A Big Vision for Small Groups

 This talk for Chichester Diocesan Evangelical Fellowship Spring Conference 2022 is 50 minutes worth your time for small group leaders and members: http://www.chichesterdef.org.uk/spring-2022.html

John Webster lectures

The Kantzer Lectures 2007 Perfection & Presence: God With Us, according to the Christian Confession

Lecture 1: Introduction  | LISTEN

Lecture 2: God’s Perfect Life  |  LISTEN

Lecture 3: God Is Everywhere but Not Only Everywhere  |  LISTEN

Lecture 4: Immanuel  |  LISTEN

Lecture 5: The Presence of Christ Exalted  |  LISTEN

Lecture 6: He Will Be With Them  |  LISTEN

(A number of the other series look very interesting too)

These lectures are a bit technical at times but very worth the time and effort.

They have quite a lot to say about dogmatic methodology as well as the substance of the issue of God’s presence.

Some partial / unsystematic and possibly erring jottings on these lectures: (I could have typed out rather more, Not normally exact quotations)

Webster argues that tautology is a virtue, a necessity, in theology. God is God. He is singular, original and particular. He cannot be understood entirely by way of contrast or comparison. He must reveal himself and tell us who he is. Dogmatic work is done in his presence under his Lordship, in response to who he and what he has done and said. We do not so much seek after God as respond to God giving himself to us. God himself specifies his being before us. He must remain God.

 

Better to think of God as uncaused rather than God as self-caused.

 

God’s perfection is his particular self-existent majesty in the relations of his being as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

 

The Mission of the Persons are temporal processions which repeat the eternal relations of origin, their eternal processions. God’s perfection is not self-enclosed. It has a term and an energy. Missions follow processions. God’s works repeat or externalise his eternal relations of being. God enacts his completeness. Neither whence nor wither can be separated off. God’s perfection includes his presence. The relations of origin turn out to be charged with economic potency.

 

Reformed Federal Theology from the late 16^th C onwards: The Covenant of Redemption / The Pact of Salvation

 

The perfect God, Father, Son and Spirit, is and is present. He has life in himself and he gives life.

 

Dogmatics give reasoned service to the gospel.

 

Dogmatics is governed by a principle of “derivation”. Dogmatics is study of God and all things in relation to God. Creaturely time is an economy formed by the Creator and the end of creation.  Giver and gift make theology possible. Theology is to teach God because it is taught by God. Recovery of beginning with God may be the sine quo non of theology.

 

Sequence. Topics must be considered in their proper order. The material sequence is God and all things in relation to him. If we seek to go from creatures to God, then we may distort both creation and God. Exposition may begin at different points, but we must relate all things to God as their beginning and end.

 

Inclusion. This does not diminish but includes the creaturely. Creatures are only properly understood in the presence of God.   

 

John Webster said that he once agreed with Colin Gunton that “life” might be the best overall way of expounding the gospel because God has life in himself and bestows life. “Life” is related to creation, redemption and eschaton.

 

John Webster argued that our theology is not that of the eternal God nor that of the blessed in glory. It is always a theology of and for pilgrims – limited, contextual. We can never give a complete and perfect picture. God’s revelation means we can make affirmations, but we also have to hedge them with negatives.

 

God’s presence - Immensity and ubiquity – omnipresence – local presence – presence on the basis of promise – free relation – purposeful presence

 

Definitive presence?

 

No bodily / spatial limitation / dimension / circumscription – not locally or by extension

 

God is simple and therefore everywhere always wholly present as himself – as Lord, creator, sustainer

 

Providence – ordered by creation and eschaton – a work of God’s love for God’s covenant purposes of fellowship with creatures – Calvin: God’s hands as well as his eyes – God conserves, accompanies and governs his creatures

 

Providence finds it consummation under the rule of Christ. God’s providence and rule cannot be separated off from his covenant purposes.

 

God’s presence in the special history of the covenant – God’s free faithful and commanding presence for God’s creatures to have fellowship with him – temporal, spatial, social, institutions, bounded, visible but also mysterious

 

God’s taking / calling / choosing create a special history by the Word of God beyond merely creaturely relations – free sovereign covenant election presence decree – unconditional ex nihilo grace, uncaused origination

 

Not merely a fiat / decree of separation and segregation but the teleological energy of a history – a temporal enactment – the steadfast love and presence of God – ongoing fellowship with God – condition, status and summons, vocation, obedience, conformity to nature

 

Sin as negation of the covenant, unbeing, absence

 

 Sinners repudiate God and their own being – sin is to choose death, unbeing

 

Our freedom is caused and given to us. It is not a freedom of spontaneity or counter-causal (against another will). God’s freedom enables our freedom. God’s causality of us and our causality are two ways of talking about the same thing which need not be played off against one another.

 

The incarnation as the great moment / test case for a theology of perfection and presence

 

What needs to be said / corrected in a particular setting? Danger of over reaction – keep in mind the overall shape of revelation and the proportion and arrangement of topics

 

Person, office and work must be held together – the metaphysics and purpose of incarnation are related    

 

The gospel requires the gospels. Christ’s presence with us flows from his presence in his incarnate ministry.

 

What does it mean to say: (1) The Word (2) Became (3) Flesh?

 

God remains God. Incarnation does not erase the difference which the perfect God is. It identifies the point at which it becomes visible in time.  

 

The perfect inner life of the Triune God must be seen not as a contradiction of the presence of God in time but as its condition. The Word became flesh. The eternal perfect divine Word of God is present. The Word is encountered in the history of Jesus as he has assumed flesh and is untied with it. The incarnation is a movement and confirmation of the Lordship and majesty of the Word. The Word becomes flesh changelessly without diminution of the deity.

 

The Word remains the free Lord of time and flesh and is not lessened by them.

 

The Word is not imprisoned within flesh. The Word remains free in the act of becoming. God is self-derived and self-determined to be incarnate. The Word is eternally to be made flesh. The Word’s stretching forth to become flesh is in keeping with the Son’s generation from the Father.

 

Word and flesh are asymmetrical. The Word exists without the flesh but the flesh does not exist without the Word. The Logos is the subject. The flesh is the predicate.

 

Jesus’ history is his mission, a function of his office. It is purposive according to the divine must.

 

Jesus’ human history is within Israel: it is the re-enactment and fulfilment of the covenant. Jesus is the faithful Son of God.

 

Jesus is baffling, oblique. He must reveal himself.

 

Jesus is prophetic. He speaks. He gives a new teaching with authority.

 

Jesus decisively brings the kingdom, unmasking his enemies, bring in his rule and Lordship.  The Kingdom of God comes and triumphs in and by Jesus.

 

Aquinas on the altar of earth which must not be ascended by steps (Exodus 20:24ff). Christ is our fleshly human altar of earth. He is divine and equal with the Father so we cannot go up to the altar by steps.

 

God’s perfection perfects.

 

The resurrection as historical apologetic is a problem if it is known not as the self-manifestation of God (his revelation) but as something to be proved by the inquirer.

 

God does not wait upon reason to establish him but God is known through God alone.

 

The historical resurrected Christ (he rose) must be related to his presence (he is risen). We need a theology of the living Christ present with us.

 

Resurrection should be related to ascension, heavenly session and eschaton. Easter Day looks ahead. Christ is contemporary and present, not just the object of probabilistic historical investigation.

 

The resurrection is the intersection of the pre-and post-presence of the Son. The resurrection points back and forward. The resurrection is related to the eternal relation of Father and Son.

 

The resurrection is natural and necessary. Of course! Not-resurrection of God the Son would be impossible.

 

The unrecognizability of the risen Christ who is then recognised shows that Christ is known only by his own act and gift. Jesus reveals himself and makes himself known. The exalted one gives himself as Lord.

 

The exalted Son turns to creatures in grace. He makes himself present to us.

 

The risen Christ is king, prophet and priest. He rules and speaks and intercedes for us.

 

Hermeneutics needs to remember that we read the Word of God in His presence. The Word is communicative, eloquent and the Truth. The canon is His Lordly address, His living voice, not just a complicated negotiation between interpreter and text. Reading the Bible is simpler and more alarming than we sometimes imagine. Christ summons and claims us by the Scriptural ambassadors.

 

More than theoretical worrying about hermeneutics, we must read. We must be attentive to one who speaks through a text.

 

We read canonically. Scripture is in one sense (a complex, historically situated) single united speech-act read traditionally. The Spirit has guided the church’s reading of this text (though not infallibly). We read with a seriousness about the 5^th Commandment.

 

We must embrace a Christological Maximalism. As Barth once said to Bultmann, Christ must stand out in gigantic proportions. He is not plastic or potential but wholly actual in his presentation to us.

 

The resurrection and exaltation of Christ has ontological, noetic and ethical implications. We are raised with Christ to know him in the Spirit for good works prepared for us to walk in.

 

Fellowship of creatures with the Creator which maintains the Creator-creature distinction.

 

For some, ecclesiology has become a kind of First Theology and has expanded into all areas of dogmatics. Communion koinonia has become a potent concept in theological and ecumenical discussion: Trinity as Communion; Communion of creatures and Creator; saving Communion in the church. The church is salvation in social form.

 

Henri de Lubac on the separation of nature and super-nature, form and inner reality etc., dualisms introduced in 12^th C – radicalised and reduced by John Milbank, On The Name of Jesus – The priority of ecclesiology over Christology and atonement – their function in bringing about a new polity of which Jesus is the founder, a New Moses. An ecclesiological deduction of Christology and the atonement. God incarnate is found in the practices of the gospel.

 

To deduce Christ from the church reverses the evangelical logic of 1 John 1. The beginning is not the church but God, the eternal life of Father and Son. Ecclesiology flows from theology proper. Testimony and proclamation flow from the manifestation of the Word resulting in fellowship. Ecclesiology has its place in this sequence and economy. It cannot be a first theology.

 

There is a we with God which answers to God with us.

 

What kind of visible polity is the church? What are its creaturely acts? What is this social history in time on the basis of the gospel realities? What is the depth of its reality as the Household of God built on the Apostles and Prophets with Christ Himself as the chief cornerstone?

 

Derivation and inclusion.

 

Theology leads to economy. God creates the life of creatures. The doctrine of God is imperfectly grasped unless all his works are included.

 

We must guard the gratuity of the church and the difference between God and the church. The shock of the existence of the people of God must not be muffled.

 

 Arguably the metaphor of the church as the body of Christ is made to do too much work in dogmatics.

 

What would an ecclesiology that started with (election or) Christ’s exaltation look like?

 

Gratuity (free, sovereign), proper externality of Christ and church as creature. The Son of God is in heaven. Christ maintains his identity. He is not mixed or confused with the church. Jesus is Lord of the church.

 

Robert Jenson Systematic Theology – embodied availability. Assembled church with her the sacraments as the way Christ is available in the world. Jenson asks where the risen one turns to find himself. But isn’t this an odd question to ask of God? The bread and the cup make Christ distinct from and available to the church.

 

Jesus is the head of the body, the firstborn from the dead, the origin who is pre-eminent. Fellowship but not confusion. The Son creates the church but he does not thereby create himself.

 

 The church is a human society which keeps us in the society of God. To participate in this fellowship is to have fellowship with the Triune God on the way to heaven. This visible human fellowship takes form in particular creaturely forms and acts, an order of signs, accessories used by God to keep the church. God’s secret power is at work by the Spirit in the church, dwelling with them as the Lord who has his own place.

 

In the sphere of the church, the Spirit acts by Scripture and sacrament.

 

The church is the creature of the Word, a hearing church which lives in the domain of the Word. The church proclaims, instructs and exhorts because it has heard and continues to hear.

 

The church is most herself as she prays for the coming of the Holy Spirit.  

And Twitter tells me I should also listen to:

The Hayward Lectures 2009  Creator, Creation, and Creature: God and God and His World