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 16th 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 5th 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 12th 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
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment