( CANADIAN EVANGELICAL REVIEW  Spring 2003) 

 

Cottret, Bernard; Calvin: A Biography (Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 2000. Translated by M.W. McDonald. Pp xv + 376. $45.99 CAN.)

 

In the final pages of his fine book Cottret asks, “Can one attempt a balanced portrait of Calvin that avoids the two usual ruts of monotonous piety or systematic denigration?” Cottret’s biography proves that one can. Written out of “wonder and exasperation”, his wonder arose at the genius of a thinker who not only authored the single most influential book of the Reformation but who also gave rise to a culture whose imprint can be identified throughout the West. His exasperation arose at the “bigotry of fellow Christians” who appeared eager to adulate Calvin but reluctant to admit his frailties.

A Protestant lay-Christian who preaches occasionally in his local congregation, Cottret is the founding chairperson of the Department of Humanities at Versailles-Saint-Quentin University in France. Awarded a prize for his biography Cromwell, he has also published substantive books on the Huguenots in England and the Political writings of Bolingbroke. Regardless of the topic addressed, however, he brings to all his work the skill for which French historians of modernity have gained their deserved reputation: a grasp of social history that forever keeps before readers the truth that intellectual life never occurs in a vacuum; rather it unfolds in a political, economic, military matrix. This matrix need not eclipse an intellectual revolution that is nothing less than Copernican; still, its bearing upon it cannot be denied, particularly with respect to the assaults, afflictions, and reactions that the makers of history evince. In this regard readers need only to note a fact found in few discussions of the Reformation and of the acerbic voice of its proponents; namely, that France was at war with the Hapsburgs from 1521-26, 1536-38, 1542-44, and 1551-59. All students of Calvin are alert to the significance of 1536 and 1559, the publication dates of the first and final edition of the Institutes. Cottret invariably recalls readers to the manifold turbulence and treachery, even occasional triumph, that are the context in which unforgettable theology is written and from which clay-footed theologians and leaders emerge.

Not surprisingly, then, a major strength of this book is found in the learning, discernment and assessment exemplified in the many excurses that adorn the book. His discussion of Renaissance humanism, for instance, details the influence the Renaissance had in providing at least the “tools” for the Reformation, even as it refuses to reduce the Reformation to an aspect of the

Renaissance. While divergences from the Renaissance ultimately overcame the Reformation’s continuities with it, Cottret admits that “Calvin remained, like so many other Reformers, a prodigal son of humanism.” In this regard Cottret probes thinkers who never fully sided with the Reformation as well as to those who did, noting precisely what humanism could do and what it was never going to do for “reformists” like Erasmus or Lefevre D’Etaples and “Reformers” like Calvin. D’Etaples (1460-1536), for instance, continued to believe that internal reform was possible for the Church whereas Calvin insisted it was not. Still, D’Etaples’ work is significant. He translated the bible into French, therein calling down the Church’s denunciation for maintaining that the three “Marys” (of Bethany, of Magdala, and the sinner) were just that, rather than three descriptions of the one “Magdalene.” Despite D’Etaples’ fine work on scripture, however Cottret correctly cautions us against “‘Protestantizing’ to excess this evangelical, who was devoted to the word of God.” Since he was “closer to the Reformers in his silences than in his words”, Cottret judiciously concludes, “What reason is there to annex him to either camp?”

In the same vein readers are brought up to date through brief expositions of Guillaume Briconnet, Marguerite de Navarre, and Gerard Roussel — not to mention his informative “digression” on the 15^th century translations of the bible into Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Catalan, and Czech, all of which predated the Reformation, and all but one of which resisted it. And no student of Calvin can afford to pass up Cottret’s recapitulation of the history of Geneva, not to mention the nature, function and history of catechisms in the context of Calvin’s 1542 Catechism.

Yet it should not be thought that Cottret’s concern with social history beclouds his theological perception. Reading scripture aright he concurs with Calvin that even the risen, ascended Christ “must be in agony until the end of the world.” Admitting the place of Romans in the genesis and ethos of the Reformation, he maintains that “justification by faith” does not do justice to the theological identity and power of the French Reformation: Hebrews must be acknowledged as no less influential — paramount, in fact — just because Hebrews consistently extols the sole, sufficient sacrifice of Christ, thereby terminating definitively all discussion of merit, indulgences, and the horribilissimum, the sacrifice of the mass. Non-Reformers like Lucien Lefebvre elevated Romans but not Hebrews, and were able thereby to avoid that break with Catholic theology that entailed a break with the Catholic church.

Similar theological insight is evident as Cottret explores Calvin’s writings — major, minor, polemical, pastoral — as they appeared year after year. Probing Calvin’s first theological publication (his first script was a humanist discussion of Seneca’s De Clementia), Cottret concludes that Psychopannychia both aimed at refuting the Anabaptist notion of “soul sleep” and signalled Calvin’s awareness that Plato’s notion of the immortality of the soul and a Christian affirmation of the resurrection were ultimately incommensurable. And of course Cottret admires the architectonic elegance, symmetry and beauty of Calvin’s best-known work. “One enters the Institutes as though into a cathedral…a stone structure built to last.” Perceptively he acknowledges that Calvin exhausted himself through preaching just because preaching was not merely one of many important features of Protestantism but rather was “the very essence of the Reformation.”

Cottret’s masterly historical treatment explodes many myths, one being the oft-parroted pronouncement that Calvin tyrannized Geneva. In fact Calvin had to struggle relentlessly in the city, not least in order to forfend the encroachment of city’s Council upon matters pertaining to the life and discipline of the church. Only after 1555 was Calvin accorded the civic support he had long sought. Similarly dispelled is the notion that Calvin was self-important and craved seeing everything he said appear in print. Calvin knew that the sermon is an aural event, and the printed sermon is therefore (partially) denatured. Still, he bowed to public importuning and allowed his sermons to be published.

At the same time, Cottret’s book raises questions for this reviewer. While Cottret comes close several times to declaring the Christological revolution at the centre of the Reformation, he seems not to grasp that for the Reformers theology is Christology. To be sure, he admits that succeeding editions of the Institutes indicated that Christ was the “heart of the system”, but he does not exploit the Christo-logic that drove the Reformation theologically and rendered it qualitatively different from Catholicism with abuses subtracted and justification by faith added.

Similarly this reviewer is disappointed to find repeated several times over the misunderstanding that Zwingli expounded a “merely symbolic” notion of Holy Communion. Zwingli did not, and Calvin simply misread Zwingli on this matter. Cottret insists throughout that Calvin was never ordained. Admittedly, no record exists of Calvin’s ordination. Yet in light of what Calvin writes about the ordained ministry and the pastoral office, it is surely unreasonable to assume that the chief pastor of Geneva, who deplored the purported ministerial irregularities of the Anabaptists, would live to fulfil the functions of the ministry (“my ministry is dearer to me than life”) yet resist the church’s authorization.

Quoting Bernard of Chartres, “We are dwarfs, perched on the shoulders of giants; that is why we may be able to see farther than they”, Cottret gladly admits that Calvin remains such a giant for him. At the same time, Cottret has shown himself to be anything but a dwarf.

Victor Shepherd Professor of Historical Theology Tyndale Seminary
10 Dec. 02

 

(CANADIAN EVANGELICAL REVIEW Spring 2003)

 The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth (John Webster, ed. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp xiii+312. ISBN: 0 521 58560 0)

 

Already recognized for his studies in Barth, Webster has only confirmed the reputation he gained from his earlier discussions (see his Barth’s Ethics of Reconciliation [1995], Barth’s Moral Theology [1996], and Karl Barth [2000]) in the collection of essays he has introduced and edited.

The book will do much to expose those to whom Barth is unknown with the substance, rigour and significance of his theology. It will also help dispel many of the myths that continue to circulate about him (e.g., that his theology is time-worn and reflects a preoccupation with issues that are obsolete today and may even have been in his era.) At the same time it will enhance conversations that look back to him in order to gain theological weight and look ahead from him in order to engage contemporaneity in his spirit.

As expected, the book treats Barth’s articulation of topics that will always be discussed just because they are the essential “building blocks” of the Christian faith: Trinity, scripture, providence, salvation, among others. In addition, however, it engages issues in light of his theology that more recent developments have rendered unavoidable: feminism, religious pluralism and postmodernity.

Some of the authors whom Webster includes are familiar to those involved in current systematic theology generally or Barth studies particularly: Alan Torrance, Colin Gunton, Bruce McCormack, Trevor Hart, George Hunsinger. Others are lesser known:, William Werpehowski, Katherine Sonderegger, J. Augustine di Noia. The roster is chiefly Protestant but does include several Roman Catholics. (In this regard it is important to note that Hans Urs von Balthasar (d. 1986), the major Roman Catholic commentator on Barth, is deemed throughout the book to be a worthy interpreter.)

While it is widely recognized that Barth opposed the Nazi menace, forfeited his teaching position at the University of Bonn, and was deported to his native Switzerland, many non-Europeans failed at that time to grasp how important Barth was in forming, informing, equipping and encouraging beleaguered pastors, parishioners and leaders amidst the trials of the Reich and its Zeitgeist. Without him the Barmen Declaration would never have appeared; with him hope arose in the wake of the newly-exposed insufficiency of liberal theology, ascendant from Schleiermacher (whose ability, if not his orientation, Barth admired) to World War I. In the wake of Hitler’s defeat English-speaking theology discerned his importance for those he had helped, honoured him by reading him and recognizing his role in the “Biblical Theology” movement of the 1950s and 60s, and then quietly set him aside as the newer voices of Moltmann and Pannenberg were heard, not to mention the more radical cries of Liberation Theology and special interest groups. While the Torrance family seemed almost single-handedly to keep Barth from disappearing entirely in the English-speaking world, Barth’s work began to recover a hearing amidst, for instance, the faculty of theology at King’s College, London. Now it appears that the Swiss thinker’s work is regaining appreciation as magisterial in a way that reflects the recognition rightly accorded the Sixteenth-Century Reformers. Webster’s book can only expand this development as the essays highlight the need constantly to rethink the “faith once for all delivered to the saints” in light of present-day challenges and rearticulate that faith in contemporary thought-forms and vocabulary. Barth, of course, never pretended that he had said the last word, wanting only, like the donkey that assisted Jesus, to be of service to his Lord through the church’s proclamation. At the same time, the content of these essays will leave readers knowing that any theology which ignores Barth’s “word” will always lack the density and resilience needed to help the church out of its current malaise.

In his introductory chapter Webster points out the fact and manner of Barth’s putting theology on a new footing and pointing it in a new direction, adding that “The significance of Barth’s work in his chosen sphere is comparable to that of, say, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Freud, Weber and Saussure in theirs, in that he decisively reorganized an entire discipline.” Webster then identifies crucial points in Barth’s formation: his disillusionment with his liberal teachers who deemed theology to legitimate national self-aggrandizement (his disillusionment ultimately giving rise to the “bombshell” Romans commentary), his work on Anselm with its concern to explicate the understanding of the faith that believers always seek, his confessional orientation wherein he saw that theology didn’t need extra-theological considerations to legitimate it or facilitate it. Here (and in other books) Webster differs from many overviews of Barth, insisting that there wasn’t a “turn” in Barth’s work that neatly divided it into two disparate parts, an earlier “dialectic” and a later “dogmatic.” Instead Webster maintains that there were certainly differences in emphasis, but not in substance: Barth’s dogmatic concerns were evident from the start, while his dialectical style he retained to the end. By way of illustrating his point Webster maintains that the earlier Barth underlined, “How is God God for us?”, and the later Barth, “How is God God for us” as Barth’s work on the covenant came to the fore.

The book concludes with Alasdair Heron’s appreciation, “Karl Barth: A Personal Engagement.” Here he indicates his debt to Barth even as he identifies matters that he thinks need to be addressed: Barth’s non-interaction with natural science in a century when scientific concerns were dominant, Barth’s formal recognition of historical-critical biblical exegesis accompanied by his material non-deployment (virtually) of it, and the proclivity of Barth’s ecclesiology towards individualism and congregationalism.

In between these “book-ends” much is found to inform, edify and delight the careful reader. Christoph Schwoebel’s essay, “Theology,” holds no surprises but faithfully, patiently, and profoundly explores the logic of Barth’s work. Francis Watson, a New Testament scholar from Aberdeen, will startle many with his claim that Barth’s use of scripture aids and abets the recovery of theological exegesis when so much biblical scholarship preoccupies itself with theological vacuity. (Critical minutiae are featured, says Watson, when scripture isn’t understood in terms of the economy of God’s self-utterance and self-bestowal.)

The most startling essay appears to be George Hunsinger’s discussion of Pneumatology. While Barth has frequently been criticized for a preoccupation with Christology whose one-sidedness moves him in the direction of doctrinal scholasticism, Hunsinger defends Barth not weakly by reminding us that Barth died before his Church Dogmatics were completed but aggressively by exposing and exploring the dynamic interconnectedness of Barth’s thought; e.g., “Whereas from the standpoint of reconciliation the work of the Spirit served the work of Christ, from the standpoint of the redemption the work of Christ served the work of the Spirit.” Hunsinger follows this with his essay’s manifesto: “A comprehensive discussion would show that, in Barth’s theology, the saving work of the Spirit is trinitarian in ground, Christocentric in focus, miraculous in operation, communal in content, eschatological in form, diversified in operation, and universal in scope.” He then proceeds to develop most of these themes. If his exposition is correct, the accusation against Barth concerning Pneumatology has to be reconsidered.

Colin Gunton, however, upholds the customary accusation in “Salvation,” the essay that appears to be the sharpest disagreement with Barth in the book: “It is here [i.e., participation in Christ] that we become particularly aware of the relative underweighting of the pneumatological and ecclesial dimensions of Barth’s way of speaking of the appropriation of salvation….It simply cannot say all that a doctrine of the Spirit is supposed to say.” Gunton goes on to fault Barth for collapsing Christ’s ascension into his resurrection, for expounding Christ “as a kind of Platonic form of humanity” so that salvation is already achieved and people need only to be informed of it, for restricting the scope of salvation to humans, for understanding the priesthood of Christ in terms on his divinity but not his humanity.

The essay that will do most to vindicate Barth through correcting a misapprehension (especially among North Americans) is Wolf Kroetke’s “The Humanity of the Human Person in Karl Barth’s Anthropology” wherein he highlights Barth’s understanding of the human not in terms of the natural or the religious or the cultural but simply that partner whom God wills not to be without and therefore cherishes eternally.

At his eightieth birthday celebration Barth remarked, “As a theologian one can never be great, but at best one remains small in one’s own way.” In the upside-down (better, capsized-but-righted) world of the Kingdom, the small are rendered great. Webster’s book will find the reader assenting to this gospel paradox concerning the man commonly regarded as the greatest theologian since the Reformation.

Victor Shepherd, Tyndale Seminary, Toronto.

 

(University of Toronto Quarterly,  Vol.72:1, Winter 2002-03)

 

George Emery. The Methodist Church on the Prairies, 1896-1914 McGill-Queen’s UP xxi, 260

Emery, professor of history at the University of Western Ontario, supplies a scholarly monograph discussing prairie church history in the era of the Laurier settlement boom. Its approach differs from that of John Webster Grant’s The Church in the Canadian Era (1967) and Neil Semple’s The Lord’s Dominion (1992.) Grant’s overview does not feature the magnification of prairie developments in the decade-and-a-half that Emery deems crucial, while Semple’s assessment of Methodist history from the standpoint of the socio-economic privilege and power of central Canada is considered inaccurate. The book focuses on the history of a particular Christian institution (The Methodist Church in Canada, arising from the union of several Methodist bodies in 1874 and 1884), rather than on non-institutional religious history. It prosecutes social history informed through rigorous deployment of quantitative evidence. It traces the shift from an earlier Methodist preoccupation in the west with aboriginal peoples to the concern for Caucasians as the lure of “grain gold” (wheat) saw vast migrations into the prairie provinces from the Maritimes, central Canada, Britain, continental Europe, and the U.S.A.

While owning the Wesleyan root in Canadian Methodism, Emery maintains nonetheless that the Canadian expression, especially on the prairies, evolved as novel and therefore unforeseeable developments required extraordinary flexibility and adaptability. The missioners faced formidable challenges. Prairie hardship, for instance, required men mobile and young enough to be bachelors (bachelors were five times as numerous proportionately in the adult population over twenty as they were in Ontario) when bachelors in east or west were utterly uninterested in the church. The non-Anglo-Saxon people, the “tired and poor” of eastern Europe, lacked the sophistication of North Americans. (Ninety per cent of Alberta’s Ukrainians, for instance, were illiterate, and often regarded schooling as a frill.) Prairie cities, the largest by far of which was Winnipeg, discovered that urban existence chilled concern for the Creator even as it spawned wretched slums. Such challenges, however, merely fanned the enthusiasm of spokespersons such as the principal of Alberta College (Methodist) who predicted a population of fifty million for the North Saskatchewan Valley.

Emery acquaints the reader with the tensions inherent in a denomination when clergy had to be male while women were found disproportionately in church services, when educational standards for ordination were not relaxed even as the west was desperate for clergy, when Methodism was the single largest Protestant denomination in Canada while the majority of Ontarians who claimed Methodist affiliation were never found at worship, when prairie church leaders were divided over whether it was in their interests to have power-wielding boards located in Toronto.

Emery’s macro-investigation of the Church on the prairies is balanced by his micro-approach to Methodism’s two major undertakings: the All Peoples Mission in Winnipeg and the Star Colony of Ukrainians northeast of Edmonton. The Winnipeg mission began with Slavic people but developed quickly into a multi-ethnic outreach. Its first superintendent, James S. Woodsworth, scorned the faith of the church catholic even as scores of workers under him did not. The Ukrainians, meanwhile, preferring the subsistence farming of the old country to incipient agribusiness, forsook prairie grasslands for the forested park-belt northeast of Edmonton. Missioners here laboured indefatigably, not least in providing medical services and schooling for children. Most of the women Methodists were graduates of Victoria College, University of Toronto; Edith Weekes, who pioneered a Ukrainian-English dictionary, had been awarded the gold medal in modern languages at Victoria.
Throughout his treatment Emery recognizes that human beings are endlessly complex. His social history is commensurately nuanced and unfailingly sensitive to wounds and wonders that may puzzle yet perdure. Eschewing both sycophantic hagiography and contemptuous superiority concerning those whose work he assesses, he recognizes Methodist missioners to have done their best with the equipment they had, and all of this amidst hardships so severe, for instance, that the clergy drop-out rate was three times higher in the west than in central Canada.

Emery’s social history includes, perforce, discussions of Methodist popular religious expression. He does not attempt an exploration of the academic Methodist theology ascendant at this point in Canada’s history. That work would complement his book and fill a lacuna in Canadian intellectual history.

(VICTOR SHEPHERD)

 

(book review to be published in the Fall 2002 issue of
CANADIAN EVANGELICAL REVIEW.)

The Promise of Trinitarian Theology: Theologians in Dialogue with T.F. Torrance (Elmer M. Colyer, ed. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001. Pp. xi+355. ISBN 0 7425 1293 2

 

Colyer’s third book on Torrance (following How to Read T.F. Torrance: Understanding His Trinitarian & Scientific Theology and The Nature of Doctrine in T.F. Torrance’s Theology) is a collection of essays by eight American scholars, two British, and one of British extraction (Alasdair Heron, for many years now professor of Reformed theology at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.)

The purpose of the book is multiform: to provide an introduction to Torrance and his theology; to acquaint readers with Torrance’s career, publications, and the secondary literature he has precipitated; to provide a comprehensive analysis and evaluation of Torrance’s theology; to be a theological event itself through engaging a major thinker of the twentieth century; to assist theologians and natural scientists in their common membership in realist-determined disciplines; to provide resources for historians and historical theologians concerned with Scottish, ecumenical or Reformed theology; to trace the appropriation of Karl Barth’s theology in the English-speaking world.

David Torrance, a younger brother, opens the discussion by acquainting the reader with the influences that helped mould Torrance’s faith, character and missionary zeal as a minister of the gospel. Born to Scottish missionaries in China, Torrance remained throughout his life sensitive to the difficulties surrounding the prosecution of the gospel there, visiting the country several times following retirement. Although an academic theologian throughout most of his working life (he was a pastor for ten years before his appointment to Edinburgh), Torrance thrived on his vocation to the ministry and his commission as missionary to a world whose mind-set was dominated by the natural sciences. This chapter is crucial if Torrance is to be repatriated with those from whom he is currently alienated, for the public image of Torrance is that he is an intellectually reclusive theoretician with no interest in the turbulence of people’s everyday lives, a one-sided cerebralist who, despite his oft-proffered disclaimer, seems to substitute doctrinal refinement for the one to whom it points, an abstract thinker who has never faced concrete danger. Torrance’s wartime decoration (the MBE for bravery) contradicts the lattermost point, while David’s disclosure of the sheer humanness, pastoral concern, and warm heart of Torrance evaporates remaining criticisms.

Alasdair Heron comments on Torrance’s relation to Reformed theology, correctly pointing out that while Torrance cherishes the sixteenth century Reformers he does not follow them slavishly, and wholly distances himself from seventeenth century Reformed scholasticism with its Aristotelian underlay, its notion of limited atonement, its schematizing distortions, and its doctrine of predestination (all of which, Torrance laments, adversely affected Scottish Church life.)

Andrew Purves highlights Torrance’s characteristic use of the homoousion, especially his identification of its epistemological and soteriological significance (as well as deployment of this significance), the relation of incarnation to atonement, and the twofold mediation of Christ (humanward and Godward.)

Gary Deddo provides the only published discussion of Torrance’s doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Here he dispels the myth that Torrance is a crypto rationalist in Reformed disguise. Deddo speaks of the Spirit’s place in the intra-Trinitarian relations as well as in the triune God’s relation to the world. Concerning the former it is apparent that the being of God, for Torrance, has to be “onto-relationality.” Concerning the latter it is evident that according to Torrance Holy Spirit entails the sovereign lordship of God over the creation, thereby forestalling any confusion between Holy Spirit and human spirit, experiences, or subjectivity — even as Spirit ad extra is God most profoundly relating himself to the specifically human.

Colin Gunton explores Torrance’s doctrine of God, drawing attention to three major items. The first is the triune economy where Torrance insists on the homoousion of the Spirit, apart from which there would be an epistemological hiatus between God’s economic action and God’s eternal being. The second is the eternal trinity. Here Gunton describes Torrance’s use of the Cappodocian Fathers, preferring Gregory of Nazianzus to Gregory of Nyssa and Basil of Caesarea inasmuch as the latter two have about them a trace of Origenist subordination. The third is the help Torrance has rendered to the churches of the east and the west by insisting that the Spirit proceeds from the Father’s being, not merely the Father’s person, rending the question of procession “‘from the Father and the Son’ or ‘from the Father through the Son” superfluous, and thereby undercutting the filioque standoff. (It might be noted that while Torrance is gracious and irenic as he responds to contributors in turn, he is uncharacteristically sharp in his reply to Gunton. Repeatedly he says, for instance, “Gunton’s faulty contrast at this point…”; “I wonder whether Gunton is aware…”; and “Prof. Gunton gives little attention to the way in which I have sought to clarify the issues involved….”)

George Hunsinger investigates Torrance’s approach to the sacraments, noting that the vicarious humanity of Christ is the central element in Torrance’s understanding of baptism and the key to his view of the Eucharist. The priesthood of the incarnate Son is the “hinge” as Christ both gives himself to us perpetually in the Eucharist and offers us eternally to the Father. Hunsinger praises Torrance for his improvement on the sacramental positions of both Calvin and Barth. Since Torrance’s reply to Hunsinger is the briefest in the book, it would appear that Torrance has little to add to what Hunsinger has said on his behalf.

Ray Anderson plumbs Torrance as practical theologian, insisting that Torrance’s reputation as practically irrelevant is groundless. Insisting rather that Torrance is “a practical theologian par excellence” on account of the latter’s love for and assistance to the multidimensional praxis of the Church, Anderson also draws attention to Torrance’s rich experience of Christ and his readiness to speak of it. Evangelicals will note that when Anderson concludes his chapter by asking Torrance if he wouldn’t ordain homosexual persons in light of the “new humanity” of Christ that permits the ordination of women, Torrance unambiguously replies that homosexual activity is sin and therefore must be repented of and forsaken.

Kurt Richardson advances a thesis concerning the mystical apprehension of God in the context of revelation and scripture. While Richardson qualifies “mystical” so as to accommodate Torrance on this topic, Torrance is gentle yet firm in his disagreement: “Dr. Richardson seems to presuppose the very notion of mysticism or the mystical which I set aside. What I am concerned with is humility before God, not with some special or esoteric way of thinking.”

Elmer Colyer reviews Torrance’s juxtaposition of “science” and “theology”, reflected most pointedly in the award-winning book, Theological Science. Here Colyer reminds the reader of Torrance’s insistence that any discipline is wissenschaftlich when the specific subject matter governs how we know it, how we think about it, and how we formulate knowledge of it in accordance with its nature and reality. Torrance claims no novelty here, gladly acknowledging his debt to the Alexandrian theologians, especially the sixth century John Philoponos.

The final two chapters examine closely the relationship of Torrance’s thought to that of natural scientists, particularly Albert Einstein. Christopher Kaiser, holding a doctorate in astrophysics, compares Torrance and Einstein on the intelligibility of the cosmos and its correspondence with the structures of human rationality. Mark Achtemeier notes the places where Torrance charts the relationship of theology to science, and concludes by comparing Nicene Christology’s dissonance with Newtonian science and Nicene Christology’s vindication in the newer (Einsteinian) science. In his comments Torrance acknowledges his debt to James Clerk Maxwell’s earlier work in electromagnetism and force fields, even as Einstein admitted Maxwell to underlie his notion of relativity.

Despite having published several volumes on the doctrine of God and despite his scholarship in Reformation theology, Torrance was never allowed to lecture on the doctrine of God at New College, Edinburgh, and upon his retirement was succeeded by a Roman Catholic. Thanks to Colyer’s indefatigable work in the United States, however, Torrance may have found, in the twilight years of his life, an appreciation seemingly denied him in his native Scotland.

Victor Shepherd, Tyndale Seminary

 

(book review to be published in the Canadian Evangelical Review)

A Scientific Theology, Volume I: Nature (Alister E. McGrath. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001. Pp. xx + 325. ISBN: 0 0028 3925 8

 

McGrath established his reputation two decades ago with Iustitia Dei, his landmark study of justification. Subsequently he published much on Reformation themes, then attempted popularizing (e.g., Studies in Doctrine), and now appears to have returned to what seems to be his métier: rigorous reflection that comprehends his twin areas of expertise, historical/systematic theology and natural science. Readers of McGrath’s recent T.F. Torrance: An Intellectual Biography (1999) will recognize in A Scientific Theology his debt to Torrance’s notion of “theological science” (which McGrath prefers to call “scientific theology”), as well as the fruit his immersion in Torrance has borne and promises to bear yet.

While working towards his Oxford doctorate in molecular biology McGrath found himself “commissioned” to explore the relation between Christian theology and natural science, in conversation with history and philosophy. The subordination is crucial for his agenda. He advances natural science as the fitting ancilla or “maidservant” of theology in that science and theology alike are intrinsically realist. Both are “scientific” in the sense of the German wissenschaftlich; i.e., the method of investigating any subject is mandated by the essence and structure of the subject under discussion. Both attempt to give an ordered account of a reality that lies beyond them. Philosophy, on the other hand, has customarily brought to theology metaphysical presuppositions and implicates that have controlled the theological enterprise, effectively denaturing it. History, on the other hand, can be allowed to “converse with” theology but ought not to be its ancilla in that history lacks the realist base found in natural science. In addition, in the hands of social scientists, history becomes historicist; the social sciences move illegitimately from the truism that all knowledge is historically located to the totalitarianism that all knowledge is historically determined. In this regard the social sciences are committed to a naturalist worldview in which theology is disdained; natural scientists, however, more profoundly (and more humbly) recognize the boundaries of their discipline, pronouncing no a priori disqualification.

McGrath has subtitled Volume I Nature. He insists that “nature” isn’t synonymous with “the universe” or “the created order,” in that “nature” is a socially mediated concept, highly interpreted. (One need only think of depictions of nature that vary from “moral educator” to “book of God” to “red in tooth and claw” where only the fittest survive to a “machine” akin to those of the industrial era.) Volume II, Reality, will be a critique of non-realist positions in theology, together with an examination of why theology must be an a posteriori, non-Idealist, discipline in its account of reality. Volume III, Theory, will address parallels between theological doctrines and scientific theories.

In the book’s first chapter, “The Legitimacy of A Scientific Theology,” McGrath maintains that since the Word or logos that became incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth is the ground of creation, the selfsame logos or rationality must be embedded in the creation, thereby giving rise to that intelligibility inhering the contingent realm which renders science possible. Foundational to McGrath’s programme, then, is his conviction that the doctrine of creation grounds the necessity (not merely the legitimacy) of a positive working relationship between Christian theology and natural science. McGrath’s convictions here contrast his critique of process theology’s provincialism, the latter being “a transitory phase in the development of Protestant English-language theology after the Second World War.” Utterly damning, from McGrath’s standpoint, is the fact that while process theology “may be of interest to some, it is implausible to most, especially in the intellectually hard-nosed scientific community.” In other words, process theology is useless in view of McGrath’s exploration of the methodological parallels between Christian theology (which for him entails the Chalcedonian definition of Christ) and natural science.

While upholding genuine science McGrath always remains aware of the danger of an ersatz “scientism.” He recognizes scientific conclusions to be provisional. What is crucial for theology isn’t the ever-shifting “conclusions” but rather the constant methods and assumptions by which scientific investigation proceeds. For this reason theology must always be engaged with science but must never ground itself in science. The church must revisit Scripture continually in order to ensure that scientific assumptions of earlier eras haven’t been incorporated into the teaching of the church.

Returning to his critique of “nature” McGrath maintains that the notion is helpful only if it is given ontological foundation by the Christian doctrine of creation. Naturalists, unaware of the social construction of “nature,” paradoxically remain unaware that “nature” isn’t natural, and therefore remain unaware that the notion is virtually useless in critical intellectual discourse. While deconstructionists have readily pointed out the mere construct, they are unable to deconstruct the natural sciences, since these are inherently impervious to the postmodern agenda.

Having exposed “nature” McGrath proceeds to probe the Christian doctrine of creation. He distinguishes among the understandings of creation found in Genesis (the creaturely is ontologically distinct from the divine), the Prophets (creation is an aspect of God’s lordship of history, therein attesting the subjugation of chaos and the imposition of order), and the Writings (patterns may be discerned in the creaturely realm, which discernment profits the wise.) In turn the New Testament yields the notion of creation ex nihilo, its twofold significance being an affirmation of the Christological determination of the creation and a negation of the world’s eternity and also of Gnostic dualism. Thanks to its having been fashioned at the hand of God, the creation possesses a goodness, a rationality and an orderedness, all of which are essential if scientific probing of contingent being is to occur. In other words, science flourishes in a world understood from the perspective of the gospel.

“Implications of a Doctrine of Creation”, the second last chapter, discusses principally the negative effect of the Fall on God’s knowability, the inversion of Feuerbach’s notion that because we long for God thereforeGod can be no more than human projection, and the role of mathematics as the “language” of the universe.

All of these are germane to McGrath’s final chapter, “The Purpose and Place of Natural Theology.” Following Torrance’s essay, “The Problem of Natural Theology in the Thought of Karl Barth,” McGrath deems illegitimate any natural theology that is a rival of revealed theology or an alternative to it. Agreeing with Torrance and Barth in all respects here he concludes that natural theology “lacks the epistemic autonomy required to permit it to be, or become, a theological resource in its own right.” He agrees with Barth that natural theology is ineradicable, and with Torrance that it is fitting as long as operates within the knowledge of God that grace-wrought faith alone yields. Admitting that natural theology’s conclusion of “Being-in-general” pales alongside the gospel’s disclosure of God as Father, Son and Spirit consubstantially, McGrath insists vigorously that a natural theology that “knows its place” (i.e., resists legitimating humankind’s craving for self-justification and domestication of the gospel) has a crucial role in demonstrating the consonance between revelation and the structures of the world. In light of his accomplishments in both natural science and theology, McGrath’s purpose in preparing this book (along with the two subsequent volumes) looms hugely in the last few pages of the book: “The recovery of a properly configured natural theology can serve as the basis for a critical theological engagement with both the world and the sciences which seek to give an account of it.”

Is this the role of such a reconfigured natural theology? Will it function as a bridge helping to end the isolation of faculties of theology? Is McGrath’s seemingly uncritical, end-of-book co-opting of Wolfhart Pannenberg in the service of his agenda aware of the reservations other theologians have expressed concerning Pannenberg? Need natural science exclude philosophy from philosophy’s customary conversation with theology?

Perhaps we should await the appearance of Volumes II and III before making an assessment. Notwithstanding what he proposes concerning the role of natural theology, McGrath’s book thoroughly acquaints readers with “scientific theology” in the context of creation.

Victor Shepherd, Tyndale Seminary

 

Law and Gospel: Philip Melanchthon’s Debate with John Agricola of Eisleben over Poenitentia.

(Timothy J. Wengert. Grand Rapids: Baker Books,1997. Paperback Pp.231)

 

Martin Luther maintained that whether or not one is a theologian is announced by whether or not one can profoundly distinguish law and gospel. In a book that evinces a perceptive reading of history, expertise in the subtleties of Reformation theology, and an ability to discern precisely where and why the gospel may be at risk, Wengert acquaints readers with the relation of law to gospel in two of Luther’s theological sons. He probes chiefly Melanchthon’s commentary on Colossians (in its three editions of 1527, 1528 and 1534), noting the subtle changes Melanchthon made as he interacted with theological publications and correspondence generated by developments in church, princedom and empire. The controversy — is poenitentia to be associated with law (Melanchthon) or with gospel (Agricola) — was the occasion of the first assault Melanchthon sustained from within the Wittenberg “family.” The outcome was plain: Lutheran theology deemed Melanchthon’s conclusions normative, and thereafter repudiated Agricola’s position as sub-evangelical in that it failed to honour a crucial aspect of the Word.

Wengert leaves untranslated both poenitentia and its German equivalent, Busse, on the grounds that the word can mean “repentance,” “penitence” or “penance” (the verbal form poenitentiam agite or tut Busse yielding “repent,” “be penitent” or “do penance”), the nuances here having everything to do with the controversy then and the reader’s assessment of the matter now.

It is in light of the above that each disputant’s characteristic dread must be understood. Melanchthon feared lawlessness and a faith that substituted one’s inner comfort and security for trust in God’s forgiveness through Christ’s sacrifice extra nos; Agricola feared a return to the rules and regulations of Rome. In this regard Agricola eliminated all consideration of law from the Christian life, denouncing Francis, Dominic, Bernard, the Fathers who upheld good works, and even the Council of Nicaea. Deploying an inaccurate (because non-Biblical) analogy, he maintained that faith can live without works just as the soul can live without the body. Christians, needing no law, travel a Mittelstrassen, free from good and evil works alike. Evil works do not deny their righteousness; good works do not attest it. Since the law’s accusation leads only to resentment and anger, never to confession and faith, the gospel alone highlights sin, magnifies grace and induces poenitentia. Christians are free from the law without qualification.

Unlike other Wittenberg theologians, Agricola began not with the distinction between law and gospel but with the Christian’s self-understanding: we are born children of Adam and therefore of wrath; by the promise of Abraham (i.e., the gospel) we are brought forth children of God. God gave the law to render us aware that he is not unmindful of us. When sinners hear the law, however, they are so thoroughly terrified that they attempt to divest themselves of its yoke even as they blame God for their predicament. Largely ignoring Melanchthon’s insistence on the first “use” of the law (to restrain civil disorder), and disagreeing with Melanchthon’s second (to direct the conscience-smitten to Christ), Agricola maintained that law-engendered terror simply drives people away from Christ. Only the gospel promises (including those found in the Old Testament) induce poenitentia. Poenitentia is therefore a mark of faith, not a mark of the person in the process of coming to faith.

As early as 1521 in his Loci Communes and 1525 in his commentary on Exodus Melanchthon had insisted the law to be essential: apart from it we lack necessary knowledge of our sinnership before God, are not impelled to seek help in God’s mercy, and cannot even truly hear the gospel. Agricola replied that humans have an aversion to anything that pains; the law can therefore arouse only hatred of it and of the law-giver himself, never yielding the slightest knowledge of sin.

The controversy, now at full flood, found its way into a plethora of catechetical materials. From 1522 to 1529 Wittenberg saw the production of sixty-two printings of thirteen different instructional booklets. Melanchthon, a prolific contributor, argued that the law-aroused conscience pleases God in that God never fails or forsakes any whom his law has terrified. Agricola replied in an idiosyncratic reading of Colossians 2: Paul says that Christians are to come to a knowledge of God’s great secret, Christ himself, and not be seduced by the face of an angel, pretty words, philosophy — or even God’s laws. Colossian 1:3-8, believers’ necessary fruit-bearing, he simply explained away.

The raging debate was taken up into the Visitation Articles of 1527 when all evangelical pastors were examined concerning their theological understanding; it became the substance of the two conferences in Torgau Castle in autumn of the same year. In it all Agricola insisted that God should be loved for his own sake and not as a provider of refuge. Melanchthon agreed, yet insisted that sinners before the holy God need a refuge; furthermore, since the “old” creature dogs even the “new” creature in Christ, sinners continue to need the law on their way to loving God for his own sake.

As the dispute over the law intensified Melanchthon came to see that his understanding of forensic justification required a third use of the law (his “third use” being subsequently taken up and elaborated hugely in the thought of Calvin and the Puritans after Calvin.) Believers whom the law has directed to Christ are not justified by the law but continue to need the law as the vehicle of their obedience on account of the imperfection that remains in them. From 1534, then, Melanchthon articulated that use of the law which forestalled the facile criticism that the Protestant Reformers, espousing forensic justification, eschewed good works. Believers’ good works please God in that God honours the aspiration wherewith believers express their desire to obey him and their gratitude to him. Unquestionably Agricola’s consistent undervaluation of the Decalogue stimulated Melanchthon in his articulation of the relation of law both to the inception of faith and to the expression of faith.

In view of Karl Barth’s “Gospel/Law” reversal of Lutheranism’s “Law/Gospel” and current Lutherans’ continuing disagreement with him, not to mention a contemporary Christianity seemingly devoid of ethical rigour, the dispute that Wengert’s exemplary research and lucid explication illuminates is as germane today as it was contentious in the Sixteenth Century. Melanchthon’s uncompromising “Where there is no fear there is no faith” needs to be pondered as the relation of fear to faith is probed in every era.

 

 

Victor Shepherd Tyndale Seminary

 

(This book review will appear in the Canadian Evangelical Review, Spring 2001)

The Binding of God: Calvin’s Role in the Development of Covenant Theology by Peter A. Lillback. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2001. Paperback Pp.331.

 

This book is the latest in a series (of seven so far), “Texts and Studies in Reformation and Post-Reformation Thought.” According to editor Richard Muller (Calvin Theological Seminary) the series aims at filling in gaps in our knowledge of the intellectual development of Protestantism in the sixteenth century and at addressing myths concerning Protestant orthodoxy of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Lillback affirms his book to be the first to provide a taxonomy of assorted views of Calvin’s covenant theology, and the first to provide a complete summation of it. He probes the role of the covenant in Calvin’s theology with a view to assessing the extent to which Calvin’s thought in this regard underlies the preoccupation with the covenant found in later Protestant Scholasticism and the latter’s characteristic use of it. His conclusion is that “Calvin’s hemeneutical application of the covenant is central to his entire system.” As expected, Lillback upholds substantial continuity between Reformers and Protestant Scholastics and disagrees most strongly with Calvin scholars (e.g., T.F. Torrance) who find Scholastic thought a declension from the Genevan’s.

Lillback divides his book into two major sections: “The Genesis of Covenant Teaching: The Conception of the Covenant in Calvin’s Historical Context” and “The Genius of Calvin’s Covenant Thought.”

In the first section Lillback discusses mediaeval covenant motifs, contrasting the stream of Augustine and Staupitz (the Reformed Augustinian Superior whose advice, “Contemplate the wounds of Christ”, enlightened a young Luther perplexed over predestination) with those of the Gabriel Biel’s nominalism and Tauler’s mysticism. While the Augustinians repudiated the notion of merit, the nominalists deployed it thoroughly in their finessing of “congruent” and “condign” with respect to the covenant, even as the mystics insisted on a “natural covenant” that presupposed an ontological structure to humankind which gave it an inalienable spiritual connection to its Creator and a natural capacity to turn to God.

The early Luther’s search for a gracious God edged him away from a merit scheme, and by 1517 the Wittenberger had shed all mediaeval vestige of the covenant as binding God to reward humankind for its having prepared for grace. Luther’s characteristic notion followed immediately: God’s saving promise as the core of the covenant rather than human responsbility. Luther’s conviction here underlies his bifurcation of law and gospel, the covenant pertaining to the latter alone: “alien” righteousness is God’s gift as promised to believers, law lacking any intrinsic relation to the gospel.

As the Reformation gained force in Switzerland the Reformed there, like Oecolampadius, maintained that Christians are found in the same covenant as Israel. Zwingli too insisted on the continuity of the covenants throughout scripture, establishing therein the Reformed conviction that infant baptism is rooted in, and is to be understood in light of, Israel’s practice of circumcision. Zwingli maintained that the ordinances do not confirm faith (nothing external can do this) but instead signify the covenant. Lillback sees Zwingli’s struggle with the Anabaptists and the latter’s denial of covenant-continuity as a watershed: the inception of covenant consciousness in Reformed thought.
In 1527 Bullinger, another Swiss Reformer, penned the first study of the covenant to be produced in the church. It affirmed the covenant to be the “chief point of religion.” All of scripture is to be referred to Genesis 17 (God’s covenant with Abram.) At this point there appeared what has never disappeared from Reformed thought, the conviction that there is ultimately one covenant only that God has forged with Abraham and his Christian descendants, “old” and “new” pertaining merely to modes of administration. In the same vein Calvin’s use of the covenant permeates his discussion of all theological topics, even as Lillback admits that the covenant doesn’t provide the organizational structure for the Institutes.

For Calvin the essence of covenant is the mutual binding of God and people. With respect to God the covenant is unconditional; with respect to the people, conditional upon their obedience. The Abrahamic covenant, operative today, distinguishes believers from unbelievers. Jesus Christ is its “heart”, while justification and sanctification are its two “great benefits.”

Certain to prove controversial, concerning the obedience of believers, is Lillback’s discussion of the form of “works” righteousness that he says appears in Calvin. Calvin scholars have long noted the concept of “double justification” in Calvin whereby believers together with their sin-riddled works are acceptable to God only insofar as grace justifies both them and what they offer. Lillback speaks at length of a “works” righteousness that stands before God, albeit as a “subordinate” righteousness to justification. Here he affirms a contradiction between Calvin and Luther, since the latter “could not see any righteousness in any human action before a holy God.” In the same way Lillback’s pronouncement, “Luther’s understanding of justification by faith alone had no room for inherent righteousness while Calvin’s view required it as an inseparable but subordinate righteousness”, will provoke discussion among Reformation scholars.

Lillback’s discussion of Calvin’s use of the Scholastics’ “Covenant of Acceptance” will prove no less controversial. He maintains that both Calvin and mediaeval scholastics agree that good works are acceptable to God only by a covenant; they disagree insofar as the scholastics understand works to be covenant-graced so as to merit salvation. Lillback adds, “Calvin admits that he is indebted to them.” Again, many Reformation scholars will ask if Calvin didn’t repudiate them.

Lillback expounds with approval elements in Calvin that other scholars find tangential, contradictory, or “surd.” One such is the distinction between the scope of covenant and election, the former being wider than the latter. He maintains that covenant is the means whereby God administers salvation, whereas only the elect are saved. “General election” or covenant, the same as “common adoption”, must be ratified by “special election” before anyone is rendered a beneficiary. Again, what Lillback uncritically expounds, other Calvin scholars have found to be highly problematic.

The question of whether there is a covenant of works in Calvin’s theology is a major consideration in the book. Lillback admits that Calvin never used the expression; this is not to deny he used the concept. Still, Lillback’s thesis here appears less substantial as he argues that there are concepts in the Institutes that are “conducive” to the notion of a pre-fall covenant, which covenant “appears warranted” to be called a covenant of works, since this is how it “functions.” He admits Calvin’s exposition here to be merely “rudimentary and inchoative”, yet it “seems in certain ways to adumbrate the covenant of works of the federalists.”

Readers may suspect special pleading here, particularly when Lillback deploys arguments of “lesser and greater grace” in Calvin to distinguish between a prelapsarian covenant and the covenant of law, and then concludes sweepingly that “Calvin’s system can be presented as a series of lessers to greaters.”

There remains another reading of Calvin. When Lillback, for instance, insists that for Calvin the covenant “contains” Christ and has Christ as its “foundation”, readers will want to ask whether Christ illustrates and/or instantiates a covenant lying behind him or is himself the covenant. Would not Calvin’s Christology, particularly his understanding of the Mediator, entail as much? Did not Oecolampadius imply this when he insisted that God first makes a covenant with Christ, which covenant God fulfills for his people in Christ?

Lillback’s book does much to advance the conversation among those who uphold either convergence or divergence with respect to Calvin and post-Calvin Scholasticism. The conversation, however, has by no means been concluded.

Victor Shepherd    November 2001

 

Elmer M. Colyer. How To Read T.F.Torrance: Understanding his Trinitarian & Scientific Theology. Downers Grove , IL : InterVarsity Press, 2001. Pp 393. Paper, n.p. ISBN 0-8308-1544-6.

 

This book is a comprehensive discussion of the work of a Scottish theologian whose output has been prodigious and profound. Thomas Torrance has long been recognized a seminal thinker in the Reformed tradition and the most important English-speaking theologian of the past fifty years.   Influenced particularly by Athanasius, Calvin and Barth, Torrance has yet eschewed becoming a clone of any of them and instead has forged a re-articulation of Protestant theology that has remained in constant dialogue with those whom Protestant theology has largely ignored (e.g., the Nicene Fathers), as well as with those with whom few theologians are able to converse: leading physicists. (In recognition of his competence Torrance has been admitted to several learned scientific societies.)

Introduced to Torrance as an undergraduate, and having wrestled with him for decades, Colyer assists both the new reader who needs an overview of the Torrance corpus as well as the experienced reader who wants an index to it. He displays a mastery (but not a domestication) that encourages readers to explore Torrance themselves, guides them through the focus and argument of thirty-plus books and three hundred articles, expounds in detail the major themes of his work, and provides a lexical aid to words and expressions that recur characteristically.

Colyer prefaces his exposition with a twenty-page biographical overview, noting the significance of Torrance’s early years with his missionary parents in China, his multi-faceted education, his military experience (including his decorations for service at the front in World War II), his academic achievements, publications and recognitions, and finally his preoccupation with the mission of the church and with the tenor of his work in light of his vocation as “theological evangelist.”

Recognizing the architectonic that the doctrine of the Trinity provides for all of Torrance’s work, Colyer apportions his book into four, equal-length sections: “The Grace of the Lord Jesus Christ” (the discussion here including the mediation of Christ — the title of Torrance’s most widely-read book), “The Love of God the Father” (with an exploration of contingent being and its relation to the Creator), “The Communion of the Holy Spirit” (including a protracted comment on the church and its ordained ministry), and by way of integration and summation, “The Triunity of God & the Character of Theology.” (This lattermost section discusses such philosophers and scientists as Descartes, Hume, Kant, and Newton , Einstein, Polanyi.)

The book accurately and adequately treats the features of Torrance ‘s thought that readers have found illuminating on account of Torrance ‘s angle of vision and his “theological instinct.” The homoousion is pre-eminent among these because foundational of all else. Colyer concurs in Torrance ‘s pronouncement that this is “the ontological and epistemological linchpin of Christian theology.” Since the Father and the Son are of the same nature, Jesus Christ is the revelation of God and not merely a revelation of a truth concerning God or an aspect of God. In the same way, because the Spirit possesses the same nature as the Father (and the Son), we are united to God by God himself: nothing besides God can unite us to God.

Torrance ‘s absorption with the homoousion, of course, is one with his absorption with the doctrine of the Trinity, “the ground and grammar” of Christian thought, faith and discipleship. Here the exposition is exceedingly fruitful as the implications of the “onto-relations” in God are identified: what God is in himself he is toward us, and vice versa, there being no dark, arbitrary recesses in God; human knowledge of God can only be a predicate of God’s self-knowing; love is what God is (not merely what God expresses), since the eternal love of the Father for the Son and the Son for the Father renders unnecessary something other than God (the creation) for God to love; the Holy Spirit is that “objective inwardness” which forestalls the “evangelical rationalism” that is otherwise prone to arise as a rationalistic apologetic, rather than the action of God, is thought to render the gospel credible; the economic Trinity must be grounded in the ontological Trinity lest God’s acts fail to include God’s person.

The vicarious humanity of Christ is related to both the above, and is shown to ground the church and to contradict the specific distortion of the “Latin heresy” and the illogic of limited atonement.

Other characteristic aspects of Torrance ‘s work stand out. Among these is the aversion to all theological speculation concerning what God can do or cannot do in the light of what God has done: given himself up to humiliation, suffering, degradation and death in the Son — all of which means that the doctrine of God’s sovereignty, for instance, must be understood as the efficacy of the cross rather than as the capacity to coerce. Natural theology is exposed as the improper attempt at attaining a knowledge of God from a point outside God, thereby rendering the human the measure of the divine. Included here too is Torrance’s willingness to speak of a genuine novum in God’s life, since both the Incarnation and the creation of the world are nova for God, and as such force a reconsideration of such traditional notions as God’s impassivity and impassibility. Colyer succinctly acquaints the reader with the emphasis Torrance has always placed on theology as scientific, “scientific” being properly predicated of any discipline whose methodology is governed by the nature of the object it investigates.

Colyer’s presentation of the filioque controversy, allowing Torrance to familiarize us with what east and west each wanted to preserve as well as fend off, together with the correct meaning of theopoiesis, shows Torrance to be truly Reformed; i.e., thoroughly catholic.

Most profoundly Colyer brings us face-to-face with a servant of the gospel whose humility eclipses his massive learning, as Torrance gladly acknowledges that the simplest believer knows more of God than the most erudite theologian will ever be able to say.

Colyer mirrors as much himself, having learned from Torrance that theology and doxology ceaselessly imply each other. Our apprehension of God fosters gratitude even as our non-comprehension leaves us adoring.

Victor A. Shepherd

Tyndale Seminary

Toronto

 

(Terry, the text of my review is 1005 words. You had allowed me 1000. Is this acceptable?)

(presented 12 May 2001 at “The Jazz of Life” symposium, Trinity College, University of Toronto)

A Comment on Jeremy Begbie’s Theology, Music and Time

 

Nowhere does Prof. Begbie attempt a “natural” theology of music that holds up music as a source of revelation, the nature of music thereby acquainting us with the nature of God. The book, rather, holds up everywhere Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God, as the event in which we are made the beneficiaries of God’s redemptive and creative gifts through the activity of the Holy Spirit.

At the same time the book nowhere submits to the older (i.e., late eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth century) notion of Kulturprotestantismus. In Kulturprotestantismus, supported by many thinkers in one era of Germany’s intellectual history, the kingdom of God is understood in terms of developments within history, the culmination of which is a cultural achievement whose genuine richness only the philistine would ever deny. Yet as world-occurrence was soon to make manifest, the richest cultural achievements are not the kingdom of God, are not revelatory, have no power to redeem (whatever else they might do as a creaturely good), but rather can be and have been co-opted by powers that even the non-charismatic among us have described as demonic.

Prof. Begbie’s book aims, rather, at theologizing through music. Since music tells us more about time than does any other cultural phenomenon, it theologizes specifically through a discussion of time as an essential feature of music. And by probing time in its significance to music, it discusses the theological significance of that temporality which is essential to the entire created order and which God has pronounced “good” without qualification.

In my work as a teacher of theology I have found that students bring with them several misunderstandings that can be traced to their assumption that Plato, particularly in his discussion of time and eternity, is an ally of Christians. The same misunderstandings, I have found, haunt the parishioners whose minister I was in the course of decades of pastoral work. Prof. Begbie’s book highlights these misunderstandings as rooted in a flight from time; specifically, a refusal to cherish the necessity and goodness of the temporality of the created order. I list several of them now.

[1] In his homooousion, where Father and Son are said to possess the same rather than merely similar substance, Athanasius distinguishes between “God in the form of the human” and “God as human”. Students put forward “God in the form of the human” as an affirmation of the Incarnation when in fact it is a denial, God now merely masquerading as human. The Incarnation is reduced to the illustrative, illustrating a truth that lies behind it, where even the “illustration” is dysfunctional because deceptive. To speak accurately of the Incarnation, “God as human”, however, commits us to the temporality of God. On account of the Platonic notion that haunts the church everywhere (in part because it lurks in the Fathers everywhere), temporality and eternality are deemed mutually exclusive. Since God’s eternality is never denied, God’s temporality has to be. The consequent denials are legion, not the least of which is the denial that God suffers.

[2] Since eternity pertains to our ultimate blessing, and eternity is commonly understood as timelessness rather than as fulfilled time, time is suspected as an impediment to that blessing. This flight from temporality entails a flight from the body and its attendant earthliness, not to mention its attendant earthiness. In contrasting a doctrine of creation with Plato’s Timaeus, I set the students the exercise of distinguishing between the erotic and pornographic. Few are able to articulate the distinction; fewer still appear to have the intra-psychic freedom to acknowledge that the erotic is a God-ordained good and is to be received with thanksgiving. More generally, temporal existence pertaining to any of the senses is deemed inferior to a realm of pure spirit (so-called) that has to do with intelligibility. (When, for instance, I ask students about the role of the sense of smell, both literal and metaphorical, in scripture, they are startled to learn that scripture discusses it at all.) While students suspect sin’s distortion everywhere in the created order, they make an exception for intelligibility, thereby indicating the extent to which rationalism has supplanted a biblical understanding of revelation.

[3] A confusion is made between temporal existence and fallen existence. On this point Prof. Begbie discusses Augustine at length. Augustine, however, is not alone. In the theological turbulence of Reformation-era Lutheranism, the gnesio-Lutherans, represented by Matthias Illyricus Flacius and opposed by Philip Melanchthon, maintained that in the wake of the fall humankind is essentially depraved. Paul Tillich says as much himself inasmuch as he equates existence with estrangement. If sin is humankind’s essence, then plainly the fallen creature is no longer human at all, the image of God having been effaced rather than merely defaced. Similarly, if sin is the essence of humankind, then redemption can only render us non-human. When Prof. Begbie opines that many people aren’t “at home” in time [71], his assertion is only confirmed when theologians as diverse as Augustine, Flacius and Tillich exemplify a common confusion.

[4] Students espouse an organic notion of the kingdom of God that borrows from the liberal myth of progress. History is deemed to progress, and the kingdom of God is the crown and completion of the progress. Oddly, those students who are most hostile to any notion of biological evolution (for which there is evidence) are often quickest to endorse a notion of historical progress (for which there is no evidence), thinking that faith must affirm a historical inevitability that is benign. Lost here is the biblical category of promise and fulfilment, wherein promise and fulfilment, alike events in time arising from the act of a person, alike depend on God’s grace.

[5] Most distressingly, in the wake of their denial of the temporality of God students espouse a notion of God’s sovereignty that equates sovereignty with sheer power, sheer arbitrariness. Here it is maintained that if God is truly God, then God can do anything at all, anything he wills. Never considered is “What is it that God wills? How is what he wills related to who he is? What is meant by ‘power’?” (Students are always surprised to learn that power is the capacity to achieve purpose.) Most tellingly, on account of their religious environment, students are reluctant to admit that we humans have no fitting idea at all as to what God can or cannot do. We know only what God has done: in his Son, for our sakes, he has given himself up to suffering, degradation, and the death of profoundest self-alienation.

While the cross has many meanings at many levels, it surely means at least that there is no limit to God’s vulnerability; the resurrection in turn means not that vulnerability has been left behind but rather that there is no limit to the effectiveness of God’s vulnerability. Sovereignty has to be understood in terms of the triumph of a vulnerability limitless with respect to God’s self-exposure and protracted in time.

Since Incarnation, cross and resurrection occur in time, plainly time is affirmed as real; time is the theatre of God’s self-disclosure and self-bestowal; time is the venue of that obedience whereby we “glorify God in our bodies”, and of that instance of obedience which is self-forgetful exultation and praise. Here the students need another book from Begbie; namely, Theology, Dance and Time.

To grasp the temporality that Prof. Begbie probes relentlessly is indeed to find, as he declared, our theologizing assisted. When he speaks of the interplay between the temporal processes of music and the temporal processes that riddle human existence in its multidimensionality, from the “micro” of heartbeat to the “macro” of the change of seasons, I am reminded of a remark I heard from violinist Isaac Stern when last he spoke in Toronto. A promising young violinist played for Stern and admitted she couldn’t get the phrasing of the music right. As often as she re-phrased her playing it wasn’t right. Stern told her to sing the part. “I have a poor voice and I don’t want to sing”, she told him. “Sing the violin music anyway”, he told her. She did, and the phrasing fell into place immediately. “You see”, continued the old master, “when you sing you have to breathe. Breathing is a natural temporal event; the breathing that is part of singing will acquaint you with the natural phrasing — the timing — of the violin music.” The point that Stern made about the relation between the timing and rhythm of breathing, a human occurrence whose “realism” no one denies, and the realism of the phrasing of the music; this relation, an intertwining of music with the temporality of the world at large and also with the temporality of the incarnate one through whom and for whom all things have been made; this matrix I found discussed most profitably throughout the book.

The chapter “In God’s Good Time” provided a framework and an articulation for so many matters that I had had in mind and heart for years yet for which I hadn’t been given useable tools. The first section in this chapter discusses the manner in which time demonstrates that there can be ordered change, that change need not imply chaos. Change is chaos, or at least the threat of chaos, of course, where the frozen fixity or immobility of Greek metaphysics is ascendant, the Greek eternal being the unchanging. Yet according to Isaiah the creator of time asks us, “Behold, I am doing a new thing. Do you not perceive it?” Jesus expects his people to be able to read “the signs of the times.” And discernment of the genuinely new, the new-at-God’s-hand, is the principal gift of the Spirit in the book of Acts.

“Taking time”, the second part of this chapter, recalled for me the time that Jesus spent repeatedly, deliberately, in the wilderness, without which the time he spent elsewhere would have been fruitless. And since “natural processes have an inherent time-structure”, according to Barbara Adams whom Begbie quotes, I felt myself vindicated for the time I am free to “waste”, as it were, instead of having to fill up needed leisure time with something that is deemed to be productive and therefore not actually leisure at all. Time spent waiting recalled for me the scriptural connection between waiting and watching. For God’s people waiting is never “waiting around”, loitering; still it is waiting. Not stated in the book but presupposed nonetheless is the fact that the New Testament word for “wait” combines the two concepts of tension and endurance. Tension, of course, together with resolution, goes to the heart of music, as does endurance, since music, unlike fine art, inherently entails protracted temporal process.

“Temporal differentiation” found in even the simplest music, attests the marvellous variety in the creation and the wisdom needed to avoid forcing “our time” on everything and everyone.

The “Limited duration” of music is one with the limited duration of all creaturely existence. Limited duration is inherent in finitude, finitude as such being not evil but rather an instance of transience. Music bespeaks fruitful transience; i.e., transience that doesn’t reflect a resented futility but rather a welcome transition at God’s hand. As a pastor who stood at deathbeds for thirty years I came to grasp what the writer of Ecclesiastes meant when he wrote, without any hint of bitterness or futility, that in God’s good ordering there is indeed a time to die.

In the chapter “Resolution and Salvation” once again I found an articulation for and exposition of the truth that the “time” of anticipatory yet delayed “closures” within a piece of music points to eschatological anticipation, surely the ultimate “hyperbar” in Christian understanding and living. Our eschatological anticipation is fraught with partial fulfilment “on the way” to the final fulfilment, each partial fulfilment serving to quicken steadfastness, to warn against a premature identification of hope with sight, yet also to reassure us of the substance of hope and the imminence of its appearing.

All my formal music training was classical; only recently have I come to appreciate jazz. For this reason the chapter on improvisation was the most moving part of the book for me, specifically the understanding of improvisation as “giving and giving back.” Prone as we are to “thingifying” (or trying to “thingify”) all that pertains to persons, the mutuality of “giving and giving back” that presupposes the irreducibility of persons found me pondering not only Begbie’s discussion of Romans 9-11 but also the work of a thinker whom the church needs to recover, Martin Buber.

The philosopher Martin Heidegger maintained that language is the “house of being.” To say the same thing differently, being is a function of language. To be sure, Heidegger would never deny the converse: language is a function of being, albeit in the relatively small sphere wherein words name or describe objects. Vastly greater, however, is the sphere wherein being is a function of language. Here the force of language isn’t that we have more words in our vocabulary and can show off more readily; rather, expanded language creates a world and admits us to a world that is vastly richer than the world inhabited by someone with meagre language. Here language doesn’t describe an already-existing world but rather gives rise to a universe imperceptible to those for whom language remains only a function of being.

As I read Prof. Begbie’s book I began to wonder if it couldn’t be said, in the spirit of Heidegger, that metre and rhythm are another “house of being.” Admittedly, temporality as such is common to the created order. Still, I can’t help wondering if our awareness of the fact, nature and ubiquity of the “rhythm over metre” that is exemplified in music and riddles life; I can’t help wondering if one’s awareness of this doesn’t facilitate an ever-expanding universe we should otherwise never know and enjoy.

Victor Shepherd, Tyndale Seminary, 12^th May 2001

 

Titus Chung,   Thomas Torrance’s Mediations and Revelation.

Farnham, U.K.; Ashgate, 2011. Pp. xx + 205. Hardcover, US$77.60. ISBN 978-14094-0570-2.

Chung’s purpose is to explore the logic and substance of revelation in the work of Thomas F. Torrance, highlighting throughout the book the role of mediation in all of Torrance’s thought, not privileging any one tome but acknowledging that Torrance’s most explicit discussion is the sustained argument found in the latter’s The Mediation of Christ (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992).

In his investigation Chung carefully distinguishes between mediation (biblically understood) and immediacy.  While he never quotes Kierkegaard to the effect that immediacy is paganism, he plainly endorses Kierkegaard’s assessment. And while he never formally states the difference between mediation and inference or deduction, he is evidently aware that according to Hebrew logic any deity that is inferred or deduced or concluded is  eo ipse an idol, since the identifying characteristic of the Holy One of Israel is the self-disclosing speech/act that renders all inference not only unnecessary but also impossible.  In short, immediacy and inference alike presuppose a deity other than Yahweh. The living God is known non-immediately (only the creaturely realm can be known immediately) yet non-inferentially, since human recipients of God’s grace are included by the Spirit in the divine/human Son’s knowledge of the Father.

Accurately reflecting Torrance’s concern in his many discussions of mediation, Chung begins his exposition with a discussion of Israel and its ardent, oft-anguished wrestling with God wherein its life with God and its disciplinary suffering under God formed it as the “womb” that nurtured and gave birth to Jesus. In Israel’s history under God there were fashioned the categories – such as sacrifice, priest, king, sin, salvation – by which Jesus Christ was to be understood and the language in terms of which he was to be described, announced and commended.

As Chung moves from a discussion of Israel as the locus of God’s self-revealing activity to the locus of the Word incarnate, Chung probes Torrance’s reiterated distinction between anhypostasia and enhypostasia. Enhypostasia means that Jesus Christ is human with the humanness with which all humankind is human, apart from which he would lack representative and substitutionary significance. Anhypostasia means that in order for the Son or Word to become incarnate he must be incarnate in a particular human individual. Apart from anhypostasia no incarnation has occurred; apart from enhypostasia, the incarnation possesses no significance for anyone beyond Jesus of Nazareth.

Chung’s exploration of the foregoing forms the bridge to his examination of dualism and Torrance’s hallmark aversion to it. In his theological work spanning almost seven decades few matters drew Torrance’s ire more than the dualism that he regarded as having disfigured theology for centuries. Dualism – between fact and meaning, soul and body, eternity and time, act and being – warped theology and above all theo-epistemology wherein a hiatus appeared between our knowledge of God and God’s knowledge of himself. Humankind’s knowledge of God was distorted by assorted speculations instead of rightly being seen as an implicate of God’s knowing himself, the latter a predicate of God’s own intra-Trinitarian life.

In light of the above Chung fittingly guides readers to Torrance’s searching, searing criticisms of Arius in the realm of Christology and Newton in the realm of physics. Athanasius (Torrance never relaxed his admiration for the latter’s homoousion apart from which Torrance always insisted the gospel would have been lost) remained as pivotal for Torrance in theology as  Maxwell, Einstein and Polanyi did in science, not least because of the lattermost’s sustained argument for the presence of a personal yet non-subjectivistic element in all knowing, scientific included. Newton’s dualism divorced God from the world and rendered God unknowable as surely as Arius’ Christology rendered Jesus Christ neither divine nor human and therefore divorced from both at once.

Chapter three, “The Epistemological Realism of Theological Science,” traces Torrance’s epistemological debt to Albert Einstein, particularly Einstein’s insistence that science progresses not by guesswork concerning the cosmos but rather as aspects of the objective world under investigation become transparent to patterns of intelligibility that inhere them; almost exude them, as it were. Science is possible only because there is a match-up between patterns of intelligibility in the natural world and the pattern or structure of human intelligence. Apart from this correspondence no one could think truthfully about the natural world. Inspired by Einstein, Torrance went beyond him in relating the correspondence between patterns of intelligibility in the cosmos and of intelligence in humans to the rationality or intelligence of the Logos, the second person of the Trinity, the one through whom all things have been made (John 1:3) and therefore whose inner principle or rationality has been imprinted upon God’s creation. As theologian Torrance maintains that only the Logos (Incarnate) is the sufficient ground for the phenomenon Einstein spotlighted.

From here Torrance explores revelation concerning its inherent logic, which logic ‘stamps’ itself upon humans as their reason – its structure survived the Fall but its integrity concerning knowledge of God did not – is now healed by grace to facilitate a non-speculative knowledge of God that can claim to be realist in the above sense as surely as scientific knowledge is realist. The remaining chapters of the book apply the material in the first three chapters to an examination of Torrance’s understanding of scripture, preaching, sacraments and church.

Doubtlessly Chung will be challenged with respect to the use he makes of Paul Tillich. In the course of comparing Tillich and Torrance Chung suggests areas where Tillich may supply a corrective to deficits in Torrance Chung claims to have identified. Are these putative deficits actual? Specifically, has Chung misread Tillich’s notion of correlation? And has Chung failed to understand the nature of theological trajectories in Torrance and Tillich that are not merely different but disparate?

The book is marred by gravely defective English.  Punctuation is incorrect and inconsistent. Non-idiomatic English expressions jar the reader on every page: e.g., “David’s [David Fergusson’s] initial supervision was consequential in setting my research in firm footing” (Preface); “The period between the two [nineteenth-century biblical criticism and postmodernism], of which Thiemann regards as leading the discipline into a blind alley, cannot be spared the influence of either” (p. xiv); “Torrance’s discourse of baptism does not end as his scripture” (p. 162); “…the referential relation between language and the objective reality of which it signifies” (p. 112); “Tillich although is unequivocal in the tenet of ‘directedness,’ his deterministic emphasis remains very much on the structure of the question” (p. 74). Most upsetting, perhaps, with respect to non-idiomatic English and sub-academic assessment is “Torrance is not the ordinary Barthian of regurgitation.” (pp. xiv-xv)

Worse are the numerous instances where the English word used is simply incorrect: e.g., “…a window to identify dualism as the threat that has to be harnessed resolutely” (p. 43); “…it is suffice at this juncture….” (p. 188); “…so that we are able to relate to divine compulsiveness” (p. 106); “On this note, the hypostatic union of Christ and his homoousion with the Father are impinged” (p. 40);“…Torrance underpins that the ultimate ‘hearing’….: (p. 188)  (Throughout the book Chung uses “underpin” repeatedly when he seems to mean “affirm” or “emphasize” or “insist.”)

Ungrammatical sentences keep readers off-balance everywhere in the book, force a re-reading, and frequently end in an irksome opacity: e.g., “Only by the epistemic dynamic of the Spirit that such trans-formal experience is made possible, so that as human we are able to know….” (p. 105)
The misrelated modifier (not to say the pointlessness ) is evident in “Being a theologian, Torrance’s articulation is expectedly theological.” (p. 71)
Readers are similarly rattled by the non-parallelism of verb tenses: e.g., “The guiding question is whether Torrance’s explication of the work of the Spirit….We would engage Kruger and Gunton….” (p. 94).

Worst of all, and indefensible, are the countless instances where major authors such as Torrance, Gunton and MacIntyre are misquoted: e.g., “…the various sciences themselves, ranging from physicals and chemistry…: (p. 175); “…they are already on the way that leads to the really existence of God” (p. 179); “It must not conceal us that such language…” (p. 78); “…the one who prefects the creation…” (p. 101).

Much work remains to be done on this book before it can be recommended to those interested in the contribution Thomas F. Torrance has made as theologian, logician of science, and the manner in which theology is deemed ‘scientific’ in the German sense of wissenschaftlich. Torrance characteristically argued that theology, like science, was marked by its own logos. For both disciplines the method of investigating any subject is mandated neither by speculation nor by importing another academic discipline (e.g., philosophy) but by the essence, structure and inner logic of the subject under discussion as the subject-matter forges within the thinker categories for understanding it in conformity with its own inherent logic as both (science and theology) attempt to give an ordered account of a reality that lies beyond them.

Victor Shepherd
Tyndale University College & Seminary
Toronto, Ontario
Email:  victor.shepherd@sympatico.ca

Thomas C. Oden, John Wesley’s Teachings: Volume 1, God and Providence

Oden’s scholarly versatility is noteworthy: see, for instance, his three-volume systematic theology, his multi-volume exploration of pastoral theology and practice, his study of the church in Africa, his examination of the Early Fathers, and his Patristic commentaries on Scripture. His current project, John Wesley’s Teachings, will eventually include volumes three (pastoral theology) and four (ethics and society). Reflecting the order of Wesley’s adherence to classic consensual Christian teaching, the work is an expansion of Oden’s earlier John Wesley’s Scriptural Christianity (1994), albeit four times longer.

Always unashamed that his ‘home’ is the Methodist tradition; always cognizant of Wesley’s catholicity, substance and particular gift to the Body of Christ; always unapologetic in the face of the weighty contributions of the Lutheran and Reformed traditions, Oden has once again expounded the angle-of-vision on theology, discipleship and community embedded in Wesley’s astute fusing of the riches of Anglicanism, Puritanism, and Pietism – with all of this enlivened by the Spirit-infusion characteristic of Methodists and their charismatic descendants.

Oden’s stated purpose is to forefend the oft-heard criticism that Wesley did not think systematically; to render Wesley’s vast patrimony available to the non-professional contemporary reader; and to increase accessibility through reducing archaisms and ambiguities.

Sternly Oden exposes the ignorance of those who think Wesley soteriologically shallow: “There is not a shred of Pelagianism in Wesley.” (v.2, p.240) Emphatically he refutes those who regard the Methodist movement as mawkish: “Especially odious to Wesley was a sentimental hymnody….” (v.2, p.95) Relentlessly he supports Wesley’s insistence that theological novelty is eo ipse heresy, since the truth and reality of the gospel is found in the apostolic confession of Jesus Christ and in the ecumenical, consensual affirmation of it found in the following four centuries. Judiciously he insists that while Wesley is a child of the West (i.e., unambiguously Protestant, ‘justification by faith’ never compromised), Wesley’s Protestantism is rooted in the Eastern Fathers no less than in the Western. Realistically Oden reminds the reader that while some might regard Wesley’s descendants as merely one more family among the dozens in the universal church, in fact Wesley’s understanding is proving at this moment to be the theology of evangelization globally: in Latin America (albeit with a Pentecostal infusion), in Continental Europe and, not least, in Russia. Profoundly Oden highlights Wesley’s theology as neither one-sided nor shallow; while rooted in antiquity it is more readily acknowledged and owned today than are the ersatz theologies that marry modernity only to find themselves widowed shortly.

Oden warns readers that “Only two subjects in the Wesley literary corpus place serious intellectual burdens on the ordinary reader, and this [i.e., predestination] is one of them (original sin being the other).” (v.2, p.157) Wesley’s articulation of original sin is his longest treatise, while Oden’s discussion of predestination is the longest chapter in the two volumes under review. Sidestepping no biblical issue, Oden develops, without discomfiture or defensiveness, Wesley’s protracted discussion of angels (parenthetically noting that Wesley’s angelology intrigues audiences more than anything else Oden says about Wesley.)

Unerringly Oden highlights Wesley’s accentuation of sanctification as transformation in this life, emphasizing the difference now in those who embrace the Saviour who releases believers from sin’s power or grip no less than from sin’s guilt. In such a judicious balance of justification and sanctification Oden points out Wesley’s insistence on the equilibrium of Christology and Pneumatology, or what God does for us in the Son and what God effects in us through the Holy Spirit; for a one-sided elevation of Christology issues in “formalism” (a frigid orthodoxy that fills the mind yet freezes the heart) while a one-sided elevation of Pneumatology issues in “enthusiasm” (an inflamed subjectivism that welcomes irrationalism). Wisely Wesley upholds the Spirit-invigorated restoration of reasoning’s integrity while eschewing philosophical rationalism.

Thanks to his extensive and intensive knowledge of Wesley, Oden can direct readers to documents wherein are found ready-to-hand deposits or concentrations of key themes. For instance, all of Wesley’s major points concerning the Holy Spirit are stated summarily in his “A Letter to a Roman Catholic” (1747); the quickest route to Wesley’s Christology is found in his “Order for the Administration of the Lord’s Supper” (1784); and the foundational documents for Wesley’s understanding of justification by faith (he never disagreed in the slightest with the Magisterial Reformers on this point) are the “Doctrinal Minutes,” the distillate of the first three Annual Conferences (1744-1746).

Christians of Pentecostal persuasion will profit from Oden’s thorough discussion of Christian Perfection. Oden points out that ‘perfect’, in Wesley’s understanding, is informed not by the Latin perfectus (faultless, admitting no development) but by the Greek teleiosis (a self-abandoned aspiration to self-forgetful love of God and neighbour).

Since Wesley names double-predestination “the very antidote of Methodism,” nothing less than a “lie” that renders God satanic, Oden patiently explores the nature and logic of prevenient grace, the merciful activity of God that ‘comes before’ sinners are even aware of their need of grace and only by means of which they can respond to saving grace. In this regard Oden faithfully reflects Wesley’s attentive reading of his Patristic mentors and the logic of prevenience at every stage of the Ordo Salutis.

Oden has performed a fine service in appending helpful bibliographies at the conclusion of each section of each volume, thereby directing readers to books and articles that amplify or situate any one item of Wesley’s theology. Since Wesley’s theology is entrenched in sermons, letters, journals, diaries and numerous tracts, footnotes indicating where corroboration of Oden’s interpretation can be found, especially in the lesser-known repositories of Wesley’s thought, are invaluable. An appendix paralleling the Jackson Edition (1829-31) and the Bicentennial Edition (1975-) of Wesley’s Sermons will save serious students no little time and spare them much frustration.

Victor Shepherd, Tyndale University College & Seminary, Toronto.

John Vissers, The Neo-Orthodox Theology of W.W.Bryden.

The main purpose of Vissers’ book is to explore and assess the contribution of W.W.Bryden, sixth principal of Knox College (University of Toronto) and professor of theology, 1925-1952. To this end Vissers prosecutes a two-fold task: an examination of Bryden’s role in introducing and magnifying the theology of Karl Barth in Canada, and, in light of Bryden’s neo-orthodox convictions, an investigation of the nature and force of Bryden’s relentless criticism of church union in Canada (1925). In the wake of the union that gathered up all of the Methodists and seventy per cent of the Presbyterians, the minority “continuing” Presbyterians perceived themselves as having to identify, articulate and defend the grounds of their resistance to a development that most of the historic Protestants in Canada had assumed to be God-willed.

Bryden was never persuaded by those who facilely spoke of church union as one manifestation of the creation-wide reconciliation wrought in Christ. He feared, on the contrary, that those who spoke like this were unwittingly embracing neo-paganism. In the surge of Barth’s tidal wave he discerned a theological resource whose substance and logic could expose theological deterioration and help a jarred denomination contend for the integrity of the gospel; and in the course of helping contend for the gospel, help the church identify its lamentable (but not irreversible) accommodation and acculturation.

Bryden regarded the churches of his era as having put asunder what God mandates, and the Magisterial Reformation echoes, be kept together: Word and Spirit, or what God does for us (Christology) and what God does in us (Pneumatology). Bryden, astute reader of Reformation theology and church history, knew that Word divorced from Spirit renders Word lifeless orthodoxy, a rationalism that merely happens to employ religious words in its thinly disguised naturalism; Spirit divorced from Word renders Holy Spirit lethally indistinguishable from human spirit, whether philosophical idealism or psychological optimism or social evolutionism. Bryden saw unerringly that the Spirit alone is the power of the Word, while the Word alone is the substance of the Spirit.

For this reason Bryden was no less convinced that the way ahead for his denomination did not lie in a retreat to biblical fundamentalism or uncritical confessionalism.  While the Westminster documents unquestionably had served the church well and could continue to inform it, no less certainly their theological deficits and deficiencies would have to be specified and corrected.

Throughout the acrimony surrounding church union and the hostile stand-off following it, Bryden remained opposed to the theological indifference on both sides. The pro-union faction appeared theologically apathetic and historically amnesiac, wanting only to construct an ‘umbrella’ large enough to accommodate all who wanted to huddle together under it; the anti-union faction appeared too often to have opposed the union for the wrong reasons: e.g., to preserve Scottish ethnicity or to retain real estate or to repristinate Westminster orthodoxy or Reformed scholasticism. The path Bryden chose to tread was lonely, and invited rejection at the hands of those who regarded him as an impediment to their cause.

Profoundly influenced by Barth, Bryden was nonetheless never a sycophantic camp-follower. Rather he recognized in Barth not merely a rescuer of the silted-over treasures of Reformation figures like Luther and Barth but also someone who could help the Canadian church re-think faith in the judging-saving Word. This Word, supposedly irrelevant (according to the theological liberalism arising from Troeltsch and his school), alone was life-giving.

Bryden’s theology, Vissers points out, was at once a theology of revelation (God speaks and acts so as to acquaint us with himself ‘from above’ since no approach ‘from below’ –  natural theology – can render sinners savingly intimate with God), a retrieval of Reformation gains, and all of this addressed to a post-Enlightenment people who neither flee modernity fearfully nor fawn over it flatteringly. Bryden’s major work, The Christian’s Knowledge of God (1940, republished at Cambridge: James Clark & Co., 2011) embodied these convictions. In line with Barth’s characteristic emphasis he maintained that God’s speech is simultaneously God’s act: supremely at the cross God did something that was cosmos-altering, not merely said something. Correspondingly humankind’s declared response, “I believe,” is simultaneously act: faith is that gift of God which must be humanly exercised, humanly experienced and humanly exemplified. Not least, Bryden, aware that evangelism regularly heads the New Testament lists of ministries of the Spirit, insisted that a theology was useful only to the extent that it invigorated the church’s evangelistic ministry. Not surprisingly, two evangelical giants to whom he remained indebted in this regard were Reformation historian T.M. Lindsay and theologian James Denney.

Vissers helpfully informs the reader of the formative influences bearing upon Bryden, of the intellectual currents flowing in early twentieth-century Canada (e.g., the philosophical idealism then in vogue at Queen’s University and whose conflation of the divine and the human was thought to be essence of Christianity), of the varieties of Continental and Scottish Calvinism that had found their way to the New World, and of Bryden’s social awareness wherefrom he consistently protested, in the name of the gospel, glaring social inequities that were nothing less than iniquities.

A major highlight of Vissers’ book is its chapter on Bryden’s theology of the Holy Spirit. Bryden rightly recognized a serious underemphasis in Barth’s thought, the work of the Holy Spirit in regenerating sinners, assuring them of their new nature in Christ and bringing forth such fruits of the Spirit within them as to transform character. This operation of the Spirit begins with God’s address to sinners, God’s address being nothing less than God-in-person speaking to us so as to render us persons.  (Not mentioned in the text but presupposed is the biblical notion that humans are the only creature to whom God speaks, God’s address being one of several ways of understanding what it is to be made “in the image and likeness of God.”) The Spirit, therefore, has everything to do with one’s experience of the living God (not merely with acquiring information about God), and with one’s awareness that God’s address has occasioned a crisis within the sinner that can be relieved only as the sinner embraces the crucified one whose arms have already embraced her. Reading the New Testament closely in this matter Bryden correctly recognized the emphasis given to the work of the Holy Spirit, that power of God which Christ uniquely bears and bestows, and the concomitant emphasis on faith’s experience of Christ. Where Barth had appeared reluctant to discuss Christian experience lest he be accused of pietism, Bryden boldly forged ahead, confident he had read the apostles aright. Bryden’s talk of “Christ mysticism,” then, was not a religious vagueness blurring creator and creation or melding sin and righteousness. Rather it was a Spirit-fostered apprehension that the cross exposes the sinner as enemy of God, and simultaneously a Spirit-facilitated inclusion of the sinner in Christ’s life, which inclusion entails an intimacy that finds language forever inadequate. In expounding the scope and depth of the Spirit’s work Bryden was helped chiefly by John Calvin, recognized among Reformation scholars as ‘the theologian of the Holy Spirit.’

Implied in Bryden’s insistence on the reality of the Spirit was his insistence on the reality of the church, the creation of the Spirit. Eschewing a voluntarist notion of the church Bryden rejected the widespread notion in North America that the church is an association of like-minded individuals whose commonality happens to be Christianity. Rather he averred, with the Reformers, that the church as Body of Christ is divinely constituted as the elect in Christ “before the foundation of the world.” (Ephesians 1:4) and to which individual believers are admitted by faith.

Bryden did not lack opponents. Fulton Anderson, formidable chair of the University of Toronto’s philosophy department, fumed over Bryden’s doggedness concerning sin’s distortion of reason. Frank Beare, church historian at McGill University’s Presbyterian College, deemed Bryden’s theology a “chain” that crippled its catholicity. Yet James D. Smart, one of the twenty-plus students of Bryden who became professors, pronounced him an exemplary representative of the Reformed tradition.

While Bryden’s work is now more than half-a-century old it remains timely. Note, for instance, his discovery, as early as the 1920s, that the church was understood less as the community of the Spirit joyfully embracing the crucified and more as a locus of business expertise and management technique.

Vissers’ book will find readers eager to probe Bryden’s major work (in print once again) and therein assess the influence of a continental giant on a major Canadian thinker who, like Barth, never scoffed at the vocation of village pastor. It provides insight into the genesis, challenges and resilience of the Presbyterian Church in Canada. In looking back to the latter’s most formative theologian it may even suggest a way forward for a denomination that struggles as much now as it did in 1925.

Victor Shepherd
Tyndale University College & Seminary
Toronto, Ontario
Email:  victor.shepherd@sympatico.ca