Christian Dogmatics

Reformed Theology for the Church Catholic

Allen, Michael, Swain, Scott R., Michael Allen, Scott R. Swain

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780801048944
• eBook ISBN: 9781493402786
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

This one-volume introduction to systematic theology draws deeply on the catholic and Reformed heritage to present the major doctrines of the Christian faith, displaying the power of theological retrieval for the church's renewal. Leading Reformed theologians, such as Kevin Vanhoozer, John Webster, Michael Horton, and Oliver Crisp, offer the "state of the question" on standard theological topics and engage in both exegetical and historical retrieval for the sake of theological analysis. The book represents the exciting new theological trajectory of Reformed catholicity.

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Knowledge of God

MICHAEL ALLEN

A Theology of Knowing God

Christian theology is human reason disciplined by the gospel. Reason is not aloof or alone. It is implicated in the story of God’s generosity. Reason is not shaped in only a parochial way, by things like sociocultural influences and partisan biases. It is baptized in the common life of the saints. Disorder arises when reason is considered apart from the rule of the gospel. When the context for intellectual self-awareness shifts from the country of the gospel to another land, fissures and imbalances set in.

The ills of recent thinking about thinking can be traced to a relocation of such reflection, no longer in the economy of sin and grace but instead transplanted to the orbit of (scientific) technique or (cultural) training. In his essay “What Is Enlightenment?,” Immanuel Kant belittled reliance on religious formation, arguing for a moral necessity to question such indoctrination and proceed to reason independently of ecclesiastical and familial order. By now a veritable industry has arisen, offering intellectual histories of the Enlightenment and its roots in earlier shifts in thinking about reality as such, our minds, and the connection between the two.1 We need not buy in hook, line, and sinker to any given genealogy, though we can surely see that the broad emphases of Enlightenment thinking about thinking located the knowing subject as one with direct and immediate access to the known (irrespective of its nature: whether creaturely or, as we are considering, the Creator himself).

And supposed rejections of Enlightenment rationality tend to be predictable responses made by those who throw their arms up in protest without changing the fundamental terms of the game. Scientific technique may be trusted no longer as a reliable broker of truth, but now knowledge is political power. In place of objectivity comes spin. The mind no longer needs to learn a certain set of methods; the mind needs to be liberated from groupthink by having the biases of one’s parents, priests, or president exposed and alternative approaches of “the other” articulated. Knowledge is reduced to angle, perspective, and approach. It may not be perceived as technique, but it is no less restricted to the realm of human action: now it is social rather than scientific, perhaps, but describable by means of materialistic processes just the same.

Roger Lundin has traced such a maneuver ably in his volume From Nature to Experience, focusing on the nineteenth century as a time of shifting beliefs about knowledge and truth. For a variety of reasons—ranging from Darwinian naturalism to the violence of the American Civil War—Lundin argues that faith in the idea of a nature that was given order from above and might communicate truth to those below sunk in this long nineteenth century. Biological evolution seemed to raise questions about nature and order in the world, while the moral ambiguities and failures of the American strife seemed to raise questions about anything like a natural law or common conscience granted from above.2 Whereas Kant had turned us from revelation to natural order, the experiences of struggle (biologically and politically) in the modern era seemed to raise questions about nature itself. Some other source of reason and wisdom must be sought. The failure to perceive an illuminating order led, first, to the search for a cohesive aesthetic (experience) and, second, to a focus on pragmatic means (of varying sorts). Thus pragmatism became the philosophy of the twentieth century over against more metaphysical approaches to truth and knowledge.

We will not attempt to locate a theological fall from grace, whether in the rise of nominalism, the person of Scotus, or the philosophy of a René Descartes or (later) a Christian Wolff. Yet we must note that for various reasons, reason has been plausibly thought within very different contexts: no longer the space of sin and its overcoming, now the territory of technical mastery or political pull. Of such approaches, completely fixed on creaturely activity as they are, the verdict of William Butler Yeats is proven true: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”3 When centered fully in the creaturely realm, reason does fall apart, and wisdom cannot hold.

If we are to avoid such maladies, then our task is reflective, namely, to address the various ways that the gospel chastens our thinking about human reason. Elsewhere I have argued that the gospel can be summarized thus: “The gospel is the glorious news that the God who has life in himself freely shares that life with us and, when we refuse that life in sin, graciously gives us life yet again in Christ.”4 Life involves truth. Indeed, a theology of knowing God will focus on this aspect of the life we have with God in Christ. God gives truth as an essential facet of that ever-bountiful blessing of life. So we can modify our thesis statement and fix our eyes on this aspect of the gospel: The gospel is the glorious news that the God who is truth himself freely shares that truth with us and, when we refuse that truth in sin, graciously gives us truth yet again in Christ. Our reflections on the place of intellectual reason within the gospel are prompted by the confession of the first of the Ten Theses of Berne (1528): “The holy, Christian Church, whose only Head is Christ, is born of the Word of God, abides in the same, and does not listen to the voice of a stranger.”5 Knowledge is provided for by divine communication—the very Word of God—and we do well to consider the metaphysics and ethics of its communication. In the following reflections, we will address matters metaphysical by considering the context of theology within the economy of God’s external works, and we will then reflect on the ethics of theology by defining the character of theology within this same economy, according to its own rules.

The Context of Theology

The discipline of the gospel can be best expressed by considering the story of the gospel. Human reason has a history, and its everyday exercise can be appreciated only when its biography is understood. To that end, we will consider the impact on human reason of the key moments of the redemptive-historical movement from eternity to economy: God’s eternity, creation, sin, and reconciliation. At each point I will highlight a key distinction that has been employed by theologians to emphasize the operative nature of this doctrine. Such distinctions are not employed to tone down or cordon off the effects of doctrines; rather, they are flags reminding one of the doctrines and insisting that no side of the divide be ignored or obfuscated. Distinctions in doctrine serve to keep us alive to the breadth of God’s address to us in Scripture. Thus these classical doctrines, if retrieved as exegetical signals, may well help to renew our efforts to think well in light of the gospel.

First, the gospel is the glorious news that God is truth himself. The God who has truth in himself elects to share that truth with others. “God is knowable to Himself; the Son to the Father, but also the Father to the Son. This is the first and last thing which is to be said about the knowability of God even from the point of view of the readiness of man.”6

Scholastic theologians noted this truth of God’s own self-knowledge by distinguishing between theology ad nostra (our theology) and theology in se (theology in himself). Duns Scotus employed the distinction to emphasize...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Endorsements
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Knowledge of God
• 2. Holy Scripture
• 3. Divine Attributes
• 4. Divine Trinity
• 5. Covenant of Redemption
• 6. Creation out of Nothing
• 7. Providence
• 8. Anthropology
• 9. Sin
• 10. Incarnation
• 11. The Work of Christ Accomplished
• 12. The Work of Christ Applied
• 13. The Law of God and Christian Ethics
• 14. The Church
• 15. Sacraments
• 16. Kingdom of God
• Contributors
• Scripture Index
• Subject Index
• Back Cover