Contemplating God with the Great Tradition

Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism

Craig A. Carter

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781540963307
• eBook ISBN:
  9781493429691
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Southwestern Journal of Theology 2021 Book Award (Theological Studies)

2021 Book Award, The Gospel Coalition (Honorable Mention, Academic Theology)

Following his well-received Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition, Craig Carter presents the biblical and theological foundations of trinitarian classical theism. Carter, a leading Christian theologian known for his provocative defenses of classical approaches to doctrine, critiques the recent trend toward modifying or rejecting classical theism in favor of modern "relational" understandings of God. The book includes a short history of trinitarian theology from its patristic origins to the modern period, and a concluding appendix provides a brief summary of classical trinitarian theology. Foreword by Carl R. Trueman.

Part One: Defining Trinitarian Classical Theism

One
Classical Orthodoxy and the Rise of Relational Theism

Because God is simple, he is absolutely and not merely contingently other than the world. . . . The otherness of God is not an instance of correlativity or complementarity. . . . Creatures are not related to God as to a thing of a different genus, but as to something outside of and prior to all genera.

John Webster1

For the past decade, I have been contemplating the meaning of two curious facts about the history of Christian theology. The first is that prior to the Enlightenment, virtually no Christian theologian thought that there was any tension, let alone a contraction, between the immutability and impassibility of God, on the one hand, and the fact that God has acted in history to judge and save, on the other. The second is that by the late nineteenth century the problem of how to reconcile divine immutability and impassibility with what the Bible says about God’s actions in history had become a pressing question, and in the twentieth century there was a virtual stampede of Christian theologians from many different traditions seeking to qualify, modify, or even deny outright the immutability and impassibility of God in the name of being “biblical.” Nobody thought it was a problem until suddenly everybody thought it was a problem. How did this change occur? Why did it occur? What does it mean for the future of orthodox Christianity?

Classical Theism versus Relational Theism

Classical theism is the historic orthodox doctrine of God, and it says that God is the simple, immutable, eternal, self-existent First Cause of the cosmos. God creates the world and acts on it, but the world cannot change God in any way. Relational theism is a term that we can apply to a number of different doctrines of God, all of which affirm that God changes the world and the world changes God. Surely it is obvious that these two conceptions of God are as different as day and night. We are talking about two different concepts of what God is.

On the one hand, there is the transcendent Creator, whose being is qualitatively different from created being and who is unknowable in his unique being except by means of his own gracious self-revelation and then only insofar as the limited capacity of the human creature allows. As John Webster says in the quotation that heads this chapter, God is not part of the world, and this means not only that God is not a being within this world but also that God does not exist alongside the world as the complement to the world. God and the world do not stand on some common plane that allows them to be in a relationship with each other as two creatures stand in relation to each other. God is totally other than the world in his divine being. Historic orthodoxy, including both Eastern Orthodoxy and Western Christianity in both its Roman Catholic and Protestant forms, has viewed divine simplicity as a way of stating the radical otherness of God rather than as a univocal statement about the nature of divine being. It is a signifier of mystery, not a rational definition. The famous denial of “real relations” between God and creation by Thomas Aquinas means not that God cannot act on the world but only that the world cannot act on God. God brings about change in the world, but the world does not bring about change in God. He writes, “Since therefore God is outside the whole order of creation, and all creatures are ordered to Him, and not conversely, it is manifest that creatures are really related to God Himself; whereas in God there is no real relation to creatures, but a relation only in idea, inasmuch as creatures are referred to Him.”2 This is an affirmation that the relationship is not between two entities of similar being but between the immutable and perfect self-existent God, on the one hand, and the world of change and imperfection that is itself wholly dependent on God, on the other.

The modern era, however, has witnessed a sustained challenge to the traditional view of God as simple, immutable, impassible, and outside of time. This challenge has taken a number of different forms, some relatively radical and others relatively conservative with regard to the classical tradition. On the radical end of the spectrum we see the weak, pleading, cajoling God of process theism, who, as part of the cosmos himself (or itself?), is incapable of directing history by his power to its appointed end. This God changes along with the world and interacts with it in such a way that God changes the world and the world changes God. Process theologians think that the omnipotence of God must be denied lest God be responsible for evil. For example, Catherine Keller, speaking of what she terms “the contradiction growing in the heart of monotheism,” says, “If the God of justice is to be counted all-powerful, that God must be held accountable for all injustice.”3 The God of the various forms of relational theism cannot prevent evil, but he/it can and does suffer along with the creation. In his dynamic panentheism, for example, Jürgen Moltmann views “the suffering of Christ as the suffering of the passionate God.”4 Divine love is redefined as God’s voluntary suffering along with the creation. This suffering god can thus rightly be said to be, in more than one sense, pathetic.

On the (relatively) conservative end of the spectrum, we see many less-radical proposals, which nevertheless are reacting to the same basic problem of the supposed incompatibility of divine immutability with divine action in history. Brian Davies has coined the term “theistic personalism” to describe those who reject classical theism and view God as a “being among beings,” that is, a person like us only greater, older, wiser, more powerful, and immortal—a sort of disembodied mind similar to Descartes’s conception of himself, only greater than us by degree. Davies cites Richard Swinburne, who defines God as “a person without a body.”5 Swinburne believes that God is within time6 and that the Trinity is a “collective” of three “individuals, whose unity consists in the fact that each of them are members of a genus (kind) named ‘divine.’”7 This “social trinitarianism” was rejected by the pro-Nicene fathers of the fourth century, who were responsible for developing the Nicene doctrine of God, but it is making a big comeback today.8 A slightly less radical proposal, but one that arises from similar concerns, is the open theism of Clark Pinnock and others. In this theology, God waits to see what creatures do and then responds because God has made “a kind of covenant of non-coercion with creatures,” which means that there are “certain metaphysical constraints that God cannot avoid.”9 In open theism the limits on God’s power are seen as self-imposed and voluntary on his part, which makes this view much closer to orthodoxy than process theology. Pinnock calls his view “a species of free will theism” that is in opposition to “the strong immutability central to the Thomistic model.”10 James E. Dolezal discusses a number of conservative Calvinist theologians who have moved in the direction of what he calls “theistic mutualism” in order to meet the objection that an immutable and impassible God is incapable of having a real relationship with us. As an example, he cites Bruce Ware, who Dolezal believes has conceded too much ground in responding to the open theists. Ware, Dolezal argues, concedes the main point that ontological change occurs in the being of God and wishes only to insist that the cause of this change is the sovereign will of God.11 It seems that many conservative evangelical and Reformed theologians feel a great deal of pressure to make similar concessions to relational theism in the current climate.

Relational theism takes many forms, resulting in models of God that vary considerably from each other. But if we look closely, we can see that all of them spring from the same source—namely, the supposed contradiction between the transcendent God of classical theism and the biblical God who speaks and acts in history to judge and to save. In surveying the proposed solutions to the problem, one gets the feeling that some theologians would have difficulty refuting the devasting assessment that they have destroyed God in order to save him. By this I mean that the solution to the problem is worse than the problem itself. Weakening the radical otherness and transcendence of God in order to bring God closer to us and ensure that we have a “real” relationship with him fails in the stated goal of making possible a relationship between the transcendent God and human beings precisely to the extent that, by denying God’s simplicity and immutability, God becomes a being different from what he actually is. Having thus created a god in our own image capable of functioning alongside us within the cosmos, we certainly are capable of having a two-way relationship with him, but we still do not have a relationship with the one true God of the Bible and of historic Christian orthodoxy. It is not with God but with an idol that we now enjoy a relationship. Rather than coming close to the God of the Bible, we have merely become idol-worshipers.

The crucial difference between the classical doctrine of God and modern relational theism has to do with the distinction between God and the world. Both classical theism and relational theism assert that God speaks and acts in history to judge and save. Where they differ is in their respective understandings of the nature of the God who does these things. In the quotation at the head of this chapter, John Webster speaks of how God differs from the world. In classical theism there is a strong emphasis on the otherness of God; God is not seen as an extension of the world in any way, and the world is not seen as an extension of God in any way. The being of the world and the being of God are not continuous but radically different. God alone is creator of all that is not God. This contrasts with all forms of pagan religion and many types of Greek philosophy, in which the being of God and the being of the cosmos are continuous.

One crucial way of expressing this difference has been to speak of God as acting causally on the world while denying that the world acts causally on God. This is because God is creator and the world is creation. The being of the world is contingent on God in a way that the being of God is not contingent on the world. This asymmetrical relationship is crucial to the preservation of God’s uniqueness. Classical theism speaks of God’s aseity, which means that he is self-existent and thus dependent only on his own being. But creation is contingent on God, which means that it is totally dependent on God both for its origin and also for its continuation in existence. In modern relational theism, the simplicity and aseity of God are denied, and God is seen as existing in a relationship to creation similar to the kind of relationship one creature has with another. Quite often as well, God is understood to be in time with us and therefore participating in the ongoing change that characterizes creatures. Characteristic of all relations between creatures is the mutual influence of creatures on each other, resulting in change on both sides. But in God the relation is one way only: God causes and changes creatures, but creatures do not cause or change God. Why not? Because God’s being is unique to himself and unlike our own. When relational theism affirms two-way relations of causality and change between God and creatures, it eliminates the uniqueness of God and brings him down to the level of a creature. The dispute between classical theism and relational theism is not about details or obscure points of metaphysics; at stake is nothing less than the creator-creature distinction. To get this issue wrong is to fall into idolatry.

In this book, I want to explain as simply and clearly as possible how and why this sea change in our understanding of the nature of God occurred and why relational theism is a dead end intellectually, spiritually, and culturally. I want to demonstrate the superiority of the historic, classic, orthodox, Nicene view of God as the true teaching of Holy Scripture. Those who hold to one version or another of the new relational understanding of God view themselves as “progressives” and see their views as surpassing the older understandings of God in much the same way as modern science surpasses primitive superstitions about how the world works. However, from my perspective, something like the opposite actually is true. The modern relational view of God is merely a reversion to the pagan mythology that existed in the world before Abraham; there is nothing progressive about it.

It is the divine self-revelation to Abraham, Moses, David, and the prophets culminating in the coming of Jesus Christ that constitutes the only true progress that has ever been made in the human understanding ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Prologue
• Part One: Defining Trinitarian Classical Theism
• Part Two: The Biblical Roots of Trinitarian Classical Theism
• Part Three: Trinitarian Classical Theism in History
• Epilogue
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index of Scripture
• Index of Persons
• Index of Subjects
• Back Cover