When God Becomes Flat

As I've tracked and engaged the writings of the late Stanley Grenz and his theological comrade John Franke, I've tended to use them as dialogue partners primarily with respect to issues of theological methodology and epistemology. However, it's been intriguing as of late to mull over their statements on the doctrine of God. In his Theology for the Community of God, Grenz makes this assertion:

In that God is love apart from the creation of the world, love characterizes God. Love is the eternal essence of the one God. But this means that it is not merely one attribute of God among many. Rather, love is the fundamental "attribute of God." "God is love" is the foundational ontological statement we can declare concerning the divine essence. God is foundationally the mutuality of the love relationship between Father and son, and this personal love is the Holy Spirit....Because throughout eternity and apart from the world the one God is love, the God who is love cannot but respond to the world in accordance to his own eternal essence, which is love. Thus, this essential characteristic of God likewise describes the way God interacts with his world. "Love," therefore, is not only the description of the eternal God in himself, it is likewise the fundamental characteristic of God in relationship with creation (p. 72).

Love as the "fundamental" divine attribute is picked up in Franke's new book Manifold Witness: "In seeking to know the character of God in response to the action of divine self-revelation, we must seek to understand the fundamental biblical assertion that 'God is love'" (p. 56, emphasis mine). I must add that I have been reasonably optimistic about the methodological progress Franke makes in this book. He seems less insistent on buying into hard linguistic constructivism and focuses more on the notion that the truth of the gospel demands to be set forth in multiple heuristic models (hence the book's title). However, I'm wondering what to do with the thought of combining the claims that love is the fundamental divine perfection and that theological reality should be rendered polyphonically.

It seems to me that Grenz and Franke flatten out the divine essence and so pass up the opportunity to stress one vital way in which the testimony of theology should be pluriform. Those of a more classically theistic bent can say, "Yes, love is God's essence. But his righteousness, immutability, aseity, faithfulness, and so on are equally his essence. Each of the divine perfections just is God's essence considered under some aspect." However, it seems to me that Grenz and Franke lose sight of an important piece of the Christian tradition and at the same time shoot down a potentially illuminating feature of doing theology in a multiple-models manner. In short, I would like to hear more on why not only, say, the atonement but also the multi-aspectival divine nature deserves a pluriform theological witness.

I also have questions about the biblical case for the centrality of the divine attribute of love. To be sure, the apostle John teaches us that God is love, but the same teaches also that God is spirit and God is light. Why not argue that God's spirituality is his fundamental perfection? Here Grenz and Franke would probably appeal to their doctrine of the Trinity, but that is an issue for another day. Any thoughts on this?

Who Said the Doctrine of the Trinity Is Irrelevant?

"The transcendent independence of the Trinity, as Wholly Other, allows the act of creation to be a sheer act of the Trinity's loving goodness and freedom.  Because they (the Father, Son, and Spirit) possess no self-fulfilling needs, they are motivated solely by their beneficent and altruistic love to bring others into existence and so bestow upon them their goodness" (Thomas Weinandy, Does God Suffer?, p. 143).  

Weinandy Waxes Eloquent

Thomas Weinandy's Does God Suffer? has been, for me, a gem on the doctrine of God.  Here are some of his reflections on the teaching of the OT:

"The Old Testament never conceives of God's transcendence in opposition to his immanence, as if that which makes God wholly other is different from that which allows him to be a personal God who lovingly acts in time and history.  For the Bible, transcendence and immanence do not describe two divine modes of being or two sets of distinguishing qualities - one as God is apart from the created order and another as he is in relation to the created order.  For God to be transcendent in the biblical understanding means that he is wholly other than the created order but not apart from the created order.  That which makes him divine, and thus wholly other and so transcendent, is that which equally allows him to be active within the created order and so be immanent.  There is no opposition between God's transcendent being and his immanent activity" (p. 56).  

I may post something on Weinandy's take on impassibility itself, but any thoughts for now?

Donald MacLeod on God's Aseity and Pastoral Care

"This [the aseity of God], of course, is simply a Latinate and inelegant expression for "self-existence," and at first sight it seems to offer little by way of pastoral application.  But it does remind us of the self-sufficiency and inexhaustibleness of God.  The bush burns and burns and is not consumed.  Age after age God keeps on being and keeps on giving and keeps on loving.  Care does not exhaust him, nor do the passing years render him irrelevant.  For all other existences, there is a law of entropy - but not for God."

("The Doctrine of God and Pastoral Care," in Engaging the Doctrine of God, ed. Bruce McCormack [Grand Rapids: Baker; Edinburgh: Rutherford House, 2008], 253)

Theology continues to show itself eminently practical, though not practical in the sense of always meeting felt needs without requiring much thought as to how it shapes life.  Perhaps we need a better understanding of "practical."

Good Collection of Essays

I'd like to commend Engaging the Doctrine of God: Contemporary Perspectives a volume edited by Bruce McCormack and featuring quite a few significant voices in biblical and theological studies.  The volume was published by Baker and Rutherford House in 2008.  I'm still reading through it, but here's a taste of the contents:

"Christian Origins and the Question of God" by N. T. Wright

"The Wrath of God" by D. A. Carson

"John Calvin and the Hiddenness of God" by Paul Helm

"Jonathan Edwards's God: Trinity, Individuation, and Simplicity" by Oliver Crisp

"Life of and in Himself: Reflections on God's Aseity" by John Webster

"God and the Cross" by Henri Blocher

"The Compassion of God: Exodus 34:5-9 in the Light of Exodus 32-34" by Pierre Berthoud

"The Sovereignty of God" by Stephen Williams

"The Actuality of God: Karl Barth in Conversation with Open Theism" by Bruce McCormack

"The Doctrine of God and Pastoral Care" by Donald MacLeod

Some highlights: 

-Carson weighs in on the personal nature of God's wrath, the impassibility of God, and the  implications of the wrath of God for configuring the atonement

-Webster pursues a particular, positive account of God's aseity as plenitude of life of and in himself

-Blocher offers a critique of Moltmann and Jungel's "crucified God" theologies and seeks conceptual  clarity on the topic

Any thoughts?

Calvin Contra Caricatures of Classical Theism

It is quite fashionable in some sectors to claim that the classical Christian description of God inherently renders him immobile and disconnected from the world. Calvin, critical of some aspects of Scholastic theology but operating broadly within the classical theism tradition, has this to say about the thought of an immobile, detached God:

"And truly God claims, and would have us grant him, omnipotence - not the empty, idle, and almost unconscious sort that the Sophists imagine, but a watchful, effective, active sort, engaged in ceaseless activity."

Institutes 1.16.3

Bavinck on Athanasius and the Importance of Trinitarianism

"Athanasius understood better than any of his contemporaries that Christianity stands or falls with the confession of the deity of Christ and the Trinity. He devoted his entire life and all his energies to the defense of this truth. He was not fighting for a philosophical problem, but for the Christian religion itself, for the revelation of God, the teaching of the apostles, the faith of the church. The Trinity is the heart and center of Christianity, differentiating it in principle from Judaism, which denies the distinctions within the divine being, and from paganism, which rejects the oneness of God."

Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2, p. 285