Sovereignty and Simplicity: Why the Two Belong Together

Recently, when asked how God could be in the right in slaughtering women and children in certain OT narratives, John Piper responded, "It's right for God to slaughter women and children any time he pleases. God gives life and he takes life....So God is God! He rules and governs everything. And everything he does is just and right and good. God owes us nothing" (to read the text in full, see here). He goes on to underscore the pertinent implication of our sinful state, namely, that our sin is sufficient reason for God to deny us the gift of life.

Bracketing the unnerving effect of some of the language in this piece, I'm in agreement that God is blessedly sovereign over all of life and that he does not owe something to sinful humanity. However, Piper doesn't clarify how God's actions constitute enactments of justice, righteousness, goodness. Does God willing something render that something a righteous action (so nominalism). Or, does God submit himself to an external standard of righteousness and then act accordingly (so hard realism)? This is a well-known issue in both philosophy and theology often called the Euthyphro problem. Neither option seems to be satisfactory inasmuch as God is neither capricious (pace nominalism) nor subject to anything external to God (pace what I would call a hard version of realism about universals like justice and goodness). In my mind, the appropriate response is to maintain that God is subject to a standard of goodness and righteousness, but that this standard is his own nature. To confess God's simplicity is, negatively, to hold that he is not composed of parts. To unpack this, God is not really distinct from any of God's perfections but just is, when viewed under a particular aspect, his corresponding particular perfection (holiness, omniscience, love, goodness, etc.). So God's essence is his own righteousness and this righteousness, internal to God, is the standard according to which God must act and does act in the world.

What does this mean for Piper's statement? It means that, while God is free to act how he pleases, not least in relation to rebellious sinners, he is, contra nominalism's doctrine of God's absolute freedom, not free to contradict his own goodness and righteousness. The pastoral and apologetical import of God's sovereignty is more firmly established if God's sovereignty is wedded to God's simplicity and his commitment always to enact his own goodness in all his dealings with his creatures.

Any thoughts on this?

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?

Herman Bavinck on the Attributes of God Pt. I

Bavinck's presentation of the doctrine of God is, in a word, masterful. In his section on the trustworthiness of God he discusses what we mean when we call God "the Truth." According to Bavinck's organisation, biblical teaching on this subject is threefold.

First, there is a metaphysical dimension to the truthfulness of God. That is, he is all that belongs to the divine nature, which is itself characterized according to God's own idea of divinity. Other "gods" do not conform to true divinity (which, again, is determined by God's own idea of divinity) and thus are deceptive, mere pretenders.

Second, there is what Bavinck calls an ethical dimension to the truthfulness of God. He is truthful in that his self-revelation corresponds to his being. His communication to us, while always accomodated to the finitude of the human mind, always accurately reflects his nature and actions. He speaks the truth about himself and always fulfills his promises.

Third, there is what Bavinck calls the logical (or epistemological) dimension of the truthfulness of God. That is, the content of God's thoughts corresponds to the way things are. In other words, his knowledge is just that: knowledge. "God's knowledge is dynamic, absolute, fully correspondent truth. It is not acquired by research and reflection but is inherent in the divine being (essential) and precedes the existence of things."

I'm thankful to God for his people's thick descriptions of him!

I wonder what it would look like to relate this three-pronged account of truthfulness to humanity. Are we, like Christ, living out all that belongs to true humanity as determined by God? Does our speech disclose only the truth about who we are and what we will do? Do we seek after authentic knowledge of God and his world?

Listening Theology as Via Media

Karl Barth was relentless in insisting that theology consists in listening and replying to the Word of God. I think we do well to ponder the power of a listening sort of theology to forge a path through some of the problematic features of modernism and postmodernism. In this post, let us explore a listening theology vis-à-vis the former.

Many Enlightenment-driven thinkers have overemphasized the prowess and place of human rationality and this often goes in one or both of the following directions. First, only those truths accessible to all cognizant human beings (the so-called truths of reason) are deemed worthwhile. This amounts to a rejection of the “scandal of particularity” inherent in the Christian claim that God speaks and acts decisively in specific situations, most importantly in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Second, if the particulars of God’s special self-presentation are in fact given consideration, they are subjected to judgment by the canons of secular reason, in which may be included, a priori, commitments such as belief in the sheer impossibility of something like the incarnation.

Now a word of affirmation followed by a word of criticism. As David Clark argues (see his To Know and Love God) there are such things as “worldview-transcending rational principles” which we find sweepingly assumed and embedded in the epistemic endeavors of human beings. These would include rudimentary laws of logic such as the law of (non)contradiction. Colin Gunton remarks (see his essay “Historical and Systematic Theology” in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine) that the importance of rationality in this sense is quite mundane and uncontroversial. But problems come when we 1) think too highly of our rational powers and/or 2) incessantly pile up, a priori, guidelines to which all doxastic candidates must conform in order to be acceptable. Regarding (1), John Webster reminds us (see his book Holiness) that human rationality is itself caught up in the history of sin and redemption, meaning that we must avoid exalting it and make sure we intentionally consecrate the use of it to the God who sanctifies his people and is the object of our theological reflection. Regarding (2), Alister McGrath’s Scientific Theology project helps us by stressing the value of viewing theology as a primarily a posteriori discipline. I am inclined to cast my lot with McGrath and suggest that, rather than stringently limiting out of the gate what can and cannot be the case, we focus more on listening to reality. In particular, we do well to be open to the possibility of God speaking and acting on the stage of world history. And, in fact, such is the case! The triune God has come on the scene and communicated with humankind, necessitating that we do theology as listeners, a posture very different from that of those who are convinced that they are able to discern from the start the impossibility of a God who reveals himself to men and women in pursuit of their redemption.