Systematic Theology (Volume 1)

Grounded in Holy Scripture and understood in light of the Church

Douglas F. Kelly

• Publisher: Christian Focus Publication
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781781913871

Chapter One

Knowledge of God: God Reveals Himself

God reveals Himself in the light of who He is by means of His Word and Spirit personally within the context of the covenant community. Thus, the pressure of the revelation of His truth gives rise to faith within this chosen community of grace throughout the Old and New Testaments. Faith is marked by believing assent and occurs within the atmosphere of prayer. God’s revelation of Himself is validated the same way it was revealed: in the gracious community context created by His Word and Spirit. To enter this context of life and truth, one must look out of every unbelieving framework to Him who is ‘the way, the truth and the life.’

I. God Makes Himself Known

The living God has made Himself known. That is the basic meaning of ‘Theology’, composed of two Greek words Theos (God) and Logos (word, or meaning or rationality). It is the essence of scientific procedure to seek to know a given reality in accordance with its nature. We must put questions to this reality in a way that is appropriate to what it is, so that it can reveal itself to us. The sort of questions we pose must be determined by the nature of the object (in the case of God, our ‘object’ is the supreme ‘Subject’ in control of all reality).

To know God, we must start our inquiry at the very place where He has chosen to make Himself known. The Living God has made Himself known in His Word in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, and supremely in the person and work of His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, God made flesh, ‘the one Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus’ (1 Tim. 2:5). The Old Testament is the background and preparation for Christ, and the New Testament is His full manifestation (see Luke 24:25-27 and John 5:39). As Novatian of Rome said in the mid-third century: ‘This Jesus Christ, I say again, the Son of this God, was promised, as we read in the Old Testament, and we find Him set before us in the New Testament, fulfilling the shadows and types of all mysterious foreshadowings, by the presence of the embodied truth’ (De Trinitate IX.46). Or in the famous words of Saint Augustine, ‘Novum testamentum in vetere latet, vetus testamentum in novo patet’ (Quaest. 73 in Exod.).¹

Those who wish to know this true and living God are in a most happy position, for He reveals Himself both in His written Word and, above all, in His Son as a speaking God. The very first chapter of the Bible begins with God speaking the cosmos into existence, and then in the heart of the New Testament, we are told that God the Father’s last word has been spoken to us ‘in his Son ... by whom also he made the worlds’ (Heb. 1:2). And as we shall see, the very ‘worlds he made’ also speak of Him in their own appointed way (see Ps. 19:1-6 and Rom. 1:18–2:16).

Holy Scripture does not begin with arguments for the possibility of God’s existence. It starts with reality, not possibility: ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth’ (Gen. 1:1). Probably ‘beginning’ (תישׁארבּ) refers to the beginning of the space/time cosmos; to the origin of what the Nicene Creed calls ‘all things visible and invisible’; that is, to the beginning of everything that is not God.² Thus the Old Testament begins with the majestic reality of God who creates all things ‘out of nothing’.

Strange as it may seem to human logic, the New Testament takes us (to use human time words) ‘much further back’ than that! For John 1:1, with obvious reference to Genesis 1:1, tells us that ‘In the beginning was the Word (Λóγος), and the Word was with God and the Word was God.’ That is to say, Word (Λóγος) existed with God the Father before there was ever a world. This Word is identified in John 1:14 and 18 as God’s ‘only begotten Son.’ The Son being fully God is as eternal as His Father.

Hence, from all eternity there has been ‘Word’ in God; there has existed a community of speaking, sharing and communication within God. That is why it should not be thought strange that this speaking, communicating God, who at a chosen point created humanity in His own image in order to know Him (Gen. 1:26, 27; Eph. 4:24; Col. 3:10), should speak to us so as to reveal Himself to us and reveal who we are and the meaning of the world around us. As John Calvin says, to know Him is to know ourselves; to know ourselves is to be confronted with Him (Institutes of the Christian Religion I.1.1).

II. How Ultimate Truth Can Be Known

In our world today, which is suspicious of truth claims, especially those with a transcendent reference, the question is certain to arise: how do we know that these assertions concerning God, Christ, Scripture and valid knowledge are true? After all, many contrary assertions to explain reality (or perhaps to deny that it can even be known) are available in the marketplace of ideas. What claim then do these biblical teachings have on us?

From beginning to end, it must clearly be recognized that the only way humans can properly test truth claims to ultimate reality must be in light of who that ultimate reality is and how He acts and speaks. The supreme reality makes Himself known as the personal God, and hence the supreme truth He reveals at its very heart partakes of His personal reality and is, for that reason, what the Greek Church Fathers called αὐτουσία (that is, ‘self-existence’ or ‘self-evidence’). That is to say, the supreme truth of the personal God does not depend on anything outside itself to validate itself, for why should that which is ultimate be dependent on that which is subordinate for its power to convince?

Professor Thomas F. Torrance has seen this with clarity, and two references should help us grasp this point:

There is no way to demonstrate this Truth outside of the Truth; the only way for the ultimate Truth to prove Himself is to be the truth, and the only way for us to prove the ultimate Truth is to let Him be what He is before us, in His αὐτουσία and αὐτεξουσία. That is the majesty and prerogative of the Truth of God as it is in Jesus, Truth who is ultimate in identity with the Being and Act of God, Truth who is and cannot be established by us, Truth who will not be mastered and yet will not remain closed to us, Truth who unveils Himself for us and who is known only through Word and Grace on God’s part and faith and thankfulness on our part. It is He who says, ’I am the way, the truth and the life; no man cometh to the Father but by me’ (John 14:6) (Theological Science, 144).

FIX UP GREEK!!!!

With us human beings authority is not something that functions by itself but depends on something else that gives it its impelling force and something else again through which it is implemented; but this is not the case with God in whom will and action and the power of his divine Being perfectly coincide. This was the point recognized by the Alexandrian theologians when they spoke of God’s Authority as Αὐτοεξουσíα in the same way in which they spoke of his Truth as Αὐτοαλεθεία. Ἀληθεία and Έξουσíα are one in the ἐγώ ἐιμι, of his very Being as God, so that Αὐτοαλεθεíα and Αὐτοεξουσία represent cognate ways in which we have to do with the ultimate Reality and Majesty of God himself (Theological Dialogue Between Orthodox and Reformed Churches, 108).

An understanding of this αὐτουσία of God’s supreme truth in Person and Word lies behind John Calvin’s teaching that the final proof of the truth of the Holy Scriptures is that, since they are given by God, they are αὐτοπίστος (or ‘self-evidencing’).³ They shine in their own light, when the One who inspired them illumines the mind of the recipient. No auxiliary, creaturely light is needed to convince the reader of their ultimate authority.⁴

God who is truth and lives in truth reveals Himself truly to His image-bearers so that they may respond to Him in truth. God, the Creator, comes first, and His created image-bearers come second. As the medieval Scholastics said in a different context, ‘operari sequitur esse’ (‘operation follows being’). This means that the order of knowing follows the order of being and determines it. As we do not prescribe to God how He shall be, so we do not prescribe how we shall know. The fact that God is God means that only He can reveal Himself to His creatures, for forcefully to draw information out of God would take a power greater than God.⁵

As Tertullian said to the heretic, Marcion, in the early third century: ‘In what manner then has he been revealed? If [you suggest] by human surmisings, I answer that a god cannot be known except on his own showing, and I appeal not only to the method employed by the Creator, but also to the conditions imposed as well by divine greatness as by human insignificance. Otherwise the man might appear greater than the god, for he would, without the god previously consenting to be known, have as it were by his own power dragged him out into the publicity of being known – though human insignificance has, by the trial and error of all the ages, found it easier to invent gods for itself than to attend upon the true God, of whom they are already aware by nature’ (Adversus Marcionem, I.xviii, translated and edited by Ernest Evans, Oxford, 1972).

In our own day, Karl Barth has stated it well in a number of places:

Divine determination and revelation, and not man’s approval, are the criterion of what is appropriate to God and salutary for us. It is not for our human approval to precede the divine approval, but to follow it up. The God-created fact of revelation is the manifestation of this divine approval. And therefore it is the judge of our convictions and not vice versa (Church Dogmatics I.2, p. 5).

... God is known through God and through God alone. God speaks to man in His Word. Thereby He gives Himself to him to be known; therein He is known by him. In this way, as the One who speaks to him, God stands before man, and it comes to pass that man stands before Him, and that man for his part – as happens in the Church of Jesus Christ – can speak and hear about Him (Church Dogmatics II.1, p. 44).

III. Truth Is Known within a Covenant Community

Scripture teaches throughout that God, who is truth, makes Himself known to mankind by means of both Word and personal communion within a covenant context. God speaks His Word to His image-bearers, not in a vacuum, but within a personal relationship. And this personal relationship in which God’s speaking occurs is always in the bounds of a covenant community. God is in charge of the speaking, of the persons who are addressed, and of their covenant relationship to Him and to one another within the wider creation.

The Sovereign God chooses to speak to those whom He has made for relationship with Him in what must be termed a gracious community context, or Covenant of Grace. Even prior to and apart from the fall of mankind into sin, God’s condescension to know and be known in a personal and intimate way by His infinitely inferior subject, man, constituted sovereign grace and infinite loving kindness. The first three chapters of Genesis indicate that man was made in such a way that when he functions properly, he may know truth.

IV. Within that Community Truth Gives Rise to Faith

God’s being and speaking in truth and grace to mankind are intended to evoke an appropriate response from His image-bearers, and that is faith, which is found only within a community of faith (or context of inter-relationship that depends on grace). The Church Fathers frequently noted three points about this movement: first, faith is caused by truth; second, faith is the only appropriate response to truth; and third, faith arises within a community context.

Faith is caused by truth

Truth causes faith; that is to say, objective reality always has priority over subjective response. The early Church Father, Irenaeus of Lyon, stated in the late second century: ‘And faith is produced by the truth; for faith rests on things that truly are...’ (Demonstration of Apostolic Preaching, 3). God created all things out of nothing; created mankind for fellowship with Himself, and graciously spoke to them, as the Gospel of Luke clearly implies, as a Father (Luke 3:38). After their disobedience and expulsion from His immediate presence (Gen. 3:22-24), God made promises of grace to them (Gen. 3:15) and over the long centuries continued to speak to them by the prophets, and ‘hath in these last days spoken unto us by His Son by whom also he made the worlds’ (Heb. 1:2). Throughout the entire process of making Himself known, what God says is always the ground on which He is to be known. Hilary of Poitiers wrote around a.d. 350: ‘For He whom we can know only through his own utterances is a fitting witness concerning himself’ (De Trinitate, I.xviii).⁶ Or as Clement of Alexandria had written earlier: ‘The voice of the Lord is the only demonstration of Himself’ (Stromateis VII.xvi).

Faith is the appropriate response to truth

Second, the appropriate response to truth is faith. God’s reality imposes itself upon those whom He has made to know Him, as Paul brings out in Romans 1 and 2. Clement of Alexandria describes how truth begets a response: ‘Knowledge is excited by outwardly existing objects’ (Strom., VI.viii).

T. F. Torrance writes:

The question must be raised as to how we get inside this new world of meaning... The answer given, for example by Clement of Alexandria, was that here we have to reckon with realities which, like the first principles in geometry or the simple facts of perception, are known on the strength not of anything else but of themselves, that is, through a basic act of assent or faith in recognition of and in response to those realities. The right way to break through into the new realm of meaning or truth, therefore, is the way of faith, for unless we believe, we will not understand [Isa. 7:9]. Now faith involves a conceptual assent to the unseen reality, for the proof of an unknown reality is its own evidence and the evident assent it calls forth from us. That is to say, if we are really to understand, we must willingly allow our minds to fall under the compulsive self-evidence of the reality, otherwise we merely lapse back uncritically into our own false preconceptions (Reality and Evangelical Theology, 102).

Far from being antithetical to reason, ‘Faith is the orientation of the reason toward God’s self-revelation, the rational response of man to the word of God ... a fully rational acknowledgement of a real Word given to us by God from beyond us.’⁷ Put another way, faith is an utterly scientific (that is, appropriate) response to the reality of the God who speaks in His Word. Much of the research of T. F. Torrance has shown that humble belief before the Word of God is, in its own field, in line with the way scientific reasoning functions in other (creaturely) realms of knowledge:

In the first place, the reorientation that has been taking place in the foundation of scientific knowledge, which we have traced from Clerk Maxwell through Einstein to Polanyi, demands that we must recog...

Table of contents

• Testimonials
• Title
• Indicia
• Contents
• Dedication
• Author's Preface
• 1. Knowledge of God: God Reveals Himself
• 2. Knowledge of the Triune God through Creation and Conscience
• 3. Western Rejection of God’s Testimony to Himself in Creation and Conscience
• 4. The God Who Is: the Holy Trinity as One Lord
• 5. What Kind of Lord He Is
• 6. The Triune God Makes Himself Known in the Covenant of Grace
• 7. The One Lord Exists as Three Persons
• 8. The Christian Church Thinks Through how God is One Being and Three Persons
• 9. The Full Co-equality of the Trinitarian Persons: No Subordinationism
• Bibliography
• Scripture Index
• Index of Names
• Subject Index
• Thanks from the Author
• Other Titles
• Christian Focus