rather because we are already known by him, in the joyous grace of the gospel.

We have already made one, and will now be making three further, formal theological alterations in the traditional shape of church doctrine concerning the living reality of God. Each of these changes has been made here and there by other theologians on occasion in the past, though only seldom, and only on a limited basis. Our suggestion is that the changes offered here best reflect the inner logic of the divine reality attested in Holy Scripture that church doctrine is called upon to reflect as in a mirror. The first change already occurred in Volume I on Canon, in which we treated the doctrine of the Trinity. Thus, the doctrine of the Trinity, which identifies the true nature and reality of the one God of the universe, not only comes first in Christian reflection on God; it comes even already in the section on church doctrine traditionally devoted to the interpretation of the Bible. There is no valid interpretation of the Bible within the community of faith that does not point to the Triune God; nor is there any genuine theological reflection on the Triune God which is not grounded in the witness of Scripture. The second change occurs in the first chapter of the present volume, insofar as we treat the knowledge of God within the doctrine of God, rather than as a separate epistemological section in the prolegomena. We cannot know God without God; we can only know God by God. Thirdly, we have moved the section on election from its most common location in the section on the church into the doctrine of God itself. The electing love of God is an eternal divine decision of grace grounded in God’s very being, not a secondary human reflection on the twofold separation of humanity into saved and not-saved. And finally, we have completed our doctrine of God with a full treatment of the first Table of the Law, which teaches the love of God. Knowing God cannot be separated from loving God, which is always expressed in the concrete form of doing God’s revealed will.

What is the purpose of these changes in the shape of church doctrine, which we are arguing are not merely conventional, but grounded in the subject matter itself? The full case for the changes can of course only be manifested in the unfolding of church doctrine itself; here we can only indicate the primary thrust. First of all, there is no God apart from, prior to, or outside of, the Trinity. The Trinity is God; God is the Trinity. Nor do we arrive at this affirmation as a conclusion in a chain of argument; rather, we start with this affirmation as a confession of faith. Our very identity as disciples of Christ is sealed in this confession, as baptized members of the body of Christ. The implication of this change is far-reaching indeed; the modern, and to some extent traditional, preoccupation with the God of theism is an idol. We repeat: the god of theism is not Christian. The Trinity is God; not the idol of theism. How that disjunction plays out, and what it means for the life and witness of the church, will be a primary concern of this volume. We have questions—many questions—to ask of the Triune God; but we will ask them of and to him alone.

We have moved the doctrine of the knowledge of God into the doctrine of God itself to complete a Reformation insight: that we live by grace alone. The Reformers—understandably—were largely concerned with issues of soteriology; we are put right with God by grace alone, through faith alone, apart from all works of the law, a faith which itself comes to us solely as a divine gift and in no sense as a human achievement. Shortly after their work the modern project of epistemology became the dominant theme of philosophy with the advent of the Cartesian cogito; unfortunately (we will argue) early modern Protestant scholastic theology did not carry the Reformation insight concerning the grace of God in redemption over into theological reflection on the way we know God. Carrying through the doctrine of justification by grace through faith into the field of the knowledge of God is a project essential to the shape of church doctrine. We know God only by grace. The possibility of knowing God, therefore, resides in God, not in us; knowledge of God is therefore theological, not epistemological. Again, what that means for the crucial issues of human knowledge of God will only become fully clear in our complete treatment.

We have moved the doctrine of election into the doctrine of God. We have therefore purposefully forced a profound issue: we cannot know God truly without acknowledging—even celebrating—his electing love. We will not treat the doctrine of election as a scandal for the church, nor as a hidden truth to be kept concealed from the ordinary Christian; we will treat God’s electing love rather as a truth to be proclaimed vigorously and openly as the ultimate consolation for faith in uncertain and often bewildering times. Our argument may appear provocative in the context of modern theology, but it is nonetheless surely compelled by the biblical witness. The gospel of free grace and the electing love of God mutually implicate one another. Without God’s electing love, there is ultimately no grace; without utterly free grace, there is no true understanding of God’s electing love. On the other hand, we will not rest content with simply retreating into the formulae of divine election from the past; but will be compelled again by the biblical witness itself to a fresh understanding of the God who claims us as his own before the world was made.

And lastly, we will immediately acknowledge the radical divine imperative that transforms all existence by treating the command of God directly after the reality of God. To know God is to be freed from the power of sin, which now lies in the past; but also to be freed for the new life of obedience, which always confronts us in the future. There can be no return, no restoration, no going backward into the past to find the living claim of God upon human life. He is here, meeting us in the present; and he leads us forward, always forward, to newness of life.

In each of these changes—as well as in the continuities with traditional church doctrine we have sought to maintain—our one aim has been to let God be God. God alone defines his reality for us; God alone makes known the truth of his being to us; God alone makes our lives whole by his direct and intimate involvement with us; God alone calls forth love with abandon from us. God is God; we begin with that truth, in order that we might understand more fully the glorious reality it contains.

Part II: GOD

1

The Knowledge of God

God is known among his people; in what way is God known?

In his letter to the Colossians the Apostle Paul directly confronts the issue.¹ God has made his word fully known to those whom he has called; the mystery of the divine will has been openly declared through the presence of Jesus Christ: which is Christ in you, the hope of glory (Col 1: 27). Knowledge of God comes therefore solely through the present reality of Jesus Christ in the community of faith. What misunderstanding of the gospel is Paul so vigorously combatting in this letter?

There are false teachers plaguing the community of faith who teach that between the church and Christ—and therefore between the church and God—are a wide variety of cosmic powers. In order to get to Christ—and therefore to God—it is first necessary to go through a religious and moral preparatory phase: that is the teaching of these would-be enlightened teachers. The details are murky; some apparently teach a form of ascetic preparation, involving food and drink and self-abasement. Others focus on a depth dimension of religious experience (worship of angels, visions). Still others advance a complex system of hierarchical powers (elemental spirits of the universe) that must be scaled in order to bridge the gap between the finite and the infinite (Col 2:16–23). Thus, while knowledge of God may finally reach up to God through Christ, it must first be mediated through some form of human moral or religious transcendent experience; only such preparation grants access to the salvation sought. What is Paul’s response?

Paul vigorously condemns the false teachers for teaching heresy that fundamentally contradicts the heart of the gospel; but in doing so his primary interest is in shedding fresh light on the positive content of the message of Christ. First of all, Paul shifts the axis 180 degrees from his common focus in order to make a fresh witness to the truth. Usually Paul speaks of the old and the new in temporal terms; in Christ the radically new has already come, the old is now forever in the past, defeated on the cross. Baptism is precisely the sign of this passing from the old life to the new through participation in the death and resurrection of Christ. In his Letter to the Colossians, Paul shifts the axis from time to space; the absolute rule of Christ over all reality has already conquered the realm of darkness, already transferred those who share in him to the new kingdom of Christ himself. The exalted and sovereign rule of Christ throughout all creation is not only temporally new, as a radical change of time itself; it signifies the absolute spatial realm of Christ that even now penetrates all reality without restriction or hindrance: for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rules or powers—all things have been created through him and for him (Col 1:16). Paul emphatically repeats three times in this short poetic passage (vv. 15–20): all things . . . all things . . . all things . . . (ta panta). There can be no room for misunderstanding; Christ alone rules the entire cosmos with absolute and direct supremacy. The genuine mystery of God is . . . Christ himself (Col 2:2).

So, what does this mean for the question Paul addresses? There are no intermediary spheres of power between Christ and his church; there are no preparatory religious or moral experiences between Christ and faith; there are no steps that, like a ladder, must be climbed in order to reach the divine throne; the present cosmic rule of Christ completely overturns the errors of the false teachers. Jesus Christ alone bridges the gap between God and humanity, between finite and infinite; for he is himself fully human, and fully divine, in one person: See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ. For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have come to fullness in him, who is the head of every ruler and authority (Col 2:8–10). Jesus Christ alone is thus the both the reality, and therefore the only possibility, of access to God, radically cancelling out all other religious, moral, and philosophical preparation, even and especially those foisted upon the nascent Christian community. There is no other intermediate step of any kind; there is only Christ, and Christ is freely given to all: And when you were dead in trespasses . . . God made you alive with him, when he forgave us all our trespasses . . . (Col 2:13). Knowledge of God therefore means Jesus Christ; and Jesus Christ means the knowledge of God; for in Christ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge (Col 2:3). For Paul, Jesus Christ is not only God’s gracious gift of mercy to the sinner, radically excluding all moral achievement; he is as well God’s free gift of knowledge of God, excluding every moral and religious avenue to God apart from the living grace of Christ himself. Johann Albrecht Bengel rightly paraphrases Paul’s thrusting argument: He who does not hold Christ alone, does not hold him at all.²

As we turn now to the doctrine of the knowledge of God, this positive witness from the Apostle Paul must be our guide, the normative rule of faith against which to test the spirits. Jesus Christ is the knowledge of God in a twofold sense: he alone is the highest God made known to us; he alone is the lowest humanity ready for God. He alone brings God to humanity; he alone brings all humanity to God. If there is a chain, it has but one link; if there is a ladder, it has but one step. Not as a conclusion reached, but as a confession affirmed, we start from here.

Why do we begin here, and not elsewhere? Because the tomb is empty; Jesus Christ is risen from the dead. He who is the true knowledge of God already rules in exaltation over all creation. That does not mean we are without questions. Faith is not blind; but it is curious, open, reflective, searching, eager to learn and to know. But our questions do not flow from our effort to find what we are looking for; our questions flow forth because he has found us, and it is now time to understand what that means for our lives, and for our world. Precisely because we know God in Jesus Christ, we seek to learn the meaning of what we know. And in seeking, we come to discover that our questions are but the echo of God’s own searching examination of his beloved people. We question him, only to realize that God is questioning us.

a. The Self-Revelation of God

The God of the Bible is not waiting to be found by human ingenuity; the God who rules over his creation is not uncovered or discovered by human cleverness. God makes himself known; God reveals himself. Always God takes the initiative. A human response is required; but the divine initiative always comes first. There is no self-grounded human possibility for knowing God; there is no innate or acquired human capacity for the knowledge of God; rather, we know God only because God himself has taken the initiative in making himself known in the world. God is eager and ready in the revelation of himself to humanity: I was ready to be sought out by those who did not ask, to be found by those who did not seek me. I said, Here I am, here I am, to a nation that did not call on my name (Isa 65: 1). The great crisis that thrusts itself upon humankind is not the absence of knowledge of God in the world; rather, the true crisis of the world is the sheer sovereign presence of God’s self-declaration, which cannot be evaded or undercut. God declares himself, hushing the noise and bluster of human folly: But the Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before him! (Hab 2:20). Likewise, the great promise that sustains all the world is the constant readiness of God to make himself known, unlimited by human ability or restriction: "O Lord, I have heard